1
Afrikaans
A West Germanic language that evolved from 17th-century Dutch in South Africa — the world's youngest major language and one of South Africa's eleven official tongues.
This is the full languages index — 200 detailed languages, each with its own profile. Click any name to open the full entry.
For languages, every profile covers family, writing scripts, native range, speaker counts, and status.
All Languages
2
Ainu
A language isolate of northern Japan and Sakhalin — once spoken by the indigenous Ainu people, now critically endangered with only a handful of native speakers.
3
Akan
A cluster of closely related Niger-Congo languages of Ghana and Ivory Coast — including Twi and Fante — spoken by roughly 11 million people as a first language.
4
Akkadian
The Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia — the tongue of Sargon, Hammurabi, and the Epic of Gilgamesh — written in cuneiform across three millennia.
5
Albanian
An Indo-European isolate forming its own branch — Albania's official language, also widely spoken in Kosovo and parts of North Macedonia and Montenegro.
6
Amharic
A Semitic language and the working language of Ethiopia — written in the ancient Geʽez script and spoken as a first or second language by tens of millions.
7
Ancient Greek
The classical language of Homer, Plato, and the New Testament — a Hellenic branch of Indo-European that shaped Western philosophy, science, and theology.
8
Arabic
A Central Semitic language whose Classical form is the liturgical tongue of Islam and whose Modern Standard form unites a continuum of regional varieties spoken from Morocco to Oman.
9
Aramaic
The Semitic lingua franca of the ancient Near East — spoken by Jesus, used in parts of the Hebrew Bible, and still alive today in scattered Christian and Jewish communities.
10
Armenian
An Indo-European language forming its own branch — official in Armenia, written in a 36-letter alphabet created by Mesrop Mashtots in 405 CE.
11
Assamese
An Indo-Aryan language and the official tongue of Assam in northeastern India — closely related to Bengali, with about 15 million native speakers.
12
Avestan
The Old Iranian language of the Zoroastrian sacred texts — closely related to Vedic Sanskrit and preserved entirely in religious literature.
13
Aymara
An Aymaran language spoken in the Andean Altiplano of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile — about 1.7 million speakers, official in Bolivia alongside Spanish and 35 others.
14
Azerbaijani
A Turkic language spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran's northwestern provinces — about 23 million speakers, closely related to Turkish.
15
Bashkir
A Turkic language of the Bashkir people in Russia — the official language of Bashkortostan, closely related to Tatar, with about 1.2 million speakers.
16
Basque
A language isolate spoken in the western Pyrenees — a linguistic mystery with no proven relatives, predating the arrival of Indo-European languages in Europe.
17
Belarusian
An East Slavic language closely related to Russian and Ukrainian — one of two official languages of Belarus, though increasingly endangered as Russian dominates.
18
Bengali
An Indo-Aryan language of Bengal — official in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal — with a rich literary tradition that produced Asia's first Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.
19
Berber (Tamazight)
A family of Afroasiatic languages indigenous to North Africa — collectively called Amazigh — with official status in Morocco and Algeria.
20
Bislama
An English-based creole that serves as the national language of Vanuatu — one of three official languages alongside English and French.
21
Bosnian
A South Slavic language standardized by Bosniaks — one of three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, mutually intelligible with Croatian and Serbian.
22
Breton
A Celtic language of Brittany in northwestern France — closely related to Welsh and Cornish, with about 210,000 speakers and ongoing revitalization efforts.
23
Bulgarian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Bulgaria — historically the first Slavic language to be written down, in the 9th-century Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts.
24
Burmese
A Sino-Tibetan language and the official tongue of Myanmar — written in a rounded Brahmic script and spoken by about 33 million people as a first language.
25
Buryat
A Mongolic language of the Buryat people in Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China — about 460,000 speakers, related to Khalkha Mongolian.
26
Catalan
A Romance language spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Andorra, and parts of France and Italy — co-official in Spain's autonomous communities and Andorra's sole national tongue.
27
Cebuano
An Austronesian language and the second-most-spoken language of the Philippines — dominant across the Visayas and northern Mindanao.
28
Chamorro
The Austronesian language of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — the indigenous tongue of Pacific island communities heavily influenced by three centuries of Spanish contact.
29
Chechen
A Northeast Caucasian language and the official language of Chechnya (within Russia) — spoken by about 1.4 million people in the North Caucasus and the Chechen diaspora.
30
Cherokee
An Iroquoian language indigenous to the southeastern United States — written in an indigenous syllabary invented by Sequoyah in 1821.
31
Chuvash
The only surviving Oghur Turkic language — official in the Russian Republic of Chuvashia, spoken by about 1 million people and a key piece of Turkic linguistic history.
32
Coptic
The final stage of the ancient Egyptian language — the language of early Christian Egypt and still the liturgical tongue of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
33
Cornish
A revived Celtic language of Cornwall in southwestern England — extinct as a community language by the late 18th century, now spoken by a few hundred dedicated revivalists.
34
Corsican
A Romance language of the island of Corsica — closely related to Tuscan Italian, with about 130,000 speakers and growing institutional support in France.
35
Cree
An Algonquian language of the Canadian boreal forests and plains — the largest indigenous language group of Canada, with about 96,000 speakers and a unique syllabic script.
36
Croatian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Croatia — written in Latin script and mutually intelligible with Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
37
Czech
A West Slavic language closely related to Slovak — official in the Czech Republic and famed for the unique "ř" consonant heard nowhere else.
38
Danish
A North Germanic language and the official tongue of Denmark — famous for soft "d" sounds, glottal stops (stød), and being notoriously hard to pronounce.
39
Dari
The Afghan variety of Persian and one of Afghanistan's two official languages — mutually intelligible with Iran's Farsi and Tajikistan's Tajik, forming the Persian dialect continuum.
40
Dhivehi
The Indo-Aryan language of the Maldives — closely related to Sinhala but isolated in a thousand-island archipelago.
41
Dothraki
A fictional language created by linguist David J. Peterson for HBO's *Game of Thrones* adaptation — the language of the nomadic Dothraki horse-lords.
42
Dutch
A West Germanic language sitting between English and German in many features — official in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders), and Suriname.
43
Dzongkha
The national language of Bhutan — a Sino-Tibetan language of the southern Himalayas closely related to classical Tibetan.
44
Egyptian Arabic
The most widely understood spoken variety of Arabic — Egypt's everyday vernacular, spread across the Arab world by Cairo's enormous film, TV, and music industries.
45
English
A West Germanic language with Norse and Norman French overlays — the most widely spoken language on Earth when second-language speakers are counted, and the de facto lingua franca of science, aviation, and the internet.
46
Esperanto
The most successful constructed international auxiliary language — created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to serve as a politically neutral second language for all.
47
Estonian
A Uralic language closely related to Finnish — Estonia's official tongue, with 14 grammatical cases and three contrastive degrees of vowel and consonant length.
48
Faroese
A North Germanic language of the Faroe Islands — closely related to Icelandic, spoken by about 72,000 people in the autonomous territory of Denmark.
49
Fijian
An Austronesian (Oceanic) language and one of Fiji's three official languages — spoken alongside English and Fiji Hindi by most of the indigenous Fijian population.
50
Finnish
A Uralic language with elaborate agglutinative morphology — Finland's official tongue alongside Swedish, and one of the most grammatically distinctive languages in Europe.
51
French
A Romance language of global reach — official in 29 countries across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and a working language at the UN, EU, and Olympics.
52
Frisian
A cluster of West Germanic languages spoken in the Netherlands and Germany — English's closest living relative, with about 470,000 speakers.
53
Friulian
A Romance language spoken in Italy's Friuli-Venezia Giulia region — about 420,000 speakers, recognized as a minority language with regional cultural support.
54
Fula
A Niger-Congo language spoken across the Sahel from Senegal to Sudan — the language of the historically pastoralist Fulani people, with about 65 million speakers.
55
Galician
A Romance language closely related to Portuguese — co-official in Galicia in northwestern Spain, with about 2.4 million speakers.
56
Georgian
A Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language and the official language of Georgia — written in its own unique 33-letter alphabet, with about 3.7 million speakers.
57
Gothic
The earliest substantially attested East Germanic language — preserved almost entirely in Bishop Wulfila's 4th-century Bible translation.
58
Greek
A single-branch Indo-European language with a continuous 3,400-year written record — the language of Homer, Plato, and modern Greece and Cyprus.
59
Greenlandic
An Eskimo-Aleut language and the sole official language of Greenland — a polysynthetic Inuit language spoken by about 50,000 people.
60
Guarani
A Tupian language and the co-official language of Paraguay — spoken by about 5 million people, unique among major Latin American languages for being used by both Indigenous and mestizo populations.
61
Gujarati
An Indo-Aryan language of western India and the mother tongue of about 56 million people — official in Gujarat and Dadra and Nagar Haveli, with global diaspora communities.
62
Gulf Arabic
The Arabic vernacular of the Persian Gulf coast — spoken from Kuwait to Oman, blending peninsular Arab features with Persian and South Asian loanwords.
63
Haitian Creole
A French-based creole and the most widely spoken creole language in the world — Haiti's co-official language alongside French, spoken by virtually all 12 million Haitians.
64
Hakka
A Sinitic language of the dispersed Hakka people — historically labelled "guest families" — spoken across southern China, Taiwan, and a wide diaspora.
65
Hausa
A Chadic language and one of Africa's largest lingua francas — spoken across northern Nigeria, southern Niger, and as a trade language throughout West Africa.
66
Hawaiian
A Polynesian language indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands — one of two official languages of the State of Hawaii, undergoing dramatic revitalization since the 1980s.
67
Hawaiian Sign Language
An indigenous sign language of the Hawaiian Islands — only recently documented and likely the last surviving member of its language family.
68
Hebrew
A Northwest Semitic language with biblical roots — the official language of Israel, revived from liturgical use into a thriving modern vernacular in the 19th–20th centuries.
69
Hindi
An Indo-Aryan language written in Devanagari and one of India's two official languages — the standardized form of a dialect continuum spoken across the Hindi Belt of northern India.
70
Hittite
The earliest attested Indo-European language — spoken in Bronze Age Anatolia and rediscovered in the 20th century from cuneiform archives at Hattusa.
71
Hmong
A Hmong-Mien language spoken in southern China, Vietnam, Laos, and the diaspora — about 4 million speakers, with major communities in the United States after Indochina wars.
72
Hopi
A Uto-Aztecan language of northeastern Arizona — spoken by the Hopi Tribe on the Hopi Reservation surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
73
Hungarian
A Uralic language stranded among Indo-European neighbors in Central Europe — Hungary's official language, with rich agglutinative morphology and vowel harmony.
74
Ido
A reformed version of Esperanto created in 1907 to address perceived flaws — the most significant Esperanto offshoot, with a small but persistent community.
75
Igbo
A Niger-Congo language of southeastern Nigeria — spoken by about 30 million people and one of Nigeria's three official "majority" languages.
76
Indonesian
A standardized form of Malay and the national language of Indonesia — a deliberate lingua franca for the world's fourth-most-populous country, with about 200 million speakers.
77
Interlingua
A naturalistic auxiliary language compiled in 1951 from the shared Romance and Latinate vocabulary of major European languages — readable on first sight by their speakers.
78
Inuktitut
An Inuit language spoken across the Canadian Arctic — co-official in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, written in both Latin and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics.
79
Iranian Persian (Farsi)
A Western Iranian language and the official language of Iran — successor to Old and Middle Persian, written in a modified Arabic script and source of much vocabulary across the Islamic world.
80
Irish
A Celtic language and the national language of Ireland — taught in all Irish schools, though daily speakers number only about 70,000 in the Gaeltacht regions.
81
Italian
A Romance language descended from Tuscan dialects of the late medieval period — Italy's national language and one of four official languages of Switzerland.
82
Jamaican Patois
An English-based creole spoken by virtually all Jamaicans — about 3 million native speakers and a growing presence in global music and pop culture.
83
Japanese
A Japonic language spoken by about 125 million people in Japan — written in a hybrid script combining Chinese characters with two indigenous syllabaries.
84
Javanese
An Austronesian language spoken by 82 million people on the Indonesian island of Java — famous for its elaborate speech levels marking social hierarchy.
85
Kannada
A Dravidian language and the official tongue of Karnataka — spoken by about 44 million people and one of India's six classical languages, with a literary history stretching back 1,500 years.
86
Kazakh
A Turkic language and the official language of Kazakhstan — about 13 million speakers, transitioning from Cyrillic to a Latin-based script by 2025.
87
Khmer
An Austroasiatic language and the official tongue of Cambodia — written in a Brahmic-derived script and notable for not being tonal, unlike its Southeast Asian neighbors.
88
Kinyarwanda
A Bantu language and the national language of Rwanda — spoken by virtually all 13 million Rwandans and shared with related dialects in Uganda and DR Congo.
89
Klingon
A constructed language created by linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek franchise — the most fully developed and widely spoken of all fictional languages.
90
Korean
A language isolate spoken by about 80 million people across the Korean peninsula and its diaspora — written in Hangul, an alphabet designed for it in the 15th century.
91
Krio
An English-based creole that is the lingua franca of Sierra Leone — descended from the speech of freed Africans resettled in Freetown from the late 18th century.
92
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
The most widely spoken Kurdish variety — a Northwestern Iranian language used by Kurds in Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq, Armenia, and the diaspora.
93
Kurdish (Sorani)
The Central Kurdish variety — official in Iraqi Kurdistan and widely used in western Iran — written in a modified Arabic script.
94
Kyrgyz
A Turkic language and the official tongue of Kyrgyzstan — closely related to Kazakh, with about 5 million speakers.
95
Ladino
The Judaeo-Spanish language preserved by Sephardic Jews after the 1492 expulsion from Spain — a 15th-century Iberian Romance variety with Hebrew, Turkish, and Greek admixture.
96
Lakota
A Western Siouan language of the Great Plains — spoken by the Lakota people across the Dakotas, Nebraska, and southern Saskatchewan.
97
Lao
A Tai-Kadai language and the official tongue of Laos — closely related to Thai and written in a similar Brahmic script, with about 30 million speakers including northeast Thailand.
98
Latin
The Italic language of ancient Rome that became Western Europe's intellectual lingua franca for over a millennium and the parent of all modern Romance languages.
99
Latvian
A Baltic language and the official tongue of Latvia — closely related to Lithuanian and similarly conservative, though with some innovations like fixed first-syllable stress.
100
Levantine Arabic
The everyday Arabic vernacular of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine — known for its lighter sound and prominence in Arabic pop music.
101
Lingala
A Bantu language and a lingua franca along the Congo River — spoken by tens of millions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo.
102
Lithuanian
A Baltic language famous for preserving many archaic Proto-Indo-European features — Lithuania's official tongue, considered the most conservative living Indo-European language.
103
Lojban
A constructed language designed for unambiguous logical expression — every sentence parses to exactly one syntactic and semantic interpretation.
104
Luxembourgish
A West Germanic language of Luxembourg — a national language alongside French and German, with about 390,000 speakers.
105
Macedonian
A South Slavic language closely related to Bulgarian — official in North Macedonia, written in a distinctive Cyrillic alphabet.
106
Maghrebi Arabic
The collective vernacular Arabic varieties of northwest Africa — spoken across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, often called Darija.
107
Malagasy
An Austronesian language spoken on Madagascar — uniquely related to languages of Borneo, 7,000 km away, brought by ancient seafarers across the Indian Ocean.
108
Malay
An Austronesian language and the national language of Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore — closely related to Indonesian, with a 1,500-year history as a regional trade lingua franca.
109
Malayalam
A Dravidian language of southwestern India and the official language of Kerala — known for its complex script and one of the highest literacy rates in India.
110
Manchu
A Tungusic language of the Manchu people of northeastern China — once the language of China's last imperial dynasty, today critically endangered.
111
Mandarin Chinese
The world's most-spoken first language, based on the Beijing dialect and codified as Standard Chinese (Putonghua) — the official language of mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore.
112
Mandinka
A Mande language spoken across the western Sahel — the most widely spoken language in The Gambia and a major language in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.
113
Manx
The Goidelic Celtic language of the Isle of Man — extinct in 1974 with the death of its last native speaker, then revived from records and is now learnt anew.
114
Maori
An Eastern Polynesian language and the indigenous language of New Zealand — an official language of Aotearoa, undergoing active revitalization after late-20th-century decline.
115
Mapudungun
An indigenous Araucanian language of central-south Chile and Argentina — the Mapuche people's traditional language, with about 250,000 speakers.
116
Marathi
An Indo-Aryan language of western India and the official language of Maharashtra — written in Devanagari and famous for the poetry of saints like Tukaram and Dnyaneshwar.
117
Marshallese
A Micronesian language of the Marshall Islands — co-official with English in the central Pacific atoll nation.
118
Min Nan
A major Sinitic language of southeastern Fujian and the Chinese diaspora — known to its speakers as Hokkien, Hoklo, or Taiwanese.
119
Mohawk
An Iroquoian language of upstate New York and southern Canada — the easternmost language of the Iroquois Confederacy, now undergoing significant revival.
120
Mongolian
A Mongolic language and the official tongue of Mongolia — about 5.7 million speakers across Mongolia, Inner Mongolia (China), and Russia.
121
N|uu
A critically endangered Tuu (formerly "Khoisan") language of South Africa — famous for having the world's largest known phoneme inventory.
122
Nahuatl
A Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico — the language of the Aztec Empire, today spoken by about 1.7 million people across more than two dozen regional varieties.
123
Navajo
An Athabaskan language and the most spoken Native American language in the United States — famed for its role in the WWII Code Talkers who transmitted unbreakable battlefield codes.
124
Nepali
An Indo-Aryan language and the official tongue of Nepal — written in Devanagari and the lingua franca for a country of more than 100 ethnic groups.
125
Norwegian
A North Germanic language with two written standards (Bokmål and Nynorsk) — official in Norway, mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish.
126
Occitan
A Romance language of southern France, Monaco, parts of Italy and Spain — once the prestige tongue of medieval troubadour poetry, today minority and endangered.
127
Odia
An Indo-Aryan language and the official tongue of the Indian state of Odisha — one of India's six classical languages, with a literary tradition dating to the 13th century.
128
Ojibwe
A Central Algonquian language spoken across the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada — one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in North America.
129
Old Church Slavonic
The first literary Slavic language — developed in the 9th century by Saints Cyril and Methodius for the Christianisation of the Slavs, still used liturgically by Orthodox churches.
130
Old English
The West Germanic language spoken in early medieval England — the language of *Beowulf*, unrecognisable to modern English speakers without study.
131
Old Norse
The North Germanic language of the Viking Age — ancestor of Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish — and the language of the Eddas and sagas.
132
Oromo
A Cushitic language and the most widely spoken first language in Ethiopia — written in a Latin alphabet known as Qubee since the 1990s.
133
Ossetian
An Eastern Iranian language and the official language of North Ossetia (Russia) and South Ossetia — about 540,000 speakers, descended from the Alans and Scythians.
134
Pali
The Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Theravada Buddhist canon — preserved across South and Southeast Asia in monastic recitation.
135
Pashto
An Eastern Iranian language and one of two official languages of Afghanistan — also spoken across the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier by tens of millions of Pashtuns.
136
Plains Cree
The largest dialect of Cree — a Central Algonquian language spoken across the Canadian prairies from Alberta to Manitoba.
137
Polish
A West Slavic language spoken by about 45 million people — Poland's national language and a major European tongue with a famously consonant-rich phonology.
138
Portuguese
A Romance language born in the Iberian northwest and spread by maritime empire — today the official language of Portugal, Brazil, and several African and Asian states.
139
Punjabi (Eastern)
The Indian variety of Punjabi — official in the state of Punjab, written in the Gurmukhi script developed in the 16th century for Sikh scripture.
140
Quechua
A family of indigenous Andean languages — the language of the Inca Empire, today spoken by about 8 to 10 million people across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and beyond.
141
Quenya
A fictional Elvish language created by J.R.R. Tolkien — the "Elven-Latin" of Middle-earth, designed to evoke Finnish and Latin aesthetics.
142
Romani
An Indo-Aryan language of the Roma people — spoken across Europe and the Americas by an estimated 4 million people, with many regional dialects.
143
Romanian
The only major Eastern Romance language — the official language of Romania and Moldova — descended from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman province of Dacia.
144
Romansh
A Romance language of the Swiss canton of Graubünden — one of Switzerland's four national languages, with about 60,000 speakers across five distinct dialects.
145
Russian
An East Slavic language and the most widely spoken Slavic tongue — official across the Russian Federation and a key second language throughout the former Soviet sphere.
146
Sami (Northern)
A Uralic language and the most widely spoken Sami variety — indigenous to northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland with about 25,000 speakers.
147
Samoan
A Polynesian language and the official tongue of Samoa and American Samoa — closely related to other Polynesian languages and the foundation for understanding the Polynesian dispersal.
148
Sango
A Ngbandi-based creole that serves as the national language of the Central African Republic.
149
Sanskrit
The classical liturgical and literary language of the Indian subcontinent — the language of the Vedas, the Mahabharata, and a millennia-spanning tradition of grammar and poetics.
150
Sardinian
A Romance language of Sardinia often called the most conservative Romance language living today — about 1 million speakers, recognized as a minority language by Italy.
151
Scottish Gaelic
A Celtic language brought from Ireland to Scotland in the early medieval period — recognized but minority, with about 57,000 speakers concentrated in the Hebrides and Highlands.
152
Serbian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Serbia — the only major European language to use both Latin and Cyrillic scripts in everyday life.
153
Shona
A Bantu language and the most-spoken first language in Zimbabwe — also widely used in Mozambique, with a vibrant oral and musical tradition (especially mbira music).
154
Sicilian
A Romance language spoken in Sicily, Calabria, and parts of Apulia — recognized by UNESCO as vulnerable, with about 4.7 million speakers.
155
Sindarin
A fictional Elvish language created by J.R.R. Tolkien — the everyday language of the Grey-elves of Middle-earth, modelled on Welsh phonology.
156
Sindhi
An Indo-Aryan language of the Indus delta — spoken by about 36 million people in Pakistan's Sindh province and the Indian diaspora, with rich Sufi poetic tradition.
157
Sinhala
An Indo-Aryan language brought to Sri Lanka over two millennia ago — official in the island nation alongside Tamil, with about 16 million native speakers.
158
Slovak
A West Slavic language closely related to Czech — the official language of Slovakia, often considered the most central Slavic tongue in mutual intelligibility.
159
Slovene
A South Slavic language and Slovenia's official tongue — notable for preserving the rare grammatical dual number, used for exactly two of something.
160
Sogdian
The Middle Iranian language of the Sogdian merchant city-states of Central Asia — the lingua franca of the Silk Road for over a thousand years.
161
Somali
A Cushitic language and the official tongue of Somalia — distinguished by its complex tone-accent system and a uniquely Latin-based orthography adopted in 1972.
162
Sotho
A Bantu language spoken by about 6 million people across Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe — also called Sesotho or Southern Sotho.
163
Spanish
A Romance language born in medieval Castile and carried by empire across the Americas — today the world's second-most-spoken native language and official in 21 countries.
164
Standard German
The standardized West Germanic language of Germany, Austria, and most of Switzerland — built on Luther's Bible translation and refined into one of Europe's most influential languages.
165
Sumerian
The language isolate of the world's earliest urban civilisation in southern Mesopotamia — the first language ever written down.
166
Swahili
A Bantu language born from East African Indian Ocean trade — official in five countries and the lingua franca for over 200 million people across the African Great Lakes region.
167
Swedish
A North Germanic language and the most-spoken Scandinavian tongue — official in Sweden and Finland, with a characteristic pitch accent.
168
Tagalog (Filipino)
An Austronesian language and the basis for Filipino, the national language of the Philippines — spoken natively by about 28 million people and as a second language by most Filipinos.
169
Tahitian
A Polynesian language indigenous to French Polynesia — co-official with French, and the basis for much of the global vocabulary of Polynesia (such as "tattoo" from tatau).
170
Tamil
A Dravidian language with one of the world's longest continuous literary traditions — official in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, and Singapore, with about 78 million native speakers.
171
Tatar
A Turkic language of the Tatar people in Russia — the official language of Tatarstan, spoken by about 5 million people.
172
Telugu
A Dravidian language of southeastern India spoken by about 96 million people — official in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with a rich classical literary tradition.
173
Thai
A Tai-Kadai language and the official tongue of Thailand — tonal, with five distinct tones and a Brahmic-derived script not separated by spaces between words.
174
Tibetan
A Sino-Tibetan language and the traditional language of Tibet — written in a Brahmic script developed in the 7th century, with about 6 million speakers.
175
Tigrinya
A Semitic language of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia — written in Geʽez script and closely related to Amharic and the ancient Geʽez liturgical language.
176
Tok Pisin
An English-based creole and one of the three official languages of Papua New Guinea — the lingua franca for a country of over 800 languages.
177
Toki Pona
A minimalist constructed language created by Sonja Lang in 2001 — with only about 120 root words, designed to encourage simple, mindful expression.
178
Tongan
A Polynesian language and the official tongue of the Kingdom of Tonga — a sister language to Samoan within the Polynesian family.
179
Turkish
The most spoken Turkic language and the official language of Turkey — famous for vowel harmony and a relentlessly suffixing morphology.
180
Turkmen
A Turkic language and the official tongue of Turkmenistan — closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani, with about 7 million speakers.
181
Twi
The most widely spoken member of the Akan dialect continuum in Ghana — particularly the Asante and Akuapem varieties.
182
Ukrainian
An East Slavic language spoken by about 40 million people — Ukraine's official language, written in Cyrillic and closely related to Russian and Belarusian.
183
Urdu
An Indo-Aryan language and the national language of Pakistan — written in a flowing Perso-Arabic script, sharing colloquial Hindustani roots with Hindi but a literary Persian heritage.
184
Uyghur
A Turkic language of Xinjiang in northwestern China — spoken by about 11 million Uyghurs, written in a modified Perso-Arabic script.
185
Uzbek
A Turkic language and the most-spoken Turkic language after Turkish — Uzbekistan's official language, with about 34 million speakers.
186
Vietnamese
An Austroasiatic language spoken by about 85 million people — Vietnam's national language, written in a Latin-based script designed by 17th-century missionaries.
187
Volapük
The first widely successful constructed international auxiliary language — created by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879 and peaking before Esperanto overtook it.
188
Wampanoag
An Eastern Algonquian language of the Wampanoag people of present-day Massachusetts — extinct as a first language in the 19th century, now being revived.
189
Welsh
A Celtic language and one of the oldest living languages in Europe — co-official in Wales, with about 884,000 speakers and active government support for revitalization.
190
Western Punjabi
The most widely spoken language of Pakistan — known there as Punjabi or sometimes Lahnda — written in the Perso-Arabic Shahmukhi script and spoken by over 100 million people.
191
Wolof
A Niger-Congo language and the lingua franca of Senegal — spoken natively by about 5 million people and used as a second language by most Senegalese.
192
Wu Chinese
A major Sinitic branch centered on Shanghai and the lower Yangtze — its best-known variety, Shanghainese, has about 14 million speakers and a notable tonal system.
193
Xhosa
A Nguni Bantu language famous for its three click consonants — South Africa's second-most-spoken language and the mother tongue of Nelson Mandela.
194
Yakut
A Turkic language of the Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia — the easternmost Turkic language, spoken by about 450,000 people.
195
Yiddish
A High German language with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic admixture — the historical mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jews and still spoken in Hasidic communities worldwide.
196
Yoruba
A Niger-Congo language spoken by about 47 million people in southwestern Nigeria and Benin — known for its rich oral tradition and tonal phonology.
197
Yucatec Maya
A Mayan language spoken across Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and Belize — the largest of the Mayan languages, with about 770,000 speakers.
198
Yuchi
A language isolate of the Yuchi people of Oklahoma — once spoken across the southeastern United States, now critically endangered.
199
Yue Chinese (Cantonese)
A southern Chinese branch centered on Guangzhou and Hong Kong — famous for preserving more tones and finals than Mandarin and for its prolific role in global Cantonese pop culture.
200
Zulu
A Nguni Bantu language and the most widely spoken first language in South Africa — official, distinctive for its iconic click consonants.
About this languages index
That's our current full list of languages. We add new entries every week — if there's a language you'd like us to cover, let us know and we'll write it up.
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