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Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). 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.
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.
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".
SIL International's Ethnologue: Languages of the World lists over 7,100 spoken and signed languages. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns codes for most languages; see ISO 639. List of ISO 639-1 codes – two-letter codes (184 major languages) List of ISO 639-2 codes – three-letter codes
Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation in the world, with over 279 million inhabitants of which the majority speak Indonesian, which makes it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. [46] Indonesian is considered the 11th most commonly spoken language by Ethnologue, as of 2022.
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]
List of languages by the number of countries in which they are the most widely used [ edit ] This is a ranking of languages by number of sovereign countries in which they are de jure or de facto official, co-official, an administrative or working language.