2006-08-12 15:51:50 · 7 answers · asked by Mommy Dearest 5 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
There is no exact count because it all depends on where you draw the line between languages and dialects. It is not as easy as you might think. Linguists list between 3000 and 8000, with most of us using the rough number of 6000. If you take six people to represent 1000 languages each, one person lives in Eurasia, two people live in Africa, one person lives in the Americas, one person lives on all the islands of Asia and the Pacific (including Australia), and one person lives on the island of New Guinea.
2006-08-12 20:02:22 · answer #1 · answered by Taivo 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
So far there are 6,912 known living languages and 39,491 known dialects . Check out this site: http://www.ethnologue.com/home.asp
But it could be actually much more than such figure. Known languages and dialects had different secondary form which means the combinations of different languages or dialects can emerge into another category of dialect. There are some languages as well which has not been used,no much documentation about it and have just forgotten which ends in what we call language death.
2006-08-12 16:43:06 · answer #2 · answered by ♥ lani s 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
there are about 5,000-6,000 different languages spoken in the world today. The imprecision in this estimate is largely due to the fact that some dialects are in the process of diverging and it is not clear that they have reached the stage of being separate languages. If two people find each other's speech unintelligible, they are usually thought to be speaking different languages rather than dialects.
There are about 200 languages that have a million or more native speakers. Mandarin Chinese is the most common, being spoken by around 874,000,000 people as a native language. English is a distant third with approximately 341,000,000 native speakers.
2006-08-12 15:55:56 · answer #3 · answered by mets9999 4 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Around 6,000 languages, but many are in the final stages of dying. Papua New Guinea has over 1,000 languages alone. Australia used to have around 400, but now as few as 20 are still spoken.
As for dialects, probably have to add another few thousand.
2006-08-12 15:59:40 · answer #4 · answered by J9 6 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Not sure about dialects but there are about 6000 languages in the world.
2006-08-12 15:56:54 · answer #5 · answered by guesswho 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Check out this site, including dialects, over 40,000!
http://www.ethnologue.com/language_index.asp
2006-08-12 15:59:04 · answer #6 · answered by sparkletina 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I THINK it's around 200.
2006-08-12 15:56:16 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 2⤋