This page is a list of lists of languages.

Published lists

SIL International SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...

's '' Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' lists over spoken and signed languages. *The

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Ar ...

(ISO) assigns codes for most languages; see

ISO 639 ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for languages and language groups. It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 (as ''ISO 639/R ...

List of ISO 639-1 codes ISO 639 is a standardized nomenclature used to classify languages. Each language is assigned a two-letter (639-1) and three-letter ( and ) lowercase abbreviation, amended in later versions of the nomenclature. This table lists all of: * ISO 639-1: ...

– two-letter codes (184 major languages) **

List of ISO 639-2 codes ISO 639 is a set of international standards that lists short codes for language names. The following is a complete list of three-letter codes defined in part two (ISO 639-2) of the standard, including the corresponding two-letter (ISO 639-1) codes ...

– three-letter codes **

ISO 639 macrolanguage ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

– ISO 639-2 codes used as ISO 639-3 codes **

List of ISO 639-3 codes See also * List of ISO 639-3 language codes (2019) * List of ISO 639-3 language codes used locally by Linguist List A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * L ...

– three-letter codes, intended to "cover all known natural languages" **

List of ISO 639-5 codes This is a list of ISO 639-5 codes, including the code hierarchy as given in the ISO 639-5 registry. The code und (''undetermined'') from ISO 639-2 can be seen as top of the hierarchy (for example, und:aav, und:euq:eu). The hierarchy is not a comple ...

– three-letter codes for

language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...

and groups *

IETF language tag An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the su ...

- depends on ISO 639, but provides various expansion mechanisms *

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...

Linguasphere Observatory The Linguasphere Observatory (or "the Observatoire", based on its original French and legal title: ''Observatoire Linguistique'') is a non-profit transnational research network, devoted (alongside related programs) to the gathering, study, classif ...

(LS-2010, totalling over 32,800 coded entries & over 70,900 linguistic names)

English Wikipedia list articles

* Index of language articles

Comprehensive lists

Lists which are global in scope (all living natural languages would classify for inclusion): *by country:

List of official languages by country and territory This is a list of official languages by country and territory. It includes all languages that have official language status either statewide or in a part of the state, or that have status as a national language, regional language, or minority lan ...

*by name:

List of language names This article is a resource of the native names of most of the major languages in the world. These are endonymic glossonyms. Languages A Aari – Aari * Spoken in: Aasáx † – Aasá * Spoken in: Abaza – Aбаза бызшва * Offici ...

(native names) * by phylogenetic relation:

List of language families The following is a list of language families. It also includes language isolates, unclassified languages and other types. Major language families By number of languages ''Ethnologue'' 24 (2021) lists the following families that contain at least 1 ...

(phylogenetic) ** by primary language family: List of Afro-Asiatic languages,

List of Austronesian languages A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...

List of Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages include some 449 (SIL International, SIL estimate, 2018 edition) languages spoken by about or more than 3.5 billion people (roughly half of the world population). Most of the major languages belonging to language br ...

List of Mongolic languages The Mongolic languages are a language family that is spoken in East- Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, Xinjiang, another autonomous region of China, the region of Qinghai, and also in Kalmykia, a r ...

List of Tungusic languages The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu-Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the doz ...

List of Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a group of languages spoken across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Siberia. Turkic languages are spoken as native languages by some 200 million people. Turkic languages by subfamily The number of speak ...

List of Uralic languages Uralic is a language family located in Northern Eurasia, in the countries of Finland, Estonia, Hungary (where Uralic languages are spoken by the majority of the population), in other countries Uralic languages are spoken by a minority of the pop ...

. * chronologically:

List of languages by first written accounts This is a list of languages arranged by age of the oldest existing writing, text recording a complete sentence in the language. It does not include undeciphered scripts, though there are various claims without wide acceptance, which, if substant ...

*by number of speakers: **

List of languages by total number of speakers This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. Some languages, such as Chinese and Arabic, cover several mutually unintelligible varieties and are sometimes ...

List of languages by number of native speakers This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers. However, all such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect ...

* List of languages by number of words according to authoritative dictionaries *

List of languages by writing system Below is a list of languages sorted by writing system (by alphabetical order). Adlam alphabet * Fulfulde/Pular Afaka syllabary * Ndyuka (on occasion) Anatolian alphabets *Anatolian languages (extinct) Arabic script * Acehnese (on occasio ...

By region

Languages of Africa The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern ...

Indigenous languages of the Americas Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numbe ...

** List of Native American languages acquired by children ** Languages of North America **

Languages of South America The languages of South America can be divided into three broad groups: * the languages of the (in most cases, former) colonial powers; * many indigenous languages, some of which are co-official alongside the colonial languages; * and various ...

Languages of Asia A wide variety of languages are spoken throughout Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. The major language families include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turk ...

East Asian languages The East Asian languages are a language family (alternatively ''macrofamily'' or ''superphylum'') proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem. Classifications Early proposals Early proposals of s ...

Languages of South Asia South Asia is home to several hundred languages, spanning the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka. It is home to the third most spoken language in the world, Hindi–Urdu; and the sixth mo ...

** Languages of Southeast Asia *

Languages of Europe Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Rom ...

Languages of Oceania Native languages of Oceania fall into three major geographic groups: * The large Austronesian language family, with such languages as Malay ( Indonesian), Tagalog ( Filipino), and Polynesian languages such as Māori and Hawaiian * The various ...

By special type or property

Extinct, endangered or revived languages *

Lists of extinct languages *List of languages by time of extinction ---- *List of extinct languages of Africa * List of extinct languages of Asia * List of extinct languages in Central America and the Caribbean * List of extinct languages of Europe * List of extinct languag ...

List of languages by time of extinction An extinct language may be narrowly defined as a language with no native speakers and no descendant languages. Under this definition, a language becomes extinct upon the death of its last native speaker, the terminal speaker. A language like La ...

Lists of endangered languages Lists of endangered languages are mainly based on the definitions used by UNESCO. In order to be listed, a language must be classified as "endangered" in a cited academic source. Researchers have concluded that in less than one hundred years, alm ...

List of revived languages A revived language is one that, having experienced near or complete language extinction as either a spoken or written language, has been intentionally revived and has regained some of its former status. The most frequent reason for extinction i ...

Regional language * A regional language is a language spoken in a region of a sovereign state, whether it be a small area, a federated state or province or some wider area. Internationally, for the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Lan ...

By status or cultural sphere of influence

List of lingua francas This is a list of lingua francas. A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a first language, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both speakers' first languages ...

* List of official languages **

List of official languages by state This is a list of official languages by country and territory. It includes all languages that have official language status either statewide or in a part of the state, or that have status as a national language, regional language, or minority lan ...

** List of official languages by institution * List of the largest languages without official status (major linguistic minorities, several million speakers) *

Languages used on the Internet Slightly over half of the homepages of the most visited websites on the World Wide Web are in English, with varying amounts of information available in many other languages. Other top languages are Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, French, Germ ...

(includes a list of languages with the most prevalence online) * List of mutually intelligible languages Special types of languages *

List of creole languages A creole language is a stable natural language developed from a mixture of different languages. Unlike a pidgin, a simplified form that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups, a creole language is a complete language, us ...

* List of mixed languages * List of pidgins, creoles, mixed languages and cants based on Indo-European languages **

List of English-based pidgins Pidgin English is a non-specific name used to refer to any of the many pidgin languages derived from English. Pidgins that are spoken as first languages become creoles. English-based pidgins that became stable contact languages, and which hav ...

List of sign languages There are perhaps three hundred sign languages in use around the world today. The number is not known with any confidence; new sign languages emerge frequently through creolization and '' de novo'' (and occasionally through language planning). In s ...

** List of sign languages by number of native signers *

List of constructed languages The following list of notable constructed languages is divided into auxiliary, ritual, engineered, and artistic (including fictional) languages, and their respective subgenres. All entries on this list have further information on separate Wiki ...