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Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect.
Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world. [2] [3] Number of living languages and speakers ... South Africa: 30 12 42 0.59 51,004,892
Worldwide, Afrikaans and Dutch as native or second language are spoken by approximately 46 million people. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, [1] [2] [3] particularly in written form.
Indonesia is the largest bilingual country in the world, with approximately 200 million people speak more than one language. Indonesians speak about 746 different languages. [ 187 ] Javanese has the most users in terms of native speakers (about 80 million).
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers.. Current distribution of human language families. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]
The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, [1] and by some counts at over 3,000. [2]
In total, Afrikaans is the first language in South Africa alone of about 7.1 million people [113] and is estimated to be a second language for at least 10 million people worldwide, [119] compared to over 23 million [92] and 5 million respectively, for Dutch.
In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants. [23] In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor .