Was There Ever One Language?
Will There Ever be One Language?
| Rank | Language | Speakers (in millions) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chinese | 1,197 |
| 2 | Spanish | 406 |
| 3 | English | 335 |
| 4 | Hindi | 260 |
| 5 | Arabic | 223 |
| 6 | Portuguese | 202 |
| 7 | Bengali | 193 |
| 8 | Russian | 162 |
| 9 | Japanese | 122 |
| 10 | Javanese | 84 |
| 11 | German | 84 |
It is likely that there was an original language, but there are no techniques to reconstruct it. Today, 94% of the world's population speaks one of the 393 languages with more than one million speakers. |
|---|
An additional 6,712 languages have fewer than one million speakers. About 1,000 of these have fewer than 100 speakers or may have already disappeared.