How many languages are spoken in the world?

Ethnologue lists about 7,160 living languages and classes about 44% of them as endangered. The 'one language dies every two weeks' line traces back to a 1992 worst-case projection; the Catalogue of Endangered Languages counts about 3 to 4 extinctions a year, closer to one every three or four months. Just 23 languages account for more than half the world's population.

Source: Ethnologue, 27th edition (2024); Campbell et al., Catalogue of Endangered Languages (2017)