Linguistic densities
The world’s top ten languages
by number of speakers
Geographical distribution of
the world’s languages |
Half the world’s population
uses a total of eight languages in daily life, while one sixth of the world’s languages
are spoken in New Guinea alone
 The
linguistic heritage is very unevenly distributed. According to estimates made by
the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which campaigns for preservation of the
least-known tongues, only three per cent of the world’s 6,000 languages are used
in Europe, whereas half of them are spoken in the Asia-Pacific region, with the top
prize going to New Guinea (the Indonesian territory of Irian Jaya plus Papua New
Guinea), which is home to one sixth of the world’s languages.
Linguistic diversity does not match population density: 96 per cent of languages
are spoken by only four per cent of the world’s population and over 80 per cent are
endemic, i.e. confined to one country. Only about 20 languages are spoken by hundreds
of millions of people in several countries.
Although the figures vary according to the method of counting, the Millennium Family
Encyclopaedia (Dorling Kindersley, London, 1997), estimates that around half the
people in the world use in everyday life one of the planet’s eight most widespread
languages: Chinese (1.2 billion speakers), English (478 million), Hindi (437 million),
Spanish (392 million), Russian (284 million), Arabic (225 million), Portuguese (184
million) and French (125 million). SIL and Linguasphere Observatory (see page 31) provide comparable figures, by adding
to those who speak a language as a mother tongue those for whom it is a “second language”.
Ten
languages die out every year
This imbalance leads
specialists to forecast that 95 per cent of all living languages will die out during
the next century. At present, 10 languages disappear every year somewhere in the
world. Some go so far as to claim a language dies out every two weeks. The rate of
disappearance is especially high in areas where linguistic diversity is greatest.
In Africa, more than 200 languages have fewer than 500 speakers each and may soon
die out. The minimum number of speakers to ensure survival is put at 100,000.
In North America, the biggest threats are to indigenous and Creole languages. With
the exceptions of Navajo, Cree and Ojibwa, the 200 Amerindian tongues which have
survived until now in the United States and Canada are endangered.
Between a third and a half of Latin America’s 500 Amerindian languages are in danger,
with the highest rate of extinction predicted in Brazil,
where most languages are spoken by very small communities.
The languages of Southeast Asia are each spoken by relatively large numbers of people,
and the future of about 40 of the 600 to 700 languages there will depend largely
on government policies.
On the other hand, only six languages out of north-east Asia’s 47 have any real chance
of survival in the face of Russian. Twenty are “nearly extinct”, eight are “seriously
endangered” and 13 are “endangered”. The first group are spoken by only a dozen people
at most. The second group are more widely used but are not being passed down to children.
The third category includes tongues spoken by some children but fewer and fewer,
according to the forthcoming UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages: Europe
and North-east Asia.
In Europe, where the number of languages varies by a factor of two according to the
criteria used to define them, 123 languages are spoken, including nine which are
nearly extinct, 26 seriously endangered and 38 endangered, according to the UNESCO book.
|
