Which country has 500 languages?
With more than 200 million people, Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and its largest democracy. With more than 300 ethnic groups, over 500 languages, and many distinct religious and regional differences, it's also one of the world's most culturally diverse countries.
With more than 200 million people, Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and its largest democracy. With more than 300 ethnic groups, over 500 languages, and many distinct religious and regional differences, it's also one of the world's most culturally diverse countries.
Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. As of 2021, 840 different languages were spoken across the country. The second most languages were spoken in Indonesia, counting 711 different languages. In the United States, 328 languages were spoken in that same year.
Ireland: Central Statistics Office figures show 182 languages are spoken in Irish State's homes | European Website on Integration.
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?
Nigeria is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, with over 500 languages spoken. The official language is English, but it is spoken less frequently in rural areas and amongst people with lower education levels.
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.
The languages that takes the number 1 place in our list and therefore, the most spoken first language in the world is, by far, Mandarin Chinese.
According to the online reference Wikipedia, half the countries of the world have official languages. Some have only one official language, such as Albania, France, Germany and Lithuania.
1 - Papua New Guinea: 840
Papua New Guinea is the world's most multilingual country, with a total of 840 languages spoken.
Who can speak 42 languages?
Powell Alexander Janulus (born 1939) is a Canadian polyglot who lives in White Rock, British Columbia, and entered the Guinness World Records in 1985 for fluency in 42 languages. To qualify, he had to pass a two-hour conversational fluency test with a native speaker of each of the 42 languages he spoke at that time.
1 in 20 people say they can speak 3 languages fluently (5%). Whilst 1.4% say they can fluently speak 4 languages. And 0.1% say they're able to speak 5 or more languages fluently!
The two with the lowest rates of bilingualism – defined as being able to hold a conversation in more than one language – were the UK and Ireland. About two-thirds of people in these countries speak only English. It's a similar story wherever English is spoken as the mother tongue.
Put simply, a polyglot is someone who speaks multiple languages. How many is 'many'? Well, the most languages spoken by one person is 58 – a record that was held by Ziad Fazah in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1998.
Within India, our language expertise covers a wide range of official tongues, all of which we explore below. These include two official languages: Hindi and English. There are also 22 official languages of India at state and/or regional level, all of which have constitutional recognition.
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. In total, there are at least 75 languages in Africa which have more than one million speakers.
It is a language rooted in central Mandarin, however, the total amount of languages spoken in China is 302, according to the last Ethnologue survey. This is also the national language.
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.
Most people will learn one or two languages in their lives. But Vaughn Smith, a 47-year-old carpet cleaner from Washington, D.C., speaks 24. Smith is a hyperpolyglot—a rare individual who speaks more than 10 languages.
The official language of Egypt is Arabic, and most Egyptians speak one of several vernacular dialects of that language. As is the case in other Arab countries, the spoken vernacular differs greatly from the literary language.
Which country has 11 languages?
South Africa's constitution recognises 11 official languages: Sepedi (also known as Sesotho sa Leboa), Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu.
Italian language, or Italiano—as it is commonly known, is a Romance language and one of the languages most people would readily agree on as one of the softest and sweetest languages in existence. The language of revolutionists like Dante da Vinci, and Pavarotti, Italian is spoken by 66 million people globally.
1. Norwegian. This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
- Frisian. Frisian is thought to be one of the languages most closely related to English, and therefore also the easiest for English-speakers to pick up. ...
- Dutch. ...
- Norwegian. ...
- Spanish. ...
- Portuguese. ...
- Italian. ...
- French. ...
- Swedish.
There are five countries in the world that do not have an official language. These countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Costa Rica, and Eritrea. English is the primary language spoken in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
