Presentation:

Countries There are 195 countries in the world today. This total comprises 193 countries that are member states of the United Nations and 2 countries that are non-member observer states: the Holy See and the State of Palestine.member states of the United Nations

Not included in this total count of 195 countries are: Taiwan - the United Nations considers it represented by the People's Republic of China The Cook Islands and Niue, both states in free association with New Zealand which are members of several UN specialized agencies and have been recognized "full treaty- making capacity", but are neither member states nor non-member observer states.

Dependencies (or dependent territories, dependent areas, dependencies) and Areas of Special Sovereignty (autonomous territories) Other countries recognized by the United Nations as not being self-governing Where are they located? 54 countries are in Africa 48 in Asia 44 in Europe 33 in Latin America and the Caribbean 33 in Latin America and the Caribbean 14 in Oceania 2 in Northern America

Languages Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations (such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, now known as SIL International) with an interest in translating the Christian Bible. As of 2009, at least a portion of the bible had been translated into 2,508 different languages, still a long way short of full coverage. The most extensive catalog of the worlds languages, generally taken to be as authoritative as any, is that of Ethnologue (published by SIL International), whose detailed classified list as of 2009 included 6,909 distinct languages.Summer Institute of LinguisticsEthnologue

Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Out of Ethnologues 6,909, for instance, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia.diverse

One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million. That makes the average number of speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any area of the world. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.

There are currently around 6,000 different languages spoken around the world. Using statistical techniques to analyse the rate at which words and dialects mutate, it has been calculated that it would have taken at least 100,000 years for a single language to have diversified that much. That would take us back to the middle of the Stone Age, around the time that Homo sapiensfirst emerged as a species. Its possible that earlier human species such as Homo heidelbergensis(600,000 years ago) or even Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) had language, but the evidence for this is much weaker.