Several sources were used to estimate the number of languages spoken in the countries that qualified for the round of 16 at the 2026 men’s football World Cup.
For African countries, we used Dr. Martin Benjamin’s African Language Grid. Languages listed as “extinct” were removed from the final count. Colonial legacy languages such as Spanish, French, English, or Portuguese are not listed in the grid. Afrikaans is included for South Africa, as it is only spoken on the continent.
For the rest of the world, the main source was Glottolog. Extinct, unattested, artificial and sign languages as well as dialects were excluded from the final count. Colonial legacy languages were also excluded, except for those such as Pennsylvania German, which are now only used in countries where settlers remained.
The Glottolog page for France did not include languages spoken in overseas territories. The number for those was drawn from the following article:
Boula de Mareüil, P., Vernier, F., Adda, G., Rilliard, A., & Vernaudon, J. (2019). A speaking atlas of indigenous languages of France and its overseas. In Proceedings of the Language Technologies for All (LT4All) (pp. 155–159). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Glottolog does not include a page for England but lists the United Kingdom instead. Therefore, the number for England was sourced from the UK Office for National Statistics.
For Spain, Glottolog doesn’t list Erromintxela or Darija Arabic, so they were added to the count.
