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People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7,000 distinct languages.
And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the 250,000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.
Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.
[...] Language diversity has played a key role in shaping the interactions of human groups and the history of our species, and yet we know surprisingly little about the factors shaping this diversity. We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.
https://theconversation.com/why-do-human-beings-speak-so-many-languages-75434
Would you people care to speculate as to why there are so many languages ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:05AM
That indicates you have little idea of what you are talking about. You didn't even seem to put in effort to understand the comment you're replying to.
http://shanghaiist.com/2017/04/05/mandarin_speaking.php [shanghaiist.com]
There's a difference between the spoken and written language. As already mentioned they can understand each other via the written language (assuming they can read and write). But spoken Cantonese is quite different from spoken Mandarin. In the past it was probably a clever idea for the various districts to send in the reports to "HQ" - they could mostly keep their spoken language, while the written reports could be understood by the Palace bureaucrats etc. That wouldn't have been the case if they had used a script that was linked to the sounds (e.g. alphabet).