Note : all links on this site to Amazon. This means I earn a commission if you click on any of them and buy something. So by clicking on these links you can help to support this site. Language and Writing Statistics How many languages are there? How many languages have a written form? How many writing sytems are currently used? How many languages are written with each writing system?
How many languages are there? The name used for Cyrillic is in Russian [ top ] How many languages are written with each writing system? Learn languages on iTalki Join shareasale. Language Tutors. Different languages may display the same sentence patterns, while a single language may display a great variety of patterns. In general, linguists have found that the analysis of the external facts of language use gives us at best a slippery object of study.
Rather more coherent, it seems, is the study of the abstract knowledge speakers have which allows them to produce and understand what they say or hear or read: their internalized knowledge of the grammar of their language. We might propose, then, that instead of counting languages in terms of external forms, we might try to count the range of distinct grammars in the world.
How might we do this? What differentiates one grammar from another? Some aspects of grammatical knowledge, like the way pronouns are interpreted with respect to another expression in the same sentence, seem to be common across languages. In She thinks that Mary is smart, the pronoun she can refer to any female in the universe with one exception: she here cannot refer to the same individual as Mary.
This seems to be a fact not about English, but about language in general, because the same facts recur in every language when the structural relations are the same. On the other hand, the fact that adjectives precede their nouns in English we say a red balloon, not a balloon red is a fact about English, since the opposite is true, for instance, in French.
If we had a complete inventory of the set of parameters that can serve in this way, we could then say that each particular collection of values for those parameters that we could identify in the knowledge of some set of speakers should count as a distinct language. But let us see what happens when we apply this approach to a single linguistic area, say Northern Italy. Consider the facts of negative sentences, for example. The functioning of negation here establishes a parameter that distinguishes these and other grammars.
This is only the beginning, though. When we look more closely at the speech of various areas in Northern Italy, we find several other parameters that distinguish one grammar from another within this area, such that each of them can vary from place to place in ways that are independent of all of the others. Still staying within Northern Italy, let us suppose that there are, say, ten such parameters that distinguish one grammar from another.
This is really quite a conservative estimate, in light of the variation that has in fact been found there. But if each of these can vary independently of the others, collectively they define a set of two to the tenth, or 1, distinct grammars, and indeed scholars have estimated that somewhere between and of these distinct possibilities are actually instantiated in the region!
Of course, the implications of this result for the world as a whole must be based on a thorough study of the range and limits of possible grammatical variation. Since the number of possible grammatical systems expands exponentially as the number of parameters grows, if we have only about 25 or 30 of these, the number of possible languages in this sense becomes huge: well over a billion, on the assumption of thirty distinct parameters.
When we look at the languages of the world, they may seem bewilderingly diverse. From the point of view of communication systems more generally, however, they are remarkably similar to one another. Human language differs from the communicative behavior of every other known organism in a number of fundamental ways, all shared across languages. By comparison with the communicative devices of herring gulls, honey bees, dolphins or any other non-human animal, language provides us with a system that is not stimulus bound and ranges over an infinity of possible distinct messages.
It achieves this with a limited, finite system of units that combine hierarchically and recursively into larger units. The words themselves are structured from a small inventory of sounds basic to the language, individually meaningless elements combined according to a system completely independent of the way words combine into phrases and sentences.
The particular linguistic system that each individual controls goes far beyond the direct experience from which knowledge of it arose. And the principles governing these systems of sounds, words and meanings are largely common across languages, with only limited possibilities for difference the parameters described above. In all these ways, human language is so different from any other known system in the natural world that the narrowly constrained ways in which one grammar can differ from another fade into insignificance.
Donate Jobs Center News Room. Search form Search. How many languages are there in the world? Stephen R. Anderson Download this document as a pdf. More than you might have thought! That makes the average number of Photo credit: Minna Sundberg speakers around 4,, possibly the lowest of any area of the world.
Fewer than there were last month Only one A biologist looks at human language Languages: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Others are spoken by huge populations across different countries, and are often popular choices among language learners. Read on for the twelve most spoken languages in the world, in terms of native speakers , and everything you need to know about them. Language family: Germanic, a sub-family of Indo-European.
With over 1, million native speakers, English is the most spoken language in the world. Not only is Shakespeare widely considered as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, but over his lifespan he added an incredible amount of about 1, words to the English language by changing nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, connecting some words with each other and adding prefixes or suffixes to others.
In terms of native speakers alone, Mandarin Chinese is by far the second most spoken language in the world. Mandarin is a tonal language, which means that the meaning of a word changes based on the way we pronounce it. With a set of about 50, characters, it is probably one of the most complex languages to learn.
Language family: Indo-Ayran, a sub-family of Indo-European. These words and many more! There are about million native Hindi speakers, which makes it the third most spoken language in the world. Language family: Romance, a sub-family of Indo-European.
Related to: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian. Fun fact: The first modern novel and the second most translated book after the Bible was written in Spanish. Which novel? This is great news for native English speakers. For Spanish appears to be the easiest foreign language for English speakers to learn! Fun fact: About 45 per cent of modern English words are of French origin. Spoken across different parts of the world — think everywhere from the rest of France and parts of Canada to a handful of African countries, including Senegal and Madagascar — the French language has spread its roots far and wide.
Language family: Semitic, a sub-family of Afro-Asiatic.
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