which country has the most local spoken languages?

Question

meaning languages only spoken in that country, not languages of people that moved there

Answer 1

According to the Ethnologue database --

#1 = Papua New Guinea - 830 languages listed (820 living, 10 extinct)
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=PG

Answer 2

China with 206 languages, of which 205 are extant. There are five distinct dialect groups, namely Mandarin, Wu, Min, Yue and Hakka in which these languages sit. (NB Yue includes the well known Cantonese.) Splitting up into their component dialects gives rise to the large number of languages (see defintion later**). Just one example: Toysan in southern China is not very big, but Toysanese is like a separate language by most people's definition. And since China is a very large country with around 1.2 billion inhabitants, you can see how the variety of languages within the five dialect groups is over 200.

**Note re language definitions: To understand why there are so many distinct Chinese languages, linguists use the following definition to distinguish between a language and a dialect:-

'If two speech varieties are mutually intelligible, they are different dialects of the same language, but if they are mutually unintelligible, they are different languages.'

Hence, the reason why a Toysanese speaker is not understood by a Fukkiansese speaker (and vice versa), is because, as far as each is concerned, the other is speaking a different language!

Answer 3

It depends on the person in question. Some people like it, some see you are in pain and try to help you out, some people want to show off thier own English skills. Another thing is French in France and French in Quebec are very different. It isn't simply the accent but the choice of vocabulary and the formality sets them apart. It could be that you learnt to speak French a certain way and native speakers found it difficult to understand.

Answer 4

Hey Whiskey,

That is an interesting question.

I know that more than 170 languages are spoken in The Philippines.

Now, according to Wikipedia, ¨The number of mother tongues in India is as high as 1,652.¨


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India

That may be the right answer to your question.

Answer 5

South Africa has 11 official languages which is officially the most in the world (according to the Guinness Books of Records)... Afrikaans (similar to Dutch) is the youngest official language in the world and the only European-originated language on African soil. South Africa has 4 main ethnic groups: black, white, colored and Indian. Afrikaans is spoken by the white and colored population! English is the only official language which is not truly indigenous to South Africa.

Answer 6

you have to be careful to understand the difference between "official language" colloquial language, dialects, indigenous languages.... there is a lot of politics involved in this, because many governments are loathe to recognize the existence of non-official languages, for reasons of maintaing power. Also, people from a predominant culture will be dismissive of minority languages and call them "dialects". you need to be critical about it.

Answer 7

The people of Portugal speak portuguese as well the people of Brazil, Uganda, Acores, etc
I don'l know the correct answer for this question, but Portugal isn't.

Answer 8

Switzerland

Answer 9

Russia has so many nations with all their own languages.

Answer 10

Australia has around a hundred aboriginal languages.