LANGUAGES AROUND THE WORLD
Do you know how many languages there are in the world? We are amused by people who can speak more than three languages, feel enlightened in their presence if they are fluent in more than five, and regard them as geniuses if they surpass seven. But the number of languages in existence around the world is a figure that will blow your mind.
On interviewing people, they estimated an average of a few hundreds. Linguists and translators surmise around 1000 languages, but after a recent count by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, now known as SIL International, they released the world’s most extensive catalogue of languages the Ethnologue. It confirms a staggering figure of 6,909 languages and dialects all over the world.
Languages are grouped into families, called language families. As Indians, we’ve been taught that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, yet it is only the origin language that gave rise to a handful of Indian languages and some Middle-eastern languages. If Sanskrit is the sun, and the Indo European family a galaxy, then there are many more suns and even more galaxies in this universe of languages.
Article By- Anwesha Roy
