English reigns supreme, unchallenged as the de facto international language spoken all over the world. It is the sole, main or an official language of the United Nations and its agencies, the Commonwealth, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Association of South-East Asian Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), European Community (EC), Organization of African Unity (OAU), South Pacific Forum (SPF), Group of 77, Non-Aligned Movement, World Council of Churches, International Olympic Committee etc. English occupies the position previously held by German in the sciences, French in international diplomacy, and Latin as the lingua franca in the western world.
Language with the most speakers: Mandarin, spoken mainly in China. Also the world’s oldest surviving language with the most durable script that dates back to more than three millenia.
Top two languages: English and French, the two working languages of the United Nations.
Top five languages: English, French, German, Italian and Japanese. The languages of the Group of Seven richest countries - United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Top six languages: The six official languages of the United Nations -English, French, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and Arabic.
Top nine languages: European Community official languages: French, Dutch, German, Italian, English, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek.
Top 10 languages in terms of speakers (approximate decreasing order): Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Indonesian and French.
Top 15 languages: The American Translators Association (ATA) has 4,000 members with recognized abilities in 15 languages and 25 language combinations. The 15 languages are Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Top 33 languages: These languages are broadcast by the Voice of Russia (formerly Radio Moscow).
Top 40-53 languages: These languages are broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Voice of America (VOA).
Top 55 languages: The languages represented in the two Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977 to the outer planets of the solar system. They include Akkadian and Sumerian.
Top 100 languages: There are about 100 official languages used among the 200 + nations of the world. A large Internet translation network claims its 18,000 members can translate 100 languages. The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) has published a list of the top 107 languages in decreasing order of speakers; the last has about seven million speakers.
Top 169 languages: In 1985 the United States Department of Education published a list of 169 languages which it described as "criticaL" for knowledge.
Top 200 languages: British academician David Crystal has compiled a list of 200 languages each with estimated speakers of over a million. The list can be viewed at www.zompist.com.
Top 225 languages: A major German project was started in 2000 to translate an 8,000 general entry international glossary from English into 224 languages. This project is probably unprecedented in the history of world linguistics and could well go down into the Guiness Book of World Records. The glossaries are to be distributed to universities throughout the world.
Top 300 to 400 languages: An Internet site gives greetings and miscellaneous sayings in these languages.
Top 826 languages: A book has been published with samples of Bible texts in these languages. The Gospel in Many Tongues was published by The British and Foreign Bible Society in 1954, containing specimens of 826 languages in which it had published or circulated some portion of the Judeo-Christian scriptures.
Top 1,000 languages. An American project is underway to preserve samples of 1,000 languages (Rosetta Project) for 1,000 years. A common text is Genesis 1-3. In 1975 The Book of A Thousand Tongues was published by the United Bible Societies with samples of biblical texts in 1,000 languages.
Top 1,500 languages: According to the Children’s Britannica, Third edition, 1973, this is the total number of languages in the world. It did not give the full list.
Top 2,500 languages: The Bible has now been translated in whole or part into 2,500 languages. Samples can be viewed from the United Bible Societies’ Web site. Copies of these Bibles are kept in the Scriptures Library of Cambridge University.
A catalogue of about 2,800 language names is available from The Future of World Evangelization, Unreached Peoples ’84.
Top 4,000 languages. An Internet Web site lists the numbers 1 to 10 in over 4,500 languages.
The largest single catalogue of languages is the Summer Institute of Linguistic’s Ethnologue, with 6,513 languages. However, the total includes Sign Languages such as Singapore Sign Language, Argentine Sign Language and Bombay Sign Language, and lists many varieties of Arabic and other languages as separate languages.
This page was first published in July 2001 to mark CEM Translation Ltd’s first anniversary.
