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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, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties, and so ...
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.
ELCat has found that 45% of all currently-spoken languages are endangered, based on the 3116 still-spoken endangered languages in ELCat compared to the 6861 still-living languages listed by Ethnologue. ELCat finds that 299 languages have fewer than 10 speakers and that 792 are "critically" or "severely" endangered.
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 ...
This article is a list of language families. This list only includes primary language families that are accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics ; for language families that are not accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics, see the article " List of proposed language families ".
A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a sign language , which is produced with the body and hands.
The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 [5] and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. [6]
A genetic relationship is when two different languages are descended from a common ancestral language. [5] This is what makes up a language family, which is a set of languages for which sufficient evidence exists to demonstrate that they descend from a single ancestral language and are therefore genetically related. [1]