In what languages does the modern world speak? Classifying the world's tongues has been the task for the past seven months of a bleary-eyed crew of linguists at Washington, D.C.'s George Washington University. They can still only guess at the number of existing languages: somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000. But the significant languagesĀthat is, those that are the mother tongues of at least 1,000,000 of the world's 2.9 billion peopleĀnumber only 130. The top dozen, and the number of people who speak them:
Chinese-Mandarin 460 million
English 250 million
Hindustani 160 million
Spanish 140 million
Russian 130 million
German 100 million
Japanese 95 million
Arabic 80 million
Bengali 75 million
Portuguese...
