Honestly, it really depends on what you define as a "language" (versus what would be considered by some as a "dialect"). Some dialects of Italian that I've heard or read seem so completely different from Italian that it's a wonder they're not considered a whole different language - but because the people that speak them are under the rule of the Italian government and they are related to the Italian language, they are considered merely dialects, not languages in their own right. There's a saying, "Language is a dialect with an army and a navy," and it's really quite true. Technically, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese are all descended from Latin - and they were all considered dialects of Latin for a very long time, until each culture that spoke the language all got their own governments and started treating each other differently.

But just so you can see the difference (yet similarity) of dialects, in standard Italian you ask "Where's the bathroom?" by saying "Dov'è il bagno?" but it's "Dulà isal il bagn?" in Sicilian. You can see "bathroom" ("bagno"/"bagn") is a related word, and "the" ("il") is the same, but the rest of it's pretty fuzzy. People who speak Italian but don't speak Sicilian can't understand Sicilian, and the same goes for people who speak Sicilian but not Italian (rare nowadays, but sometimes seen with the older generations). Likewise, the standard Italian phrase for "Get well soon!" is "Guarisci presto!" but in Friulian (spoken in northeast Italy) it's "Vuariš daurman!"

Back to your question. Again, the answer varies, but the average count of languages in today's world is about 7,300.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_name
Studied Italian and wrote my Bachelor's thesis on Italian dialects.

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Per the link provided at the "wiki-know-it-all" site, there are approximately 6,913 existing spoken languages. Now this does not mention written stuff such as heiroglyphs or native american writings, symbolism, computer programming languages, and/or languages spoken in the past that have since been extinct. Hope this helps!
wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_different_languages_are_the... wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_different_languages_are_there_in_the_world
Source(s):
wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_different_languages_are_the... wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_different_languages_are_there_in_the_world

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There are 6,800 known languages spoken in the 200 countries of the world. 2,261 have writing systems (the others are only spoken) and about 300 are represented by on-line dictionaries as of May 11, 2004.

----end of quote---
Source(s):
http://www.yourdictionary.com/languages.html

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