A definitive answer to that would hang upon there being a consensus of what constitutes a separate and discrete language - since over the centuries languages gradually morph into something unintelligible to the ancestral speakers - even seen in the difficulty a Joe Average like me has understanding Chaucerian English (listening to, for instance, the BBC recording narrated by Alan Wheatley). There are very different languages said to, and shown to, have derived from the proposed Proto-Indo-European language of the remote past: English, Celtic, Hindi, Greek, Farsi, Spanish, Tocharian (of the long-extinct people of the Tarim Basin, China), Italian, Hittite (a people of the mountains of Turkey - powerful enough to have once fought the Egyptians to a draw, dispersed and extinct as a cultural entity after about 1200 bce) - quite a parade of what look like very dissimilar languages - but all shown to have derived from the same root language. Sorry to go on but this is an interest.
This post was edited by rattbagge at January 19, 2018 9:34 AM MST
Ethnologue estimates around 7000 living languages. Numbers vary based on differing definitions of "language" vs. "dialect". And defining those becomes even more difficult when we're talking about small tribal languages in linguistically diverse places like Papua New Guinea and the Amazon.
For example, Ethnologue (and most linguists) consider Chinese to be a language family, not a single language with many dialects (as the Chinese government considers it).
