How Many Different Sounds Do Languages Have?

Their name is “phones”: the smallest units of sound in a language. You would be surprised by how many of them your mouth could pronounce.

Every child could learn any of the almost 7,000 existing languages, which means they could pronounce any sound a human being can make. But have you ever thought of the immense variety of sounds in all the languages spoken around the world?

Phones: We Pronounce Them Every Day Without Knowing

Their technical name is “phones”: the smallest distinct sounds we can produce. They can be consonants, vowels or a mixture of the two and they can be made in our throat, mouth or nose. If it has ever occurred to you to hear someone talking in a language which sounded very strange to your ears, it is only because we get acquainted with a very few of them in our life.

To count the actual number of phones in the world is very difficult. Even if we managed to look at all 7,000 existing languages – some of which are still spoken only by a few people, in the most remote corners of the world – we would only discover something that linguists have understood since a long time. Namely, that it is not so easy to decide how to separate sounds one from another. There are cases when two of them are so tightly linked that you can’t decide whether they are two or one.

Despite these difficulties, experts have tried to categorize all existing phones, creating a universal alphabet which should allow us to write in any language. It’s the International Phonetic Alphabet. The Alphabet has 107 letters and around 50 diactric signs. The diacritic signs can indicate many things – generally they make small modifications to the letters. If the letters don’t seem enough to you to include all languages in the world, think of the possible combinations!

So, how many sounds do languages actually have?

It appears that the scientific answer is nothing more than: “a lot, but we can’t know precisely”. Even if we may never hear a large part of the existing phines – unless we spend our life travelling – we all become experts of those which belong to our language, learning to perceive the most subtle difference of pronunciation.

The number of phones in a language can vary. English, for example, has 44 of them, 24 consonants and 20 vowels (alphabet and phones can differ considerably!). Modern Standard Arabic has 38. Spanish only has a little more than 20. The Taa language, spoken by some 3,000 people in Botswana and Namibia, has by far the world’s largest inventory, with as many as 80 consonants and approximately 20 vowels.