Language Diversity Chart on The Economist (Links & Internet Resources) Language Learning Forum

Language Diversity Chart on The Economist
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Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources

nway
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Message 1 of 4

15 February 2012 at 6:26pm | IP Logged

Thoughts? Any surprises?

Notable to me are that there's such a significant gap between Australia and the two other large Anglophone immigrant countries (Canada and the US), and that Brazil is so much more linguistically homogenous than the likes of France and Germany. It's also interesting to compare the ratio between the number of indigenous languages and the likelihood of two citizens sharing the same mother tongue, with Saudi Arabia and Brazil at the polar extremes. I'm lastly surprised that such a tiny strip of land as Israel manages to house 33 different indigenous languages.

The Economist wrote:

DESPITE the idea that English is spoken in America, Chinese in China, and Russian in Russia, most of the world is far more diverse than the presence of big national languages suggests. In fact, monolingual countries are hard to find. The chart below measures language diversity in two very different ways: the number of languages spoken in the country and Greenberg's diversity index, which scores countries on the probability that two citizens will share a mother tongue. America, Russia, Brazil, China and Mexico have over 100 languages each, but score relatively low on the diversity index, because English, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese and Spanish have grown to the point where they threaten to destroy the many tiny native languages. By contrast, linguistic rivalry and relative poverty have kept a single language from dominating countries like India and Nigeria, which score high on the diversity index. Geography is an additional factor. The many islands of Indonesia and the Philippines shelter small languages despite those countries’ middle-income status. Both poverty and geography combine to make Congo and Papua New Guinea the most linguistically diverse countries in the world.

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GeneMachine
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Message 2 of 4

15 February 2012 at 6:56pm | IP Logged

Since I was wondering why they listed 27 indigenous languages for Germany, I had a look at the source at http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=DE - they seem to use a very weird definition of language. According to the list in the link, Bairisch, Mainfr�nkisch, K�lsch, Schw�bisch etc. are considered to be separate languages. Those are dialects - no way you can classify those as languages in any meaningful way.

To pile on the weirdness, if you look at their entry for Bavarian (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=bar), they list it as a language of Austria. Sure, the bavarian dialect group extends into Austria, but, as the name suggests, its home is Bavaria, after all.

This is even inconsistent with their own FAQ, stating "Two related varieties are normally considered varieties of the same language if speakers of each variety have inherent understanding of the other variety at a functional level (that is, can understand based on knowledge of their own variety without needing to learn the other variety)." All of the German dialects I listed above are definitely mutually understandable at a functional level.

So, to summarize, I'd take their numbers with a huge helping of salt.
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geoffw
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Message 3 of 4

15 February 2012 at 8:26pm | IP Logged

Checking Ethnologue's entry for Israel, I count 36 languages listed there. This includes 7 different entries for Arabic, as well Ancient Hebrew, English, Russian, 3 kinds of Yiddish, etc. I have no doubt that these are all spoken there, but it also makes you wonder what they mean by "indigenous."
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Iversen
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Message 4 of 4

16 February 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged

I totally agree with GeneMachine and geoffw -if you consistently count dialects as
languages your statistics become worthless. It is also misleading to exclude the native
languages of immigrants. In a country like Denmark we basically have four native and
indigenous languages (Danish with its dialects, Faroese, Greenlandic and German), but the
total number of the last three is less than the number of Turkish speakers. Third
observation：there is a lot of difference between calculating the likehood of of two
random citizens sharing their native language and two native speakers not being able to
understand each other (maybe through a koine or through simple polyglottery). And one
final quibble: if you mean USA then don't write 'America'.

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