Although most countries have a number of official or nationally recognized languages, each country normally has groups of individuals whose first language is a language aside from the country’s lingua franca. The variety of such groups varies from country to country, and the scale of those minority language “groups” can range from one person to tens of millions of speakers.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) takes the highest spot with an awesome 820 languages. Much of this diversity could be explained by the country’s topography: deep valleys and unnavigable terrain have separated tons of of various clans for hundreds of years, giving rise to distinct languages and customs.
The country has a comparatively small population of seven million, which implies it is amazingly likely that two randomly chosen people will speak different native languages.
Indonesia, PNG’s close neighbor, is just not far behind with almost 750 languages. Below are the 20 countries where essentially the most languages are currently spoken, including all settled and immigrant languages.
Source: Ethnologue.com
