Practice question · Numerical answer
Approximately how many living languages are there, to the nearest thousand?
Hints
- More than five thousand, fewer than ten.
- About seven thousand.
Show the answer
7000 (answers within ±500 count)
Why
About 7,000. The count depends on where a dialect ends and a language begins, which is a political question as much as a linguistic one. Chinese and Arabic are each counted as one language in some tallies and as a dozen mutually unintelligible ones in others.
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