How many types of languages – spoken in the world today and where do they originally come from?
Linguists estimate that there are about 5,000-6,000 different languages spoken in the world today. The imprecision in this estimate is largely due to the fact that some dialects are in the process of diverging and it is not clear that they have reached the stage of being separate languages. If two people find each other’s speech unintelligible, they are usually thought to be speaking different languages rather than dialects. There are about 200 languages that have a million or more native speakers. Mandarin Chinese click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced is the most common, being spoken by around 874,000,000 people as a native language. English is a distant third with approximately 341,000,000 native speakers. English is far more world wide in its distribution than all other spoken languages. It is an official language in 52 countries as well as many small colonies and territories. In addition, 1/4 to 1/3 of the people in the world understand and speak English to some deg
