A Global View: Language, Ethnicity and Religion

It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are spoken around the world. Ninety percent of these languages are used by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people converse in 150-200 languages. The world's five most widely spoken languages by the number of native speakers are: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic (all dialects). English is the most widespread language in the world by the number of ethnic groups in different countries who use it as a mother tongue.

In today's Viz, Knoema provides the ethnolinguistic data from the Joshua Project - a research initiative that collects information about people groups, languages, and religion from a variety of sources including the Ethnologue, SIL, WCD, IMB, regional research such as COMIBAM, MANI, Asia Harvest, Omid, Finishing The Task (FTT), Jesus Film, Global Recordings, Faith Comes by Hearing, Operation World, and a wide variety of mission agencies, field workers, census data, denomination reports, and surveys.

Browse by Language | Browse by Country

Please note, that Joshua Project compiles the work of numerous missions researchers to develop a list of all ethnic peoples that is as complete as possible. Many errors, duplicates, and overlaps exist and the data is continually being updated. For further information please visit the JoshuaProject website