According to Ethnologue, there are over 7,000 distinct languages
in the world and about 40,000 dialects. Some languages, like
Russian and Hindi, are written from left-to-right, while others,
like Hebrew and Persian, are written right-to-left.
The nation of Papua New
Guinea has the highest language diversity in the world. There
are 820 languages spoken in an area the size of Spain.
There are logographic
languages, like Japanese and Korean, where symbols represent
words, and there are Dongba and Nsibidi which are pictographic
languages where symbols represent ideas.
Incidentally, there
are over 1.5 billion speakers of English globally. In 2015,
out of the total 195 countries in the world, 67 nations have
English as the primary language of 'official status'. Plus
there are 27 countries where English is spoken as a secondary
'official' language.