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For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese.
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
Lists of endangered languages are mainly based on the definitions used by UNESCO. In order to be listed, a language must be classified as "endangered" in a cited academic source. Researchers have concluded that in less than one hundred years, almost half of the languages known today will be lost forever. [1] The lists are organized by region.
In the Foreign Service Institute’s language classification system, the most difficult languages are at Category 5. These take 88 weeks or 2,200 hours of classroom time to reach proficiency.
The 20 most common languages, each with more than 50 million speakers, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, but most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. [3] The first step towards language death is potential endangerment. This is when a language faces strong external pressure, but there are still communities of speakers ...
English as a first language is only spoken by 259,678 people, as a second language by 182,717,239 and as a third language by 45,562,173. [4] Nigeria: 206,200,000 125,039,680: 60.64 20,000,000 9.70: 103,198,040 50.05: English is the most widespread language in the country due to the many different languages spoken, with 60 million speakers. [5]
This is first of all due to the question of defining "language" vs. "dialect". Identification of varieties as a single language or as distinct languages is often based on ethnic, cultural, or political considerations rather than mutual intelligibility. The second difficulty is multilingualism, complicating the definition of "native language".