2006-08-16 08:53:55 · 2 answers · asked by Eduard 1 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
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, generaously 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.
2006-08-16 09:33:02 · answer #1 · answered by Taivo 7 · 1⤊ 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 16:00:51 · answer #2 · answered by kittyloah 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋