How many languages are there in the world? It is believed that from 2500 to 7000. The views of scientists on their total number differ due to the lack of a unified approach to what is considered a language and what is a dialect.
How many languages are there in the world?
All languages of the world are divided into families, which number 240. The largest language family and by far the most studied is the Indo-European group, which includes the Russian language. The basis for including different languages in one family is the significant phonetic similarity of the roots of words denoting basic concepts, and the similarity of the grammatical structure.
There are also isolate languages that cannot be placed in any family. An example of such an isolate language, “not remembering kinship”, is the Basque dialect “Euskera”.
Most spoken languages
How many languages in the modern world are most widely spoken? These include 10: Chinese (Mandarin), English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malayo-Indonesian, French. Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people. On each ofnine others of the top ten are spoken by over 100 million people.
The reason for the popularity of the Chinese language should be considered that it is spoken in China, Singapore, Taiwan, there are vast Chinese diasporas in almost all countries of Southeast Asia and other countries of the world. We must not forget the fertility of this people.
Native speakers of English and Spanish were the most active conquerors of overseas lands, discoverers of the Americas. That is why, if we look at the language map of the world, we will see that these two languages are territorially dominant. English is official in 56 states, Spanish - in more than 20 countries. The French, just like the British and Spaniards, also created a mighty empire in their time, which controlled vast territories in North America and Africa. Today French is the first official language in 15 countries of the world.
Interesting facts
In the history of European civilization, several languages in the world at different times occupied the position of an interethnic means of communication - the lingua franca. During the time of the Roman Empire, Koine, a common Greek language, became such a "lingua franca" for the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. Subsequently, for more than 1000 years, first in the Mediterranean countries, and then throughout Catholic Europe, Latin was used as the lingua franca. In the 18th-19th centuries, French became the medium of international communication. Since the end of the twentieth century, the means of interethnic communication throughout the world has becomeEnglish is undoubtedly due to the leading position in the world of the English-speaking superpower - the United States.
Dead languages
In linguistics there is such a thing as a "dead language". This is one that is no longer spoken, and is known only through written monuments. In some cases, dead languages live on because they are used for scientific or religious purposes. And how many languages are there in the world? These include Latin, from which the Romance languages subsequently developed; Old Russian, which became the basis for the East Slavic languages, and Ancient Greek. There are also a number of dead languages that are used for scientific and religious purposes - Sanskrit, Coptic, Avestan.
There is one unique case of the resurrection of a dead language. After the Second World War, when the State of Israel was established, Hebrew, which had not been spoken for 18 centuries, was revived as the official language of this country.
Dominant language
In a bilingual environment, one language is dominant. Previously, during the time of empires, the main reason for the death of local languages was the mass destruction of the local population. Today, the weaker language is dying for socio-economic reasons, not because its speakers are dying out. Ignorance of the dominant language entails the impossibility of getting an education, moving up the social ladder, etc. Therefore, in a bilingual family, parents often prefer not to even speak their native, endangered language, so as not to create problems for children inthe future. To a large extent, the process of extinction is influenced by the media using the dominant language.
An important question is how many languages there are in the world. But an even more important problem is their extinction. Every 2 weeks, one language disappears from the world. According to scientists, by the end of the 21st century, 3.5 thousand of them will disappear.
Constructed languages
An interesting phenomenon in the world of languages is artificial dialects. How many languages are there in this type of world? The most famous are 16, and the most popular of them is Esperanto, created in 1887 by Ludwig Zamenhof. Zamenhof was originally from Bialystok, a city inhabited by Jews, Poles, Germans, Belarusians. The city had very complex inter-ethnic relations. Zamenhof considered their reason for the lack of a single language. The goal of Esperanto was to spread the ideas of peaceful coexistence among people all over the world. Zamenhof published an Esperanto textbook. He translated many masterpieces of world literature into his own language and even wrote poetry in Esperanto. Most of the Esperanto vocabulary consists of Romance and Germanic roots, as well as Latin and Greek, which have a general scientific meaning. Around 200,000 articles in Esperanto have been published on Wikipedia.
Now you know how many languages there are in the world, and perhaps you can save endangered ones by studying them.
