How Many

Languages
Are There in
the World?
Written by Stephen R. Anderson
How Many Languages Are
There in the World?
The object of inquiry in linguistics is human lan-
guage, in particular the extent and limits of diversity
in the world’s languages. One might suppose, there-
fore, that linguists would have a clear and reason-
ably precise notion of how many languages there are
in the world. It turns out, however, that there is no
such definite count—or at least, no such count that
has any status as a scientific finding of modern lin-
guistics. The reason for this lack is not (just) that
parts of the world such as highland New Guinea or
the forests of the Amazon have not been explored in
enough detail to ascertain the range of people who
live there. Rather, the problem is that the very
notion of enumerating languages is a lot more com-
plicated than it might seem.

There are a number of coherent (but quite different)

answers that linguists might give to this apparently
simple question.

More than you might have thought.

When people are asked how many languages they
think there are in the world, the answers vary quite
a bit. One random sampling of New Yorkers, for
instance, resulted in answers like “probably several
hundred.” However we choose to count them,
though, this is not close. When we look at reference
works, we find estimates that have escalated over
time. The 1911 (11th) edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, for example, implies a figure somewhere
around 1,000, a number that climbs steadily over the
course of the twentieth century. That is not due to
any increase in the number of languages, but rather
to our increased understanding of how many lan-
guages are actually spoken in areas that had previ-
ously been underdescribed. Much pioneering work in
documenting the languages of the world has been
done by missionary organizations (such as the
Summer Institute of Linguistics) with an interest in
translating the Christian Bible. As of 1997, at least a
portion of the Bible had been translated into 2,197
different languages, still a long way short of full cov-
erage. The most extensive catalog of the world’s lan-

*With contributions from David Harrison, Laurence Horn, Rafaella

Zanuttini and David Lightfoot.
guages, generally taken to be as authoritative as
any, is that of the Ethnologue organization
(http://www.ethnologue.com), whose detailed classi-
fied list currently includes 6,809 distinct languages.

A family is a group of languages that can be shown

to be genetically related to one another. The best-
known languages are those of the Indo-European
family, to which English belongs. Considering how
widely the Indo-European languages are distributed
geographically, and their influence in world affairs,
one might assume that a good proportion of the
world’s languages belong to this family. That is not
the case, however: there are about 200 Indo-
European languages, but even ignoring the many
cases in which a language’s genetic affiliation cannot
be clearly determined, there are undoubtedly more
families of languages (about 250) than there are
members of the Indo-European family.

Languages are not at all uniformly distributed

around the world. Just as some places are more
diverse than others in terms of plant and animal
species, the same goes for the distribution of lan-
guages. Out of Ethnologue’s 6,809, for instance, only
230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in
Asia. One area of particularly high linguistic diversity
is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated
832 languages spoken by a population of around
3.9 million. That makes the average number of
speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any
area of the world. These languages belong to
between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the
number of families may change as scholarship
improves, but there is little reason to believe that
these figures are radically off the mark.

We do not find linguistic diversity only in out of the

way places. Centuries of French governments have
striven to make that country linguistically uniform,
but (even disregarding Breton, a Celtic language;
Allemannisch, the Germanic language spoken in
Alsace; and Basque), Ethnologue shows at least ten
distinct Romance languages spoken in France,
including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, and several
others in addition to “French.”
Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed
(apart from the status of French in Canada) in terms
of English vs. Spanish, or the languages of immi-
grant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but
we should remember that the Americas were a
region with many languages well before modern
Europeans or Asians arrived. In pre-contact times,
over 300 languages were spoken in North America.
Of these, about half have died out completely. All we
know of them comes from early word lists or limited
grammatical and textual records. But that still leaves
about 165 of North America’s indigenous languages
spoken at least to some extent today.

Once we go beyond the major languages of econom-

ic and political power, such as English, Mandarin
Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of
speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we
find a vast number of others, belonging to many
genetically distinct families. But whatever the degree
of that diversity (and we discuss below the problem
of how to quantify it), one thing that is fairly certain
is that a surprising proportion of the world’s lan-
guages are in fact disappearing—even as we speak.

Fewer than there were last month.

Whatever the world’s linguistic diversity at the pres-
ent, it is steadily declining, as local forms of speech
increasingly become moribund before the advance of
the major languages of world civilization. When a
language ceases to be learned by young children, its
days are clearly numbered, and we can predict with
near certainty that it will not survive the death of
the current native speakers.

The situation in North America is typical. Of about

165 indigenous languages, only eight are spoken by
as many as 10,000 people. About 75 are spoken
only by a handful of older people, and can be
assumed to be on their way to extinction. While we
might think this is an unusual fact about North
America, due to the overwhelming pressure of
European settlement over the past 500 years, it is
actually close to the norm. Around a quarter of the
world’s languages have fewer than a thousand
remaining speakers, and linguists generally agree in
estimating that the extinction within the next century
of at least 3,000 of the 6,809 languages listed by
Ethnologue, or nearly half, is virtually guaranteed
under present circumstances. The threat of extinction
thus affects a vastly greater proportion of the world’s
languages than its biological species.
Some would say that the death of a language is
much less worrisome than that of a species. After all,
are there not instances of languages that died and
were reborn, like Hebrew? And in any case, when a
group abandons its native language, it is generally
for another that is more economically advantageous
to them: why should we question the wisdom of
that choice?

But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since

the language was not in fact abandoned over the
many years when it was no longer the principal
language of the Jewish people. During this time,
it remained an object of intense study and analysis
by scholars. And there are few if any comparable
cases to support the notion that language death
is reversible.

The economic argument does not really supply a

reason for speakers of a “small” and perhaps
unwritten language to abandon that language simply
because they also need to learn a widely used
language such as English or Mandarin Chinese.
Where there is no one dominant local language, and
groups with diverse linguistic heritages come into
regular contact with one another, multilingualism is a
perfectly natural condition. When a language dies, a
world dies with it, in the sense that a community’s
connection with its past, its traditions and its base
of specific knowledge are all typically lost as the
vehicle linking people to that knowledge is aban-
doned. This is not a necessary step, however, for
them to become participants in a larger economic or
political order.

For further information about the issues involved in

language endangerment, see the LSA’s FAQ “What is
an endangered language?”

Count the flags!

To this point, we have assumed that we know how
to count the world’s languages. It might seem that
any remaining imprecision is similar to what we
might find in any other census-like operation: per-
haps some of the languages were not home when
the Ethnologue counter came calling, or perhaps
some of them have similar names that make it hard
to know when we are dealing with one language and
when with several; but these are problems that
could be solved in principle, and the fuzziness of
our numbers should thus be quite small. But in fact,
what makes languages distinct from one another
turns out to be much more a social and political
issue than a linguistic one, and most of the cited
numbers are matters of opinion rather than science.

The late Max Weinreich used to say that “A language

is a dialect with an army and a navy.” He was talk-
ing about the status of Yiddish, long considered a
“dialect” because it was not identified with any
politically significant entity. The distinction is still
often implicit in talk about European “languages” vs.
African “dialects.” What counts as a language rather
than a “mere” dialect typically involves issues of
statehood, economics, literary traditions and writing
systems, and other trappings of power, authority and
culture — with purely linguistic considerations play-
ing a less significant role.

For instance, Chinese “dialects” such as Cantonese,

Hakka, Shanghainese, etc. are just as different from
one another (and from the dominant Mandarin) as
Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian
and Romanian. They are not mutually intelligible, but
their status derives from their association with a sin-
gle nation and a shared writing system, as well as
from explicit government policy. In contrast, Hindi
and Urdu are essentially the same system (referred
to in earlier times as “Hindustani”), but associated
with different countries (India and Pakistan), different
writing systems, and different religious orientations.
Although varieties in use in India and Pakistan by
well-educated speakers are somewhat more distinct
than the local vernaculars, the differences are still
minimal—far less significant than those separating
Mandarin from Cantonese, for example.
For an extreme example of this phenomenon,
consider the language formerly known as Serbo-
Croatian, spoken over much of the territory of the
former Yugoslavia and generally considered a single
language with different local dialects and writing
systems. Within this territory, Serbs (who are largely
Orthodox) use a Cyrillic alphabet, while Croats
(largely Roman Catholic) use the Latin alphabet.
Within a period of only a few years after the
breakup of Yugoslavia as a political entity, at least
three new languages (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian)
had emerged, although the actual linguistic facts had
not changed a bit.

One common-sense notion of when we are dealing

with different languages, as opposed to different
forms of the same language, is the criterion of mutu-
al intelligibility: if the speakers of A can understand
the speakers of B without difficulty, A and B must be
the same language. But this notion fails in practice
to cut the world up into clearly distinct language
units. In some instances, speakers of A can under-
stand B, but not vice versa, or at least speakers of B
will insist that they cannot. Bulgarians, for instance,
consider Macedonian a dialect of Bulgarian, but
Macedonians insist that it is a distinct language.
When Macedonia’s president Gligorov visited
Bulgaria’s president Zhelev in 1995, he brought an
interpreter, although Zhelev claimed he could under-
stand everything Gligorov said. Somewhat less fanci-
fully, Kalabari and Nembe are two linguistic varieties
spoken in Nigeria. The Nembe claim to be able to
understand Kalabari with no difficulty, but the rather
more prosperous Kalabari regard the Nembe as poor
country cousins whose speech is unintelligible.

Another reason why the criterion of mutual intelligi-

bility fails to tell us how many distinct languages
there are in the world is the existence of dialect con-
tinua. To illustrate, suppose you were to start from
Berlin and walk to Amsterdam, covering about ten
miles every day. You can be sure that the people
who provided your breakfast each morning could
understand (and be understood by) the people who
served you supper that evening. Nonetheless, the
German speakers at the beginning of your trip and
the Dutch speakers at its end would have much
more trouble, and certainly think of themselves as
speaking two quite distinct (if related) languages. In
some parts of the world, such as the Western Desert
in Australia, such a continuum can stretch well over
a thousand miles, with the speakers in each local
region able to understand one another while the
ends of the continuum are clearly not mutually intel-
ligible at all. How many languages are represented in
such a case?
Related to this is the fact that we refer to the lan-
guage of, say, Chaucer (1400), Shakespeare (1600),
Thomas Jefferson (1800) and George W. Bush (2000)
all as “English,” but it is safe to say these are not
all mutually intelligible. Shakespeare might have
been able, with some difficulty, to converse with
Chaucer or with Jefferson, but Jefferson (and certainly
Bush) would need an interpreter for Chaucer.
Languages change gradually over time, maintaining
intelligibility across adjacent generations, but eventu-
ally yielding very different systems.

The notion of distinctness among languages, then, is

much harder to resolve than it seems at first sight.
Political and social considerations trump purely lin-
guistic reality, and the criterion of mutual intelligibili-
ty is ultimately inadequate.

At least 500 (But that’s just in Northern Italy).

So does the science of Linguistics provide a better
basis for measuring the number of different lan-
guages spoken in the world? When we address the
question of just when forms of speech differ system-
atically from a linguistic point of view, we get
answers that are potentially crisp and clear, but
rather surprising.

If we try to distinguish languages from one another

simply in terms of their words and the patterns we
can observe in sentences, problems arise. Very differ-
ent languages can share words (through borrowing)
while different speakers of the “same” language may
vary widely in their vocabulary due to factors of edu-
cation or speaking style. Different languages may dis-
play the same sentence patterns, while a single lan-
guage may display a great variety of patterns. In gen-
eral, linguists have found that the analysis of the
external facts of language use gives us at best a slip-
pery object of study. Rather more coherent, it seems,
is the study of the abstract knowledge speakers have
which allows them to produce and understand what
they say or hear or read: their internalized knowledge
of the grammar of their language.

We might propose, then, that instead of counting

languages in terms of external forms, we might try
to count the range of distinct grammars in the
world. How might we do this? What differentiates
one grammar from another? Some aspects of gram-
matical knowledge, like the way pronouns are inter-
preted with respect to another expression in the
same sentence, seem to be common across lan-
guages. In She thinks that Mary is smart, the pro-
noun she can refer to any female in the universe
with one exception: she here cannot refer to the
same individual as Mary. This seems to be a fact not
about English, but about language in general,
because the same facts recur in every language
when the structural relations are the same. On the
other hand, the fact that adjectives precede their
nouns in English (we say a red balloon, not a bal-
loon red) is a fact about English, since the opposite
is true, for instance, in French. If we had a complete
inventory of the set of parameters that can serve in
this way, we could then say that each particular col-
lection of values for those parameters that we could
identify in the knowledge of some set of speakers
should count as a distinct language.

But let us see what happens when we apply this

approach to a single linguistic area, say Northern
Italy. Consider the facts of negative sentences, for
example. Standard Italian uses a negative marker
which precedes the verb (Maria non mangia la carne
‘Maria not eats the meat’), while the language spo-
ken in Piémonte (Piedmontese) uses a negative
marker that follows the verb (Maria a mangia nen la
carn ‘Maria she eats not the meat’). Other differ-
ences correlate with this: standard Italian cannot
have a negative with an imperative verb, but uses
the infinitive instead, while Piedmontese allows neg-
ative imperatives; standard Italian requires a ‘double
negative’ in sentences like Non ho visto nessuno ‘not
have I seen nobody’ while Piedmontese does not
use the extra negative marker, and so on. The func-
tioning of negation here establishes a parameter that
distinguishes these (and other) grammars. This is
only the beginning, though. When we look more
closely at the speech of various areas in Northern
Italy, we find several other parameters that distin-
guish one grammar from another within this area,
such that each of them can vary from place to place
in ways that are independent of all of the others.

Still staying within Northern Italy, let us suppose that

there are, say, ten such parameters that distinguish
one grammar from another. This is really quite a
conservative estimate, in light of the variation that
has in fact been found there. But if each of these
can vary independently of the others, collectively
they define a set of two to the tenth, or 1,024
distinct grammars, and indeed scholars have
estimated that somewhere between 300 and 500
of these distinct possibilities are actually instantiated
in the region!

Of course, the implications of this result for the

world as a whole must be based on a thorough
study of the range and limits of possible grammati-
cal variation. But all of these forms of “Italian” have
a great deal in common, and there are many ways in
which they are all distinct as a group from many
other languages in many other parts of the world.
Since the number of possible grammatical systems
expands exponentially as the number of parameters
grows, if we have only about 25 or 30 of these, the
number of possible languages in this sense becomes
huge: well over a billion, on the assumption of thirty
distinct parameters. Obviously not all of these possi-
bilities will be actualized, but if the space of possi-
ble grammars is covered uniformly to something like
the extent we find in Northern Italy for the limited
set of parameters in play there, the number of lan-
guages in the world must be much greater than the
Ethnologue’s 6,809.

Only one
(A biologist looks at human language).
When we look at the languages of the world, they
may seem bewilderingly diverse. From the point of
view of communication systems more generally, how-
ever, they are remarkably similar to one another.
Human language differs from the communicative
behavior of every other known organism in a number
of fundamental ways, all shared across languages.

By comparison with the communicative devices of

herring gulls, honey bees, dolphins or any other
non-human animal, language provides us with a sys-
tem that is not stimulus bound and ranges over an
infinity of possible distinct messages. It achieves this
with a limited, finite system of units that combine
hierarchically and recursively into larger units. The
words themselves are structured from a small inven-
tory of sounds basic to the language, individually
meaningless elements combined according to a sys-
tem completely independent of the way words com-
bine into phrases and sentences.

The particular linguistic system that each individual

controls goes far beyond the direct experience from
which knowledge of it arose. And the principles gov-
erning these systems of sounds, words and mean-
ings are largely common across languages, with only
limited possibilities for difference (the parameters
described above). In all these ways, human language
is so different from any other known system in the
natural world that the narrowly constrained ways in
which one grammar can differ from another fade into
insignificance. For a native of Milan, the differences
between the speech of that city and that of Turin
may loom large, but for a visitor from Kuala Lumpur
both are “Italian.” Similarly, the differences we find
across the world in grammars seem very important,
but for an outside observer—say, a biologist study-
ing communication among living beings in general—
all are relatively minor variations on the single
theme of Human language.

As the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica

put it, “[...] all existing human speech is one in the
essential characteristics which we have thus far
noted or shall hereafter have to consider, even as
humanity is one in its distinction from the lower
animals; the differences are in nonessentials.”

For Further Reading

Anderson, Stephen R. & David W. Lightfoot. 2002.
The Language Organ: Linguistics as Cognitive
Physiology. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.

Baker, Mark. 2001. The Atoms of Language. New

York: Basic Books.

Chambers, J. K. & Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology.

2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Romaine, Suzanne. 2000. Language in Society. 2nd
edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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