Are there just too many languages in the world?
No… There are just as many as there need to be. Are there too many to learn, or too many to learn about? Well, possibly. But if you had to narrow it down, we would humbly recommend one of these forty to start with. Click on the links below for pages with stats and fun information on each language.
Why? For the rationale behind choosing these languages (out of several thousand other possibilities): Please see the post ‘Around the world in 40 ways‘. These are not the only important ones! …We just had to start somewhere.
Numbers are estimates of the total number of speakers; the proportion of native to non-native speakers varies widely between languages.
- English – 1.5 billion
- German – 180 million
- Dutch – 30 million
- Swedish – 13 million
- Norwegian – 5.4 million
- French – 312 million
- Spanish – 560 million
- Portuguese – 264 million
- Italian – 68 million
- Latin – Unknown; no native speakers
- Turkish – 90 million
- Arabic – 380 million
- Hebrew – 9 million
- Persian – 127 million
- Hindi – 609 million
- Tamil – 87 million
- Vietnamese – 86 million
- Malay (including Indonesian) – 290 million
- Tagalog – 83 million
- Māori – 200,000
- Navajo (Diné) – 170,000
- Inuktitut – 42,000
- Nahuatl – 1.7 million
- Mayan – 6 million
- Quechua – 7.2 million
- American Sign Language (ASL) – 860,000
[Sources: Ethnologue, 25th-27th eds., 2022-2025; national census data]