Languages and means of communication

A stylised dark green tree with long roots; around its branches float a scroll, a clay tablet, a knotted cord, a drum, a hand making a sign, a book, a radio and a telephone; on the right, a few twigs fade and disappear. — A tree whose every branch bears a means of communication, from the scroll and the clay tablet to the book, the radio and the telephone. Erosophia illustration, réalisée avec l'aide d'une IA

How many languages are there in the world?

Two major catalogues provide an answer. They do not give the same number.

Two answers, no mistake

Ethnologue, the most widely consulted catalogue, counts just over 7,100. Glottolog, maintained by a Max Planck institute, counts several hundred more.¹

Nobody has made a mistake.

The explanation lies in the criterion used. To decide whether two ways of speaking are two languages or a single one, the main test is whether their speakers understand each other without prior learning: this is what is called mutual intelligibility. If it exists, we speak of two dialects of the same language; if not, of two languages.

Yet mutual understanding is not a matter of yes or no, but of degree.

There are regions where each village understands its neighbours very well, the villages beyond a little less well, and those at the far end of the chain not at all. Where should the line be drawn? Depending on where the boundary is placed, a different number comes out.

Another factor comes into play. Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are similar enough for their speakers to understand one another in part. Yet they are called three languages, largely because they belong to three countries.

This is the key point: this number is not a fact that we observe, but the result of a sorting rule. Changing the rule means changing the number.

What is more, this number changes constantly, for three very real reasons: previously unknown languages are documented, which pushes it up; languages die out, which brings it down; and the catalogues sometimes revise their classification of a way of speaking, which makes it jump one way or the other.²

What a language is, and the channels through which it travels

A language is a shared system that makes it possible to produce an unlimited number of messages from a limited number of elements. This is the idea that the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt defended in the nineteenth century when he argued that a language makes infinite use of finite means. A few dozen sounds, combined, give thousands of words; rules of grammar combine these words into sentences that no one has ever uttered before and that everyone nevertheless understands. It is this capacity to make something new out of something known that distinguishes a language from a mere repertoire of signals.³

It travels through several channels, and none is more “real” than the others.

Speech is the oldest and most universal channel. All known human societies speak.
Sign languages use the hands, the face and space. They are not gestural translations of a spoken language: they are complete languages, with their own grammar, and there are hundreds of them, differing from one country to another.
Writing is a late and rare addition. It was invented only three or four times in history, and the great majority of the world’s languages have never been written. A language without writing is neither poorer nor less structured: it is simply more fragile, because it does not outlive its last speakers.

Languages have families

Languages change constantly, and when groups that spoke the same language separate for long enough, they end up no longer understanding one another. This is how Latin gave rise to French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian — which are thus, literally, Latin that has evolved separately.

Languages descended from the same ancestor are grouped into families. French belongs to the Indo-European family, which also includes English, Russian, Greek, Persian and Hindi. There are dozens of isolate languages, which are not linked to any family — Basque in Europe, Ainu in Japan, Burushaski in Pakistan, Zuni in North America.

As for the number of families, it depends on the catalogue consulted, like the number of languages itself: some count about a hundred and forty, others several hundred, depending on whether one tends to group languages together or to split them apart. This is exactly the problem this page is about, applied one level higher.

The boundary between “two languages” and “two ways of speaking the same one” is far from obvious, and this is exactly the problem that the rest of this page deals with.

The real subject is not the total

How they are distributed matters more, because that is where the figures become astonishing:

Papua New Guinea, with a modest population, has on its own more than eight hundred languages — more than the whole of Europe.⁴

In other words, there is no relationship between the number of speakers and the number of languages they speak.

At the other end of the scale, one figure reveals the true shape of diversity. Just twenty-three languages are spoken by more than half of humanity — that is, about 0.3% of languages.⁵

A few enormous languages, and thousands of very small ones.

This page deals with spoken languages. Their writing, printing and preservation are covered on page 9.13.

Many languages are endangered

About four in ten living languages are classified as endangered — roughly three thousand. Many have fewer than a thousand speakers.⁶

The classification, moreover, states precisely what “endangered” means: it is no longer the norm, in that community, for children to learn and use the language. The criterion is not the number of living speakers; it is transmission.⁷

One claim often circulates: “*a language disappears every two weeks*”. It can be found everywhere. Its origin is instructive.

It goes back to an article published in 1992 by an American linguist, Michael Krauss, in a scientific journal. In it, he estimated that a large proportion of the world’s languages were doomed to disappear over the coming century.⁸

Krauss was not writing for the general public. He was writing to his fellow linguists, and he was warning them: their discipline risked going down in history as the only science that had watched its own subject disappear without reacting.⁹

So it was a warning figure, meant to shake people up.

This is why the rates one reads do not agree: one language every two weeks, every month, every three months. These are not counts; they are different projections.

That said, the opposite conclusion should not be drawn. Languages really are disappearing, and other studies have confirmed it since: a major 2022 study estimates that, without swift action, more than 1,500 languages may cease to be spoken by the end of the century. It is the rate that is uncertain, not the fact.¹⁰

This story cannot be reduced to a tally of losses. In many places, people are recording, writing down and teaching their own language to their children, from within their own community.

One last detail about Krauss. He had headed the Alaska Native Language Center, and he was the specialist in a language called Eyak. This language died out in January 2008. He was still alive.¹¹

How a language disappears

It does not evaporate. Usually, its speakers stop passing it on to their children, and something has pushed them to do so.

An example close to home illustrates this.

In Brittany, and in the same way in the south of France for Occitan, there was an object at school called the symbol (the signal, in Occitan). A pupil caught speaking their language was given it. As soon as they heard a classmate speaking Breton, they passed it on to them. Whoever still had it at the end of the day was punished.¹²

The school administration in Brittany laid down the principle that not a single word of Breton was to be spoken, either in class or in the playground.¹³

As the page on school points out, the same laws that taught millions of children to read were also used for this. Both happened in the same classroom. An institution is almost never all of a piece.

And now, a language that was born

Much is said about dying languages. Here, by contrast, is one that came into being.

In Nicaragua, before the end of the 1970s, there was no sign language. Deaf children stayed at home, each with a few gestures invented with their family, and almost never met other deaf children.

At the end of the 1970s, the state opened a centre for special education in Managua. For the first time, deaf children found themselves together in large numbers in the same place.

The school, for its part, taught them spoken Spanish and lip-reading. It discouraged signing, and failed. But by bringing them together, it had unintentionally created what was missing: a group.

In the playground and on the bus, the children pooled their gestures. They built a language — a real one, with its grammar, its vocabulary and its rules. Neither the teachers nor the state made it: the pupils did.

The Ministry of Education, which did not understand what these children were saying to each other, brought in a linguist, Judy Kegl, to explain it. Other researchers followed, including Ann Senghas, who showed something surprising: it was the youngest newcomers who made the language more regular. Each new wave of children improved the grammar of the previous one. It was the first time that a language could be followed from its birth.¹⁴

A historian tells the story differently. Laura Polich worked in the national archives of Nicaragua, visited special schools and interviewed deaf people, including the oldest members of the national association. Her conclusion: the adoption of a common sign language was not sudden. It took years, and it only really took hold once a community began to meet regularly — in adulthood, not only at school.¹⁵

What holds in both versions: children built among themselves a system that no one had taught them, and the following waves made it more regular. What is disputed: the speed, and the degree of isolation. The linguists observed children signing; the historian read archives and interviewed adults. It is not that one of them is wrong: it is that they are not looking in the same place.

We now need to go back a century. A major international congress held in Milan had recommended teaching deaf children to speak and to lip-read, abandoning sign languages. This approach was followed for a very long time. The deaf participants had been excluded from the vote.¹⁶

This is exactly the mechanism of the Breton symbol, in the same period and on another continent: a school that forbids a language to those who speak it.

Note 1

7,164 languages are in use today.

Ethnologue, “How many languages are there in the world?”, SIL International, open access

Glottolog is an initiative of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. […] Currently 2026-03-02 there are 7674 spoken L1 languages

Hammarström, Harald, Forkel, Robert, Haspelmath, Martin and Bank, Sebastian, Glottolog, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, base mise à jour en continu