Language families

How many?

If we ask a person in the street about the number of languages in the world, the answer will probably vary from one hundred to a couple of hundreds. In reality, the situation is completely different.

According to Ethnologue, the most authoritative resource on world languages, there are currently 7,097 living languages in the world. Just as the weather can be different in different regions, the same is true for languages distribution. They are unevenly scattered across the world with Asia having 2,300 spoken languages while there are only 288 of them in Europe. If we explore the number of active languages within only one country, we’ll see that Papua New Guinea is undoubtedly a medallist. It is one of the most multicultural countries in the world with 841 living languages spoken by a population of about 4 million.

Family

As with animals and plants, languages are classified into families, subfamilies, branches and groups. A family is a group of languages with the common ‘parent’ called proto-language. There are about 140 language families six of which are defined as major or primary: Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Trans-New Guinea.

1,527 languages, the biggest number of all, belong to the Niger-Congo family whereas the Indo-European has only 444 languages. Nevertheless, the latter is the most known due to the vast geographical distribution and usage in the world arena.

Living vs dying

Unfortunately, the number of languages is not a constant. In 2015 there were 7,102 living languages. The number is decreasing. Thankfully, there are some organisations trying to preserve and widespread languages: Ethnologue, UNESCO, FEL (Foundation for endangered languages), SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics), Living Tongues Institute for endangered languages, Cultures of resistance network, the endangered languages projects, ANA (Administration for Native Americans) and others.

Somebody might say that there’s nothing dangerous if a language dies. It’s not a plant or an animal. I believe we should look deeper. With the death of a language a part of the world dies, a part that you can’t see or touch, but a part representing cultural, linguistic, social heritage whose disappearance will affect the world.

 

Sources:

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world https://www.sil.org/ https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/resource/1ana-native-language-preservation-a-reference-guide-for-establishing https://livingtongues.org/ http://www.ogmios.org/manifesto/index.php http://culturesofresistance.org/language-preservation http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/?hl=en http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/