I'm going to say a very obvious fact: there are tons of languages out there spoken in
the world, after all that kind of makes sense since languages arise from people being isolated
from each other for a long enough time to start calling things by different names.
If you wanted to go on a multinational trip to Europe or Asia or Africa, but also wanted
to learn all the languages of all the countries you wanted to visit, you would likely find
yourself learning several different languages just for one region.
So just how many languages are there in the world and why is this there no definite number?
First let’s look at the numbers, at least 178 countries have at least one official language
(though this is including all the countries who speak English, French, Spanish, Arabic,
and the others), of those however many have way more than just one official language.
South Africa for instance has 12 official languages and Bolivia recognizes a staggering
37.
The numbers get even higher when looking toward regional languages, of which India recognizes
32, China recognizes 47, Russia recognizes 33, the US 28, and ol’ Canada recognizes
9 indigenous languages.
This list totals to several hundred languages recognized at at least one rung of the government
ladder in one country, but the total count of how many languages there are is still much
higher than that.
In total linguists estimate there to be around 3,000 to 7,000 different languages spoken
around the world.
That is an incredibly big range though, so why are linguists so uncertain?
Well this is because of dialects.
As just about all of us knows, some languages are way more similar to some than to others.
For example English and Turkish are completely different, they developed a world apart from
one another and they’re not related in the slightest.
Albanian is related to English but still completely different to the ear, German is much closer
and some very basic sentences like “öffnet die Tür” can possibly be understood.
Scots however (not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic or the Scottish accent) is generally
considered a dialect of English since English speakers can still understand what a Scots
speaker is saying, making English and Scots mutually intelligible (for the most part).
Because of the similarity of many of the world’s languages, mutual intelligibility is what’s
usually used to tell apart languages, for example Turkish and Yakuts are considered
different languages since they aren’t mutually intelligible, though Turkish and Azeri are
generally considered widely different dialects, since it is often said that a Turkish speaker
can go to Azerbaijan not understanding Azeri in the morning but understanding it perfectly
by the evening, and thus why it’s often called “Azeri Turkish”.
The problem however is when dialects stand on the border of being different languages
entirely.
For example an Arabic speaker from Iraq will likely have trouble understanding an Arabic
speaker from Morocco, since the different dialects of Arabic differ so much over so
much distance.
It does go the other way however, for example Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin
are all often grouped together as “Serbo-Croatian” due to their high degree of mutual intelligibility,
though the one thing keeping these languages apart and pushing others together is politics.
Serbo-Croatian is often split into these four different languages due to the intense politics
of the region.
Something similar is also the case in China, where Mandarin Chinese is the official language
but many other dialects are also spoken (mainly in the south), notably Cantonese in the Special
Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau.
Mandarin and Cantonese are generally not mutually intelligible, and yet are generally considered
dialects of the same language largely for political reasons.
Because of the often incredibly vague differences and similarities between different dialects,
it’s often hard to tell when one language ends and the other begins, especially in the
case of a dialect continuum.
All around the world, people arguing that groups of diverse people should be united
under one language and people arguing that a particular group should declare their independence
and say they speak a different language from everyone else, happens all the time.
This has been the case in the Balkans, China, South Asia, Czechoslovakia, and many other
places.
So in a sense the difference between dialects and languages is mostly up for debate between
cases, after all a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy, and these opinions
change all the time too.
Before the 1990’s people talked about speaking Czechoslovak, whereas nowadays people talk
about speaking Czech and/or Slovak.
The Romance Languages also kind of fall into this category, where languages like Italian,
Spanish, and Portuguese are considered different languages, but are closely related enough
that there is still a large degree of mutual intelligibility.
In fact as someone who has studied both Spanish and Italian, whenever I practice one I find
myself getting worse in the other, it’s weird.
Sadly for the world of linguistics, as time goes on and the world gradually starts moving
toward using a handful of international languages, we will continue to see more and more languages
gradually dying out and going extinct.
Humans have spoken easily tens of thousands of different languages over the millennia,
and no surprise most of them by now have been lost to history (I mean, no one’s exactly
conversing in Sumerian anymore, right?)
And this is now the case with many small languages today.
In fact, out of the 7,000 or so languages and unique dialects spoken today, around 2,000
have less than 1,000 native speakers.
In fact it has been estimated that one language dies out roughly every two weeks.
This happens for numerous reasons, though in the modern world this is usually due to
a cultural shift into modern society, often from younger generations living in areas surrounded
by another culture, speaking what is known as a “prestige language” (think native
Americans and Australians learning English, people in the Amazon learning Spanish or Portuguese,
or people in far-off Siberia learning Russian).
The amount of languages in the world may be shrinking, but what’s important to know
is that there are constant efforts being made to preserve these unique ways of seeing the
world.
Now, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica said that there were around 1,000
languages in the world.
Over the last 100 years this estimate has grown by several thousand, not because there
have been a crap-ton of new languages, but because linguists had the chance to explore
all the world’s languages to better categorize them.
In a sense they were almost hiding in plain sight, waiting to be found.
If you want to celebrate this spirit of exploration and deep diving into topics you’re truly
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Thanks as always for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this video.
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