Cross-cultural variation in children’s early linguistic experience is vastly understudied. Here we quantify young children’s language exposure across communities speaking North American English, British English, Argentinian Spanish, Yélî Dnye, or Tseltal. Our data includes annotations from 70 daylong, naturalistic recordings of 1–36-month-olds. We focus on what children heard in terms of speaker gender, age, and addressee in randomly selected clips from each recording. We find three key results. First, speech quantity was remarkably stable across age. Second, the bulk of child-directed speech children hear comes from women. Finally, we report on differences and similarities in relative rates of adult- and child-directed speech across communities. Critically, this work provides a much-needed cross-cultural approach to understanding young children’s early language experiences.