
How many languages are there in the world? - breck
https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages
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jdale27
I found this article to be rather more illuminating on this question, as it
addresses the ambiguity in how you slice up the world into distinct linguistic
chunks: [https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-
languages...](https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-
are-there-world)

~~~
ufmace
Much more interesting article at least mentioning the difficulties that came
to mind reading the other one. Like exactly how do we distinguish a different
language when some say it's a dialect of another language? At exactly what
point is it and is it not another language?

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shervinafshar
In the meantime;

– Wikipedia is available in 299 languages [1];

– Facebook is localizing into 117 languages [2];

– Unicode is covering 139 modern and historic writing system [3].

To cover the other half of the speakers of these 7099 languages, the community
of software and digital technology practitioners have a long way to go and
much to do.

[1]:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias)

[2]:
[https://m.facebook.com/language.php](https://m.facebook.com/language.php)

[3]: note that language:writing system could be n:1

Edit: formatting.

~~~
peterburkimsher
The full Bible has been translated into 636 languages. Parts have been
translated into 3,223 languages.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations)

A convenient feature of Bible translations is that the text is truly
bilingual. Every sentence is numbered (verses) and lines up nicely with the
corresponding verse in other languages.

Using the Chinese/English Bible text to improve a Chinese dictionary and teach
me Chinese is one of the main motivations behind Pingtype.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Using the Bible for language learning is perhaps better than nothing, but one
does get frustrated by the very limited lexicon used within. For many
languages, even those with few speakers, there are often resources available
that better prepare you to use the language in a 20th/21st century context,
not the Middle East of 2000 years ago+.

As for Bible translations matching up perfectly, one has to consider that a
great many New Testament translations are in fact translations of
translations, and this process has sometimes introduced some striking
innovations. A good example of this are the Bible translations produced for
Russia’s minority peoples by the Stockholm Institute for Bible Translation.
Most of these are translations from Russian, not Greek, and in using them you
have to be aware of quirks introduced by that intermediary layer.

