TRANSLATION INDUSTRY UPDATES June 2025

Spotlight on multilingual countries and cities: a deep dive into some of the world’s most polyglot places

In this month's translation industry updates, we'll be looking at some of the most multilingual countries and cities. In a world where around half the population is at least bilingual, it stands to reason that a substantial number of countries have more than one language commonly spoken. Yet some countries are more diverse than others, as the examples below show.

It’s important to emphasise that there are many different ways of determining how multilingual a city or a country is, depending on whether we consider the number of languages alone, the number of languages relative to population size, the proportion of the population that speaks more than one language, the number of official languages in the country, and so on. In our article, we've tried to consider the situation from a number of perspectives, but we completely understand that there may be places we haven't talked about that are equally multilingual by other criteria.

Here are some of the world’s most multilingual nations.

Highest total number of languages and greatest language diversity: Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is widely cited as being the world's most multilingual country, with an incredible 840 living languages spoken by a population of around ten million people. It also has the highest language diversity index in the world, meaning that of everywhere on earth, it’s least likely that two randomly-selected individuals from Papua New Guinea will share the same mother tongue. The language diversity of Papua New Guinea is often attributed to a challenging physical topography which fostered the independent development of different languages spoken by different communities, and it’s interesting to note that the South Pacific as whole is characterised by linguistically diverse nations. The Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are also among the top ten scorers on the global language diversity index with an incredible 97% each.

Highest number of other languages spoken at home: USA and Australia

Intriguingly, some of the countries widely perceived as being uniformly English-speaking actually have very high numbers of people who speak other languages at home. In the USA around one in five people are believed to speak a language other than English at home, and while Spanish predominates, with around 41 million speakers according to the United States Census Bureau, other commonly-spoken languages include Chinese, with around 3.5 million speakers, and Tagalog, Vietnamese and Arabic, with over one million speakers each.

In Australia, 22% of the population speaks a language other than English at home, with Mandarin being the most predominant, followed by Arabic, Vietnamese and Cantonese. It's also important to mention that in the US, Australia and many other countries with a history of colonisation, a wide number of indigenous languages are, and have been, spoken. According to data by Ethnologue, the US has 197 living indigenous languages, while Australia currently has 214, although in both cases the number was higher prior to colonisation.

Highest number of official languages: Bolivia

A fair number of countries have two, three or even four official languages, such as Canada (French and English), Belgium (Dutch, French, and German) and Singapore (English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil). For historical and other reasons, several other nations go above and beyond this. Zimbabwe has an incredible 16 official languages, while India has 22. But the country that tops the list with an amazing 37 official languages is the landlocked South American nation of Bolivia, which has Spanish and 36 different indigenous languages, the most widely-spoken of which are Quechua and Aymara. Not included among the official language list but still part of Bolivia’s intricate cultural mix are German (spoken by around 160,000 descendants of European origin), and Portuguese (as spoken in neighbouring Brazil and as a native language by approximately 0.2% of Bolivia’s population).

Most multilingual population: Luxembourg

The tiny nation of Luxembourg has three official languages but is an interesting case study in that each of the official languages is spoken by a substantial proportion of the population, which is not necessarily the case in all countries with multiple official languages. 98% of Luxembourg’s population speaks French, while the nation’s other two official languages of German and Luxembourgish are spoken by 78% and 77% respectively. Over and above this, around 80% of the population is reported to speak English, which is not an official language of Luxembourg, meaning that in practice most Luxembourgers are quadrilingual people.

Luxembourg also has a very high proportion of nationals from other countries, with foreign residents constituting close to 50% of the total population, meaning that other languages are also widely spoken in the country. Portuguese nationals alone constitute around 14.5% of Luxembourg’s total population, while communities of nationals from other European countries also number in the thousands, meaning that Italian, Romanian, Polish and Ukrainian also have strong communities of speakers.

Having talked about multilingualism on a national level, we'll end by describing some of the world's most multilingual cities.

Most languages spoken in a small area: Macau, Chinese SAR

The tiny enclave of Macau, a special administrative region of China, is just 33.3 square kilometres in size, making it around 22 times smaller than the already-tiny Singapore, and around 33 times smaller than Hong Kong. By some estimates it is reported to be one of the most densely-populated places on earth. Due to its historical links with Portugal through its position as a former colony, Macau has Portuguese as well as Chinese as an official language. In practice, the most widely-spoken languages in Macau are Cantonese and then Mandarin, with English being widely used in tourism and spoken proficiently by an increasing number of residents, particularly younger people.

Highest proportion of official languages spoken: Johannesburg, South Africa

As of 2025, South Africa has twelve official languages, each one of which is used to some degree in the country’s largest and most populous city, Johannesburg, with ten of these languages enjoying significant representation there. According to data from Memrise, 23% of the city’s population speaks Zulu as a first language, followed by 20% for English and 18% for Xhosa, with other languages including Afrikaans, Ndebele, North Sotho, South Sotho, Tswana, Venda and Tsonga also being widely used, meaning that it is not uncommon for locals to be able to communicate using between two to five of these languages. Looking at the nation as a whole, it’s also noteworthy that South African Sign Language has had official status since 2023, making South Africa part of a growing trend towards nations including a sign language in their official list.

Most multilingual city in the world: Manchester, UK

Some of the world’s most multilingual cities are in English-speaking countries, and two of the most classic examples that are commonly cited are Los Angeles and New York. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, the northern English city of Manchester has been reported, by some estimates, to be the world’s most multilingual, with over 200 languages spoken relative to a population of around 500,000. According to the Multilingual Manchester project, half of the adult population of the city is bilingual, while the same is true of more than four in ten young people. The most widely-spoken language after English is Urdu, with Arabic, Cantonese, Polish, Bengali and Somali also having substantial numbers of speakers.

We hope you've enjoyed reading our run-down of some of the most linguistically vibrant corners of the world, but our lists are not definitive! If you come from, or know about, a multilingual place that's not on our list, please let us know in the comments, so that we can all learn more about our linguistically diverse world.

Keep it multilingual, and see you again for next month's updates!

Sources

Atlas & Boots | Kia Abdullah

World’s Most Multilingual Countries – Ranked

https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/worlds-most-multilingual-countries-ranked

Australian Bureau of Statistics

2021 census highlights increasing cultural diversity

https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/2021-census-highlights-increasing-cultural-diversity

BBC Future | Lindsey Galloway

Want to learn a language? Try living here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20150928-living-in-the-most-multilingual-cities

Daily Express | Charles Harrison