Languages (2024)

FAQs

What are the 23 world languages? ›

The Top 23 Languages On Earth

Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Persian, German, Russian, Malay, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Lahnda, Tamil, Urdu, Korean, Hindi, Bengali, Japanese, Vietnamese, Telugu, and Marathi. Chances are you speak at least one of these languages fluently.

1) Assamese, (2) Bengali, (3) Gujarati, (4) Hindi, (5) Kannada, (6) Kashmiri, (7) Konkani, (8) Malayalam, (9) Manipuri, (10) Marathi, (11) Nepali, (12) Oriya, (13) Punjabi, (14) Sanskrit, (15) Sindhi, (16) Tamil, (17) Telugu, (18) Urdu (19) Bodo, (20) Santhali, (21) Maithili and (22) Dogri.

7000 Languages is a non-profit that helps Indigenous communities around the world teach, learn and sustain their languages through technology. We create free online language-learning courses in partnership with Indigenous, minority, and refugee communities so they can keep their languages alive.

Papua New Guinea has about eight million people, but more than 800 languages. The oldest ones, in the Papuan group, date back tens of thousands of years. So why are there so many languages in this mountainous island country?

According to SIL's publication Ethnologue there are 6,909 distinct languages. Languages are not uniformly distributed around the world: only 234 are spoken in Europe, while 2,322 are spoken in Asia. Another 2,110 are spoken in Africa, 993 in the Americas, and 1,250 in the Pacific.

1. Chinese — 1.3 Billion Native Speakers. Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 900 million of whom speak Mandarin — but there's no doubt it's the most spoken language in the world.

English remains the dominant language of international business and global communication through the influence of global media and the former British Empire that had established the use of English in regions around the world such as North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Today, there are more than 7,100 languages spoken on this planet – and the United States is a polyglot nation of more than 1,000 of those tongues, the Census Bureau reports. English is still the most common language spoken at home in the U.S. According to the Census Bureau, 78% of the population speaks only English.

What are the big 3 languages? ›

It comes as no surprise that English reigns supreme, with over 1.1 billion total speakers—or roughly 15% of the global population. Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and French round out the top five.

Languages in real life vs Languages online

Over 7000 languages are spoken across the world today. Chinese, the language with the most native speakers, has 13 variations, whilst Similarly, Arabic has 20 variations, reflecting the wide range of countries and cultures it is spoken in.

1 in 20 people say they can speak 3 languages fluently (5%). Whilst 1.4% say they can fluently speak 4 languages.

Examples of a Dead Language

But Latin isn't the only dead language, some of the other known dead languages are Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Gothic, all of which are still studied both academically and religiously. However, not all hope is lost for dead languages.

Powell Alexander Janulus (born 1939) is a Canadian polyglot who lives in White Rock, British Columbia, and entered the Guinness World Records in 1985 for fluency in 42 languages. To qualify, he had to pass a two-hour conversational fluency test with a native speaker of each of the 42 languages he spoke at that time.

The EU has 24 official languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

There are six official languages of the UN. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Over 7000 languages are spoken across the world today. Chinese, the language with the most native speakers, has 13 variations, whilst Similarly, Arabic has 20 variations, reflecting the wide range of countries and cultures it is spoken in.