Ling 001: Linguistic Typology

Languages: Basic Facts

• How many languages are there? According to the Ethnologue database, there were in 2000 a total of
• 6,809 living languages in the world
• Naturally the different languages have distinct geographical distributions

Geography

• Distribution:
•   

• Americas: 1013
• Africa: 2058
• Asia: 2197
• Europe: 230
• Pacific:1311

Comments

• When the numbers of languages are given in such terms, it is to be assumed that the number of speakers varies greatly
• E.g. Mandarin Chinese is reported to have 874 million speakers, whereas some languages have only a single speaker remaining
• In addition, counts are subject to questions of what counts as a (first) language and so on, and are thus not absolute (see below)