How many languages are spoken in the world today?

How to get close to this number

Reason from the places where languages are dense. A few regions — New Guinea, parts of West Africa, the Caucasus, the Amazon — each hold hundreds of distinct languages, because mountainous or forested terrain isolates communities. Adding those dense regions to the broad scattering elsewhere gives a total in the thousands.

The distribution in the explanation is the important part and it inverts the naive picture: around half the world speaks one of the two dozen largest languages, while over three thousand have fewer than ten thousand speakers each. A count of languages tells you almost nothing about how people actually communicate, because the median language is spoken by almost nobody.

Where you draw the line between a language and a dialect is a genuinely unresolved question, and it moves this total by hundreds. The distinction is as much political as linguistic — mutually intelligible varieties are counted as separate languages when they have separate states, and mutually unintelligible ones share a name when they share a country. Any figure here is a catalogue's editorial judgement.