How many languages have been documented?

How many languages have been documented?

There are currently 7,117 known languages spoken by people around the world, according to Ethnologue, widely considered to be the most extensive catalogue of the languages of the world. Sadly, this number declines every month. Of these languages, 90\% are spoken by less than 100,000 people.

How many officially recognized languages in the world?

7,139 languages are spoken today. This is a fragile time: Roughly 40\% of languages are now endangered, often with less than 1,000 speakers remaining. Meanwhile, just 23 languages account for more than half the world’s population.

How are languages documented?

Methods. Typical steps involve recording, maintaining metadata, transcribing (often using the International Phonetic Alphabet and/or a “practical orthography” made up for that language), annotation and analysis, translation into a language of wider communication, archiving and dissemination.

Which language is the most well documented language group in the world?

1. Chinese — 1.3 Billion Native Speakers. Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 1.1 billion of whom speak Mandarin — but there’s no doubt it’s the most spoken language in the world.

How many written languages are there?

How many languages have a written form? According to Ethnologue, 4,065 language currently have a written form. However many are rarely written, or few of the people who speak them are able to read and write them.

What is the most documented language?

Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. It is spoken in China and some countries of East Asia. The Chinese language belongs to the Chinese-Tibetan language-family and is actually a group of languages ​​and dialects. Standardized Chinese is actually a language called “mandarin”.

What are the differences between language documentation and description?

Language Documentation and Description It clarifies the distinction between raw, primary, and structural data and argues that documentary linguistics is concerned with raw and primary data and their interrelationships, while descriptive linguistics is concerned with the relations between primary and structural data.