How many languages do you know

How many languages do you know?

JLanguage

Senior Member

How many languages do you know?

Not a must, but it would be great if you could also post which languages you know and your current level of fluency.

In order to count as knowing a language you should at least be semi-fluent. (Whatever that means to you)

PS: I have done a couple searches and haven’t found a poll exactly like this one, but maybe I missed something.

JLanguage

Senior Member

Artrella

Banned

I speak Spanish (mother tongue), English, German and Italian.

alc112

Senior Member

timpeac

Senior Member

ambar_violeta

New Member

It’s been a while since my last post.

Spanish: Mother tongue.
English: Pretty fluent.
German: I’ve been learning German for about 2 months. But I’m in love with this language. If you speak I’ll understand nothing, but I can read some.
French: If you speak really slowly I’ll probably understad you, because I’m learning French at school, but I don’t really like it and I can’t pronunce it.
Portuguese: I’ve never studied this language, but I can understad almost everything and sometimes I can speak a bit too.

suzzzenn

Senior Member

cuchuflete

Senior Member

Hola,
English
español/castellano
português
italiano

The last two are quite rusty from lack of use.

Also a bit of RPG!! and dim memories of APL

I can read quite a bit of French, but have the good sense not to pretend to speak it.

Don’t know what you would do to classify these: Galego. It’s so close to português that I can read it and understand it with no problem.
Catalá—fairly easy to read. I don’t speak it at all.

I often have trouble understanding women, regardless of the language we are using. does anyone have a good textbook? They seem to have no trouble figuring me out! Could this be a phonetics issue?

VenusEnvy

Senior Member

Senior Member

This post has made me think about taking some classes again. Maybe when I finish the translation workshop I am currently attending I’ll seek some, thanks!

Senior Member

Don’t worry, I’m a woman mysef and I swear I don’t understand my fellow «gender-mates» half the time!

My husband and my brother in-law keep asking my dad about the user’s manual they claim they should’ve received at the weddingl; if he ever hands it out I promise you a copy

basurero

Senior Member

Jana337

Senior Member

Czech: native
English: fluent
German: fluent
Italian: upper-intermediate, hope to converge to fluency in the foreseeable future, there’s much to to grammarwise but it is vocabulary what presents the main challenge
.
.
.
Slovak: extremely easy to read, and I am able to pretend active knowledge but there’s obviously no need to do it
.
.
.
Russian: pretty rudimentary
Arabic: even the basics that I have learnt are rusty

To sum up, I voted 4 in the poll.

mnzrob

Senior Member

beatrizg

Senior Member

English (or should I say globish?!)

Artrella

Banned

English (or should I say globish?!)

Bea, salgo en el próximo avión para interiorizarme de la problemática con el alfabeto griego. en un par de horas me hago un cursito super intensivo de griego y ya voy con un bosquejo para la próxima reforma.

Whodunit

Senior Member

German native language

English second language and fluent

French I’m studying it for 3 years, but I know its grammar pretty good.

Arabic I’m just learning it, very basic

Spanish I’m just learning it, quite rusty

Italian I’ll learn it in the foreseeable future.

I voted 3 languages.

Senior Member

I’ve done timid attempts at self-teaching Italian and Chinese.

zebedee

Senior Member

CLEMENTINE

Senior Member

CBFelix

Senior Member

So, I vote for 5

Philippa

Senior Member

Nothing very interesting or dramatic from me:

So I’m voting 2!!
Philippa

garryknight

Senior Member

English: native language
Spanish: learning now; can read most of what I come across, albeit with a dictionary to hand, can write as long as the dictionary is within reach, not so good at speaking but can manage basic conversation
French: learned at school to GCSE O level, forgotten a lot
Russian: learned at school to GCSE O level, only remember a few words
Latin: learned at school for 3 or 4 years, only remember a few words

Also C, Pascal, Basic, Perl, Python, various assembler languages, etc.

So I voted for 2: English, Spanish

saramar

Senior Member

Phryne

Senior Member

Spanish: native language, but I’m still learning.
English: I can speak much better than I can write it. It’s my everyday language, if that means anything.
Italian: I can read it and hold a conversation, but I speak Spalian/Itanish or mostly Spanish with an Italian accent. Classes are approaching.
Portuguese: I can read it and follow a conversation, nothing else, Ican’t even speak Portuñol. Classes are on hold. for good?
French: I can’t speak it, I can read some and I was able to understand a lot when I was in France. Pathetic!
Spanish lisp: I can do a fairly good impression. hehehehe
Spanglish: I’m learning a lot but not a fluent speaker yet!
Gerinjoso: Very proficient. In order to learn it, Spanish is a must!
Chinese: Wishing I knew some
German: Pending
Ebonics: Learning as we speak.

So, I’m just bilingual, I’m afraid to say!

Like an Angel

Senior Member

EDIT: I was sleepy when I wrote this, so I have made some corrections

Benjy

Senior Member

Outsider

Senior Member

Portuguese: native language.
English: fluent.
French: a bit rusty now, due to lack of practice.

I can understand written Spanish quite well, and spoken Spanish with a little more difficulty, but I’ve never actually studied it, and I can’t speak fluently.

haujavi

Member

Citrus

Senior Member

I voted 2 languages

te gato

Senior Member

Te gato English—very fluent..(have my own Dictionary & Spelling)
English—Try to speak it..and write it..
Spanish—Hopeless..but still trying..
French—a little to speak..
German—a little to speak..
Dutch—a little to speak
Catalan—being tutored
So I voted for none..Still learning all.

LV4-26

Senior Member

French : mother tongue

English : written, spoken, translated and interpreted. Still a long way to go, though.
Spanish : my second foreign language. It was my third Language at the «Ecole Supérieure d’Inteprètes et de Traducteurs». (after French and English). This means I can translate from Spanish to French but never the other way round.
German and Italian : Learnt German for 3 years a long time ago. Only two years of Italian but I feel much more at ease in Italian than in German. (I believe you could call me a «four-oh-four» in German).

I voted for 2 (FR and EN)

alc112

Senior Member

HeatherR

Senior Member

timpeac

Senior Member

lainyn

Senior Member

So I’m going to vote for 3.

Helicopta

Senior Member

English – Mother tongue (although I would never treat my mother the way I treat the English language)
Spanish – Determined to become fluent, after 2 years of study I know that my goal remains a long, long way away.

French and German – Studied at school but have forgotten all but a few words.

I’ve picked up one or two words of Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Sinhalese, Arabic and Flemish from travelling. I won’t pretend that I know anything of these languages, I just think it’s courteous to at least learn things like ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘how do you do’ and ‘thank you’ when visiting another country.

I’ve voted for two but I’m probably flattering myself by including Spanish. I didn’t want to be the only person to vote for one.

Senior Member

Italian: mother tongue
English: fluent
French: fluent
German: rusty (used to be good in the past)
Spanish: well, rather. Itañolo (I need more vocabulary. )
Arabic: I never had a chance to speak it so that I can only read and write it (there’s a huge gap between written and spoken Arabic)
Latin: I adored it (I just brushed it up while trying to understand some Roman inscriptions)
Benjois: I was one of the first official Benjois interpreters

mia04

Senior Member

walnut

Senior Member

Rebecca Hendry

Senior Member

English is my mother tongue.

I speak Spanish very fluently, having studied it at university and lived in Spain for several years. I am often mistaken for an «andaluza» because of my accent, but I actually learnt my Spanish in Extremadura.

French was my minor subject at uni, and I used to speak it fairly well, but now every time I try it comes out Spanish! I can read it pretty well, and understand it relatively well, but I’d need to live in France again I think to get back what I used to know.

Cairenn

Senior Member

Croatian is my mother tongue

I studied French in my primary and high school, total of 9 years. I’m not sure if I’d be able to communicate in French (I can count till billion ), though I can read it.

I started learning English when I was 7 years old and I’ve been using it more or less actively since then.

Sindri

Senior Member

Voted for three

Lancel0t

Senior Member

I only voted for 2 because those are the only languages I really know and I feel that I am on a firm ground everytime I’m using those.

elroy

Moderator: EHL, Arabic, Hebrew, German(-Spanish)

Here are my languages in order of proficiency:

1. English
2. Arabic
3. French
4. Spanish
5. German
6. Dutch
7. Hebrew
8. Italian
9. Norwegian

Legend:
NATIVE FLUENCY
FLUENCY, NOT NATIVE
BASIC KNOWLEDGE

How Many Languages is it Possible to Know?

There are millions of people, even in the mostly monolingual US, who speak more than one language at home. Competence in three languages is not unusual, and we’ve all heard stories of grandmas and grandpas who had to master four or five languages on their way from the old country to the new. In India it is common for people to go about their business every day using five or six different languages. But what about 10, 20, 30, 100 languages? What’s the upper limit on the number of languages a person can know?

Michael Erard, in his fascinating book Babel No More, travels around the world in search of hyperpolyglots, people who study and learn large numbers of languages. He sheds light on the secrets of their success, and explains why it can be hard to put an exact number on language knowledge. Here are some of the hyperpolyglots he meets:

Graham Cansdale, 14 languages.
Cansdale uses all 14 languages professionally as a translator at the European Commission in Brussels. He has studied more languages.

Lomb KatГі, 16 languages.
This Hungarian polyglot said five of these «lived inside» her. Five others needed at least a half day of review in order to be reactivated, and with the six remaining she could do translation. Confidence, she claimed, was crucial to language learning. Her study tip: «Be firmly convinced you are a linguistic genius.»

Alexander Arguelles, 20 languages or so.
Arguelles declines to say the exact number. «If someone tells you how many languages they speak, then you shouldn’t trust them,» he says. He has studied more than 60 languages and devotes 9 hours of study every day to them. Twenty is the number of them in which he has reading competence.

Johan Vandewalle, 22 languages.
In 1987, Vandewalle won the Polyglot of Flanders contest, where he was tested in 22 languages (though he has studied more). The contest required 10 minute conversations with native speakers, with 5 minute breaks in between.

Ken Hale, 50 languages.
The famous MIT linguist said he could «speak» only three languages (English, Spanish, Warlpiri), and could merely «talk in» others. He considered the ability to speak a language to include knowing all its cultural implications. He didn’t like people perpetuating the «myth» of his language feats, though many colleagues had observed him do things like study a grammar of Finnish on an airplane and start speaking it easily upon arrival.

Emil Krebs, 32 to 68 languages.
The number depends on who’s counting. A German diplomat who worked in China, Krebs had such an unusual talent for languages that after his death his brain was preserved for study.

Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, 40 to 72 languages.
One of his biographers broke it down as follows: he had 14 which he had studied but not used, 11 in which he could have a conversation, 9 which he spoke not quite perfectly but with a perfect accent, and 30 languages (from 11 different language families) which he had totally mastered.

Stories of Mezzofanti’s language prowess are so legendary, they may be merely legends. But it is clear from Erard’s time among the hyperpolyglots that with the right kind of natural talent, motivation, and hard work, remarkable feats can be accomplished. The psycholinguists Erard talked to said there was «no theoretical limit to the number of languages one could learn.» There was only the limitation of time.

But most of the hyperpolyglots themselves were reluctant to claim too many, even when they had studied dozens. This is because they have a finer definition of «knowing» a language than most people, and the humility that comes from becoming an expert: The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know. Among the hyperpolyglots, 15 seems to be about the high end when it comes to the number of languages they are willing to vouch for in themselves. Even so, the 30 or so other languages with which they may have some lesser familiarityВ are probably still better than your high school Spanish.

How many languages are there in the world?

250? 1,000? Or more?… Do you know how many languages are spoken around the world? To be honest, even experts don’t really know. Some say that there are about 5,000 different languages while others claim that there are around 10,000 languages! Either way, one thing is certain: there are a lot of them. Some, like English and Chinese (Mandarin) are very common, while others are spoken only by a handful of people.

How many languages in the world? Hard to tell…

Around 7,000 languages: a figure that seems to be a consensus

Not all experts agree on the number of languages spoken in the world. However, in recent years, almost everyone seems to agree on one figure: there would be approximately 7,000. Depending on the studies, this data varies a lot. Some say there are less than 5,000 languages while others say there are 10,000.

Why is it so difficult to quantify the number of languages in the world? There are several reasons for this.

First of all, not everyone has the same definition of what a language is. Indeed, there is no clear difference between a language and a dialect for example. That is why studies with a strict definition of language count much less than those with a broader definition. According to the ENS of Lyon’s website Géoconfluences, a language differs from a dialect mainly according to “the degree of official recognition of their status, decreed by the State (…)».

Then, we must also take into account the fact that some languages are only spoken by very few people, and sometimes in very remote areas exclusively. It can therefore be difficult to include them in scientific researches.

Finally, there is a third and sad reason: some languages are disappearing. Therefore, a figure given in a 2015 study, for example, may no longer be true at the time when this article is written.

Languages are distributed differently depending on the continent

Interestingly, Oceania has over 1,000 languages on its own, but these are only spoken by very few people. In reality, 84% of the world’s population uses a language of Asian or European origin.

The country with the most languages spoken within its territory is Papua New Guinea, with 840 languages. Nevertheless, with only 9 million inhabitants, people speak 3 times more languages there than in Europe!

“Whoever does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own language.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The most common languages in the world… And those in danger

In the world, not all languages are in the same boat. Some are spoken by more and more people, while others disappear in silence …

Languages spoken by billions of human beings

Still according to l’Ethnologue, the 200 most spoken languages in the world are used by 88% of the world’s population (as mother tongue or second language).

By the way, do you know which languages are the 10 most spoken in the world in 2021? No? Here is the answer with their number of speakers:

✨ Do you want to start learning a new language? Find out which languages are the easiest to learn for French speakers.

The phenomenon of language extinction is not something new. Latin and ancient Greek are particularly striking examples. On his website, Jacques Leclerc, the famous Canadian linguist, indicates that during the last 5 millennia, apparently, more than 30,000 languages were born and disappeared.

If you are curious to know which languages are at risk of extinction in the coming decades, UNESCO has listed them on an interactive map: The Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

In France alone, 13 regional languages are considered as “seriously endangered”. For example, among them, there are Picard, Poitevin-Saintongeais, Languedocien and even Franc-Comtois. Hopefully they will not experience the same fate as Auregnais, a Norman language native to the island of Alderney (Aurigny), which ceased to be used in the 1960s.

Wish to be one of the 1.348 billion English speaking people? Or you may prefer joining the 543 million-wide Spanish speakers’ community? 1to1PROGRESS offers distance language courses, by phone or web conference. Contact us to prepare your customized language training project.

(1) Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (Eds.). 2021Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-fourth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International.

All Things Linguistic

A blog about all things linguistic by Gretchen McCulloch.

I cohost Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.

I’m the author of Because Internet, a book about internet language!

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Why linguists hate being asked how many languages they know

“So you’re a linguist. How many languages do you know?” Every linguist hears this question a lot. There’s even a meme about it. And in addition to over-use, there are several contradictory reasons why it’s deeply frustrating.

1. Linguistics isn’t about learning lots of languages. Except when it is.

Linguists as scholars work to analyze language and figure out how it works and why we can speak it. Unfortunately, there’s also another meaning for linguist which is a translator or person who speaks a ton of languages. Academic linguists refer to the latter as polyglots or hyperpolyglots. But, for example, the US military job descriptions use linguist to mean polyglot/translator. As a descriptivist, I’m not going to say this isn’t a real meaning, but it’s like asking a baseball player if they hit balls using a small winged mammal. Not so much.

2. Speaking lots of languages doesn’t necessarily make you a better linguist. Although it might help.

There are many very legitimate and well-respected linguists who only really work in one language (Noam Chomsky being one of them). But all else being equal, having knowledge of multiple languages probably does mean that it’s easier for you to make comparisons between them, read papers written about them, and see how broadly applicable your theories are, which is probably useful.

3. Many linguists don’t speak lots of languages. But quite a lot do.

Even though it’s very much possible to be a monolingual linguist, some percentage of people do get into linguistics because they enjoy learning and speaking languages. So I would estimate very informally that maybe half of the linguists I know are bilingual or trilingual, about a quarter are monolingual, and about a quarter have four or more languages at a pretty decent level. And maybe 5 or 10 percent are true hyperpolyglots. Which is almost definitely greater than the general population.

4. The more languages you “know”, the more picky you get about what “know” means.

It’s people who don’t speak another language who think that learning a language is like learning to ride a bicycle: a few weeks of practice and you’re basically set for life. People who speak several languages tend to classify their languages on a scale of fluency, from “know a few words/phrases” to “can basically get by” to “comfortable” to “native-like”, and in between. And what about if you speak two languages that are very similar, or two dialects that are very different? No one who speaks more than 2-3 languages is going to give a simple answer to “how many?” So if you ask it, be prepared for at least ten minutes and maybe an hour on the process of learning each language, their relation to each other, and relative levels of fluency.

Like many stereotypes, “linguists speak a lot of languages” has a grain of truth but is by no means wholly accurate, which is probably what makes it both very common and very annoying.

So what is linguistics then? And how do you make small talk with a linguist?

I’ve got a whole bunch of links and analogies on How to explain linguistics to your friends and family.

And try asking “what got you interested in linguistics?” or “what area of linguistics are you interested in?” In fact, this probably works for most fields. For example, I expect that most geologists wouldn’t mind being asked about their interests in geology either. Rather than, say, how many pet rocks they have.

Linguistic Society of America

Advancing the Scientific Study of Language since 1924

How many languages are there in the world?

How many languages are there in the world?

Stephen R. Anderson

The object of inquiry in linguistics is human language, in particular the extent and limits of diversity in the world’s languages. One might suppose, therefore, that linguists would have a clear and reasonably precise notion of how many languages there are in the world. It turns out, however, that there is no such definite count—or at least, no such count that has any status as a scientific finding of modern linguistics.

The reason for this lack is not (just) that parts of the world such as highland New Guinea or the forests of the Amazon have not been explored in enough detail to ascertain the range of people who live there. Rather, the problem is that the very notion of enumerating languages is a lot more complicated than it might seem. There are a number of coherent (but quite different) answers that linguists might give to this apparently simple question.

More than you might have thought!

When people are asked how many languages they think there are in the world, the answers vary quite a bit. One random sampling of New Yorkers, for instance, resulted in answers like “probably several hundred.” However we choose to count them, though, this is not close.

When we look at reference works, we find estimates that have escalated over time. The 1911 (11th) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, implies a figure somewhere around 1,000, a number that climbs steadily over the course of the twentieth century. That is not due to any increase in the number of languages, but rather to our increased understanding of how many languages are actually spoken in areas that had previously been underdescribed.

Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations (such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, now known as SIL International) with an interest in translating the Christian Bible. As of 2009, at least a portion of the bible had been translated into 2,508 different languages, still a long way short of full coverage. The most extensive catalog of the world’s languages, generally taken to be as authoritative as any, is that of Ethnologue (published by SIL International), whose detailed classified list as of 2009 included 6,909 distinct languages.

Did you know that (most) languages belong to a family?

A family is a group of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another. The best known languages are those of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs. Considering how widely the Indo-European languages are distributed geographically, and their influence in world affairs, one might assume that a good proportion of the world’s languages belong to this family. That is not the case, however: there are about 200 Indo-European languages, but even ignoring the many cases in which a language’s genetic affiliation cannot be clearly determined, there are undoubtedly more families of languages (about 250) than there are members of the Indo-European family.

Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Out of Ethnologue’s 6,909, for instance, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia.

One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million. That makes the average number of

speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any area of the world. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.

We do not find linguistic diversity only in out of the way places. Centuries of French governments have striven to make that country linguistically uniform, but (even disregarding Breton, a Celtic language; Allemannisch, the Germanic language spoken in Alsace; and Basque), Ethnologue shows at least ten distinct Romance languages spoken in France, including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, and several others in addition to “French.”

Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed (apart from the status of French in Canada) in terms of English vs. Spanish, or the languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but we should remember that the Americas were a region with many languages well before modern Europeans or Asians arrived. In pre-contact times, over 300 languages were spoken in North America. Of these, about half have died out completely. All we know of them comes from early word lists or limited grammatical and textual records. But that still leaves about 165 of North America’s indigenous languages spoken at least to some extent today.

Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families. But whatever the degree of that diversity (and we discuss below the problem of how to quantify it), one thing that is fairly certain is that a surprising proportion of the world’s languages are in fact disappearing—even as we speak.

Fewer than there were last month.

Whatever the world’s linguistic diversity at the present, it is steadily declining, as local forms of speech increasingly become moribund before the advance of the major languages of world civilization. When a language ceases to be learned by young children, its days are clearly numbered, and we can predict with near certainty that it will not survive the death of the current native speakers.

The situation in North America is typical. Of about 165 indigenous languages, only eight are spoken by as many as 10,000 people. About 75 are spoken only by a handful of older people, and can be assumed to be on their way to extinction. While we might think this is an unusual fact about North America, due to the overwhelming pressure of European settlement over the past 500 years, it is actually close to the norm.

Around a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than a thousand remaining speakers, and linguists generally agree in estimating that the extinction within the next century of at least 3,000 of the 6,909 languages listed by Ethnologue, or nearly half, is virtually guaranteed under present circumstances. The threat of extinction thus affects a vastly greater proportion of the world’s languages than its biological species.

What happens when a language “dies”?

Some would say that the death of a language is much less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are there not instances of languages that died and were reborn, like Hebrew? And in any case, when a group abandons its native language, it is generally for another that is more economically advantageous to them: why should we question the wisdom of that choice?

But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since the language was not in fact abandoned over the many years when it was no longer the principal language of the Jewish people. During this time, it remained an object of intense study and analysis by scholars. And there are few if any comparable cases to support the notion that language death is reversible.

The economic argument does not really supply a reason for speakers of a “small” and perhaps unwritten language to abandon that language simply because they also need to learn a widely used language such as English or Mandarin Chinese. Where there is no one dominant local language, and groups with diverse linguistic heritages come into regular contact with one another, multilingualism is a perfectly natural condition.

When a language dies, a world dies with it, in the sense that a community’s connection with its past, its traditions and its base of specific knowledge are all typically lost as the vehicle linking people to that knowledge is abandoned. This is not a necessary step, however, for them to become participants in a larger economic or political order.

For further information about the issues involved in language endangerment, see the LSA’s FAQ “What is an endangered language?”

Count the flags!

To this point, we have assumed that we know how to count the world’s languages. It might seem that any remaining imprecision is similar to what we might find in any other census-like operation: perhaps some of the languages were not home when the Ethnologue counter came calling, or perhaps some of them have similar names that make it hard to know when we are dealing with one language and when with several; but these are problems that could be solved in principle, and the fuzziness of our numbers should thus be quite small. But in fact, what makes languages distinct from one another turns out to be much more a social and political issue than a linguistic one, and most of the cited numbers are matters of opinion rather than science.

The late Max Weinreich used to say that “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” He was talking about the status of Yiddish, long considered a “dialect” because it was not identified with any politically significant entity. The distinction is still often implicit in talk about European “languages” vs. African “dialects.” What counts as a language rather than a “mere” dialect typically involves issues of statehood, economics, literary traditions and writing systems, and other trappings of power, authority and culture — with purely linguistic considerations playing a less significant role.

For instance, Chinese “dialects” such as Cantonese, Hakka, Shanghainese, etc. are just as different from one another (and from the dominant Mandarin) as Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian. They are not mutually intelligible, but their status derives from their association with a single nation and a shared writing system, as well as from explicit government policy.

In contrast, Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same system (referred to in earlier times as “Hindustani”), but associated with different countries (India and Pakistan), different writing systems, and different religious orientations. Although varieties in use in India and Pakistan by well-educated speakers are somewhat more distinct than the local vernaculars, the differences are still minimal—far less significant than those separating Mandarin from Cantonese, for example.

For an extreme example of this phenomenon, consider the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, spoken over much of the territory of the former Yugoslavia and generally considered a single language with different local dialects and writing systems. Within this territory, Serbs (who are largely Orthodox) use a Cyrillic alphabet, while Croats (largely Roman Catholic) use the Latin alphabet. Within a period of only a few years after the breakup of Yugoslavia as a political entity, at least three new languages (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) had emerged, although the actual linguistic facts had not changed a bit.

What is mutual intelligibility and can it help us identify different languages?

One common-sense notion of when we are dealing with different languages, as opposed to different forms of the same language, is the criterion of mutual intelligibility: if the speakers of A can understand the speakers of B without difficulty, A and B must be the same language. But this notion fails in practice to cut the world up into clearly distinct language units.

In some instances, speakers of A can understand B, but not vice versa, or at least speakers of B will insist that they cannot. Bulgarians, for instance, consider Macedonian a dialect of Bulgarian, but Macedonians insist that it is a distinct language. When Macedonia’s president Gligorov visited Bulgaria’s president Zhelev in 1995, he brought an interpreter, although Zhelev claimed he could understand everything Gligorov said.

Somewhat less fancifully, Kalabari and Nembe are two linguistic varieties spoken in Nigeria. The Nembe claim to be able to understand Kalabari with no difficulty, but the rather more prosperous Kalabari regard the Nembe as poor country cousins whose speech is unintelligible.

Another reason why the criterion of mutual intelligibility fails to tell us how many distinct languages there are in the world is the existence of dialect continua. To illustrate, suppose you were to start from Berlin and walk to Amsterdam, covering about ten miles every day. You can be sure that the people who provided your breakfast each morning could understand (and be understood by) the people who served you supper that evening. Nonetheless, the German speakers at the beginning of your trip and the Dutch speakers at its end would have much more trouble, and certainly think of themselves as speaking two quite distinct (if related) languages.

In some parts of the world, such as the Western Desert in Australia, such a continuum can stretch well over a thousand miles, with the speakers in each local region able to understand one another while the ends of the continuum are clearly not mutually intelligible at all. How many languages are represented in such a case?

Related to this is the fact that we refer to the language of, say, Chaucer (1400), Shakespeare (1600), Thomas Jefferson (1800) and George W. Bush (2000) all as “English,” but it is safe to say these are not all mutually intelligible. Shakespeare might have been able, with some difficulty, to converse with Chaucer or with Jefferson, but Jefferson (and certainly Bush) would need an interpreter for Chaucer. Languages change gradually over time, maintaining intelligibility across adjacent generations, but eventually yielding very different systems.

The notion of distinctness among languages, then, is much harder to resolve than it seems at first sight. Political and social considerations trump purely linguistic reality, and the criterion of mutual intelligibility is ultimately inadequate.

At least 500 (But that’s just in Northern Italy).

So does the science of Linguistics provide a better basis for measuring the number of different languages spoken in the world? When we address the question of just when forms of speech differ systematically from a linguistic point of view, we get answers that are potentially crisp and clear, but rather surprising.

If we try to distinguish languages from one another simply in terms of their words and the patterns we can observe in sentences, problems arise. Very different languages can share words (through borrowing) while different speakers of the “same” language may vary widely in their vocabulary due to factors of education or speaking style. Different languages may display the same sentence patterns, while a single language may display a great variety of patterns.

In general, linguists have found that the analysis of the external facts of language use gives us at best a slippery object of study. Rather more coherent, it seems, is the study of the abstract knowledge speakers have which allows them to produce and understand what they say or hear or read: their internalized knowledge of the grammar of their language.

We might propose, then, that instead of counting languages in terms of external forms, we might try to count the range of distinct grammars in the world. How might we do this? What differentiates one grammar from another? Some aspects of grammatical knowledge, like the way pronouns are interpreted with respect to another expression in the same sentence, seem to be common across languages.

In She thinks that Mary is smart, the pronoun she can refer to any female in the universe with one exception: she here cannot refer to the same individual as Mary. This seems to be a fact not about English, but about language in general, because the same facts recur in every language when the structural relations are the same.

On the other hand, the fact that adjectives precede their nouns in English (we say a red balloon, not a balloon red) is a fact about English, since the opposite is true, for instance, in French. If we had a complete inventory of the set of parameters that can serve in this way, we could then say that each particular collection of values for those parameters that we could identify in the knowledge of some set of speakers should count as a distinct language.

But let us see what happens when we apply this approach to a single linguistic area, say Northern Italy. Consider the facts of negative sentences, for example. Standard Italian uses a negative marker which precedes the verb (Maria non mangia la carne = ‘Maria not eats the meat’), while the language spoken in Piémonte (Piedmontese) uses a negative marker that follows the verb (Maria a mangia nen la carn = ‘Maria she eats not the meat’).

Other differences correlate with this: standard Italian cannot have a negative with an imperative verb, but uses the infinitive instead, while Piedmontese allows negative imperatives; standard Italian requires a ‘double negative’ in sentences like [Non ho visto nessuno] (‘not have I seen nobody’) while Piedmontese does not use the extra negative marker, and so on. The functioning of negation here establishes a parameter that distinguishes these (and other) grammars.

This is only the beginning, though. When we look more closely at the speech of various areas in Northern Italy, we find several other parameters that distinguish one grammar from another within this area, such that each of them can vary from place to place in ways that are independent of all of the others.

Still staying within Northern Italy, let us suppose that there are, say, ten such parameters that distinguish one grammar from another. This is really quite a conservative estimate, in light of the variation that has in fact been found there. But if each of these can vary independently of the others, collectively they define a set of two to the tenth, or 1,024 distinct grammars, and indeed scholars have estimated that somewhere between 300 and 500 of these distinct possibilities are actually instantiated in the region!

Of course, the implications of this result for the world as a whole must be based on a thorough study of the range and limits of possible grammatical variation. But all of these forms of “Italian” have a great deal in common, and there are many ways in which they are all distinct as a group from many other languages in many other parts of the world. Since the number of possible grammatical systems expands exponentially as the number of parameters grows, if we have only about 25 or 30 of these, the number of possible languages in this sense becomes huge: well over a billion, on the assumption of thirty distinct parameters. Obviously not all of these possibilities will be actualized, but if the space of possible grammars is covered uniformly to something like the extent we find in Northern Italy for the limited set of parameters in play there, the number of languages in the world must be much greater than the Ethnologue’s 6,909.

Only one (A biologist looks at human language).

When we look at the languages of the world, they may seem bewilderingly diverse. From the point of view of communication systems more generally, however, they are remarkably similar to one another. Human language differs from the communicative behavior of every other known organism in a number of fundamental ways, all shared across languages.

By comparison with the communicative devices of herring gulls, honey bees, dolphins or any other non-human animal, language provides us with a system that is not stimulus bound and ranges over an infinity of possible distinct messages. It achieves this with a limited, finite system of units that combine hierarchically and recursively into larger units. The words themselves are structured from a small inventory of sounds basic to the language, individually meaningless elements combined according to a system completely independent of the way words combine into phrases and sentences.

The particular linguistic system that each individual controls goes far beyond the direct experience from which knowledge of it arose. And the principles governing these systems of sounds, words and meanings are largely common across languages, with only limited possibilities for difference (the parameters described above).

In all these ways, human language is so different from any other known system in the natural world that the narrowly constrained ways in which one grammar can differ from another fade into insignificance. For a native of Milan, the differences between the speech of that city and that of Turin may loom large, but for a visitor from Kuala Lumpur both are “Italian.” Similarly, the differences we find across the world in grammars seem very important, but for an outside observer—say, a biologist studying communication among living beings in general—all are relatively minor variations on the single theme of Human language.

As the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica put it, “[. ] all existing human speech is one in the essential characteristics which we have thus far noted or shall hereafter have to consider, even as humanity is one in its distinction from the lower animals; the differences are in nonessentials.”

For Further Reading

* With contributions from David Harrison, Laurence Horn, Rafaella Zanuttini and David Lightfoot.