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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-Enough-Babel-Fish dept.

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 ?


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:28PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:28PM (#541036) Journal

    Not to disagree with your point, but rather to reinforce it with divergences that happen with evolution:

    Language evolves; all of them. [...] Only a few hundred years ago the words "Thee" and "thou" were used.

    "Thou" and related forms are still are used in some rare dialects, particularly some Amish communities in the U.S.

    "Leveled" was spelled "levelled" in the first of the 20th century.

    Doubling of letters with suffixes is a very unstable phenomenon in English, with Brits retaining a lot more doubled letters these days than Americans.

    And when was the last time you heard "shall" in conversation?

    Uh, yesterday -- when I said it. It still is used colloquially in certain contexts, though often in a somewhat stylized utterance. It often only appears in questions like "Shall we?" when about to embark on something, etc. It's a bit unfair to target "shall" because most of the first-person occurrences are subsumed into contracted forms "we'll," "I'll," etc., so it's actually unclear whether "shall" or "will" is intended. That's probably one major element that led to its gradual decline in usage; on the rare occasions that most people expand those contracted forms in speech, they now prefer "will" most of the time. (A better metric for this is the demise of the contraction "shan't" = "shall not" which is decidedly archaic now.) Aside from occasional use in questions (generally first-person plural), it still is standard when discussing formal rules or regulations, as in bylaws that state "The Treasurer SHALL do X..."

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