Loca Lingo Multicultural

According to Ethnologue, there would be 6900 different languages in the world. Each dot hereunder represents a language (you can click on the map for a larger version of it - www.ethnologue.com).

What do you notice?
Maybe Chiapas and Guatemala, The West Coast of Afica, Central Africa, the Himalaya chain, Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia ? Or maybe Europe, North America, Siberia, the Arab world, China ?

How come there are so many languages in one place, and so few in others ? Is this linked to the level of development of these countries ? So the more developped it is, the poorer from a linguistic diversity point of view it becomes ? Maybe is it due to geography as well (high mountains, islands…) ? Maybe a bit of everything…

We could state as well the fewer dots in a region, the more powerful is the language from a global point of view (English, European languages,…).

When considering many dots in one region, just imagine all the potential problems of communication between all these groups of people… On the other hand, what a cultural richness ; a language would equal to a center, to a particular thought, and therefore to a different vision of life.

According to UNESCO, over 50% of the world’s 6000 languages are endangered, 96% of the world’s 6000 languages are spoken by 4% of the world’s population, 90% of the world’s languages are not represented on the Internet, one language disappears on average every two weeks, 80% of the African languages have no orthography.