When businesses consider offering their products or services globally, or manufacturing and securing resources outside their own country, language barriers arise.  Interacting with people who speak a different language is one of many variables that complicate doing business globally – yet millions of businesses need to do more business globally.  Thankfully, translations to and from most mainstream languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, and Chinese are easily done with online programs, and there are millions of multi-lingual people.

Pioneering work to document the number of different languages spoken has been done by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International.  That organization today publishes 2,508 translations of the Christian Bible, and has compiled a catalog of the world’s languages, called the Ethnologue, which lists 6,909 distinct languages being spoken.  Of that total, only 230 are spoken in Europe and 2,197 in Asia.  But in Papua-New Guinea, 830 different languages are spoken by 3.9 million people, and in France, the Ethnologue cites ten languages being spoken, including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, Allemannisch, Alsace, Breton, and French.

Good news for businesses doing business globally is that the total number of languages spoken globally is decreasing.  For example in North America, many native American languages are disappearing yearly, a common phenomena all over the world.  Whenever any language ceases to be learned by young children, that language generally does not survive the death of current native speakers.  In North America, about 75 languages are spoken by only a handful of older people, and those languages are expected to become extinct.  About 25 percent of the world’s languages have fewer than a thousand remaining speakers.  By the year 2099, analysts estimate that roughly one half of the 6,909 languages listed by Ethnologue will disappear.

Source:  Based on information from the website http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world