Linguistic diversity

SIL Ethnologue defines a "living language" as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language".

The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between languages and dialects.

As of 2016, ''Ethnologue'' cataloged 7,097 living human languages. The ''Ethnologue'' establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications.

For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutlandic dialect) by the ''Ethnologue''.

According to the ''Ethnologue'', 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world's population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population.

For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin (Mandarin Chinese) are, for example, often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish (Swedish language) is from Norwegian (Norwegian language).

Before the Yugoslav civil war, Serbo-Croatian (Serbo-Croatian language) was considered a single language with two dialects, but now Croatian (Croatian language) and Serbian (Serbian language) are considered different languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.