Around 6,500 to 8,000 languages are thought to be in use in the world today. The precise count depends partly on whether related varieties are treated as dialects of a single language or as separate languages.
Detailed descriptions do not exist for all languages. Hammarström (2016) found 6,409 spoken languages that are (or were) mutually unintelligible with each other. He classified them into the groups shown in table 1.
| Most extensive description | Languages | % |
| Long grammar (beyond∼300 pages) | 1,134 | 17.7 |
| Grammar (∼150 pages) | 891 | 13.9 |
| Grammar sketch (∼50 pages) | 1,602 | 25.0 |
| Phonological description or similar | 711 | 11.1 |
| Wordlist or less | 2,071 | 32.3 |
| Total | 6,409 | 100.0 |
Strikingly, no grammatical description of any kind exists for almost half (43%) of the languages.
Hammarström (2016) mentions the 2 main global databases of languages:
- Ethnologue: http://www.ethnologue.com contains speaker numbers, detailed locations, and other metadata. The 28th edition (2025) covers 7,159 living languages. https://www.ethnologue.com/ethnoblog/welcome-28th-edition/ A new edition of Ethnologue is issued year on International Mother Language Day (21 February).
- Glottolog http://www.glottolog.org contains sources of data on languages. Hammarström is a main contributor to Glottolog. Tables 2 and 3, downloaded from Glottolog on 21 May 2025, list languages by descriptive status and by endangerment status.
Hammarström (2016) explains that Ethnologue and Glottolog both classify more varieties as separate languages than he did in his 2016 count mentioned above.
Glottolog 5.1 edited by Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
| Most extensive description | Languages | % |
| Long grammar (more than 300 pages) | 1,904 | 24.2 |
| Grammar (less than 300 pages) | 1,027 | 13.0 |
| Grammar sketch | 1,957 | 24.8 |
| New testament, text, phonology, (typological study of a particular feature or dictionary | 1,059 | 13.4 |
| Wordlist or less | 1,936 | 24.6 |
| Total | 7,883 | 100.0 |
Endangered languages
Table 3 classifies languages by how endangered they are.
| How endangered | Languages | % |
| Not endangered | 2,719 | 35.1 |
| Threatened | 1,544 | 20.0 |
| Shifting | 1,795 | 23.2 |
| Moribund | 412 | 5.3 |
| Nearly extinct | 299 | 3.9 |
| Extinct | 970 | 12.5 |
| 7,739 | 100.0 |
I haven’t tried to work out the reasons for the different numbers of languages captured in tables 2 (7,883) and 3 (7,739).
Source
Linguistic diversity and language evolution, Harald Hammarström, Journal of Language Evolution, Volume 1, Issue 1 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzw002