Daily Almanac for
Dec 6, 2009
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The Question:

How many spoken languages are there in the world?

The Answer:

There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers.

The most popular language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are 885,000,000 people in China that speak that language. You might also like our list of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

—The Editors

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