The Countries With The Most Linguistic Diversity

Humans are thought to speak more than 7,000 languages across the globe - 7,139 to be precise, according to Ethnologue. Asia has the most of them, 2,300, followed by Africa with 2,144. There are 1,313 tongues spoken in the Pacific region, followed by 1,061 in the Americas while Europe has 287 different languages. A living language is defined as having at least one speaker for whom it is their first language. Extinct languages used only as a second language are not included in this ranking.

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. To put things into perspective: in the United States, a little less than one language is spoken per one million inhabitants.

Second on the list is Indonesia, with 712 different languages used throughout the country, followed by Nigeria with 522 spoken languages.

As highlighted by one of our recent charts, around 40% of the world's languages are at risk of dying out, as some languages become less widespread with each new generation.