About Languages Around the World
The world has roughly seven thousand languages, spread very unevenly. They are grouped into families by shared ancestry, and their speakers may be spread over continents or confined to a single valley. Contact, migration, and policy constantly reshape which languages are spoken where.
Africa
Four major groupings and more than two thousand languages.
Learn MoreEast and Southeast Asia
Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Austronesian languages.
Learn MoreSouth and Central Asia
Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, plus many smaller families.
Learn MoreThe Middle East and North Africa
Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and the region's older languages.
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Mostly Indo-European, with a few older survivors.
Learn MoreThe Americas
Hundreds of Indigenous languages alongside colonial languages.
Learn MoreOceania and the Pacific
The most languages per person of any region.
Learn MoreContact and Change
Borrowing, language loss, revival, and global lingua francas.
Learn MoreAfrica
Africa is home to the Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan groupings, with the Bantu expansion spreading related languages across the south and east. Many Africans speak three or more languages, mixing local languages, regional lingua francas such as Swahili or Hausa, and a former colonial language.
East and Southeast Asia
This region includes Mandarin, the language with the most native speakers, along with Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, and the many languages of the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. Chinese characters, and scripts derived from Indian models, are both widely used.
South and Central Asia
Northern South Asia speaks Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, and Punjabi, while the south speaks Dravidian languages including Tamil and Telugu. The region uses a large number of related alphasyllabic scripts descended from ancient Brahmi.
The Middle East and North Africa
Arabic dialects form a continuum across the region, alongside Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Hebrew. The area was where alphabetic writing first developed, and the Aramaic and later Arabic scripts spread far beyond it.
Europe
Most European languages belong to the Indo-European family, in Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and other branches, with Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and the isolate Basque as exceptions. Standardized national languages, promoted through schooling and print, often overshadow regional languages and dialects.
The Americas
Before European contact the Americas held enormous linguistic diversity, and hundreds of Indigenous languages survive, including Quechua, Guarani, Nahuatl, and Navajo. Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French now dominate as national languages, and creoles developed in several areas.
Oceania and the Pacific
The island of New Guinea alone has more than eight hundred languages. The Pacific is home to the far-flung Austronesian family, reached by voyaging, as well as the unrelated Papuan languages and the Indigenous languages of Australia, many now endangered.
Contact and Change
Languages in contact borrow words and structures, sometimes merging into pidgins and creoles. Roughly one language stops being spoken every few months, prompting documentation and revival efforts, while a small number of languages, led by English, now function as global second languages.