How many languages are there in the world? It is believed that from 2500 to 7000. The views of scientists on their total number diverge due to the lack of a unified approach to what is considered a language and what is a dialect.
How many languages are there in the world?
All languages of the world are divided into families, which number 240. The largest language family and by far the most studied is considered to be the Indo-European group, which includes the Russian language. The basis for the inclusion of different languages in one family is the significant phonetic similarity of the roots of words denoting basic concepts, and the similarity of the grammatical structure.
There are also isolate languages that cannot be placed in any family. An example of such an isolating language, "one who does not remember kinship," is the Basque dialect of "Eusker."
The most common languages
How many languages in the modern world are the most common? These include 10: Chinese (Mandarin), English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French. Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people. Each of the nine others out of the ten most common is spoken by over 100 million people.
The reason for the popularity of the Chinese language should be considered to be that it is spoken in China, Singapore, Taiwan, there are vast Chinese diasporas in almost all countries of Southeast Asia and other countries of the world. We must not forget about the fertility of this people.
Speakers of English and Spanish were the most active conquerors of overseas lands, the discoverers of the Americas. That is why, if we look at the linguistic map of the world, we will see that these two languages are territorially dominant. English is official in 56 states, Spanish - in more than 20 countries. The French, just like the British and Spaniards, also at one time created a powerful empire, which controlled the vast territories in North America and Africa. Today, French is the first official language in 15 countries of the world.
Interesting Facts
In the history of European civilization, several languages in the world at different times occupied the position of an interethnic means of communication - the lingua franca. During the time of the Roman Empire, Koine - the pan-Greek language - became such a “lingua franca" for the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. Subsequently, more than 1000 years, first in the Mediterranean countries, and then throughout Catholic Europe, the Latin language was used as the lingua franca. In the 18th-19th centuries, French became a means of international communication. Since the end of the 20th century, the English language has become a means of interethnic communication throughout the world, undoubtedly because of the leading position in the world of the English-speaking superpower - the United States.
Dead languages
In linguistics there is such a thing as “dead language”. This is one that is no longer spoken, and they know about it only thanks to written monuments. In some cases, dead languages continue to live because they are used for scientific or religious purposes. And how many languages are there in the world? These include Latin, from which the Romance languages subsequently developed; Old Russian, which became the basis for the East Slavic languages, and ancient Greek. There are a number of dead languages that are used for scientific and religious purposes - Sanskrit, Coptic, Avestan.
There is one unique case of the resurrection of a dead tongue. After the Second World War, when the state of Israel was created, Hebrew, which no one spoke for 18 centuries, was revived as the official language of this country.
Dominant language
In a bilingual (bilingual) environment, one language is dominant. Previously, during the time of empires, the main reason for the death of local languages was the mass destruction of the local population. Today, a weaker language is dying for socio-economic reasons, and not because its speakers are dying. Ignorance of the dominant language entails the impossibility of getting an education, moving up the social ladder, etc. Therefore, in a bilingual family, parents often prefer not even to speak their own endangered language so as not to create problems for children in the future. To a large extent, the process of extinction is influenced by the media using the dominant language.
The important question is how many languages are there in the world. But an even more important problem is their extinction. Every 2 weeks, one language disappears in the world. According to scientists, by the end of the 21st century, 3,500 of them will disappear.
Artificial languages
An interesting phenomenon in the world of languages are artificial dialects. How many languages in the world are of this type? The most famous are 16, and the most popular of them is Esperanto, created in 1887 by Ludwig Zamenhof. Zamenhof was from Bialystok, a city inhabited by Jews, Poles, Germans, Belarusians. The city had very complex interethnic relations. Zamenhof considered them the reason for the lack of a single language. Esperanto's goal was to spread the idea of peaceful coexistence among people around the world. Zamenhof published an Esperanto textbook. He translated many masterpieces of world literature into his language and even wrote poetry in Esperanto. Most of the Esperanto dictionary consists of Romanesque and Germanic roots, as well as Latin and Greek, which have a general scientific meaning. About 200,000 articles in Esperanto are published on Wikipedia.
Now you know how many languages exist in the world, and you can probably save the endangered by studying them.