Language & Vocabulary
Your native language's global reach, family tree, and endangerment status. Plus an optional vocabulary size estimator.
English belongs to the Indo-European language family. It has approximately 380M native speakers — 4.7% of the world.
English is rarer than
95%
of languages by speaker count
Native speakers
380M
World share
4.7%
Top languages by native speakers
There are approximately 7,000 living languages in the world. Over 40% are endangered with fewer than 1,000 speakers. Mandarin is the most spoken native language; English has the most total speakers when including second-language speakers (~1.5B).
Put It In Context
Ethnologue estimates that a language goes extinct every two weeks. Of the ~7,000 languages alive today, half have fewer than 10,000 speakers. The top 20 languages account for the native language of 4.5 billion people — over half the world's population. Speaking a rare language makes you part of a shrinking community preserving a unique cognitive and cultural heritage. Each language encodes a distinct way of perceiving the world — some have words that have no equivalent in any other tongue.
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