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How many languages is in the World, including "dead" languages?

2006-08-16 08:50:43 · 4 answers · asked by Eduard 1 in Society & Culture Languages

Exept dialects.

2006-08-16 08:56:48 · update #1

4 answers

Counting "dead" languages is a difficult task because in places like the Americas, hundreds of languages went extinct without any record of their existence. Also, do we count Old English as a different language than Modern English even though Modern English is the direct descendant of Old English? So, generously counting the dead languages that we know about, we come upon the further complication of whether two speech forms are dialects of the same language or two different languages. Linguistically accurate lists have included between 3000 and 8000 different languages. Most linguists talk about 6000 languages. Of these languages, about 1000 are spoken in the Americas, about 1000 in Eurasia, about 2000 in Africa, about 1000 in Australia and the islands of the Pacific and Asia, and about 1000 on the island of New Guinea.

EDIT: A note about the Ethnologue site. It is not the final word in language numbers. While it is widely used and quoted, it suffers from a number of methodological problems in its accounting. First, its coverage of recently extinct languages is haphazard. For example, it lists many extinct languages in some parts of the world and none in others. It lists, for example, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, which went extinct in the 11th or 12th centuries, but it does not list Lule, which went extinct in the 19th or 20th centuries. It lists about half of the extinct languages of Australia without any real methodology as to which extinct languages it includes and which extinct languages it excludes. Its coverage of living languages is quite good, but it tends to list too many languages sometimes, calling mutually intelligible dialects "languages". One must always remember that the primary focus of Ethnologue is to serve as a planning document for Bible translation, not as a purely scientific list of the world's languages. Therefore, two communities that speak dialects of the same language, but have different writing systems or are antagonistic towards one another, will be listed twice in Ethnologue rather than once.

2006-08-16 09:34:54 · answer #1 · answered by Taivo 7 · 1 0

The widely respected SIL site "ethnologue.com" counts 6912 living languages.

See their chart with a breakdown by continent:

http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=area#1

Dead languages are much harder to count, though ethnologue does include a listing of those they've accounted for under the individual nations. (Unfortunately, they do not list the total, and I have not the time to visit over 200 pages to total them!)

2006-08-16 12:03:29 · answer #2 · answered by bruhaha 7 · 0 0

There are six-thousand and eight-hundred known languages spoken in all of the world. 2,261 have writing sytems, as the rest are simply spoken. Yes, this includes dead languages.

2006-08-16 08:58:34 · answer #3 · answered by kittyloah 1 · 0 0

I heard that there are like 2,000 languages in the world.

2006-08-16 08:55:53 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

Many thousands, if you include dialects.

2006-08-16 08:55:49 · answer #5 · answered by ? 3 · 0 0

one!!!! I Need to learn to speak inglish!!! I'm braziliam.

2006-08-16 08:58:51 · answer #6 · answered by Manuela 2 · 0 1

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