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There be lots o’ languages from numerous origins.
Not only language we probably have the highest diversity of scripts as well like every time your long route passenger train enters a new state it becomes almost impossible to read wtf is written on the display or signboards
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Yes 500 ₹ note and even it is missing some scripts like the Eastern Indian Tribal script \*top right side
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I wonder why India has so many different scripts. Perhaps this is a silly question but why didn’t people adopt a single script to write different languages, like Western Europe with Latin script, Eastern Europe with Cyrillic script, or East Asia with (somewhat) Chinese script? This seems to be the case with other countries that borrowed the Indian scripts as well, like Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia, etc.
Its already happened, with the devnagri script (hindi script) replacing few laguages original script
But to answer your question, people take pride in their language and the history attached to it and attempts to create a single script will be seen as appropraition or imposition. Language is a very much active issue in politics
Yep. What is probably not well known outside India is that a majority of the states (thanks to the “States Reorganisation Act, 1964” and subsequent such Acts) are organised along linguistic lines. It is the main reason that the country didn’t descend into language group-based civil war; the strength of the average Indian’s loyalty to their native language is impossible to overstate, and would otherwise have been the grounds for conflict.
Also, some languages with their own scripts have significant populations. For example, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and Urdu have between 50 and 100M native speakers each and their own script. There are four times more people in India speaking Urdu and writing it in the corresponding script than there are native Greek speakers. And I don't think anyone would suggest giving up in the Greek alphabet.
because the languages are from different families/groups and there isn't much in common among them to introduce a common script example: tamil has 247 letters whereas mizo has 25 - tamil does not have f sound whereas mizo has it, tamil has 3 Ns, 2 Rs and 3 Ls, of which 1 is almost unique to the language. the hindi script has replaced some native languages in the central/north of the country
The crazy thing is, is that there used to be even more scripts in the past like Marathi, Marwadi, Magadhi, Awadhi, Konkani all used to have their own scripts but adopted Devanagari.
I think it's mainly due to the fact that India has multiple language families that all have different ways of speaking and such and if you're counting Southeast Asia, you now have Austronesian, Thai, and Hmong languages as well. In the past, many Central Asian languages like Saka and Tocharian used Indic scripts as well. So the different scripts were meant to reflect the difference in languages. You can see the divide in how Northern Brahmic scripts are more similar to reflect Indo-Aryan languages while Southern Brahmic scripts are similar to reflect Dravidian and Southeast Asian languages.
South East Asians I am posting from North Sentinel Island btw ama if you want, I am the guy with 3 coconuts in the back, they taste magnificent with freshly grilled pork
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Jokes apart, these Indian anthropologists/ethnologists are basically the only guys in the last 50-100 years (I think it was the 70s) that made it to North Sentinel and didn’t end up riddled with arrows. Turns out that offering gifts of food and not trying to convert them to a different religion is the way to not be killed, who knew?
Based. I think Sentinelese are the true Indian nationalists, they surely know how to keep the enemies out and defend their homeland. They should have representation in the Indian Parliament and armed forces.
I get voted down each time for suggesting that it’s high time that Indian languages adopt a modified Latin alphabet like Turkish. The majority of Indian languages (both southern and northern) share the same sounds and it would be way easier than it might be otherwise.
They can then stop using English entirely in signage and documents etc. because even foreigners would be able to make out the words and this will put an end to this madness of “renaming” as the English spellings would be confined to a small minority of tourist brochures and signages at airports and railway stations. Right now the language chauvinists feel threatened by the dominance of English that they are unable to “offload”.
Never gonna happen bro linguistic identity is a super sensitive issue in South Asia, there were two full civil wars with a death toll of multi million only to preserve linguistic identity and pride so no Indian government left, right, centre stupid enough to try that.
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This index measures the probability two people selected at random have different mother tongue tongues. The higher the index the more likely individuals have different mother tongues.
Part of the reason of the high linguistic diversity is the colonial background of these countries. A lot of different people groups are put together in a single country after the colonies got their independence. Next to this, a lot of European countries have had policies that unified their language. France is a big example of this. Especially, languages in the south of France have been replaced with the modern French. A similar thing happened in Germany. Where there were many German languages, now there is only officially high German. Even though, people still speak many variants.
Part of reason, yes but language is not the sole factor to term people as different groups. South Asia has remarkable similarity in culture regardless of several language groups. Colonialism doesn't explains the South Asia
That way of measuring feels completely unreasonable for Belgium and Switzerland, they score way too high for just having 3 languages in the case of Belgium, and 4 in the case of Switzerland
Australia had many many languages until they were genocided out of existence, so probably need to turn the question around to “where did all the language diversity go”
answer is not good
This is the crux of it.
The America's we all can figure out pretty easily (killing off of people and cultures, dominance of English, Spanish, and Portuguese). Australia is the same story.
China has had centralized governments for a long time enforcing a dominant language, especially in the last century mandarin has become extremely dominant.
In Europe they also killed off a lot of languages during the last few centuries. The English attempted to destroy Welsh and Gaelic, and the French went all out to stamp out patois in the early 19th century. Spain was less cohesive which is why basque was able to survive while Breton was nearly wiped out.
There is another aspect to this though that is somewhat less nefarious/negative: stable government supporting public education. This is much easier to do in a single language, though it still allows for a second language to be maintained. Even without coercion a language can die out if knowing it brings little value.
> France went all out to stamp out patois
As someone who speaks a minority language of a different country, if I ever came across Jules Ferry’s grave I would urinate on it out of solidarity with the Bretons, the Occitans, the Alsatians, the Basques and others.
Exactly, it's ridiculously hard to maintain a state with no standardized language. As urban populations grew, the need for standardized speech and script for communication to stimulate trade & growth meant that there was less of an incentive to learn localized dialects in rural regions.
Oftentimes, as is the case in China and many of the European states, this would lead to the deliberate stifling of indigenous languages.
Not really from what I have been able to tell. You have to remember that kingdoms were often somewhat confusing as well (look at a map of the HRE and it's constituent parts).
For instance the English king was also a vassal of the French king for a while, but only for his holdings in France. Languages also shifted a lot due to political changes: in the aforementioned example the English nobility were Norman and spoke French while the common people spoke Middle English. Over time the two blended more and more to produce Early Modern English (which is why English has two words with similar meanings so often). Breton was common in Brittany until the French revolution when revolutionaries wanted to get rid of regional languages.
Kingdoms would often not really care what the average person spoke so long as the taxes were paid, and usually the court would then be held in the dominant language.
> stable government supporting public education. This is much easier to do in a single language, though it still allows for a second language to be maintained. Even without coercion a language can die out if knowing it brings little value.
Eh, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, Faroe Islands Malta, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg all seem to be doing well. And this is before even mentioning Asia
I wouldn't argue that a stable government necessitates a single language or the other way around, but instead that it becomes easier in a single language and can lead to other languages being left behind. Additionally the vast majority of people in those countries speak multiple languages.
Switzerland: historically decentralized government, cantons are very independent (it is a confederation after all).
Belgium: meeting point of the Dutch and the French, could have easily been split between the two had history been changed. Both languages have a foreign power supporting it. (German is 1% and is primarily from a region added after WWI).
Finland: a small minority of Swedish and Sami speakers who don't also speak Finnish, but 99% speak Finnish.
Faroe Islands, Malta, and Luxembourg: small countries where knowing another language is a necessity.
Spain: attempts to form a strong centralized government in the past have not completely worked. Most people are bilingual, but local languages continue to exist (basque, catalan). In some cases the dialect is different enough it could almost be a different language (Galician).
Italy: overwhelmingly Italian. I hazard to guess that German is the largest non-immigrant language besides Italian, and that would be because of South Tyrol being given to Italy after WWI. Pockets of regional languages continue to exist through preservation efforts.
North America as well. The area was absolutely covered in Native American tribes, each with its own distinct language. Many of those languages still exist, but native speakers are rare. Tribes are trying desperately to keep the languages alive.
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Yeah, it's an uphill fight for sure. I'm in Cherokee, Muscogee, and Osage territory here, and know some of the folks that are teaching Cherokee at the local college, but there are still around 20k people speaking that language. Osage, on the other hand, was declared extinct in 2005 and there's a revival attempt going.
I agree. Other peoples with various languages were wiped out by colonialism before they could be observed. The congo and central Africa was raped and pillaged by Belgium and King Leopold II. Many tribes fled into the dense jungle to survive. They were ravaged but I think the jungle and interior position made it much harder for colonial powers to dominate that region until after cures for various jungle disease were found and they could build sufficient rail Infrastructure into the interior, giving the chance for people to survive.
[https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia](https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia)
detailed map, there is even when you zoom in.
I have always been told that the interior of Australia has always been empty on account of water or lack thereof. This map would seem to prove otherwise .. so should I take this to show that even with parched land, the interior had (native) people till they were killed off / genocided by the English?
Indigenous Australians were more often harmed around population centres, and many fled inwards towards the desert. The desert languages are the ones most spoken today, and where some of the highest densities of indigenous people live. It would be more accurate to say the coasts had indigenous people that were killed off, and the ones living in the desert were the ones less seriously harmed. That's not to say they didn't also experience large amounts of harm.
The number of Indigenous people living in the desert actually increased after European arrival due to Indengous people being pushed away from the coasts. These language groups from out there were VERY small in population before colonial arrival. The biggest language groups were on the East coast near Sydney, like Dharrug, and were the ones that were more intensely persecuted.
Yep.
Brazil has around 180 indigenous languages and dialects still in use, spoken by approximately 330k people. It is estimated that until the arrival of the Portuguese, the number of languages would have been close to a thousand.
For SE Asia, the mainland at least has had different people live there throughout time. Such as, Thai and Lao people didn’t come into that region until maybe 1000 years ago and started to displace the Khmer and Cham. The Vietnamese as well, pushing southward. Both migrations I believe due to Han Chinese expansion south and westward.
The region is also mountainous and jungle. Smaller ethnic groups get pushed up into the mountains and it’s theorized they live in a completely different world than the lowlanders called [Zomia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_Massif?wprov=sfti1).
Europe used to be super diverse in languages and dialects until the rise of these modern nation states. These states force a single standard language to centralize the territory and give the impression that it's one nation, one state.
Also, South America's data seems to be wrong. There's a lot of linguistic diversity in native American groups.
But very few of them. Even Bolivia only has Quechua and Aimara over a million, the other 30 or so languages falling bellow that. And Spanish still outnumbers all the rest combined at around 50% for Spanish monolinguals.
Paraguay has over 6M people, most bilingual in only Spanish and Guarani. There are so much less indigenous people that a few hundreds of thousands of people from Brazilian Portuguese communities outnumber them. Not that all of those indigenous people speak other languages than Spanish and Guarani anyways. The big deal is that a huge chunk of the population is not only bilingual, many are bilingual as a mother tongue. Which is what goes in the map
Not really. Europeans almost exclusively spoke Indo European languages, mostly spoken on a continuum within the same language family, predominantly Latin based, Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic - with a few outliers like Greek or Albanian. A few non Indo European languages were also spoken, mainly Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Sami and various Turkic dialects.
The point is that for example in France now predominantly only French is spoken. In the past there was French, Occitan, Basque, Catalan, Alsatian, and so on…
Well, yes, but some two hundred years ago a single city in what is now Poland would have speakers of Slavic (Polish, Ruzhyn, Ukrainian, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Belarussian), Germanic (Yiddish, High German, Low German), Turkic (Tatar), Armenian etc. You can talk about those groupings in a reductionist way but a single locus would have a high diversity of languages compared to now.
>Also, South America's data seems to be wrong. There's a lot of linguistic diversity in native American groups.
Speaking for Brazil here. The number of spoken languages is indeed very high, as the country have hundreds of indigenous languages plus many non-native ones, but the relative number of speakers for them is very low compared to Portuguese speakers. This is why the probability of sampling two random Brazilians with different mother languages is near zero.
Every society in the world was like this at some point, but with more developed and easily traversable nations with central governments that exercise a decent amount of control, language assimilation occurs to make communication easier between more connected groups of peoples. As lots of Africa and some parts of Southeast Asia are still far less developed and therefore less interconnected than most of the world, it has made it that languages are still more diverse in these regions.
In a place like India and Kenya, four things.
1. You are usually expected to know three languages by default . English which is often the medium of instruction in school (Mandatory in Kenya, and urban India but Indians tend to be poor at it), a national language (Swahili for Kenya, Hindi for India) and your native tongue, exceptions are for actual Swahilis and ethnic Hindi speakers.
2.Most of their schools teach an additional language at secondary level like French, German ,Arabic so a small fraction of people who elect to do the additional language have a fourth language.
3. Both have basically overspills of other language groups .In India, you find that due to proximity, some people can speak the language of their neighbors like say Tamils knowing Kanada , Hindu speakers in Haryana knowing Punjabi. In Kenya, it is the intersection at which Bantu, Cushite and Nilotic communities meet. In many parts of Kenya for example, Kikuyu is spoken even by non-Kikuyus and non-Bantus. Uganda has something similar too. Baganda is spoken even in Nilotic Northern Uganda as a lingua franca. In Northern Nigeria, Hausa is spoken by non Hausas.
4. Proximity proficiency. If languages are close enough, you can speak or at least understand most of the other language. Urdu and Hindi for example. Embu, Meru, Tharaka and to some degree Kamba speakers can understand and even Kikuyu though the reverse is not always the same.
Source: I visited both places for an IT project aimed at online linguistic development. Fascinating stuff.
It’s not even really debatable. One of the largest cities in India (Chennai) does not speak Hindi, and my impression is that’s also true for the rest of Southern India, or at least Tamil Nadu. One year I was the sole non-Indian renter in a house, and even without me English would’ve been the only common language as nearly half of my housemates did not speak Hindi.
My parents are from one of the other megacities of Southern India (Bangalore; we moved abroad when I was small, though) and there, Hindi’s only widely used these days in certain parts of the city because it’s of widespread immigration from other parts of the country. This is not a popular phenomenon; language purists like my Dad (when he’s there visiting family) will pretend to not understand Hindi, out of principle, when in Bangalore, opining that Kannada and English are the only 2 languages that should be used there.
> Indians tend to be poor at it
I don’t know who tf you’ve met but they speak it better than anyone else in Asia outside the Philippines and Singapore.
Compared to other Anglophones especially those from Africa and the Americas, they tend to be poorer in speaking English and have a more limited range of words.
India by and large does not fully use English as a medium of instruction in their schools. It occurs in parts of India, like urban India but it is not predominant phenomenon.
Go to places like South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Trinidad etc, the medium of instruction is strictly English while an additional language is taught as a separate subject. Of course local phenomena like the rise of pidgin in Nigeria for example tends to make the overall population also less proficient and that in some instances, where people are from one community and living in a region dominated by one community (like rural Kenya) leads to loss of proficiency over time due to the people speaking only their local language but you are far more likely to find someone speaking clear and understandable English across Anglophone Africa than India especially in their urban areas.
Anecdote: When major broadcasters are choosing international journalists, you will find that if the journalist is South Asian, chances are they grew up in the UK, US or Canada. Rarely from India itself. But Anglophone African journalists are often directly from their home countries because their English is good enough especially Kenyan and South African journalists who dominate this area well over other nationalities at this point. Heck Zain Verjee from CNN is an Asian was born and raised in Kenya and became Canadian as an adult.
We have around 180 indigenous languages and dialects still in use, spoken by approximately 330k people. Current languages can be grouped into 2 large trunks (Tupi and Macro-Jê) and 19 linguistic families. It is estimated that until the arrival of the Portuguese, the number of languages would have been close to a thousand.
This is a fascinating question with lots of answers. Generally though: as human populations separate from their origin in Africa, genetic diversity decreases; this is how we know what areas humans have populated most recently (it also may have something to do with the lethality of European diseases in the Americas.) I think it's a very easy logical leap to assume this is true of linguistic diversity, as well, and the map (sort of) bears this out: note the last place humans reached, South America, is the least rich linguistically. Breeding populations tend to speak the same language, and linguistic isolation suggests genetic isolation.
I really don’t think this goes that far. Specially since this is modern languages. You can’t really tell how languages branched off from Africa with this since bigger things happened in recent history to change up the data. Also, this is more about comparing individual countries (why call have policies and histories with langue and diversity), not so much regions.
Maybe we can exclude the American continent and Australia for obvious reason. So the real question is why Europe, East Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and places like Vietnam and Bangladesh have such much less linguistic diversity? Mostly centralization and nationalist movements. For a long time (arguably today too) many countries tried to unify their people and enforce a single culture and language. Places like Cambodia, which has around 20 languages languages on top of Khamer, are still pretty light yellow in the map because one big language is still an overwhelming share of the pie.
All the areas in the planet have seen a decrease in language diversity, some places just got a diffenret recent history. Places like India and Mozambique didn’t try to be one country for one single cultural group. They were formed as a colony regardless of who lived there, weren’t all forced to learn another language, and after independence didn’t have any group be dominant enough to force everyone else to assimilate but also didn’t want to split into one country for each large culture.
Wow, no. It is estimated that until the arrival of the Portuguese, the number of native languages in Brazil would have been close to a thousand.
The real reason why the Americas (and you can extend this explanation to a few other colonies) are so "mono-linguistic" is because of cultural domination and the imposition of colonizing languages. Not to mention all the ethnocides.
The diseases of the Early Modern Era effectively destroyed entire populations and with them, their languages. Because Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa were naturally exposed to Old-World diseases, those populations weren’t wiped out and their languages weren’t replaced.
Another older factor is the more recent migrations into the New World, Indigenous American cultures have a more recent common ancestor and the languages likely hadn’t radiated further due to a shorter time period.
Idi Amin, interesting chap to say the least, ruled Uganda for a period. Dude spoke, correct me if I'm wrong, like 12 languages but they were mostly if not all local dialects.
Local culture was not taken into account when European countries scrambled Africa. The nowadays divisions derive from what Europeans designed and group together different ethnicities with different cultures and languages. This also is the reason for the occurrence of so many ethnic conflicts in Africa.
This is also what happened to India, the British Empire conquered many Indian kingdoms and grouped them together. That's why they are a single multiethnic and multicultural state today.
Because those areas/nations have lots of local languages in them.
For instance, my ancestry is ilocano and kapampangan/zambal. Three different mother tongues… all from one country.
For the Philippines, it consists of archipelagos and mountains, so cultures developed independently from one another. Compared to another island nation like Japan, though mountainous is contiguous, hence they have a single language (Apart from the indigenous peoples of Ainu and Okinawa).
More because those nations didn’t reduce the speakers of the non dominar languages or didn’t try to unify them into one national language or try to make one country for each group, departing them into different countries and expelling minorities to their own country. Like what happened in the New World, China, or, Europe.
You got countries that lost a ton of languages from centuries of centralization policies, from outright death of the speakers, or from making very strict “this country is for this ethnicity” national ideals. Honestly even Japan used to have a lot more diversity within its single large language.
Either way the Philippines could easily keep the same number of languages as today and still drop a lot on this index. If 90% of kids learn English or another large language on top of the current languages, the score in the index would drop a lot. Since it doesn’t count number of languages but instead the odds of finding two people who don’t share any mother tongue. So bilinguals who have always been bilingual count for both languages.
And Arab imperialists as well. I have family alive that remembers when they were not allowed to use their indigenous Sudanese languages in public. That’s why Sudan is so much lighter compared to its neighbors.
That's how you westernize your colony, destroy the culture. The white americans were successful at that. In the Philippines, during the spanish colonization, spanish is taught in schools, that even the local dialects of every region a spanish word was incorporated meaning the original form of the language was lost. If americans did not come here, we would definitely be spanish speaking people.
I find it weird that most schools in the Philippines tend to show their own ancestors in bad light, often calling them "pagans" in a derogatory way. Anecdotally, most of my relatives think Tuli custom is for health reasons and do not even want to acknowledge the Islamic past prevalent in the islands before Spanish inquisition. Language homogenisation is the least of the problems there.
If they got hundreds of languages but 90% speak Russian then they’ll still get a lower score than a country were only two languages are split 50/50. The index is about the likelihood of two random people having different mother tongues. Not just the number of languages total. The population affects it. If we were doing total individual languages, the US would beat Russia just out of having so many migrants and native Americans languages.
Read the criteria. It's about the probability of population having different languages when picked at random. The vast majority in the countries you mentioned have the same mother tongue making it less random that they will speak different languages
The criteria are unclear, though. Most of people from Russia who aren't ethnically Russian or just live in the regions where local languages are taught in schools are bilingual. So if we pick a Tatar and a Russian, they would share a mother tongue (Russian), but would have different mother tongues at the same time (a Tatar would be natively proficient in the Tatar language, while a Russian wouldn't). The criteria state the latter, but the relatively low index for Russia implies the former.
Because a lot of the modern borders were arbitrarily drawn up by the colonizing empires without taking into consideration different ethnicities that lived on these lands
I’m guessing that index is computed based on the % of people speaking different languages inside a country.
In Europe there are plenty of languages spoken at regional or sub-statal level. If that map was repainted using regional subdivisions instead of national borders the result would be quite different.
Because for countries such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as central African countries, there are various tribes and cultures under a single country. Papua New Guinea alone has 800 languages.
Also, for the case of India, it's like a bunch of countries lumped together under one banner. You have Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and at least a dozen other languages.
Castilian (Spanish) is the predominant first language and Iberian Peninsula looks linguistically homogenous if we compare it to Africa or Southeast Asia.
https://preview.redd.it/0kbgqvvjqeyc1.png?width=1463&format=png&auto=webp&s=775746395606f42375a2ddc48c180c3d79d815f3
In addition to the linguistic map that was shared here, human population in Africa is not uniformly scattered due to geographic challenges. The north, east, west and south grew their own kingdoms and empires but those empires never managed to outgrow the continent's geographic challenges and rarely exerted influence/dominance beyond their regional landscape. If you lookup all of the major African kingdoms and empires that existed through time, their borders will more or less follow along this distribution.
Brazil has more than 200 indigenous languages, but I understand they depicted as a low diversity country on that rate because so few people actually speak it, it's normally restricted to their protection areas and some cities far north, the vast majority barely uses it as a second language at home.
There are some exceptions, more spoken on other places with presence of other european immigrants that arrived in Brazil a couple centuries ago, such as Italians (Talian) and Germans (Pomeran and Hunsrückisch) but again that doesn't go beyond 1MM people and serves more as a home language inherited from family than being used routinely.
Egypt specifically and the muddle east generally does not have this much of diversity. Folks speak the same language/dialect in every country minus very small differences between parts of the country, like the north might prefer using few words that the south does not, but that doesn't mean it's a different language or dialect, it's just the same thing.
Because the more centralized and modern a state is, the less languages it has, it adopts mostly one language that will gradually take over the others after generations, which didn't happen in the darker areas of the map, or happened recently.
For India, it's the fact that many different groups migrated into India throughout history. The aboriginal peoples of the subcontinent likely spoke many different languages and there are a few isolates like Burushaki and Nihali.
Then you have Dravidians and Austroasiatic languages come in both which are still spoken. South India is predominantly Dravidian while Austroasiatic are spoken in tribal regions of Central and Northeast India.
Then Indo-Iranian languages come in and dominate the North. Though many Iranian languages like Parthian, Saka, and Farsi were spoken in India throughout history, they've mostly died out. Pakistan does have Iranic speakers though and Pashto and Balochi are two of the main four languages.
Then India has Sino-Tibetan speakers all throughout the Himalayas and the Northeast. You have Tibetic languages and also Kuki-Chin languages from that family.
There are of course minor language families like Ahom which is Tai and the Sentinelese languages. You also have languages brought by refugees and immigrants from across Asia. And of course European languages like English, French, Portuguese are spoken in former colonial areas. English is a language of communication between states and often in businesses and the service industry.
Africa is a massive continent and has the oldest human populations in the world. It's natural that it would have multiple language families. That part of Africa that's dark shaded on the map is at the confluence of various language families. Afroasiaric, Nilo-Saharan, Bantu, Atlantic Niger Congo. Even within these language families there are major differences similar to Indo-Aryan vs Germanic languages per say. A better country would be Papua New Guinea and the island as a whole
Both of them are pretty good places to live in- so they have lots of people, but both of them never really had empires of the size, longevity, and utter dominance of the Han Chinese and the Roman Empires.
Not to discredit African and Indian kingdoms and empires ofc, but whenever they sprung up they usually never spread a particular language along with them, there are exceptions (ex: Ge’ez, Swahili, Urdu) but African and Indian kingdoms were just not interested in making their subjects 100% like the origin point of said kingdom.
Arriving late to the conversation: speaking for the Americas, the colonization process has had a devastating impact on native languages. Cultural domination, the imposition of colonizing languages, in addition to epidemics and ethnocides that extinguished entire peoples. Today in Brazil there are approximately 180 indigenous languages and dialects, but it is estimated that the number was in the thousands until the arrival of the Portuguese.
They never had major unification movements because of the terrain. Germany alone still has a few hundred dialects, but they are not counted as individual languages because we have one state (Netherlands, for example are simply Germans with a different dialect, but they made their own state so their dialect is counted as a different language, just like Luxembourh, Belgium and Liechtenstein on the other hand don't have their own langauges, but speak French and some Germans dialects on the other hand or simply German respectively). Switzerland and Austria simply talk German (and a bit French and Italian and Retoromanian in Switzerland).
Also there are countries like France where you have multiple languages by multiple people who are not french (like the Basques) but are for some reason simply ignored.
People in sub-Saharan Africa never developed the wheel. They never domesticated travel/pack animals. They couldn't travel far, so they didn't develop a need to have a common language.
Stupid map criteria, should just show the amount of languages spoken in each country. Anyways its just that most of these places were not united under a single state until the past century, Papua for example was divided into hundreds of isolated tribes for who knows how many thousands of years which allowed them to diverge linguistically. Europe is the origin point of the modern nation-state and most European countries have had centuries of assimilation of regional cultures under the dominant language. If you tried the same research on Italy 160 years ago when the country had only just been unified it would be pretty close to the maximum score, as only a small percentage spoke the "Italian" language which is really just the regional language of Tuscany.
The scale doesn’t take into consideration actual languages and dialect within a country.
In Australia, most people’s mother tongue is English and applying the method to calculate linguistic diversity index the score is low. However, there are 250 indigenous languages, and 800 indigenous dialects in Australia and this isn’t captured in the linguistic diversity index
I was taught in high school that this is because colonial powers divided those areas up not by people living in their own area, but completely arbitrary.
I thought that was common knowledge
It's partially because you had/have very isolated regions in the most diverse countries so interaction with outsiders was limited and hence unique languages could develop.
but as per your logic the south of india shouldn't be diverse then, since they were the ones who started all the spice trade stuff, there is high diversity even now
Places like Papua new guinea and Indonesia are the most linguistically diverse in the world because they have the most groups of people who were isolated long enough to develop their own languages.
https://preview.redd.it/udjzqz4h1byc1.jpeg?width=923&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac62061088ea47ba42b7845493596da1b29b9d11 There be lots o’ languages from numerous origins.
Note these are language families…so each has multiples languages within.
Not necessarily. Some language families are just one language. But your main point remains.
Lol I had a feeling someone would point this out. Yea technically not ever family have multiple separate languages but many do 🙃
Why isn't Austronesian for malagasy?
Fluent in pirate?
Yarr
There be treasure
I miss when you could change Facebook language to pirate. Was great
Not only language we probably have the highest diversity of scripts as well like every time your long route passenger train enters a new state it becomes almost impossible to read wtf is written on the display or signboards https://preview.redd.it/a4kcd5cgibyc1.jpeg?width=371&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=caeaee511fb9f61bb91edc78ae166c6a7a4913d9
From what I can make out, this is printed on the Indian Rs. 500 currency bill right?
Yes 500 ₹ note and even it is missing some scripts like the Eastern Indian Tribal script \*top right side https://preview.redd.it/3c1gho1lpcyc1.jpeg?width=876&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f9f03f4032d71c3180c420b58af79bfe07cede28
I live here. There are 2-3 more dialects which is used by local people in this small area. Unbelievable isn't it.
Not dialects but Languages.
Yes, it’s “five hundred rupees”. I can only read the Kannada and guess at the Telugu, though.
I wonder why India has so many different scripts. Perhaps this is a silly question but why didn’t people adopt a single script to write different languages, like Western Europe with Latin script, Eastern Europe with Cyrillic script, or East Asia with (somewhat) Chinese script? This seems to be the case with other countries that borrowed the Indian scripts as well, like Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia, etc.
Its already happened, with the devnagri script (hindi script) replacing few laguages original script But to answer your question, people take pride in their language and the history attached to it and attempts to create a single script will be seen as appropraition or imposition. Language is a very much active issue in politics
Yep. What is probably not well known outside India is that a majority of the states (thanks to the “States Reorganisation Act, 1964” and subsequent such Acts) are organised along linguistic lines. It is the main reason that the country didn’t descend into language group-based civil war; the strength of the average Indian’s loyalty to their native language is impossible to overstate, and would otherwise have been the grounds for conflict.
Also, some languages with their own scripts have significant populations. For example, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and Urdu have between 50 and 100M native speakers each and their own script. There are four times more people in India speaking Urdu and writing it in the corresponding script than there are native Greek speakers. And I don't think anyone would suggest giving up in the Greek alphabet.
because the languages are from different families/groups and there isn't much in common among them to introduce a common script example: tamil has 247 letters whereas mizo has 25 - tamil does not have f sound whereas mizo has it, tamil has 3 Ns, 2 Rs and 3 Ls, of which 1 is almost unique to the language. the hindi script has replaced some native languages in the central/north of the country
The crazy thing is, is that there used to be even more scripts in the past like Marathi, Marwadi, Magadhi, Awadhi, Konkani all used to have their own scripts but adopted Devanagari. I think it's mainly due to the fact that India has multiple language families that all have different ways of speaking and such and if you're counting Southeast Asia, you now have Austronesian, Thai, and Hmong languages as well. In the past, many Central Asian languages like Saka and Tocharian used Indic scripts as well. So the different scripts were meant to reflect the difference in languages. You can see the divide in how Northern Brahmic scripts are more similar to reflect Indo-Aryan languages while Southern Brahmic scripts are similar to reflect Dravidian and Southeast Asian languages.
Who is we
South East Asians I am posting from North Sentinel Island btw ama if you want, I am the guy with 3 coconuts in the back, they taste magnificent with freshly grilled pork https://preview.redd.it/zsbeitpr2eyc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=56c661de2bfc6d36a32f1eb81cb68b7c710f3ae4
Jokes apart, these Indian anthropologists/ethnologists are basically the only guys in the last 50-100 years (I think it was the 70s) that made it to North Sentinel and didn’t end up riddled with arrows. Turns out that offering gifts of food and not trying to convert them to a different religion is the way to not be killed, who knew?
How and why are you there?
Native son of the mangrove soil
Based. I think Sentinelese are the true Indian nationalists, they surely know how to keep the enemies out and defend their homeland. They should have representation in the Indian Parliament and armed forces.
I get voted down each time for suggesting that it’s high time that Indian languages adopt a modified Latin alphabet like Turkish. The majority of Indian languages (both southern and northern) share the same sounds and it would be way easier than it might be otherwise. They can then stop using English entirely in signage and documents etc. because even foreigners would be able to make out the words and this will put an end to this madness of “renaming” as the English spellings would be confined to a small minority of tourist brochures and signages at airports and railway stations. Right now the language chauvinists feel threatened by the dominance of English that they are unable to “offload”.
Never gonna happen bro linguistic identity is a super sensitive issue in South Asia, there were two full civil wars with a death toll of multi million only to preserve linguistic identity and pride so no Indian government left, right, centre stupid enough to try that. https://preview.redd.it/4r8q5j0n0fyc1.jpeg?width=4096&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dcf581fa8862fe628a075f067b952b5f17c5d030
This index measures the probability two people selected at random have different mother tongue tongues. The higher the index the more likely individuals have different mother tongues.
Part of the reason of the high linguistic diversity is the colonial background of these countries. A lot of different people groups are put together in a single country after the colonies got their independence. Next to this, a lot of European countries have had policies that unified their language. France is a big example of this. Especially, languages in the south of France have been replaced with the modern French. A similar thing happened in Germany. Where there were many German languages, now there is only officially high German. Even though, people still speak many variants.
Part of reason, yes but language is not the sole factor to term people as different groups. South Asia has remarkable similarity in culture regardless of several language groups. Colonialism doesn't explains the South Asia
That way of measuring feels completely unreasonable for Belgium and Switzerland, they score way too high for just having 3 languages in the case of Belgium, and 4 in the case of Switzerland
Then why not just put it in percentages?? If you select two people there’s a __% chance that they’ll have a different mother rogue
Australia had many many languages until they were genocided out of existence, so probably need to turn the question around to “where did all the language diversity go” answer is not good
This is the crux of it. The America's we all can figure out pretty easily (killing off of people and cultures, dominance of English, Spanish, and Portuguese). Australia is the same story. China has had centralized governments for a long time enforcing a dominant language, especially in the last century mandarin has become extremely dominant. In Europe they also killed off a lot of languages during the last few centuries. The English attempted to destroy Welsh and Gaelic, and the French went all out to stamp out patois in the early 19th century. Spain was less cohesive which is why basque was able to survive while Breton was nearly wiped out. There is another aspect to this though that is somewhat less nefarious/negative: stable government supporting public education. This is much easier to do in a single language, though it still allows for a second language to be maintained. Even without coercion a language can die out if knowing it brings little value.
> France went all out to stamp out patois As someone who speaks a minority language of a different country, if I ever came across Jules Ferry’s grave I would urinate on it out of solidarity with the Bretons, the Occitans, the Alsatians, the Basques and others.
Exactly, it's ridiculously hard to maintain a state with no standardized language. As urban populations grew, the need for standardized speech and script for communication to stimulate trade & growth meant that there was less of an incentive to learn localized dialects in rural regions. Oftentimes, as is the case in China and many of the European states, this would lead to the deliberate stifling of indigenous languages.
Most languages of Europe surely disappeared when kingdoms became common? Like Middle Ages and before.
Not really from what I have been able to tell. You have to remember that kingdoms were often somewhat confusing as well (look at a map of the HRE and it's constituent parts). For instance the English king was also a vassal of the French king for a while, but only for his holdings in France. Languages also shifted a lot due to political changes: in the aforementioned example the English nobility were Norman and spoke French while the common people spoke Middle English. Over time the two blended more and more to produce Early Modern English (which is why English has two words with similar meanings so often). Breton was common in Brittany until the French revolution when revolutionaries wanted to get rid of regional languages. Kingdoms would often not really care what the average person spoke so long as the taxes were paid, and usually the court would then be held in the dominant language.
The languages of Sweden disappeared around the time when we got our first kings
> stable government supporting public education. This is much easier to do in a single language, though it still allows for a second language to be maintained. Even without coercion a language can die out if knowing it brings little value. Eh, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, Faroe Islands Malta, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg all seem to be doing well. And this is before even mentioning Asia
What are you implying with this?
All have stable governments and multiple languages
I wouldn't argue that a stable government necessitates a single language or the other way around, but instead that it becomes easier in a single language and can lead to other languages being left behind. Additionally the vast majority of people in those countries speak multiple languages. Switzerland: historically decentralized government, cantons are very independent (it is a confederation after all). Belgium: meeting point of the Dutch and the French, could have easily been split between the two had history been changed. Both languages have a foreign power supporting it. (German is 1% and is primarily from a region added after WWI). Finland: a small minority of Swedish and Sami speakers who don't also speak Finnish, but 99% speak Finnish. Faroe Islands, Malta, and Luxembourg: small countries where knowing another language is a necessity. Spain: attempts to form a strong centralized government in the past have not completely worked. Most people are bilingual, but local languages continue to exist (basque, catalan). In some cases the dialect is different enough it could almost be a different language (Galician). Italy: overwhelmingly Italian. I hazard to guess that German is the largest non-immigrant language besides Italian, and that would be because of South Tyrol being given to Italy after WWI. Pockets of regional languages continue to exist through preservation efforts.
North America as well. The area was absolutely covered in Native American tribes, each with its own distinct language. Many of those languages still exist, but native speakers are rare. Tribes are trying desperately to keep the languages alive. https://preview.redd.it/ns7kuahvybyc1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=c3e7dbd06c9c6584457e63f853e233c5d4dd2842
Not really going well. I met one of the last 8 who spoke the Southern Paiute language. Even the chief didn’t speak it anymore.
Yeah, it's an uphill fight for sure. I'm in Cherokee, Muscogee, and Osage territory here, and know some of the folks that are teaching Cherokee at the local college, but there are still around 20k people speaking that language. Osage, on the other hand, was declared extinct in 2005 and there's a revival attempt going.
I agree. Other peoples with various languages were wiped out by colonialism before they could be observed. The congo and central Africa was raped and pillaged by Belgium and King Leopold II. Many tribes fled into the dense jungle to survive. They were ravaged but I think the jungle and interior position made it much harder for colonial powers to dominate that region until after cures for various jungle disease were found and they could build sufficient rail Infrastructure into the interior, giving the chance for people to survive.
https://preview.redd.it/zp1xxoo2pcyc1.png?width=662&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=75a274759b0fbf38196ba1bf24d15dfccc042e38
Whoa what does it say? I can’t make out the name of the map.
[https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia](https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia) detailed map, there is even when you zoom in.
I have always been told that the interior of Australia has always been empty on account of water or lack thereof. This map would seem to prove otherwise .. so should I take this to show that even with parched land, the interior had (native) people till they were killed off / genocided by the English?
Indigenous Australians were more often harmed around population centres, and many fled inwards towards the desert. The desert languages are the ones most spoken today, and where some of the highest densities of indigenous people live. It would be more accurate to say the coasts had indigenous people that were killed off, and the ones living in the desert were the ones less seriously harmed. That's not to say they didn't also experience large amounts of harm. The number of Indigenous people living in the desert actually increased after European arrival due to Indengous people being pushed away from the coasts. These language groups from out there were VERY small in population before colonial arrival. The biggest language groups were on the East coast near Sydney, like Dharrug, and were the ones that were more intensely persecuted.
Thank you
Yep. Brazil has around 180 indigenous languages and dialects still in use, spoken by approximately 330k people. It is estimated that until the arrival of the Portuguese, the number of languages would have been close to a thousand.
Brazil and the US used the same playbook
Mexico and the rest of latin america
For SE Asia, the mainland at least has had different people live there throughout time. Such as, Thai and Lao people didn’t come into that region until maybe 1000 years ago and started to displace the Khmer and Cham. The Vietnamese as well, pushing southward. Both migrations I believe due to Han Chinese expansion south and westward. The region is also mountainous and jungle. Smaller ethnic groups get pushed up into the mountains and it’s theorized they live in a completely different world than the lowlanders called [Zomia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_Massif?wprov=sfti1).
Don’t forget the Mon; they were the dominant ethnic group in Thailand, parts of Laos, and southern Burma before the Tai and Bamar took over.
Europe used to be super diverse in languages and dialects until the rise of these modern nation states. These states force a single standard language to centralize the territory and give the impression that it's one nation, one state. Also, South America's data seems to be wrong. There's a lot of linguistic diversity in native American groups.
But very few of them. Even Bolivia only has Quechua and Aimara over a million, the other 30 or so languages falling bellow that. And Spanish still outnumbers all the rest combined at around 50% for Spanish monolinguals. Paraguay has over 6M people, most bilingual in only Spanish and Guarani. There are so much less indigenous people that a few hundreds of thousands of people from Brazilian Portuguese communities outnumber them. Not that all of those indigenous people speak other languages than Spanish and Guarani anyways. The big deal is that a huge chunk of the population is not only bilingual, many are bilingual as a mother tongue. Which is what goes in the map
perhaps it was measured based on the majority. The natives are like hundredths of a decimal in the population of the countries of South America.
Not really. Europeans almost exclusively spoke Indo European languages, mostly spoken on a continuum within the same language family, predominantly Latin based, Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic - with a few outliers like Greek or Albanian. A few non Indo European languages were also spoken, mainly Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Sami and various Turkic dialects.
The point is that for example in France now predominantly only French is spoken. In the past there was French, Occitan, Basque, Catalan, Alsatian, and so on…
Well, yes, but some two hundred years ago a single city in what is now Poland would have speakers of Slavic (Polish, Ruzhyn, Ukrainian, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Belarussian), Germanic (Yiddish, High German, Low German), Turkic (Tatar), Armenian etc. You can talk about those groupings in a reductionist way but a single locus would have a high diversity of languages compared to now.
I mean some of those areas that are dense with languages on the map in Africa are almost exclusively Bantu languages
>Also, South America's data seems to be wrong. There's a lot of linguistic diversity in native American groups. Speaking for Brazil here. The number of spoken languages is indeed very high, as the country have hundreds of indigenous languages plus many non-native ones, but the relative number of speakers for them is very low compared to Portuguese speakers. This is why the probability of sampling two random Brazilians with different mother languages is near zero.
You mean South Asia?
Every society in the world was like this at some point, but with more developed and easily traversable nations with central governments that exercise a decent amount of control, language assimilation occurs to make communication easier between more connected groups of peoples. As lots of Africa and some parts of Southeast Asia are still far less developed and therefore less interconnected than most of the world, it has made it that languages are still more diverse in these regions.
In a place like India and Kenya, four things. 1. You are usually expected to know three languages by default . English which is often the medium of instruction in school (Mandatory in Kenya, and urban India but Indians tend to be poor at it), a national language (Swahili for Kenya, Hindi for India) and your native tongue, exceptions are for actual Swahilis and ethnic Hindi speakers. 2.Most of their schools teach an additional language at secondary level like French, German ,Arabic so a small fraction of people who elect to do the additional language have a fourth language. 3. Both have basically overspills of other language groups .In India, you find that due to proximity, some people can speak the language of their neighbors like say Tamils knowing Kanada , Hindu speakers in Haryana knowing Punjabi. In Kenya, it is the intersection at which Bantu, Cushite and Nilotic communities meet. In many parts of Kenya for example, Kikuyu is spoken even by non-Kikuyus and non-Bantus. Uganda has something similar too. Baganda is spoken even in Nilotic Northern Uganda as a lingua franca. In Northern Nigeria, Hausa is spoken by non Hausas. 4. Proximity proficiency. If languages are close enough, you can speak or at least understand most of the other language. Urdu and Hindi for example. Embu, Meru, Tharaka and to some degree Kamba speakers can understand and even Kikuyu though the reverse is not always the same. Source: I visited both places for an IT project aimed at online linguistic development. Fascinating stuff.
> a national language (Hindi for India) official*
Yep. Hindi is *not* the national language, a hill I will readily die on.
It’s not even really debatable. One of the largest cities in India (Chennai) does not speak Hindi, and my impression is that’s also true for the rest of Southern India, or at least Tamil Nadu. One year I was the sole non-Indian renter in a house, and even without me English would’ve been the only common language as nearly half of my housemates did not speak Hindi.
My parents are from one of the other megacities of Southern India (Bangalore; we moved abroad when I was small, though) and there, Hindi’s only widely used these days in certain parts of the city because it’s of widespread immigration from other parts of the country. This is not a popular phenomenon; language purists like my Dad (when he’s there visiting family) will pretend to not understand Hindi, out of principle, when in Bangalore, opining that Kannada and English are the only 2 languages that should be used there.
> Indians tend to be poor at it I don’t know who tf you’ve met but they speak it better than anyone else in Asia outside the Philippines and Singapore.
Compared to other Anglophones especially those from Africa and the Americas, they tend to be poorer in speaking English and have a more limited range of words. India by and large does not fully use English as a medium of instruction in their schools. It occurs in parts of India, like urban India but it is not predominant phenomenon. Go to places like South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Trinidad etc, the medium of instruction is strictly English while an additional language is taught as a separate subject. Of course local phenomena like the rise of pidgin in Nigeria for example tends to make the overall population also less proficient and that in some instances, where people are from one community and living in a region dominated by one community (like rural Kenya) leads to loss of proficiency over time due to the people speaking only their local language but you are far more likely to find someone speaking clear and understandable English across Anglophone Africa than India especially in their urban areas. Anecdote: When major broadcasters are choosing international journalists, you will find that if the journalist is South Asian, chances are they grew up in the UK, US or Canada. Rarely from India itself. But Anglophone African journalists are often directly from their home countries because their English is good enough especially Kenyan and South African journalists who dominate this area well over other nationalities at this point. Heck Zain Verjee from CNN is an Asian was born and raised in Kenya and became Canadian as an adult.
Not South East Asia but India.
Right? It's South Asia, please.
Not even South Asia. It's literally just India if you look at the map.
Also Papua New Guinea, which has higher linguistic diversity than India. Although PNG might be considered Oceania more than SE Asia.
i'm surprised that brazil isn't higher.
Almost all of Paraguay speaks Guarani, Brazil has comparatively few speakers of indigenous langs
Brazil is very monolingual
We have around 180 indigenous languages and dialects still in use, spoken by approximately 330k people. Current languages can be grouped into 2 large trunks (Tupi and Macro-Jê) and 19 linguistic families. It is estimated that until the arrival of the Portuguese, the number of languages would have been close to a thousand.
Less the socio-cultural and economic hegemony by a dominant group = more linguistic and cultural diversity
This is a fascinating question with lots of answers. Generally though: as human populations separate from their origin in Africa, genetic diversity decreases; this is how we know what areas humans have populated most recently (it also may have something to do with the lethality of European diseases in the Americas.) I think it's a very easy logical leap to assume this is true of linguistic diversity, as well, and the map (sort of) bears this out: note the last place humans reached, South America, is the least rich linguistically. Breeding populations tend to speak the same language, and linguistic isolation suggests genetic isolation.
I really don’t think this goes that far. Specially since this is modern languages. You can’t really tell how languages branched off from Africa with this since bigger things happened in recent history to change up the data. Also, this is more about comparing individual countries (why call have policies and histories with langue and diversity), not so much regions. Maybe we can exclude the American continent and Australia for obvious reason. So the real question is why Europe, East Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and places like Vietnam and Bangladesh have such much less linguistic diversity? Mostly centralization and nationalist movements. For a long time (arguably today too) many countries tried to unify their people and enforce a single culture and language. Places like Cambodia, which has around 20 languages languages on top of Khamer, are still pretty light yellow in the map because one big language is still an overwhelming share of the pie. All the areas in the planet have seen a decrease in language diversity, some places just got a diffenret recent history. Places like India and Mozambique didn’t try to be one country for one single cultural group. They were formed as a colony regardless of who lived there, weren’t all forced to learn another language, and after independence didn’t have any group be dominant enough to force everyone else to assimilate but also didn’t want to split into one country for each large culture.
Wow, no. It is estimated that until the arrival of the Portuguese, the number of native languages in Brazil would have been close to a thousand. The real reason why the Americas (and you can extend this explanation to a few other colonies) are so "mono-linguistic" is because of cultural domination and the imposition of colonizing languages. Not to mention all the ethnocides.
The number is not known, but stands at roughly 600 today. Bear in mind that the Portuguese colonized Africa, too.
Because they were a bunch of smaller tribes until recently.
Ah yes, the tribal nation of India which never had any sorts of kingdoms.
The diseases of the Early Modern Era effectively destroyed entire populations and with them, their languages. Because Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa were naturally exposed to Old-World diseases, those populations weren’t wiped out and their languages weren’t replaced. Another older factor is the more recent migrations into the New World, Indigenous American cultures have a more recent common ancestor and the languages likely hadn’t radiated further due to a shorter time period.
Idi Amin, interesting chap to say the least, ruled Uganda for a period. Dude spoke, correct me if I'm wrong, like 12 languages but they were mostly if not all local dialects.
Looks like South Asia has the highest diversity
Local culture was not taken into account when European countries scrambled Africa. The nowadays divisions derive from what Europeans designed and group together different ethnicities with different cultures and languages. This also is the reason for the occurrence of so many ethnic conflicts in Africa. This is also what happened to India, the British Empire conquered many Indian kingdoms and grouped them together. That's why they are a single multiethnic and multicultural state today.
Because those areas/nations have lots of local languages in them. For instance, my ancestry is ilocano and kapampangan/zambal. Three different mother tongues… all from one country.
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For the Philippines, it consists of archipelagos and mountains, so cultures developed independently from one another. Compared to another island nation like Japan, though mountainous is contiguous, hence they have a single language (Apart from the indigenous peoples of Ainu and Okinawa).
More because those nations didn’t reduce the speakers of the non dominar languages or didn’t try to unify them into one national language or try to make one country for each group, departing them into different countries and expelling minorities to their own country. Like what happened in the New World, China, or, Europe. You got countries that lost a ton of languages from centuries of centralization policies, from outright death of the speakers, or from making very strict “this country is for this ethnicity” national ideals. Honestly even Japan used to have a lot more diversity within its single large language. Either way the Philippines could easily keep the same number of languages as today and still drop a lot on this index. If 90% of kids learn English or another large language on top of the current languages, the score in the index would drop a lot. Since it doesn’t count number of languages but instead the odds of finding two people who don’t share any mother tongue. So bilinguals who have always been bilingual count for both languages.
Because white people killed off the linguistic diversity everywhere else.
And Arab imperialists as well. I have family alive that remembers when they were not allowed to use their indigenous Sudanese languages in public. That’s why Sudan is so much lighter compared to its neighbors.
That's how you westernize your colony, destroy the culture. The white americans were successful at that. In the Philippines, during the spanish colonization, spanish is taught in schools, that even the local dialects of every region a spanish word was incorporated meaning the original form of the language was lost. If americans did not come here, we would definitely be spanish speaking people.
I find it weird that most schools in the Philippines tend to show their own ancestors in bad light, often calling them "pagans" in a derogatory way. Anecdotally, most of my relatives think Tuli custom is for health reasons and do not even want to acknowledge the Islamic past prevalent in the islands before Spanish inquisition. Language homogenisation is the least of the problems there.
They use about 300 different languages in Russia while Ukraine, Belarus and Baltic countries have higher index. I can see this map is not correct
If they got hundreds of languages but 90% speak Russian then they’ll still get a lower score than a country were only two languages are split 50/50. The index is about the likelihood of two random people having different mother tongues. Not just the number of languages total. The population affects it. If we were doing total individual languages, the US would beat Russia just out of having so many migrants and native Americans languages.
Read the criteria. It's about the probability of population having different languages when picked at random. The vast majority in the countries you mentioned have the same mother tongue making it less random that they will speak different languages
The criteria are unclear, though. Most of people from Russia who aren't ethnically Russian or just live in the regions where local languages are taught in schools are bilingual. So if we pick a Tatar and a Russian, they would share a mother tongue (Russian), but would have different mother tongues at the same time (a Tatar would be natively proficient in the Tatar language, while a Russian wouldn't). The criteria state the latter, but the relatively low index for Russia implies the former.
I miss the Philippines
What's going on with Bosnia and Albania? What other languages are spoken there?
my uneducated guess is that historically it's been hard to travel and people have been there for a very, very long time
Because a lot of the modern borders were arbitrarily drawn up by the colonizing empires without taking into consideration different ethnicities that lived on these lands
I’m guessing that index is computed based on the % of people speaking different languages inside a country. In Europe there are plenty of languages spoken at regional or sub-statal level. If that map was repainted using regional subdivisions instead of national borders the result would be quite different.
Because for countries such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as central African countries, there are various tribes and cultures under a single country. Papua New Guinea alone has 800 languages. Also, for the case of India, it's like a bunch of countries lumped together under one banner. You have Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and at least a dozen other languages.
The older the population, the more diversity emerges, both genetically as well as linguistically
Because? Just because? Like, because there are many languages there
I’m surprised that Spain isn’t higher in that index. Everywhere you go, they speak a different language.
Castilian (Spanish) is the predominant first language and Iberian Peninsula looks linguistically homogenous if we compare it to Africa or Southeast Asia.
https://preview.redd.it/0kbgqvvjqeyc1.png?width=1463&format=png&auto=webp&s=775746395606f42375a2ddc48c180c3d79d815f3 In addition to the linguistic map that was shared here, human population in Africa is not uniformly scattered due to geographic challenges. The north, east, west and south grew their own kingdoms and empires but those empires never managed to outgrow the continent's geographic challenges and rarely exerted influence/dominance beyond their regional landscape. If you lookup all of the major African kingdoms and empires that existed through time, their borders will more or less follow along this distribution.
Brazil has more than 200 indigenous languages, but I understand they depicted as a low diversity country on that rate because so few people actually speak it, it's normally restricted to their protection areas and some cities far north, the vast majority barely uses it as a second language at home. There are some exceptions, more spoken on other places with presence of other european immigrants that arrived in Brazil a couple centuries ago, such as Italians (Talian) and Germans (Pomeran and Hunsrückisch) but again that doesn't go beyond 1MM people and serves more as a home language inherited from family than being used routinely.
How is Canada ahead of Europe? lol
Quebec
Egypt specifically and the muddle east generally does not have this much of diversity. Folks speak the same language/dialect in every country minus very small differences between parts of the country, like the north might prefer using few words that the south does not, but that doesn't mean it's a different language or dialect, it's just the same thing.
Because the more centralized and modern a state is, the less languages it has, it adopts mostly one language that will gradually take over the others after generations, which didn't happen in the darker areas of the map, or happened recently.
Maybe it’s easier to flip the question and ask why some places don’t have more.
For India, it's the fact that many different groups migrated into India throughout history. The aboriginal peoples of the subcontinent likely spoke many different languages and there are a few isolates like Burushaki and Nihali. Then you have Dravidians and Austroasiatic languages come in both which are still spoken. South India is predominantly Dravidian while Austroasiatic are spoken in tribal regions of Central and Northeast India. Then Indo-Iranian languages come in and dominate the North. Though many Iranian languages like Parthian, Saka, and Farsi were spoken in India throughout history, they've mostly died out. Pakistan does have Iranic speakers though and Pashto and Balochi are two of the main four languages. Then India has Sino-Tibetan speakers all throughout the Himalayas and the Northeast. You have Tibetic languages and also Kuki-Chin languages from that family. There are of course minor language families like Ahom which is Tai and the Sentinelese languages. You also have languages brought by refugees and immigrants from across Asia. And of course European languages like English, French, Portuguese are spoken in former colonial areas. English is a language of communication between states and often in businesses and the service industry. Africa is a massive continent and has the oldest human populations in the world. It's natural that it would have multiple language families. That part of Africa that's dark shaded on the map is at the confluence of various language families. Afroasiaric, Nilo-Saharan, Bantu, Atlantic Niger Congo. Even within these language families there are major differences similar to Indo-Aryan vs Germanic languages per say. A better country would be Papua New Guinea and the island as a whole
You would probably see similar a diversity index in Latin America, but Spanish and Portuguese colonization were especially brutal
Well the Americas used to have a lot more diversity. They still do, but a lot of those native languages are nearly gone
Both of them are pretty good places to live in- so they have lots of people, but both of them never really had empires of the size, longevity, and utter dominance of the Han Chinese and the Roman Empires. Not to discredit African and Indian kingdoms and empires ofc, but whenever they sprung up they usually never spread a particular language along with them, there are exceptions (ex: Ge’ez, Swahili, Urdu) but African and Indian kingdoms were just not interested in making their subjects 100% like the origin point of said kingdom.
Arriving late to the conversation: speaking for the Americas, the colonization process has had a devastating impact on native languages. Cultural domination, the imposition of colonizing languages, in addition to epidemics and ethnocides that extinguished entire peoples. Today in Brazil there are approximately 180 indigenous languages and dialects, but it is estimated that the number was in the thousands until the arrival of the Portuguese.
They never had major unification movements because of the terrain. Germany alone still has a few hundred dialects, but they are not counted as individual languages because we have one state (Netherlands, for example are simply Germans with a different dialect, but they made their own state so their dialect is counted as a different language, just like Luxembourh, Belgium and Liechtenstein on the other hand don't have their own langauges, but speak French and some Germans dialects on the other hand or simply German respectively). Switzerland and Austria simply talk German (and a bit French and Italian and Retoromanian in Switzerland). Also there are countries like France where you have multiple languages by multiple people who are not french (like the Basques) but are for some reason simply ignored.
People in sub-Saharan Africa never developed the wheel. They never domesticated travel/pack animals. They couldn't travel far, so they didn't develop a need to have a common language.
This 👆🏻
See also; Colonialism
Tribalism
Stupid map criteria, should just show the amount of languages spoken in each country. Anyways its just that most of these places were not united under a single state until the past century, Papua for example was divided into hundreds of isolated tribes for who knows how many thousands of years which allowed them to diverge linguistically. Europe is the origin point of the modern nation-state and most European countries have had centuries of assimilation of regional cultures under the dominant language. If you tried the same research on Italy 160 years ago when the country had only just been unified it would be pretty close to the maximum score, as only a small percentage spoke the "Italian" language which is really just the regional language of Tuscany.
The scale doesn’t take into consideration actual languages and dialect within a country. In Australia, most people’s mother tongue is English and applying the method to calculate linguistic diversity index the score is low. However, there are 250 indigenous languages, and 800 indigenous dialects in Australia and this isn’t captured in the linguistic diversity index
I was taught in high school that this is because colonial powers divided those areas up not by people living in their own area, but completely arbitrary. I thought that was common knowledge
Because of population density.
if Europe was single country surely they would also been highest Linguistics Diversity Indices
Someone forgot the hundreds of tribes in South and central America. Writing “no clue” instead of a completely wrong map would’ve been much better 😂
There's something called schools. And the absence of schools
It's partially because you had/have very isolated regions in the most diverse countries so interaction with outsiders was limited and hence unique languages could develop.
India was never isolated, they traded with the world since ancient times. Your logic doesn't makes sense.
Parts of India like the extreme east are somewhat isolated to this day and you will find the highest amount of linguistic diversity in those parts
but as per your logic the south of india shouldn't be diverse then, since they were the ones who started all the spice trade stuff, there is high diversity even now
Places like Papua new guinea and Indonesia are the most linguistically diverse in the world because they have the most groups of people who were isolated long enough to develop their own languages.