Living languages

Linguists count about 7,100 living languages. Roughly 40 percent are endangered.

Where one language ends and a dialect begins is often debated.

Context

The count of living languages comes mainly from Ethnologue, a catalogue maintained by linguists that updates its totals each year. The figure hovers around 7,100 and shifts a little with every edition as researchers describe newly documented languages, merge entries or record languages falling silent.

There is no neutral line between a language and a dialect. Mutual understanding, shared writing systems, politics and identity all play a role, so two catalogues can reach different totals for the same part of the world. That is why the number is an estimate rather than a fixed fact.

Researchers who track language vitality report that a large share, roughly 40 percent by Ethnologue's measure, is endangered, meaning that speakers are declining or children are no longer learning the language. Being endangered does not by itself mean a language has fewer than 1,000 speakers; some endangered languages still have thousands of speakers, while many others have far fewer. UNESCO runs its own atlas work on the topic using different criteria.

For these reasons, language scientists prefer to describe the total as a range or an approximate figure, and they note that figures for endangered languages in particular are revised often as new fieldwork comes in.