This partial list of languages is sorted by a partial count of

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s (generally ignoring tone, stress, and diphthongs). Languages in this list cannot be directly compared: Counts of the phonemes in the inventory of a language can differ radically between sources, occasionally by a factor of several hundred percent. For instance,

Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP) is the Accent (sociolinguistics), accent of British English regarded as the Standard language, standard one, carrying the highest Prestige (sociolinguistics), social prestige, since as late as the beginning of the 2 ...

of English has been claimed to have anywhere between 11 and 27 vowels, whereas West ǃXoon has been analyzed as having anywhere from 87 to 164 consonants.

List

This list features standard dialects of languages. The languages are classified under primary

language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ana ...

, which may be hypothesized, marked in italics, but do not include ones discredited by mainstream scholars (e.g. Niger–Congo but not

Altaic The Altaic () languages are a group of languages comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists including the Koreanic and Japonic families. These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final ...

). Dark-shaded cells indicate

extinct language An extinct language or dead language is a language with no living native speakers. A dormant language is a dead language that still serves as a symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group; these languages are often undergoing a process of r ...

s. The parenthesized righthand side of expressions indicates marginal phonemes.

Footnotes

References

* * * * *{{cite book, title=Los sonidos del español, last=Hualde, first=José Ignacio, publisher=Cambridge University Press, year=2014, isbn=978-0-521-16823-6, url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1a3CAQAAQBAJ&q=%22fonemas+conson%C3%A1nticos%22&pg=PR14, access-date=28 October 2020, archive-date=10 December 2020, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201210143921/https://books.google.com/books?id=1a3CAQAAQBAJ&q=%22fonemas+conson%C3%A1nticos%22&pg=PR14, url-status=live number of phonemes

List

See also

Footnotes

References