Re: Linguistic superpowers or...
- From: "John Atkinson" <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:46:48 GMT
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
"jimbo.ty...@xxxxxxxxx" <jimbo.ty...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I found this link
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/230-papua-new-guinea-the-...
on nakedtranslations (a translator's blog). For people who don't
follow links it's a map purportedly showing countries ranked by
linguistic diversity. Here are the results for the top 12. I'm not
convinced by any of these numbers but the one that puzzles me is
Nigeria. Is there any evidence that Nigeria is more linguistically
diverse than its neighbours?
You can get quite reliable information on language count at
ethnologue.org. If that's what this site lists as its source, it's
fairly trustworthy. The number for Indonesia looks grossly inflated
also, though.
No it's not.
At least half those Indonesian languages are in West Papua, of course.
Papua New Guinea 823 languages
Indonesia 726
Nigeria 505
India 387
Mexico 288
Cameroon 279
Australia 235
DR Congo 218
China 201
Brazil 192
United States 176
Philippines 169
It appears that this count includes languages that have gone extinct over the last century or two. For example, 235 is a fair estimate of the number of languages that we know about that existed in Australia at the time of first contact. Today, less than half that number have any living speakers.
I suspect at a guess that something similar is true for the number given for USA.
John.
.
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