There was a wonderful editorial in the Chicago Tribune today celebrating the 60th anniverary of Pakistan's independence from British rule. I wanted to link to the article ("The Worlds Largest Democracy"), but it wasn't available yet to non-subscribers.

One comment there piqued my linguistic interest. They stated that Pakistan is more linguistically diverse than Europe. That made me think...what is the most linguistically diverse country? Does anyone know?

It seems to me that the most linguistically diverse countries are those, like Pakistan, that have a wide range of religious or "tribal" factions. Pakistan's language breakdown is:

Punjabi 48%, Sindhi 12%, Siraiki (a Punjabi variant) 10%, Pashtu 8%, Urdu (official) 8%, Balochi 3%, Hindko 2%, Brahui 1%, English (official; lingua franca of Pakistani elite and most government ministries), Burushaski and other 8% (SOURCE: CIA World Factbook, 14 June, 2007).

Few European countries have more than three official languages - probably the most diverse is Switzerland: German (official) 63.7%, French (official) 20.4%, Italian (official) 6.5%, Serbo-Croatian 1.5%, Albanian 1.3%, Portuguese 1.2%, Spanish 1.1%, English 1%, Romansch 0.5%, other 2.8% (2000 census)

The USA's diversity is: English 82.1%, Spanish 10.7%, other Indo-European 3.8%, Asian and Pacific island 2.7%, other 0.7% (2000 census)and the UK's is: English, Welsh (about 26% of the population of Wales), Scottish form of Gaelic (about 60,000 in Scotland), plus small percentages of Romany and Manx Gaelic.

Of course, these statistics are for "official" languages. London is a hugely diverse city and hundreds of languages can be heard there. Five hundred is a figure I have seen but I have no source for it.

I think India would be near the top; Indian currency has 15 languages on it.

Romantsch is the fourth official language of Switzerland. The various languages of Pakistan break down into some broad groups: Indo-European and non-Indo-European. Of the former, the breakdown is Indic languages (Urdu, which is mutually intelligible with Hindi (but uses a different alphabet), Panjabi, Siraiki, and Hindko), Iranian (Pashtu and Balochi), and Germanic (i.e., English). Of the non-Indo-European languages there are two in the CIA World Factbook list: Dravidian (Brahui, the only one of this language family outside of South India) and a language isolate (Burushaski). There are 72 languages used in Pakistan, of which three are official, i.e., Urdu, Sindhi, and English. Russia has over a hundred languages.

This article about India is the only one I could find.

Tinman

Ethnologue report for India: 415 living languages

China: 235

Russia: 101

Pakistan: 72

How many languages for all of Europe? Many of them are PIE, split into several families, but languages such as Finnish are in completely separate languages, plus the oddity of Basque. I've been told that it isn't unreasonable to think of China as analogous to Europe, with similar numbers of different languages and ethnic groups, all under the banner of one nation.

I believe than New Guinea has hundreds of different languages, although they've probably somewhat died out. Similarly, the number of Native American languages was pretty large, although they've died out as well.

Added from Wikipedia:

quote:

New Guinea is perhaps the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, which are not obviously related to each other or to anything else, plus a large number of language isolates.

Thanks, Tinman. That was the article.

Yes, Sean, Shu thought it would be New Guinea, too. I think the size of the area (i.e., how many languages per square foot, or something similar) is interesting, too. For example, in lowly Chicago there is a small neighborhood, Uptown, where there are lots of immmigrants; in that very small section of the city there are over 40 different languages spoken. I am sure it's by no means a record, but still it's amazing. I used to volunteer there in a free clinic, and we needed all sorts of translators.

The last time I checked, according to Guinness there are around 5,600 languages worldwide and, as I wrote, in London hundreds of different languages will be spoken. Cities such as Chicago and New York will have similarly large numbers of foreign speakers.

The figures I quoted, though, are for officiallanguages and are very different. For example, none of the Arab or Indian languages is an official language in the UK but that doesn't mean that nobody speaks any of them.

Many official documents (such as the notices issued by the NHS) are now produced in several different languages although, ironically, apart than English, rarely is any one of the UK's official languages used.

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apart than English, rarely is any one of the UK's official languages used

In England, maybe. Not so in Wales, where Welsh appears on virtually every official document, and on road and other signs.

Indeed. I was speaking of England. In Wales most official forms and similar notices are bilingual, as they are in Ireland.

I have not seen much evidence of this in Scotland, the Isle of Man or Cornwall - all of which areas have their own form of Celtic.

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as they are in Ireland.

The Republic of Ireland has bi-lingual road signs and so on, but not so the UK portion, Northern Ireland, which has few, if any, Gaelic speakers nowadays. The closest are in Donegal, which, although it is part of Ulster, is part of the Republic. Much of Donegal is also further north than anywhere in Northern Ireland...

Cornwall

Cornish (in Cornish Kernowek) became extinct in the late 18th century (or sometime during the 19th, depending on whom one believes). It was revived in the 20th, and today there are about 300 hundred fluent speakers. I do not believe it is one of the official language of the duchy of Cornwall (or County Cornwall), but I could be wrong. I believe it is, or is to become, a protected language status under the EU charter for regional or minority languages (ETS-148). Because it went extinct, the vocabulary has been augmented with reshaped borrowings from Welsh and Breton, its closest living relatives.

In addition, no-one has Cornish as a mother tongue, which would require adding the language to signs and official documents. That is really what I meant about Gaelic speakers in Northern Ireland; although plenty of people know Gaelic, it is not their first language.

mother tongue

Right you are, arnie. That's what I meant more obliquely by Cornish being revived. Though many cases of language revival don't seem to have taken, there is one rather successful case, that of Israeli Hebrew, though it is quite different, structurally and vocabulary-wise, from Biblical and Talmudic Hebrew.

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The Republic of Ireland has bi-lingual road signs and so on, but not so the UK portion, Northern Ireland, which has few, if any, Gaelic speakers nowadays.

Which is why I said "Ireland", not "Northern Ireland" - which is part of the United Kingdom - although it is part of the island of Ireland.

You mentioned the UK's official languages in your earlier post - no mention of Ireland, British Isles, isles of Britain, whatever.

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In addition, no-one has Cornish as a mother tongue, which would require adding the language to signs and official documents.

Indeed. Cornish became extinct in the 19th century, Manx in the 20th. Scots Gaelic is still an official langauge.

But all of these languages are now spoken by some people, even if only as a revival. However, none is used on official documents and road signs as is Welsh (although I have seen Cornish road signs recently).

Whether it is axiomatic that any mother tongue is automatically added to signs and official documents, I don't know. I would guess not.

quote:

You mentioned the UK's official languages in your earlier post - no mention of Ireland, British Isles, isles of Britain, whatever.

That's quite true. The figures were only for the UK, not Ireland, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man. My source (CIA World Factbook, 14 June, 2007) did not give figures for Ireland but said, "...English (official) is the language generally used, Irish (Gaelic or Gaeilge) (official) spoken mainly in areas located along the western seaboard..."

cool map showing the countries sized by number of languages. The countries in red have more than 200 languages. Papua New Guinea is way ahead.

What a curious projection. It seems to have no rhyme, reason or logic. I did wonder whether it was ranked by linguistic diversity but even that doesn't seem to work.

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Originally posted by Richard English:
What a curious projection. It seems to have no rhyme, reason or logic. I did wonder whether it was ranked by linguistic diversity but even that doesn't seem to work.

“Languages are very unevenly distributed among the countries of the world. The map tries to capture this fact by rendering each country in a size corresponding to the number of languages spoken in it. (Because of the inherent problems in accomplishing this, sizes are rather approximate). The ten shaded countries are those in which more than 200 languages are in use.”

I have seen a similar kind of map, based on per person energy use. But somehow the cartographer managed to do a better job - even though the differences there were also very large.

I suspect this particular cartograph was done by eyeballing it, not algorithmically.

I haven't even heard of most of those languages.

Perhaps we've discussed this before, but does anyone know how many living languages there are?