Strands#265 Did You Hear That?
Quizzes & Puzzles10 mins ago
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.Click http://www.yourdictionary.com/languages.html and a link will take you to a dictionary website... possibly the one Clanad refers to. There, you will see a claim - more or less universally accepted - that there are about 6,800 languages. About 1,000 of these are to be found in New Guinea alone! (These are supposedly distinct languages and not just related dialects.) Some linguists will tell you that it is impossible to be accurate on total numbers, since there is no agreed definition - even among themselves! - of what a language actually is.
There are about 120 languages which have over a million speakers and about 4,000 with fewer than 10,000. The vast majority of the 6,000 + total are under threat of extinction, as Chinese, English and Spanish increasingly dominate world communications. Over a billion speak Mandarin Chinese and about half a billion English.