- from Language
If you didn’t speak any kind of language, how would you communicate what you want and need? Would you point at things you want, or tug on people’s sleeves to get their attention? Would you pantomime your plans for the future?
Fortunately, and thanks to our ancestors, human beings do have language. Just how many languages, however, no one can say for sure. One group of scholars has cataloged 6,703 living languages. Some of these are spoken by millions of people. Most are spoken by a much smaller number of people. By the time you read this, some of these languages may have died out with their last native speakers. That’s why linguists, people who study languages, are committed to recording as many of the world’s languages as they can.