Re: Linguistic superpowers or...

On Feb 1, 5:07 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

On Jan 31, 9:46 pm, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@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?

Its neighbour Cameroon is generally quoted as the most linguistically
diverse country in Africa.  It's much smaller in area than Nigeria.

That's more because there's no lingua franca for even a part of the
country (like Hausa in northern Nigeria), let alone the whole country,
so you can't say "Cameroon: language X plus 200 tribal languages."

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.
The last time I looked at the Ethnologue maps of Indonesia (on paper,
of course), I couldn't help noticing how few languages were located in
West Irian.

I was surprised to hear that, so I checked with Ethnologue (on screen,
of course) and see that you're correct -- only 269 languages  there, as
opposed to 820 in PNG.  

It could, I suppose, be due to lack of data; or is the terrain
noticeably different?

Ethnologue lists 737 for Indonesia (cf 726 on
jimbo's site, which got its numbers from the previous edition).  Most
are in the east, as one would expect -- Maluku 129, Sulawesi 114,
Kalimantan 83, Nusu Teggera 73, and so on.  Only 20 in Java and Bali.

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.
The folklore seems to think differently -- in the new novel by
Australian Geraldine Brooks, the brilliant *People of the Book*, the
Australian narrator says near the end that she now regrets she spent
all that time swotting Hebrew and Arabic and never took an interest in
any of the 500 native languages of her country.

It's a matter of definition, as you have so often pointed out -- just
like in Yugoslavia and Scandinavia.  Every "tribe" (700 or more of them)
considered themselves to speak their own language, essentially by
definition.  However several neighbouring tribes in fact often spoke
mutually intelligible varieties of what the linguists consider to be a
single language.

Thus the language for which Dixon invented the name "Dyirbal" consists
of the tribal languages Girramay, Djirru, Jirrbal, Gulngay, Mamu,
Ngadjan, and others that were wiped out in the 19th century whose names
are no longer remembered.  "Dyirbal", of course, is just a variant
spelling of "Jirrbal", since the JirrbalNan were the group that had the
most remaining speakers when Dixon started work.

I assume Brooks would have been thinking in terms of the number of
political languages, while Ethnologue (and thus the list above) counts
the number of "linguistic" languages.

I suspect at a guess that something similar is true for the number
given
for USA.

Well, there's a great blank space in the Southeast labeled "unknown,"
so any educated guess is an underestimate.
.

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