Some dictionaries include language names among their entries, and you’ve probably seen lists that provide information about the number of speakers of various languages. When the U.S. Census Bureau compiles its census data each decade, it asks residents what language they speak and publishes that information. At the United Nations, most countries are represented, and their ambassadors must know which languages are spoken in their home countries. With all that information, it should be easy to answer this question: How many languages are there in the world? Actually, enumerating them is not a straightforward task. First, it’s not always clear whether to call two language varieties dialects of the same language or different languages. Then, too, languages previously unknown to scholars are sometimes discovered in the Amazon, Papua New Guinea, and other remote parts of the world. Some compilations of languages may be limited to spoken tongues, while others include signed languages. Finally, languages die when their last speaker dies, and that happens more often than you’d think.