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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 they are sometimes considered language families instead.
This is a list of languages arranged by age of the oldest existing text recording a complete sentence in the language. It does not include undeciphered writing systems , though there are various claims without wide acceptance, which, if substantiated, would push backward the first attestation of certain languages.
For many languages which have become extinct in recent centuries, attestation of usage is datable in the historical record, and sometimes the terminal speaker is identifiable. In other cases, historians and historical linguists may infer an estimated date of extinction from other events in the history of the sprachraum .
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 .
He is famous for claiming to speak more than fifty languages, and for a time was listed in The Guinness Book of Records. It is unclear how many languages he can in fact speak. [219] Andrew Divoff (1955–), Venezuelan actor and producer. He speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, English, German, and Russian. [220]
a Proto-human language, the hypothetical, most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages; the date of attestation in writing . see list of languages by first written accounts. the conservative nature of a given language (low rate of language change, viz. "old" in the sense of "has not changed much for a long time"), see
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.
Eight of the top ten biggest languages, by number of native speakers, are Indo-European. One of these languages, English, is the de facto world lingua franca, with an estimate of over one billion second language speakers. Indo-European language family has 10 known branches or subfamilies, of which eight are living and two are extinct.