Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world, with approximately 840 languages used, more than twice as many as the entire continent of Europe.
According to the 2005 Census of Colombia, the country has 37 major languages.
Indonesians are the second-largest multilingual population in the world, there are about 700 languages in Indonesia. The many other regional and most popularly used languages include Javanese, Sudanese, Hindi, Chinese, Minangkabau, Dutch, and English. Watch more about Indonesian by clicking this picture below: Enjoy!
Currently, these are the 10 most spoken languages in the world in 2023, sorted by number of mother language speakers: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Yue chinese, Vietnamese.
This is the second oldest language in the world which is still being used today. Sanskrit is the language of Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. 7,000 people are Sanskrit speakers.
Some have only one official language, such as Albania, France, Germany and Lithuania. Some have more than one official language such as Belarus, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Afghanistan, Paraguay, Bolivia, India, Switzerland, and South Africa.
Despite a population of just 8.8 million, Papua New Guinea comes in first with a total of 840 languages spoken across the country. To put things into perspective, that's almost 12% of the world's languages spoken in an area that's roughly the size of California.
Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world, with approximately 840 languages used, more than twice as many as the entire continent of Europe. Nearly 94 languages are spoken per one million inhabitants across the country's islands.
With anywhere between 1000 and 2000 languages, Africa is home to approximately one-third of the world's languages. The diversity of Africa's languages is evidenced by their populations.
Of those 6,912 languages, 820 of them are spoken in Papua New Guinea. Can you imagine 820 languages being spoken in one country?
There is no country code +69, only three-digit numbers with the digits '69' and a third digit. The New Zealand territory of Tokelau uses +690, the Federated States of Micronesia uses +691 and the Marshall Islands use +692.
3 - South Africa
However, according to South Africa's constitution, only 11 are recognised as official languages. Most South Africans can speak more than one language, and there is very often a diglossia between the official and unofficial language forms for speakers of the latter.
Smith is a hyperpolyglot—a rare individual who speaks more than 10 languages. In a new brain imaging study, researchers peered inside the minds of polyglots like Smith to tease out how language-specific regions in their brains respond to hearing different languages.
Learn About All The English Speaking Countries
In fact, English is recognized as an official language in a total of 67 different countries, as well as 27 non-sovereign entities.
From Afrikaans to Zulu, Italian to Japanese, there are currently 7,117 known languages spoken by people around the world, according to Ethnologue, widely considered to be the most extensive catalogue of the languages of the world.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
Papua New Guinea has about eight million people, but more than 800 languages. The oldest ones, in the Papuan group, date back tens of thousands of years. So why are there so many languages in this mountainous island country? This video has been optimised for mobile viewing on the BBC News app.
Many people are searching and want to know what is the official language of Australia. While there is no official language in Australia, the main language of Australia is definitely English. The written English used is closely related to the English of Britain, although there are a few differences in spelling.
The majority of Australians speak English as a first or other language, however a significant number of people also speak languages other than English. About 76% of Australians reported speaking only English at home in the 2021 Census.
English is the majority native language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Republic of Ireland (see Anglosphere) and is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.