The languages of the world are unevenly distributed geographically and across speaker populations. Just 4% of all languages [around 275] are spoken by 96 percent of the world's population or, in other words, just 4 percent of the world's population speaks 96 percent of its languages. The largest eight languages alone have over 150 million speakers each and together account for 40 percent of the world's population. These are the "major languages" discussed in World Languages Chapter [pages 10-35]. More than half of all languages today have fewer than 10,000 speakers; more than a quarter have fewer than 1,000 speakers. In some cases of highly endangered languages in Australia or the Americas, there are just one or two elderly people who speak them. Geographic distribution of languages is also very uneven. The largest numbers of languages are spoken in Africa and Asia, and much smaller numbers elsewhere. Papua New Guinea stands out as a single island with 820 languages. Vanuatu, with 120 languages among its 200,000 population, has the highest language density of any country in the world. Each chapter of this book covers a different geographical region and presents a number of feature languages with shorter discussions of other selected languages. The chapters cover such topics as history and origins of languages, numbers of speakers, writing systems, special features, and basic vocabulary items.