how many language in world?

Answer 1

It's not so easy to give a number ...The problem is that as older people die, the number of languages in the world that are spoken is shrinking.
According to China's People's Daily newspaper, " half of the existing 6,700 languages in the world will die away in a century and another 2,000 languages will be endangered if no efforts are made to save them,."
IIn http://www.ling.gu.se/projekt/sprakfrageladan/english/sprakfakta/eng-sprak-i-varlden.html, it says "it is difficult to give an exact figure of the number of languages that exist in the world, because it is not always easy to define what a language is. The difference between a language and a dialect is not always clear-cut. It has nothing to do with similarity of vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation. Sometimes, the distinctions are based purely on geographical, political, or religious reasons. It is usually estimated that the number of languages in the world varies between 3,000 and 8,000". This site also talks about how, depending on language whether it's counted as one of more languages, Arabic can either be the the 10th or 6th highest in number of speakers in the world.
http://www.ling.gu.se/projekt/sprakfrageladan/english/sprakfakta/eng-sprak-i-varlden.html
Here's a great language site...it tells about the world's different languages and offers a virtual translator.
http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/
I hope this has helped answer your question.

Answer 2

Languages of the World
It is difficult to give an exact figure of the number of languages that exist in the world, because it is not always easy to define what a language is. The difference between a language and a dialect is not always clear-cut. It has nothing to do with similarity of vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation. Sometimes, the distinctions are based purely on geographical, political, or religious reasons. It is usually estimated that the number of languages in the world varies between 3,000 and 8,000.
There is a list of the world's languages, called "Ethnologue" (Grimes 1996). There are 6,500 living languages listed. Of these, 6,000 have registered population figures. 52% of the 6,000 languages are spoken by less than 10,000 people, and 28% are spoken by less than 1,000 people. 83% of them are limited to single countries.

The ten largest languages in the world are the first languages for nearly half of the world's population.

Here is a list of the top 10 languages in February 1999 according to Ethnologue:


1. Mandarin 885 million speakers
2. Spanish 332 million speakers
3. English 322 million speakers
4. Bengali 189 million speakers
5. Hindi 182 million speakers
6. Portuguese 170 million speakers
6. Russian 170 million speakers
8. Japanese 125 million speakers
9. German 98 million speakers
10. Wu 77 million speakers
The figures refer to the number of people who have the language as their first language. If those speakers who have learnt the language as a foreign language were to be included, English might be at the top of the list.
Arabic would be among the 10 most widely spoken languages, if it were to be counted as one language. Ethnologue lists ten variants of spoken Arabic among its top 100. The biggest of these is Egyptian Arabic with 42.5 million speakers. If they were to be counted as one and the same language, Arabic would come out sixth with 175 million speakers, and Wu would drop out of the top ten.
These figures are from 1999, so some languages may have shifted postions on the list for demographical reasons, and then particularly in positions 4 through 7, where also Arabic might turn up, see above.

The branch of linguistics which is called comparative philology, has classified the world's languages into different families. All of the relationships within the families are not yet clear, and therefore the classification must be seen as preliminary.

The languages within a family usually share a common language, from which they developed. However, sometimes languages are considered to be related just because they happen to be geographically close to one another.

Answer 3

A language is a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures or written symbols which communicate thoughts or feelings.

In the view of Ethnologue organisation there are about 6,809 languages.
Personally I believe that there are about 10,000 languages, including dialects.

Answer 4

122 languages. Go to (specific languages in yahoo directory)