The countries around the world which speak the most languages

There are thought to be more than 7,000 languages spoken by humans around the world and Britain has 56 of these spoken by people as a first language.

We asked Statista to find the countries in the world which speak the most languages for a comparison:

Data from Ethonologue showed that Papua New Guinea was host to the most mother tongues, with 839 "living languages" in total.

Living languages are defined as having at least one speaker for whom it is their first language - extinct languages and those used only as a second language are not included.

Asia has the greatest variety of tongues, with 2,301, whereas Europe has the least with 286.

Chinese is the most spoken language (or family of dialects) spoken around the world, with more than a billion people counting it as their first language.

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