Roughly how many languages are spoken in the world today?
Counts vary depending on how languages and dialects are defined.
The figure comes from Ethnologue, a widely cited catalogue of living languages published by SIL International. Its recent editions list a little over 7,000 living languages. The number is a snapshot, not a fixed count, because languages die out, are newly documented, or get reclassified between editions.
The count depends heavily on where linguists draw the line between a language and a dialect. Mutually intelligible varieties may be counted as one language or several depending on political, cultural and structural criteria. Chinese varieties such as Mandarin and Cantonese are a standard example: they share a writing tradition but are not mutually intelligible in speech, and are often treated as separate languages by linguists and as dialects in everyday usage. A UNESCO statistics paper on Ethnologue also discusses the limits of these figures, so any total should be read as an estimate.
Languages are very unevenly distributed. A small number of languages are spoken by billions of people, while a large share of the total has only a few thousand speakers or fewer. Ethnologue classes a substantial portion of living languages as endangered, and a number of them are spoken by only a handful of elderly people. Papua New Guinea and Indonesia are among the countries with the most languages, while the great majority of the world's population speaks one of a few dozen large languages.