Do we know enough about the languages of the world— how many there are, where they are, and how many speakers they have?

The short answer is that we know very little. The number of languages in the world is not known exactly, and cannot be known. Why? Two reasons. First, there are some insurmountable problems in identifying what "a language" is, primarily because there are no unambiguous scientific criteria for distinguishing between "languages" and "dialects" (see Language or Dialect?).

Second, our knowledge about existing languages is shaky. Languages as resources have not enjoyed high priority as subjects for research; there is extremely little money for even basic counting and description. The statistics used by even the best reference works are extremely variable in quality (and the authors mostly admit this). Updating is difficult in books — many good reference works are years in the making. Many countries do not have language questions in their censuses. Many use predetermined language labels and this often excludes small languages and sometimes even all minority languages (governments of several countries claim that "we do not have minorities"). Sometimes the numbers of speakers are based on old censuses which are themselves of suspect quality. Less than half of the world's spoken languages are used for writing, and many languages will die/be killed before anything has been written about them. Moreover, linguists do not always agree on definitions or numbers. (TSK)

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How many languages are there?

Linguists estimate that there are anywhere from 4,000 to more than 10,000 distinct languages still spoken. Many linguists give a figure of 6,000-7,000, more or less following the lead of the reference work Ethnologue: languages of the world (www.sil.org/ethnologue/) — check the "Introduction". The 14th. edition of Ethnologue is due out in November 2000. However, many Sign languages (see entry SIGN LANGUAGES) have been omitted from these counts (the Ethnologue lists 103 — see www.sil.org/ethnologue/special.html), so the actual number of languages is much larger and could even be twice that high. (TSK)

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How many speakers do various languages have?

The top 20 oral languages by population (i.e., those with the most native speakers), according to the Ethnologue,were, in November 2000, as follows (numbers in millions):

1. Mandarin Chinese (885) 2. Spanish (332) 3. English (322) 4. Bengali (189) 5. Hindi (182) 6. Portuguese (170) 7. Russian (170) 8. Japanese (125) 9. German (98) 10. Chinese, Wu (77.2)

11. Javanese (75.5) 12. Korean (75) 13. French (72) 14. Vietnamese (67.7) 15. Telugu (66.4) 16. Chinese, Yue (66) 17. Marathi (64.8) 18. Tamil (63.1) 19. Turkish (59) 20. Urdu (58)

The list changes, so check (www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html) for a more recent list.

According to Erik Gunnemark (Countries, Peoples and their Languages. The Geolinguistic Handbook,1991), the following 208 languages had more than 1 million native users a decade ago:

Achinese, Afrikaans, Akan, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bai, Balinese, Baluchi, Bambara, Bashkir, Batak, Bemba, Bengali, Berber, Bete, Beti, Bhili, Bhojpuri, Bikol, Buginese, Bulgarian, Burmese, Buyi, Byelorussian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chinese, Chokwe, Chuvash, Congo, Czech, Danish, Dinka, Dong, Dutch, Edo-Bini, Efil-Ibibio, English, Estonian, Ewe, Finnish, Fon, French, Ful, Galician, Ganda, Garhwali, Georgian, German, Gisu, Gondi, Greek, Guaraní, Gujarati, Gurma, Hadiyya, Haitian, Hani, Hausa, Haya, Hebrew, Hehe, Hiligaynon, Hindi, Ho, Hungarian, Igbo, Ijo, Iloko, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kamba, Kannada, Kanuri, Karen, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Khmer, Kirghiz, Kisii, Konkani, Korean, Kumauni, Kurdish, Kurukh, Kuyu, Lao, Latvian, Li, Lingala, Lithuanian, Low German, Luba, Luhya, Luo, Macassar, Macedonian, Madurese, Magahi, Maguindanao, Maithili, Makonde, Makua, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Malinke, Manipuri, Marathi, Marwari, Mbundu, Mende, Miao, Minangkabau, Mongolian, Mongo-Nkundu, Mordva, More, Mundari, Nahuatl, Nandi, Nandi-Kipsigis, Ndebele, Nepali, Nkore-Kiga, Norwegian, Nuer, Nupe, Nyamwezi, Nyanja, Occitan, Oriya, Oromo, Pampangan, Pangasinan, Panjabi, Pashto, Pedi, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romany, Romanian, Ronga-Tsonga, Russian, Rwanda-Rundi, Santali, Sasak, Senufo, Serbo-Croatian, Serer, Shan, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Songe, Songhai, Sotho, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajiki, Tamil, Tatar, Teke, Telugu, Temne, Teso-Turkana, Thai, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Tiv, Tonga, Tswana, Tulu, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Umbundu, Urdu, Uygur, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Waray, Welamo, Wolof, Xhosa, Yao (Man), Yao (Chiyao), Yi, Yoruba, Zande, Zhuang, Zulu.

(Even here, mistakes can occur. Mordva, for instance, should not be on the list, according to a Mordva expert, Cornelius Hasselblatt — thanks! Gunnemark is in the process of revising his book).

The median number of speakers of a language is probably around 5-6,000. More than 95% of the world's spoken languages have fewer than 1 million native speakers. Half of all the languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers. A quarter of the world's spoken languages and most of the Sign languages have fewer than 1,000 users. (TSK)

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Where are the languages?

Europe & the Middle East, linguistically the poorest areas of the world, have only 4% of all languages;
the Americas — North, Central, South — have 15%,
Africa 30%,
Asia 32%,
the Pacific (19%).

Nine "megadiversity" countries account for more than half of the world's spoken languages: two of them have over 500 languages — Papua New Guinea (850) and Indonesia (670).

Another seven have over 200 languages each: Nigeria (410); India (380); Cameroon (270); Australia (250); Mexico (240); Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) (210); Brazil (219); totalling 3,490 languages.

The following 13 countries have at least 100 languages each: the Philippines; Russia; the U.S.A.; Malaysia; the Peoples' Republic of China; Sudan; Tanzania; Ethiopia; Chad; the New Hebrides; the Central African Republic; Myanmar (Burma); and Nepal. (TSK)

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What is the state of the languages: the "moribund", the "endangered" and the "safe"?

Because of the uncertainties in the statistics, no one really knows how many languages are already "moribund" (no longer learned by children), "endangered" (those which will soon cease to be learned by children), or "safe" (neither moribund nor endangered). It has been estimated (e.g., by Michael Krauss in Alaska), that 20-50% of the world's languages are already moribund, and that 90% (possibly even more) may be moribund or will have disappeared by 2100. (TSK)

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Why is it important whether a group is defined as a "minority" according to international law or not?

The "minority" concept is difficult to handle because of the many connotations which place the concept differentially in several hierarchies, not just one. Many groups, therefore, do not wish to be called "minorities" but prefer other terms. Some groups gain rights by being accepted as "minorities", some lose rights.

In international law, groups accepted as "minorities" have many more guaranteed rights, also in education, than "immigrants", "migrants", "guest workers" or refugees, who have almost no rights. Therefore, many of these groups strive towards being granted the status of minorities. One of the strategies to force unwilling States to organise minority education better is to make them real duty-holders: to hold them to task under international or regional human rights instruments which they have signed and ratified.

But many of these groups reject labels, not knowing the legal implications. "Linguistically diverse students" (a recent North American invention) have no rights whatsoever, they are a non-entity in international law, whereas "minority students" at least have some rights. In much British discourse "immigrant" is seen as a negative term by many immigrant minorities from former colonies, whereas in Germany being accepted as "immigrants" (rather than as "foreigners" or "guest workers") would be positive for Turks. In the U.S.A., on the other hand, being a "minority" is seen by many as degrading. Some groups think that "minority" necessarily has negative connotations of "dominated", "poor", "less worthy", even "primitive" or "backward" — many North American immigrant groups have held this view. On the other hand, other immigrant groups, e.g., in northern Europe, have claimed that "minority" connotes a group which intends, and is allowed, to settle permanently and is therefore a preferred label (as compared to "guest worker" or "immigrant") for a "hyphenated" group, e.g., Swedish Finns (Finns living in Sweden), Greek Australians (Australians of Greek origin). Likewise, these groups see that being accepted as a "national/ethnic" minority confers many more legal rights in international law to a group than the rights which immigrants or refugees have; therefore, becoming a minority has positive connotations.

From a human rights point of view, especially in relation to legal implications in education, those groups mentioned here who reject the label (ethnic/linguistic/national) "minority" are doing themselves a disservice and, sometimes unknowingly, rejecting rights which they need and want to have.

On the other hand, we also have the opposite situation, where accepting the label "minority" may be legally disadvantageous. In international law only "peoples" have a right to self-determination, whereas minorities do not have this right. Many indigenous peoples (see Indigenous or tribal; a "traditional community") do not see themselves as minorities but as peoples. Accepting the label "minority" would connote accepting the legitimacy of the jurisdiction of the state which has colonised them, and might prevent certain preferred interpretations of self-determination. Some groups see a hierarchy of concepts where "nations" and "nationalities" are "above" minorities. Both nations and nationalities would then have a certain right to political self-determination (including having their own state if they so wish), whereas minorities might only have the right to cultural autonomy. This has been the interpretation in several central and eastern European situations under communism. (TSK)

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*Initially, much of this page's content is based on Linguistic Genocide in Education — Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? written by Dr. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (TSK). The book was published in 2000 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, New Jersey 07430-2262 U.S.A. The book has 818 pages, with figures, tables, definition boxes, address boxes, information boxes, inserts, reader tasks and 4 indices. The bibliography (over 1,600 references) is a good starting point for additional sources.