Open AccessDiversidade linguistica do Mundo
Author(s) -
Kazimierz J. Zaniewski
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
confins
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1958-9212
DOI - 10.4000/confins.6529
Subject(s) - humanities , art , philosophy
According to the latest edition of Ethnologue: Languages of the World, there are 6,909 languages spoken in the world today. They belong to 116 different linguistic families. The six largest families are Niger-Congo (1510 languages), Austronesian (1231), Trans-New Guinea (475), Sino-Tibetan (445), Indo-European (426), and Afro-Asiatic (353). Over 64 percent of languages belong to one of these families, and they are spoken by over five billion people (five-sixths of the world’s population). The..