The Tower of Babel explains why everyone doesn’t speak the same language today. Much of this information is found in the Insight to the Scriptures volume 2 under language. Other of the research is found on various sites that I found agree with much of the reasoning I agree with.
According to historians, there are slightly less than 7,000 spoken languages in the world today. Yet the number of languages emerging from Babel at the time of the dispersion would have been much less than this—likely less than 100 different original language families. Towards the bottom of this page, I have listed the 20 most popular languages currently being spoken. I have not been able to discern what the first original languages were. The list below is simply the most languages spoken in the world today.
So where did all these languages come from? Linguists recognize that most languages have similarities to other languages. Related languages belong to what are called language families. These original language families (probably less than 100) resulted from God’s confusion of the language at Babel. Since that time, the original language families have grown and changed into the abundant number of languages today.
Is it feasible for 6,000-7,000 languages to develop from less than 100 in 4,000 years? The languages that came out of the confusion at Babel were “root languages” or language families. Over time, those root languages have varied by borrowing from other languages, developing new terms and phrases, and losing previous words and phrases. So yes, this is a possibility. A strong fact that this is possible is because they do exist today. So the real question would be whether or not the genealogy was correct, not that there could be 7,000 languages in existence in this short period of time. And yes, the genealogy too has been proven to be accurate.
I found something even more interesting that different languages also take on different thought patterns on how to construct everything from sentences to culture and the way words are expressed to form one thought. I found this: Thus, after God confused their language, not only did the builders at Babel lack “one set of words” (Genesis 11:1), one common vocabulary, but they also lacked a common grammar, a common way of expressing the relationship between words. Professor S. R. Driver stated: “Languages, however, differ not only in grammar and roots, but also . . . in the manner in which ideas are built up into a sentence. Different races do not think in the same way; and consequently the forms taken by the sentence in different languages are not the same.” (A Dictionary of the Bible, edited by J. Hastings, 1905, Vol. IV, p. 791) Thus, different languages require quite different thought patterns, making it difficult for a new learner to ‘think in the language.’ (Compare 1Cor. 14:10, 11.) This is also why a literal translation of something said or written in an unfamiliar language may seem illogical, often causing persons to say, “But it doesn’t make sense!” So, it appears that, when Jehovah God confused the speech of those at Babel, he first blotted out all memory of their previous common language and then introduced into their minds not only new vocabularies but also changed thought patterns, producing new grammars.—Compare Isaiah 33:19; Ezekiel 3:4-6.
Language research provides evidence in harmony with the preceding information. The New Encyclopædia Britannica says: “The earliest records of written language, the only linguistic fossils man can hope to have, go back no more than about 4,000 or 5,000 years.” (1985, Vol. 22, p. 567) An article in Science Illustrated of July 1948 (p. 63) states: “Older forms of the languages known today were far more difficult than their modern descendants . . . man appears not to have begun with a simple speech, and gradually made it more complex, but rather to have gotten hold of a tremendously knotty speech somewhere in the unrecorded past, and gradually simplified it to the modern forms.” Linguist Dr. Mason also points out that “the idea that ‘savages’ speak in a series of grunts, and are unable to express many ‘civilized’ concepts, is very wrong,” and that “many of the languages of non-literate peoples are far more complex than modern European ones.” (Science News Letter, September 3, 1955, p. 148) The evidence is thus against any evolutionary origin of speech or of ancient languages.
On another side note, as of the present time, the Bible, the whole or in part, is available in upwards of 2,000 languages.
Here are some of the worlds languages and the number of people speaking them (I'm certain the numbers listed here are approximate and change with population growths):
Name of the language and number in the millions
1 Mandarin Chinese 885
2 English 322
3 Spanish 266
4 Bengali 189
5 Hindi 182
6 Portuguese 170
7 Russian 170
8 Japanese 125
9 German 98
10 Wu Chinese 77
11 Javanese 76
12 Korean 75
13 French 72
14 Vietnamese 68
15 Telugu 66
16 Yue Chinese (Cantonese) 66
17 Marathi 65
18 Tamil 63
19 Turkish 59
20 Urdu 57
Another set of questions have to do with what counts as a language. For instance, you may be surprised to see Arabic -- certainly one of the world's major languages -- missing entirely from this list of the "top twenty." In fact, Arabic (in all its varieties) has 202 million speakers world-wide, and with this count would be #4 on the list above. However, Ethnologue considers the local colloquial varieties of Arabic to be separate languages, and the largest single colloquial is Egyptian, with 42.5 million speakers. This is not unreasonable, since different Arabic colloquials are not mutually intelligible, or at least not entirely so. Algerian Colloquial Arabic (for instance) is roughly as different from Egyptian Colloquial Arabic as Portuguese is from Spanish. If we considered Portuguese and Spanish as a single language -- called "Iberian" or something like that -- then the combined language would have 436 million speakers (or 502 million by Ethnologue's 1999 definitions), far ahead of English in second place.
On the other side of the argument, educated people in all the Arabic-speaking countries can speak, read and understand "Modern Standard Arabic", which is also the language used in news broadcasts, newspapers, and so on. Thus an educated Egyptian in Algeria can read the paper, understand the TV news, and converse easily with an educated Algerian. In some sense, they remain part of the same linguistic community, in a way that speakers of Spanish and Portuguese may not.
To take another example, Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language. For historical and political reasons, they have different writing systems, and some different strata of borrowed vocabulary, but ordinary speakers are likely to be able to understand one another quite well. Combining their counts would give us 182+57 = 239, a 30% increase for Hindi, putting the Hindi/Urdu combination into fourth place -- though Hindi was already in fifth place.
For a third example, consider Turkish, which is listed with 59 million speakers (46 million in Turkey). Speakers of closely related languages that are mutually intelligible with Turkish (at least to some extent) include 13.9 million South Azerbaijani, 7 million North Azerbaijani, 5.4 million Turkmen, 500,000 Gagauz Turkish, 400,000 Khorasani, 300,000 Crimean Turkish, 200,000 Qashqa', 55,000 Salar: about 87 million total. This 47% increase in the count for Turkish would move it to 10th position from 19th position.
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