There are approximately 7,000 languages believed to be spoken around the world. Despite this diversity, the majority of the world’s population speaks only a fraction of these languages. The three largest language groups (Mandarin, Spanish, and English) are spoken by more than 1.5 billion people. Other estimates state that 2/3 of the world’s population share only 12 languages.
But it is the diversity of the languages spoken by the few that makes language a remarkable cultural phenomenon. It is estimated that about 96 per cent of the languages are spoken by only 3 to 4 per cent of the people. 2,000 of the world’s languages have less than 1,000 native speakers.

(click for larger version with language labels)

There are many attempts to understand and map this diversity of languages around the world. The Ethnologue database as one of the most comprehensive projects lists exactly 7,099 individual languages in a comprehensive geographic database that many of the above-mentioned statistics are based upon. An even more detailed account when looking at the real diversity of language provides Glottolog of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. Glottolog “aims to provide complete references on the world’s languages”. It also looks at the distribution of dialects and consists of almost 8,500 entries. Besides detailed linguistic information, this database includes basic geographic information about the origins of languages, their families and their dialects.
The Glottolog database was used in this cartogram feature to highlight the geographic distribution of language diversity around the world. The main locations of each entry from the database were used to calculate the density (and diversity) of languages in their spatial distribution. The cartogram therefore shows larger areas where there is a relatively higher diversity of languages. This is also reflected in the differently shaded colours that are overlaid.
The highest language diversity in the world can be found in Africa and Asia, both with more than 2,000 living languages. On the other end of the geographic spectrum lies Europe with only around 250 living languages and dialects spoken there.
How vulnerable languages are can be seen even in Europe with its relatively low language diversity. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level lists 11 languages in the United Kingdom alone that have a certain degree of endangerment. Most critically endangered are Cornish and Manx on the Isle of Man, two of 14 languages in Europe with this most severe status. Both languages are now subject to a certain extent of revival efforts.
The authors of the Handbook of Endangered Languages estimate that by the end of the century 50 to 90 per cent of the currently spoken languages could be extinct. First affected will be the approximately 500 nearly extinct languages that often only have a few (sometimes even only one) known speakers left. Endangered languages face similar fates as endangered species in nature.
Such highly endangered languages include the Bishuo language in Cameroon for which there was only one known native speaker left in the last records. In North America, many of the nearly extinct languages are to be found among the native populations along the west coast. One example is the Klallam language, for which there were still 5 speakers recorded in the 1990 Census. It now is regarded as extinct with its last native speaker having died in 2014, although a few second language speakers remain.
Projects like the Endangered Languages Project aim to utilise the internet in their efforts to raise awareness for endangered languages and work towards the future preservation of today’s language diversity.

A modified version of this map was published in the June 2017 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.