JW.ORG: 1100 languages and growing!

[jwhess]

It was mentioned in another thread that we made it to 1100 languages.

 

[jwhess]

It took us 140 years to get the first 1000 languages covered.  We managed to get another 100 languages added in about 5 years.  Very impressive...♥️

[humble bumble bee]

I share the excitement of everyone with the milestone of 1100th language what happens to be :

 

Romany (Central Bulgaria)

 

Romani languages encompass sixty or more highly divergent dialects.

JW.org lists 23 of them so there is more scope

[Mike047]

Don't our brothers do a fantastic job, with guidance from Jehovah. At the time of the last of the anointed being taken to their heavenly reward, they will be able to say of their work 'it has been accomplished'.

[Sepie93]

1101

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[Dages]

5 hours ago, Sepie93 said:

1101

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-S911B met Tapatalk
 

1111 will be cool  

[Sheep]

12 hours ago, Dages said:

1111 will be cool  

 

I don't remember now... Did anything bad happen when we reached 666 languages?

[humble bumble bee]

On 3/12/2025 at 9:53 PM, Sepie93 said:

1101

The number has changed but my list is the same as last time so, I can't say what language is supposed to have been added.

It's a puzzle. Any ideas?

[Cool.As.Ice]

How long do you reckon it’ll be before we get to 1200?

 

 Maybe even 2000?

[jwhess]

One thing to keep in mind is there are over 7000 languages on this planet.  But around half of them have less than 1000 speakers.  In fact there are quite a few with less than 100 speakers.

 

So there are close to 3500 languages with more than 1000 speakers.  However, the 20 top languages are spoken by almost half of the worlds population.  So at 1101 translated, we are digging deep in the less spoken languages already.  It would seem a poor use of dedicated funds to assign a translation team of 5 people to spend years translating a language that was only spoken by 5 people...♥️

[Michał]

And due to globalization snd migration the number of languages (~7000) is decreasing.


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[Michał]

I asked AI some questions:

How many languages have written form?

Out of the approximately 7,100 languages spoken today, only about 4,000 have a written form. The rest are purely oral, with no standardized writing system.

Many indigenous and minority languages rely entirely on oral tradition, while others have only recently developed writing systems through linguistic documentation efforts. Some languages once had writing systems but lost them over time.

If I wanted to translate a book so 99% of human population can read it in their native language, how many languages should it be translated into?

To ensure that a book is accessible to 99% of the world’s population in their native language, translations would need to cover approximately 30 to 40 languages. This estimate is based on the cumulative percentage of native speakers for the most widely spoken languages.

Here is a list of languages that, when combined, would cover approximately 99% of the global population:
1. Mandarin Chinese 
2. Spanish
3. English 
4. Arabic
5. Hindi
6. Bengali
7. Portuguese 
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. Western Punjabi 
11. Javanese 
12. German
13. Korean
14. French
15. Telugu
16. Marathi
17. Turkish
18. Tamil
19. Vietnamese
20. Italian
21. Urdu
22. Gujarati
23. Polish
24. Ukrainian
25. Persian (Farsi)
26. Malayalam
27. Kannada
28. Oriya (Odia)
29. Maithili
30. Thai
31. Burmese 
32. Tagalog (Filipino)
33. Yue Chinese (Cantonese)
34. Swahili
35. Romanian 
36. Dutch
37. Hausa
38. Pashto
39. Amharic
40. Yoruba

Translating your book into these languages would make it accessible to the vast majority of people worldwide in their native tongues.


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[jwhess]

4 hours ago, Michał said:

I asked AI some questions:

How many languages have written form?

Out of the approximately 7,100 languages spoken today, only about 4,000 have a written form. The rest are purely oral, with no standardized writing system.

Many indigenous and minority languages rely entirely on oral tradition, while others have only recently developed writing systems through linguistic documentation efforts. Some languages once had writing systems but lost them over time.

If I wanted to translate a book so 99% of human population can read it in their native language, how many languages should it be translated into?

To ensure that a book is accessible to 99% of the world’s population in their native language, translations would need to cover approximately 30 to 40 languages. This estimate is based on the cumulative percentage of native speakers for the most widely spoken languages.

Here is a list of languages that, when combined, would cover approximately 99% of the global population:
1. Mandarin Chinese 
2. Spanish
3. English 
4. Arabic
5. Hindi
6. Bengali
7. Portuguese 
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. Western Punjabi 
11. Javanese 
12. German
13. Korean
14. French
15. Telugu
16. Marathi
17. Turkish
18. Tamil
19. Vietnamese
20. Italian
21. Urdu
22. Gujarati
23. Polish
24. Ukrainian
25. Persian (Farsi)
26. Malayalam
27. Kannada
28. Oriya (Odia)
29. Maithili
30. Thai
31. Burmese 
32. Tagalog (Filipino)
33. Yue Chinese (Cantonese)
34. Swahili
35. Romanian 
36. Dutch
37. Hausa
38. Pashto
39. Amharic
40. Yoruba

Translating your book into these languages would make it accessible to the vast majority of people worldwide in their native tongues.


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And how many of these languages do we translate into?

[Cool.As.Ice]

If I were a betting man, I’d say all of ‘em

[jwhess]

4 hours ago, Cool.As.Ice said:

If I were a betting man, I’d say all of ‘em

My guess as well...♥️

[Michał]

So 40 languages needed to reach 99% of human population. That means reaching 8.01 bilion people. We translate publications into additional 1061 languages. Well, that’s pretty impressive if you ask me.

Anyway, the number of languages on jw.org will no doubt increase but the top limit is 4000 languages. However, as @jwhess pointed out a lot of these languages are spoken by a few thousand people so my guess is it’s not practical to reach more than 1500-2000 languages. Speakers of this language minority groups often know other more popular language - I guess that’s often the case in South America either Spanish.


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