What is the least spoken language?

Answer 1

The language with the most native speakers is Mandarin.

The language that is most widely spoken in the world is English.

The least spoken language is a tie of about 200 languages, with only 1 or 2 remaining speakers. Ter Sami is often listed as the least spoken, but there are languages all over Australia, Africa, and the Americas with only 1 speaker left.

Answer 2

Many languages are called dead languages s popular culture does not use them. Latin is one of these although many people speak it as a second language or as a specialty language in their field of science or linguistics. Other languages are artificial such as Esperanto and have followers and speakers in specialized groups.

Other dead languages have no speakers in the modern world. many of these are many centuries dead others have recently died out as the remaining speakers were absorbed into other language cultures.

However there are more than 200 languages with only 1 or 2 speakers left. An example is Ter Sami, originally spoken in the Kola peninsula of Russia, had only 2 speakers remain in 2011.

Native American languages are almost all dying out with only a few exceptions. The languages of Papua, New Guinea are only spoken in Papua, New Guinea, often by only a single village or small collection of villages.

Even rarer languages exist in such places as the Smithsonian Institute. There some languages only exist as recorded samples from many years back. These may still be understood by some people who heard their grandparents speak them but they cannot speak them themselves.

It would be difficult to be sure of which language is spoken by the least number of people because there are many languages that have a couple hundred or fewer speakers. For more information, you might want to look at a list of endangered languages. Some of these languages are spoken in remote areas, so if several of the remaining elderly speakers have died, we would not necessarily know that the language is down to its last speaker or is now an extinct language. Ter Sami and Kion are each only spoken by a few elderly persons. Njerep is a nearly extinct language, too. The last known native speaker of Eyak died in 2008. Omotik has fewer than 100 speakers. Umutina had one remaining speaker in 1999. Kalapuya is an extinct language, but I met one person in the Willamette Valley of Kalapuya descent who knows a couple words she learned from her grandmother.

Answer 3

There are numerous languages that have fewer than ten living speakers and some, like Eyak (for example) where the last speaker has died within the past decade. Languages that are moribund like this include many of the native languages of North America, Australia, and Africa, as well as minority languages in Europe that have been overshadowed by a different national dialect (such as Occitan and Provencal in France being overshadowed by Parisian - what we usually call French).

Answer 4

As of 2018, there are more than 100 languages with only 1 native speaker, mainly Native American languages.