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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 ...
Current distribution of human language families. Human languages ranked by their number of native speakers are as follows. All such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]
The ranking reflects the most recent month in the data (Sep 2024). Most edited editions of Wikipedia over time. The ranking reflects the most recent month in the data (Sep 2024). The Wikimedia Analytics API provides the most recent data on page views and page edits, among other statistics, for all language editions of Wikipedia.
The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total English-speaking population of the European Union and the United Kingdom combined (2012) is 256,876,220 [69] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [70] i.e. 51%) including 65,478,252 native speakers and 191,397,968 non-native speakers, and would be ranked 2nd if it were included.
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 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)
World map of linguistic diversity index (linearly proportional to the shading intensity). Data is from the 18th edition of Ethnologue: Languages of the World.. Linguistic diversity index (LDI) may refer to either Greenberg's (language) Diversity Index [1] or the related Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD) from Terralingua, which measures changes in the underlying LDI over time.
Various definitions of the term world language have been proposed; there is no general consensus about which one to use. [4] [5]One definition proffered by Congolese linguist Salikoko Mufwene is "languages spoken as vernaculars or as lingua francas outside their homelands and by populations other than those ethnically or nationally associated with them".