Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by one speaker or by a group of speakers. When only two languages are involved it is usually called bilingualism. Many people and places around the world are multilingual.
Key takeaways
- Multilingualism means using more than one language, as an individual or as a community.
- It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population.
- Papua New Guinea has 864 languages on the map, and India has 456.
- The map shows where languages are traditionally spoken, not how many languages each person speaks.
How multilingualism works
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, by one speaker or by a group [1]. When the number is exactly two, the usual word is bilingualism [1]. It is believed that people who use several languages outnumber those who use only one [1]. The term covers a wide range, from a person who runs a business in three languages to a town where several languages are heard on every street.
As with bilingualism, the definition is debated. At one end, a multilingual person has command of each language equal to a native speaker's. At the other, they know enough phrases to manage as a visitor. Most fall somewhere between [1]. The first language is usually learned in childhood without formal teaching, and others are added later, at school, through work or by moving [1].
Multilingual communities often rely on a shared language for people with different home languages to talk to one another. Such a language is called a lingua franca: one used systematically so that groups who do not share a native language can communicate [2]. In such a setting a person might use one language at home and a different, shared one with outsiders.
Multilingualism is not the same as having many official languages. A country can recognise one language and have many in daily use, or recognise several and see most people use only one. The two are separate questions.
An example from our data
Our map is a good place to see where multilingual living is likely, because it shows how many traditional language areas fall inside each country. Papua New Guinea has 864 languages from 50 families, with Tok Pisin the largest at 71%. Indonesia has 708 languages across 37 families, Nigeria has 528, and India has 456.
A high count does not prove that people there speak many languages each, because the map has no data on that. It does show that these countries hold many separate language communities. The countries section of the homepage lists the places with the most.
The thing people get wrong
A frequent mistake is to read a long language list for a country as proof that its people are all multilingual, or to assume a small, single-language country has monolingual citizens. Counts on the map describe traditional language areas drawn from atlases, many decades old, not what individuals speak today. Another mistake is to treat the number of languages in a country as a measure of how well its people can talk to each other. They often use one shared language for that purpose, which may be a lingua franca.
Multilingualism vs bilingualism
| Multilingualism | Bilingualism | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of languages | More than one | Exactly two |
| Scope | A person or a community | A person or a community |
| On the map | Shown indirectly, through language counts per country | Not shown directly |
Frequently asked questions
Are most people in the world multilingual?
It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers, though exact counts are hard to make.
What is a polyglot?
A polyglot is a person who speaks several languages.
Which countries have the most languages on the map?
The countries page lists each country with its number of languages.
Sources
- Multilingualism, Wikipedia.
- Lingua franca, Wikipedia.
- Every figure from our own map is worked out from the datasets on the data sources page (checked against Glottolog and Glottography, retrieved 13 October 2026).