1476: The Most Official Languages Dec 27, 2018

The country with the most official languages is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as Zimbabwe, with 16 languages (listed at the bottom), but this number is hard to tally sometimes. First of all, most of the world's languages are not codified or standardized, so a county like Papua New Guinea where an estimated 11% of the world's languages are spoken does not—and cannot—list every one of them. Likewise, Bolivia has around 37 official languages, but this includes a few that are extinct, and most—except Spanish— are not official on a national level, but only in smaller subdivisions of the country.

The languages of Zimbabwe include: Chewa, Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, Koisan, Nambya, Ndau, Ndebele, Shangani, Shona, sign language, Sotho, Tonga, Tswana, Venda and Xhosa.

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