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Why do Human Beings Speak so Many Languages?

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

AnonTechie writes:

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: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:56PM (2 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:56PM (#541236) Journal

    Khallow, you are doing it again.

    Just because he has political opinions you happen to like, doesn't make his linguistics research unusually remarkable.

    And just because Chomsky has political opinions that khallow doesn't like, . . . wait a minute, that might means that Chomsky is a remarkable linguistics researcher! But it does definitely means that khallow has no idea whom Chomsky is, other than a bête noire of the alt-wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_structure [wikipedia.org]

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:02AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:02AM (#541238) Journal
    You do realize that the original post was probably just ad spam for the Chomsky website, right?

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:21AM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:21AM (#541251) Journal

      No, I do not realize this. Do you imagine that you do? Calm down, khallow, or I will say "Hillary" to you multiple times!