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How Many Languages Are Spoken in Mexico? — Indigenous Mexico [1]
['John Schmal']
Date: 2025-08
This article discusses the age-old question of how many languages are spoken in Mexico? The answer is not an easy one because none of the sources are in agreement about that topic. This article will discuss INALI’S three-tiered approach to Mexico’s languages, as well as the estimates provided by other sources.
How Many Languages Are Spoken in Mexico?
In the 2020 census, 7,364,645 persons 3 years of age or more indicated that they spoke some kind of indigenous language. This represented 6.1% of Mexico’s 120 million citizens.[1] As a country with a centuries-old multilingual tradition, Mexico currently appears to rank fifth among the countries that have the largest number of languages, after New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, and India. But the actual number of languages spoken in Mexico varies depending on the sources consulted, all of which have incongruent calculations.
Ethnologue Estimate
According to Ethnologue – which is published by SIL (The Summer Institute of Linguistics) – there are 7,097 languages in the world. Papua New Guinea ranked first with 841 languages, representing 12% of the world total. Indonesia comes in at second place with 710 languages, and Nigeria is third with 526 languages. According to SIL’s most recent estimate, Mexico is in seventh place with 292 languages.[2]
Mexico’s Living Languages
The Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity) indicates that Mexico’s national linguistic wealth is made up of 291 living languages, compared to the 6,912 languages spoken on the entire planet.[3]
Of the 291 languages spoken in the nation of Mexico, 158 languages are spoken in Oaxaca. Puebla has the second largest number of languages spoken: 29, followed by Chiapas with 25, Veracruz with 23, and Guerrero with 16.
Estimates of the CDI and INEGI
The National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI-2009) has estimated that the Mexican people speak 62 languages. According to INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía) – known in English as the National Institute of Statistics and Geography – there were 89 designated languages in Mexico’s 2010 census for citizens to choose from. However, in 2020, INEGI appears to have condensed the number of languages on the census questionnaire to 70 languages, with an option for “other language” to be used by citizens when they did not speak one of the seventy languages.
INALI Estimates of Linguistic Variants
The National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), an institution created by the Mexican government in 2003, created the “Catalogue of National Indigenous Languages: Linguistic Variants of Mexico With Their Self-Denominations and Geostatical References” in 2008. This catalogue created a three-tiered classification as follows:[4]
The First Tier: Familias Lingüísticas (Linguistic Families)
According to INALI, there are 11 linguistic families spoken throughout Mexico. Each family is a set of languages whose similarities in their linguistic and lexical structures are due to a common origin. The language families are found in various parts of the Mexican Nation, as the following map indicates:[5]
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[1] Url:
https://www.indigenousmexico.org/articles/how-many-languages-are-spoken-in-mexico
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