According to the world's largest language catalog Ethnologue, as of 2024 there are 7,164 languages on Earth, belonging to 142 different language families.
The most common languages, of which there are 40, are spoken by about 2/3 of the world's population. The most people speak Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Portuguese. French is also widely spoken, but the number of those who consider it their native (first) language is relatively small.
The highest concentration of different languages is observed in Papua New Guinea, which is due to the many isolated mountain valleys in this country. The languages of Papua New Guinea make up about 10% of the total number of languages in the world.
With the development of communications, the number of living languages is decreasing at an average rate of 1 language every two weeks. Languages die along with the last speaker, and therefore the danger threatens, first of all, peoples who do not use writing. One of the reasons for the death of languages is their uneven distribution by the number of speakers. Thus, 80% of the planet's population speaks 80 languages, and only 0.2% of the world's inhabitants speak 3.5 thousand languages. The main reasons for the process of language extinction are considered to be globalization and migration. People leave villages for cities and lose the language of their people.
