Countries With the Most Languages: The Top 10 Counted Down

Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country: 841 living indigenous languages, ahead of Indonesia with 719 and Nigeria with 531, according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019), the catalogue of world languages published by SIL International. India (453), China (302), Mexico (287), Cameroon (274), Australia (226), the United States (219) and Brazil (217) complete the top ten. Papua New Guinea alone holds nearly 12 percent of the roughly 7,100 living languages Ethnologue recognised in that edition, and most of the leaders owe their place to rugged terrain, island geography or the sheer number of small communities that were never absorbed into a single state language.

How Ethnologue's 2019 count separates a language from a dialect

Any ranking of this kind depends on where the line between a language and a dialect is drawn. Ethnologue uses mutual intelligibility plus a shared ethnolinguistic identity: if two speech varieties cannot be understood by each other's speakers, they are listed as separate languages. Other bodies draw the line elsewhere. The People's Linguistic Survey of India counted 780 languages in India, far above Ethnologue's figure, while a former prime minister of Papua New Guinea, Sir Michael Somare, put his country's total at 832 in 2006.

Ethnologue also splits its totals into "established" languages, meaning those spoken by long-settled communities, and "immigrant" languages brought by recent migrants. The countdown below ranks countries by established languages, because that figure measures the diversity a country produced itself. The immigrant figure matters most for the United States, Australia and Canada, whose totals jump once newcomers' languages are added.

Numbers 10 to 8: Brazil, the United States and Australia's shrinking indigenous tongues

10. Brazil, 217 languages. Almost everyone in Brazil speaks Portuguese, yet the country still counts about 217 indigenous languages. The linguist Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues estimated that more than 1,000 languages were spoken in the territory when the Portuguese arrived in 1500. The survivors are small: in 2005 no indigenous language in Brazil had more than 40,000 speakers. A few have won local recognition, such as Nheengatu, a descendant of Tupi that is co-official in the Amazonian municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira.

9. United States, 219 languages. The American figure is mostly Native American and Alaska Native languages, plus Hawaiian. Once immigrant languages are added, Ethnologue's total rises to 335. Many indigenous languages have very few speakers left: only about 372,000 people reported speaking an indigenous language at home in the 2010 census. Ethnologue puts the median speaker count of a language in the United States at just 12.

8. Australia, 226 languages. Australia's place rests on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, whose original number is estimated at between about 250 and 363. The Pama-Nyungan family alone covered roughly seven-eighths of the continent. The count now overstates how many are in everyday use: by 2020 barely more than 100 were still spoken, 90 percent of them endangered, and only thirteen were still being learned by children. Ethnologue's median for Australia is a startling 10 speakers per language.

Numbers 7 and 6: Cameroon and Mexico, where colonial languages sit on top

7. Cameroon, 274 languages. Cameroon packs a remarkable spread of language families into 475,000 square kilometres: 169 Niger–Congo languages (130 of them Bantu), 55 Afro-Asiatic languages, two Nilo-Saharan and four Ubangian. French and English are official because the territory was divided between France and Britain from 1916 to 1961, but daily life runs on regional lingua francas: Cameroonian Pidgin English in the anglophone Northwest and Southwest regions, Fulfulde in the north and Ewondo across much of the Centre, South and East. In the late 19th century Sultan Ibrahim Njoya even created the Bamum script to write his own people's language.

6. Mexico, 287 languages. Mexico has no official language in its constitution, though Spanish is spoken by more than 90 percent of people. The government recognises 63 indigenous languages, which Ethnologue, applying its test of whether speakers can understand each other, splits into 287. History swung sharply: in 1570 Philip II made Nahuatl an official language of New Spain, and in 1696 Charles II banned everything but Spanish. Today about 5 to 6 percent of Mexicans speak an indigenous language, with Nahuatl at almost two million speakers and Yucatec Maya at about one million.

Numbers 5 and 4: China's Sinitic family and India's 22 scheduled languages

5. China, 302 languages. Ethnologue's figure covers mainland China only. About 92 percent of the population speaks one of the Sinitic, or Han, languages, usually grouped into seven major branches that differ from each other roughly as much as English, German and Danish do. The remaining 8 percent speak around 300 minority languages from at least nine families, from Turkic Uyghur and Kazakh to Tibetan, Mongolian, Zhuang and Korean. Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang appear on renminbi banknotes. Ethnologue estimated that 904 million people in China spoke a variety of Mandarin as their first language in 2017.

4. India, 453 languages. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by 78.05 percent of Indians and Dravidian languages by 19.64 percent; the rest speak Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Tai–Kadai and Andamanese languages, plus isolates. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution lists 22 languages, and the 2001 census recorded 122 major languages and 1,599 other languages, 30 of them with more than a million native speakers. The gap between those census figures and Ethnologue's 453 shows how much the count depends on how dialects are grouped. The constitution names no national language: Hindi and English are the languages of the central government, a compromise fixed by the Official Languages Act of 1963 after opposition to Hindi in the south.

Number 3: Nigeria and its 531 languages from three African families

Nigeria is Africa's most linguistically diverse country and its borders take in languages from all three of the continent's major language families: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger–Congo. Hausa (over 63 million speakers including second-language users), Yoruba (over 47 million) and Igbo (over 33 million) dominate the north, south-west and south-east. Around them sit hundreds of smaller languages, including a few, such as Centúúm, that linguists have not been able to classify at all.

English has been the official language since independence, precisely because choosing any one Nigerian language would have favoured one group. French was added as a second official language in December 1996 under Sani Abacha, reflecting Nigeria's French-speaking neighbours. The most common lingua franca on the street, though, is Nigerian Pidgin, an English-based creole spoken by more than 60 million people.

Number 2: Indonesia's 719 languages from Sumatra to Papua

Indonesia accounts for roughly one in ten of the world's languages. Most belong to the Austronesian family and are spoken in the west and centre of the archipelago, from Acehnese on Sumatra to Sundanese on Java and Buginese on Sulawesi. The eastern provinces of Papua and the Maluku Islands add more than 150 Papuan languages that are unrelated to Austronesian. Javanese is the largest mother tongue, spoken natively by 31.8 percent of Indonesians in 2010.

What holds the country together is Indonesian, a standardised form of Malay that over 97 percent of the population could speak by the 2020 census. Indonesian dominates commerce, administration, education and the media, yet most Indonesians speak another language, such as Javanese, as their first language, which makes plurilingualism the norm. At least 43 regional lingua francas, such as Ambonese Malay and Papuan Malay, bridge the gaps in between.

Number 1: Papua New Guinea, 841 languages and a median of 1,315 speakers

Papua New Guinea's 841 languages are shared among a population whose size is itself uncertain: a 2022 UN-backed study using satellite imagery suggested about 17 million people, nearly double the official estimate of the time, although in July 2023 the UN revised its own figure to 11.8 million. Ethnologue's figures show how small many of these communities are, since the median language has about 1,315 speakers. Steep mountain ranges, dense forest and swampy lowlands kept valley communities apart for thousands of years, and most of the country's languages belong to the many unrelated Papuan families of New Guinea island. Austronesian speakers arrived along the coasts about 3,500 years ago and added the Oceanic languages of the islands and shoreline.

Colonial history layered more on top. The northern half of the country was German New Guinea from 1884 to 1914, which left German loanwords in Tok Pisin and a small German-based creole, Unserdeutsch, in East New Britain Province. Today four languages have statutory recognition: Tok Pisin, English, Hiri Motu and, since May 2015, Papua New Guinean Sign Language. Tok Pisin is the real common tongue; in the 2011 census 68.4 percent of people were literate in it, against 39.9 percent in English and 4.7 percent in Hiri Motu.

The flip side of so many small languages is fragility. When a language has a few hundred speakers, a single generation that switches to Tok Pisin or English can end it, a pattern tracked in our guide to the world's endangered languages. The Austronesian branch that links Papua New Guinea's coasts to Indonesia, Madagascar and Hawaii is explored in our article on the Austronesian language family, and the mountains, islands and provinces that produced all this variety are covered in our Papua New Guinea country guide.