How many languages are there in the world? The 2026 count

Ethnologue, the language catalog published by SIL Global, released its 29th edition on February 21, 2026. It lists 7,170 living languages, a net increase of 11 over the previous edition. According to Gary Simons, who announced the edition on Ethnologue's blog, 14 languages were newly listed as living and 3 were dropped, and entries for 1,835 languages were updated.

Glottolog, a catalog run by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, released version 5.3 on March 2. It gives a higher number: 7,674 spoken first languages.

Why the catalogs disagree

Part of the gap is simple bookkeeping. Glottolog files extinct languages such as Latin and Sumerian in the same category as living ones, while Ethnologue's headline number covers only languages in use. UNESCO's 8,324 covers languages spoken or signed, both in use and not in use.

The harder problem is deciding where one language ends and another begins. Ethnologue's methodology page admits that "not all scholars share the same set of criteria for distinguishing what level of divergence distinguishes a 'language' from a 'dialect.'" Since its 15th edition in 2005, Ethnologue has followed ISO 639-3, the international standard for language codes. That standard treats two varieties as one language if their speakers have "inherent understanding of the other," and as separate languages where "such mutual intelligibility does not exist." Glottolog uses the same test: a language is distinct if it is "not mutually intelligible with any other language."

Mutual intelligibility comes in degrees, so two catalogs applying the same rule to thousands of varieties will still draw some lines differently.

Sign languages add another difference. Ethnologue's 2026 edition lists 159 living sign languages. Glottolog lists 227.

Where the languages are

Languages are packed unevenly across the map. Ethnologue's country pages list these four at the top:

The last column adds the non-indigenous languages Ethnologue lists for each country. Papua New Guinea alone accounts for more than one in nine of the world's living languages.

Speakers are spread even less evenly than languages. According to Ethnologue, the 20 largest languages are the native tongue of more than 3.7 billion people, "just 0.3% of the world's languages accounting for nearly half of the world's population." At the other end, Ethnologue's FAQ lists 1,431 languages with fewer than 1,000 first-language speakers, 463 with fewer than 100 and 110 with fewer than 10.

How many are endangered

Ethnologue counts 3,226 languages as endangered, about 44% of the total. It splits them into two groups. The 2,180 it calls "in trouble" are languages whose passing from parents to children is breaking down, though the parents' generation can still use them. The other 1,046 it calls "dying."

Other trackers land close to that figure. The Endangered Languages Project, which keeps its own catalog, puts the share at 46% and says more than 400 languages have been lost since 1960. UNESCO says at least 40% of languages are threatened with extinction in the long term. The United Nations' page for International Mother Language Day puts the pace this way: "Every two weeks a language disappears."

How many language families

Counting families is even less settled than counting languages. Ethnologue's FAQ gives 143 language families. Glottolog groups its 7,674 spoken languages into 246 families plus 183 language isolates, languages with no demonstrable relatives, which it treats as families of one.

For the people who record and describe these languages, see what does a linguist do. Ethnologue releases a new edition each year on February 21, International Mother Language Day, and we will update this page when the 30th edition appears.