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Linguistic Diversity Project - Sagar

This document discusses linguistic diversity around the world. It notes that a majority of the world's approximately 7,000 languages are threatened with extinction. Africa and Asia have the largest number of languages, while only a small percentage of the world's population speaks the majority of languages. Maintaining linguistic diversity has cultural, informational, and identity benefits, such as preserving cultural knowledge, furthering the understanding of language, and maintaining cultural identities. The loss of languages also means a loss of history, as each language has importance to understanding its culture's history.

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Sagar Agarwal
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555 views2 pages

Linguistic Diversity Project - Sagar

This document discusses linguistic diversity around the world. It notes that a majority of the world's approximately 7,000 languages are threatened with extinction. Africa and Asia have the largest number of languages, while only a small percentage of the world's population speaks the majority of languages. Maintaining linguistic diversity has cultural, informational, and identity benefits, such as preserving cultural knowledge, furthering the understanding of language, and maintaining cultural identities. The loss of languages also means a loss of history, as each language has importance to understanding its culture's history.

Uploaded by

Sagar Agarwal
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1.

Introduction
Linguistic diversity in the world today is an issue of growing social importance
because a majority of all living languages are threatened in their continued existence.
How they can be sustained is a matter of study and debate. Changes in the vitality of a
language has important implications for individuals and societies. Multilingualism is a
common and increasing phenomenon in present day society which can be studied
from different perspectives. The purpose of the position paper is to focus on language
as a cultural asset and to establish the relationship between linguistic diversity and
human welfare from an economic perspective.
Nowadays there are around 7,000 languages being spoken in the world. It is difficult
to know the exact number of languages because the distinction between a language
and a dialect is not always clear. In fact languages are not isolated entities and in
many cases there are no clear boundaries between them, it is rather a continuum that
extends along a geographical area.
Linguistic diversity has been defined in a broad sense as the range of variations
exhibited by human languages. The most common definition uses a simple count of
languages: the more languages, the more Linguistic Diversity.
Distribution of languages by area of origin
Continent

Languages

Count Percent

Africa

2,092

30.3

Americas

1,002

14.5

Asia

2,269

32.8

Europe

239

3.5

Pacific

1,310

19.0

Totals

6,912

100.0

This table shows that Africa and Asia have a much larger number of languages than
Europe. Most of the worlds languages are spoken in a broad area on either side of the
Equator - in South-east Asia, India, Africa, and South America.
The languages included in this table are living languages with speakers who have
these languages as a first language and languages are only counted once as their
country of origin even if they are spoken in more than one country.
While less than ten thousand people (0.00015%) of the worlds population speak 52%
(about 3640) of the worlds languages as natives, over a 100 million people (40%) of
the worlds population speak only eight languages (0.1%) as their native language. In
all, while a great majority of the worlds popu- lation (94%) speak only 5% of the
worlds languages as their native languages, only a few people of the worlds
population (6%) speak the remaining 95% of the worlds languages as their native

lan- guages. For example, 50% of the worlds languages are spoken in 8 countries
only.
Although diversity has been shown to have a number of benefits, including enhanced
employee creativity and competence, this recognition is often found more in theory
than actual practice.
Intercultural communication has become a necessity in most workplaces due to the
forces of globalization. There may be no other region where this necessity is more
clearly evident than in the Arabian Gulf, and more specifically, the United Arab
Emirates. This is especially evident in the UAE where an excessively large ratio of
the workforce is foreign.

IMPORTANCE OF LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY


1) Loss of cultural information - There may be a lot of interesting and useful
cultural information captured by a language's lexicon that is lost when the language
dies. For example, a language might make a lexical distinction between two different
types of plants that may ultimately have medical benefit. Ultimately, Language has
been called "the DNA of culture." (Bruce Cole)
2) Loss of linguistic information - Not only do linguists care about this, but the
general public might, too. Understanding how language works can ultimate provide
insight into rehabilitating aphasia, dealing with dyslexia, helping children with
specific language impairment, helping older people with hearing loss and may help
with degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. If there are only a handful of languages
to study, then we do not have enough data to really understand how language actually
works in the brain.
3) Loss of cultural identity - Language is an important way of establishing and
maintaining cultural identity. This may not seem important to you, but to a lot of
cultures and peoples, it makes them happy to not assimilate 100% to the dominant
culture.
4) Loss of History Languages are ancient, they can be a hundred or even thousands
of year old. Each language has its importance in history and to understand history,
understanding its language is the most important.

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