Statistical Summaries
The World Languages section of this site provides country summaries and language-by-language information. This section steps above that detail to offer a summary view of the world language situation. Specifically, it offers numerical tabulations of languages and number of speakers by world area, by language size, by language status, by language family, and by country.
Summary by language status
PrintTable 4 summarizes the distribution of languages in the world by their status in terms of language development or language endangerment. The EGIDS column categorizes the languages by their level on the EGIDS scale. Consult Language Status for a description of the levels in the scale.
The next six columns are as in Table 2. In addition, the Mean column gives the average population of all the languages with the given EGIDS level and the Median column gives the median population for the languages at that level, that is, half of the languages at that level have a higher population and half have a lower population. If there are any languages with an unknown population, these are ignored in the calculation of the mean and the median.
Table 4. Distribution of world languages by status of development or endangerment
| EGIDS | Living languages | Number of speakers | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Percent | Cumulative | Total | Percent | Cumulative | Mean | Median | |
| 6 | 0.1 | 0.1% | 1,818,381,088 | 29.1574 | 29.1574% | 303,063,515 | 334,800,758 | |
| 95 | 1.3 | 1.4% | 1,917,448,972 | 30.7460 | 59.9034% | 20,183,673 | 6,915,000 | |
| 70 | 1.0 | 2.4% | 702,091,474 | 11.2579 | 71.1613% | 10,029,878 | 1,152,735 | |
| 166 | 2.3 | 4.7% | 520,850,402 | 8.3518 | 79.5131% | 3,137,653 | 697,200 | |
| 345 | 4.9 | 9.6% | 240,886,147 | 3.8626 | 83.3757% | 698,221 | 100,000 | |
| 1,534 | 21.6 | 31.2% | 587,368,282 | 9.4184 | 92.7940% | 382,900 | 26,000 | |
| 2,502 | 35.2 | 66.4% | 382,441,032 | 6.1324 | 98.9264% | 152,854 | 10,000 | |
| 1,025 | 14.4 | 80.8% | 53,902,649 | 0.8643 | 99.7907% | 52,588 | 2,700 | |
| 456 | 6.4 | 87.2% | 12,053,328 | 0.1933 | 99.9840% | 26,433 | 1,080 | |
| 286 | 4.0 | 91.3% | 922,885 | 0.0148 | 99.9988% | 3,227 | 260 | |
| 432 | 6.1 | 97.4% | 75,308 | 0.0012 | 100.0000% | 174 | 18 | |
| 188 | 2.6 | 100.0% | 0 | 0.0000 | 100.0000% | 0 | 0 | |
| 7,105 | 100.0 | 6,236,421,567 | 100.0000 | |||||