How many languages are there in the world?

There are about 7,000 languages in the world. The two catalogues that linguists rely on give different figures: Ethnologue counts 7,170 languages in use today, and Glottolog lists 7,674 spoken languages. Neither is wrong. They are counting slightly different things, and the gap between them shows why no exact number exists. The world's speakers are spread very unevenly across those languages: by Ethnologue's figures, the 20 largest are the first language of nearly half of humanity.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 7 min read

The two counts

Both figures were read from the catalogues' own pages on 14 October 2026. Both will have changed by next year: Ethnologue says of its own figure that it "is constantly in flux, because we're learning more about the world's languages every day."

Why the two numbers differ

They do not agree on whether a language has to be alive. Ethnologue describes its purpose as "a comprehensive listing of the known living languages of the world". Glottolog's 7,674 are "spoken languages traditionally used by a community of speakers as their first language", and that includes languages nobody speaks any more. Latin has an entry among them, marked extinct. That difference alone pushes Glottolog's figure up.

They draw the line between a language and a dialect differently. Glottolog uses a single test. A language has to be distinct from every other, and "by distinct, we mean not mutually intelligible with any other language." Ethnologue follows the international standard for language codes, ISO 639-3, which starts from the same idea and then adds two exceptions:

• Two varieties that can barely understand each other still count as one language if they share "a common literature" or "a common ethnolinguistic identity".
• Two varieties that understand each other well can still count as two languages when they have "long-standing, distinctly named ethnolinguistic identities" and their own literatures.

Ethnologue is frank about what this means: "the identification of 'a language' is not based on linguistic criteria alone."

They sort the edge cases into different places. Glottolog keeps its 7,674 for ordinary spoken languages and files everything else separately: 227 sign languages, 87 pidgins, 31 artificial languages, 19 speech registers, 4 mixed languages, and 196 languages that are unattested or cannot be classified, for 8,238 entries in all. Esperanto is one of the 31 artificial languages there. Ethnologue treats sign languages as within its scope and lists 159 living ones.

Some languages on the lists may not exist. Glottolog gives an example: a language called Yarsun "was once claimed by Ethnologue to be an Austronesian language of northern New Guinea", and later research found no good evidence that it had ever been distinct from its neighbours. Catalogues of 7,000 languages, many with a few hundred speakers and little written about them, always contain a few such entries, and each new edition removes some and adds others.

Language or dialect: the question underneath

Every count depends on where one language stops and the next begins, and speech does not come divided up. Neighbouring villages usually understand each other; the villages at the two ends of a long chain may not. Any line drawn across the chain is a decision.

Chinese is the largest example. Ethnologue treats "Chinese" as a macrolanguage, "a grouping of nineteen languages all considered 'Chinese' due to a shared writing system and literature", and names Mandarin, Wu and Cantonese among them. Counted by the writing, that is one language. Counted by whether the speakers understand each other, it is nineteen. Both answers are in the same catalogue.

That is not a technicality for the people involved. Shanghainese, the best-known variety of Wu, is not understood by Mandarin speakers and is called a dialect in everyday Chinese usage: the argument is set out in is Shanghainese a language or a dialect, and the numbers of speakers in how many people speak Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese. The same question, asked of two languages that everyone agrees are separate, is can Portuguese speakers understand Spanish: measured, they understand a good deal, and nobody concludes that they speak one language.

Most people speak a handful of them

The languages are many and the speakers are concentrated. Ethnologue's figures:

• The 20 largest languages are the first language of more than 3.7 billion people. In its words, "that's just 0.3% of the world's languages accounting for nearly half of the world's population."
• Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers, followed by Spanish, English and Hindi. Counting everyone who speaks a language, native or not, English is the largest, followed by Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish.
• Six families hold most of the languages and most of the people. Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic "together account for nearly two-thirds of all languages" and "five-sixths of the world's population". Niger-Congo and Austronesian have more than 1,000 languages each.

So the typical language is small. A language with a hundred million speakers is the rare exception.

Where the languages are

They are not spread evenly either. Ethnologue puts the most in Papua New Guinea, with over 800, followed by Indonesia, with over 700. "More than twice the number of languages spoken across Europe can be found in Papua New Guinea alone."

Nearly half are endangered

Ethnologue counts 3,226 languages as endangered, about 44% of the total, "often with fewer than 1,000 users remaining". It defines the moment precisely: a language becomes endangered "when its users begin to pass on a more dominant language to the children in the community."

That is the test that matters for a language's future, more than the number of speakers. Te reo Māori is being passed on again after a long decline, and the figures are in how many people speak Māori. Shanghainese still has millions of speakers and is losing its youngest: see is Shanghainese dying.

So what is the answer?

• "About 7,000" is the honest short answer.
• 7,170 if you mean languages in use today, by Ethnologue's rules.
• 7,674 if you mean spoken languages that are known to have existed as someone's first language, by Glottolog's.
• More than 8,000 if you add sign languages, pidgins and constructed languages, as Glottolog's full list does.

Any more exact figure than that depends on decisions about what a language is, and the two catalogues are open that they have made those decisions differently.

If you want to learn one of them

Verbavia (our own course) teaches 9 of the 7,000, a lesson a day, free on the web. They include the two languages with the most native speakers, Mandarin and Spanish; one constructed language, Esperanto; and the two whose futures are discussed above, Shanghainese and te reo Māori. Which is quickest for an English speaker is weighed up in the easiest languages to learn and the hardest languages to learn, and which has the most tones in which language has the most tones.

Which of those languages have the most speakers, counted two ways, is in the most spoken languages in the world.

Which of them was written down first, and why no living language is older than any other, is in what is the oldest language in the world.

How many of them a single person can learn is in how many languages can one person speak.

Sources

• Ethnologue: How many languages are there in the world? (7,170 languages; 44% endangered; the 20 largest languages), How many languages are endangered? (3,226), What is the most spoken language? (the rankings; the Chinese macrolanguage), What are the largest language families? (143 families; the six largest) and What countries have the most languages?. Read 14 October 2026.
• Ethnologue: Methodology, for its purpose, the criteria for identifying a language, and the 159 living sign languages.
• Glottolog 5.3: About languoids, for the counts by category (7,674 spoken L1 languages, dated 2 March 2026; 246 families and 183 isolates), the test of mutual intelligibility, and the Yarsun example; and the entries for Latin and Esperanto. Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M. & Bank, S., Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
• ISO 639-3 Registration Authority: Scope of denotation for language identifiers, for the standard's criteria and its definition of a macrolanguage.