Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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".
List of sign languages by number of native signers; List of language families (with number of speakers) List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official language; Number of languages by country; Languages used on the Internet; List of ISO 639-3 codes; Lists of languages; List of languages by number of ...
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 an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 6 January 2025. Group of languages related through a common ancestor 2005 map of the contemporary distribution of the world's primary language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a ...
Lists which are global in scope (all living natural languages would classify for inclusion): by country: List of official languages by country and territory; Number of languages by country; by name: List of language names (native names) by phylogenetic relation: List of language families (phylogenetic)
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.
In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue , with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.