There are differences of opinion about exactly how many “Languages” there are, as many are spoken by very few people and some are indexed as dialects rather than seperate languages.
Others, such as Silbo Gomero from a single village in the Canary islands, are not even languages as we would naturally understand them, as it is whistled and not spoken!
The BBC has a good web page about language here and below are some facts from that page that you may find interesting:
It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are spoken around the world. 90% of these languages are used by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people converse in 150-200 languages and 46 languages have just a single speaker!
2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia, while Europe has at least 230.
Papua New Guinea boasts no less than 832 different languages!
The world’s most widely spoken languages by number of native speakers and as a second language, according to figures from UNESCO are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French.
UNESCO has identified 2,500 languages which it claims are at risk of extinction.
One quarter of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people.
The world’s most widely-used alphabets (or scripts) which are still in use today are (in alphabetical order): Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese script, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese script, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Sinhala, Thai and Tibetan.
The United Nations uses six official languages to conduct business: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic.
Around 200 artificial languages have been created since the 17th century, including ‘Klingon’ and ‘Esperanto’. Esperanto was invented by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887 and is a spoken and written blend of Latin, English, German and Romance elements and literally means “one who hopes”. Today, it is widely spoken by approximately 2 million people across the world.