I am amazed and humbled to hear that India has 880 languages.

I am a stereotypically monolingual American--years of study allow me to mumble a few sentences of Spanish, German, and an even smaller amount of Japanese. I cannot even conceive of 800/1100+ languages--it's like trying to understand the scale of the Sun or imagine how fast light travels compared to say, a motorcycle or walking.

I was hoping someone here on HN was going to give a little background on what 880 living languages even means. Mostly, in a linguistic/cognitive sense, but also in a cultural/economic/political sense.