Hi there, in the previous video we looked to the ethnicity and we examined the attempts to measure it. We also described the hear ] from the Delhish index. We'll be using this same index in this video, but this time we're going to be focusing on linguistic diversity. Now if ethnicity had seem complicated, language may offer a backdoor way into the same sort of questions. Indeed one author refers to differences in languages as cultural fractionalization. So having seen the difficulties we experienced in measuring ethnicity, you could have been forgiven for thinking that languages will be much easier. All you have to do is to see what language people speak. Well, if only that were the case. Well, let's start with the idea of your mother's tongue. Is that the language spoken at home or a language generally used? Think of someone in a migrant family, first or second generation who may indeed speak his or her mother's language in the home. But the host language of course will be spoken outside. Well think of multinational lingual communities that are generally bilingual, as in the case of Wales, where everyone that speaks Wales can also speak English, and often has to. Similarly in Belgium many citizens can converse in either French or in Flemish, and in mixed families they may do so at home as well. In Africa too, many language groups are so similar that people can freely switch between them. And this brings us naturally to a second problem, when is a language a language, and when is it a dialect? This is essential if we're trying to establish linguistic diversity. The usual criteria employed is one of mutual intelligibility. A language does not count as a separate language if it can be understood from another language. Okay, lets have a look making it easier. Let's have a look at Scandinavia. Norwegians can understand both Swedish and Danish. And Danes and Swedes can understand each other, although the Danes have a bit more difficulty. And yet all claim to speak separate languages and they are always usually listed as such. So, let's have a look at the evidence then. The pay per produce by Alesina and his associates in 2002 used exclusively the encyclopedia botanical. From this source they managed to distill 1,055 language groups for 201 countries. They chose to ignore the evidence collected by the Ethnologue Project. Now this is a group of linguists interested in preserving languages. Then the 2013 edition of their handbook, they listed over 7,000 languages, 7,105 to be precise. So now we've got an obvious discrepancy between the two sources. Of course with the Ethnologues offer a further breakdown. They have 682 languages as official language, officially recognized as such by some national or international authority. They categorize a further 2,500 languages as vigorous, which means they are used for face to face communication by all generations. Another 1,500 and so languages are defined as developing. So these 4,700 languages as spoken by almost 99% of the world's population. So we don't need the rest to suspect that the encyclopedia has been a little enthusiastic in compressing the language groups. So, I did the second test for myself. According to Wikipedia, Papua New Guinea with over 850 languages is the most linguistically diverse place on earth. Now the Ethnologue Project nuances this picture little, 12 of the languages are already extinct, 36 are dying and a further 100 also are in trouble, all presumably because they don't have many speakers. And because of that, there are unlikely any way to impact on a fragmentation index. The way it's calculated it is such a small percentage in the total, doesn't count for much. Now the Ethnologues calculate Papua's fractionation score at 0.990, making it indeed the most fragmented country on earth. Alesina and associates calculated at 0.35, making it less linguistically diverse than the Netherlands. Now one way of resolving this discrepancy is to introduce a concept of language distance. It's not a difficult concept to grasp. French and Italian are closer to each other than either of them are to English, but all three are closer to each other than any of the master Chinese. Now linguistics construct linguistic trees to capture the degree of similarity and differences between languages. By applying criteria of vocabulary and syntax to the world's languages listed by the Ethnologue database, one doesn't have to make a crude distinction between language and dialect. And the effect of this basically is to decrease the diversity in Central Africa where most languages are rooted in different versions of Bantu. And to increase the range in Latin America where there is a large gulf between the European languages and the native languages stemming from before the conquest. The result of this exercise leaves Papua New Guinea with a score of 0.6, and the third in the world. And the Netherlands now has a much more believable score of 0.13. Now I wish we could say that we can now conclude the discussion, but there's one more question we have to address. All of this data relates to native languages. None of the data makes any attempt to capture the languages spoken by first or second generation migrants. In fact, none of the studies even mention it as a problem. But if languages form a means of communication within society and migrant groups don't speak the host language, it's certainly going to damage the formation of trust. Now one solution in the past was for the host population to translate the information and then in this form it would act as a way of socialization. When I visited the local history museum in Chicago, I was struck by a poster calling the workers to go on strike. That's nothing unusual, but the poster was in English and in German. Another solution is simply to wait for the problem to disappear. The second generation would speak their native language at home, their host language outside. The third generation would learn a few languages to talk to grandmother, and by the fourth, it would be totally assimilated. But this model no longer works because transport costs have fallen, so every generation has the opportunity to return to the home country. They might even migrate back. And as a result, there is an incentive in maintaining native language fluency. And again, as migrant communities plug into satellite television, so they recreate more of their home culture around themselves, and this again reduces the incentive to adapt linguistically. Much of the relative linguistic homogeneity in Europe, conceals a potential social and economic problem and one that might undermine the high trust goals that they still have, and they still for the time being manage to register. So let's sum up then. In this video we've looked to a phenomenon of linguistic diversity and we've looked at the difficulties in defining it and measuring it. In the next video were going to turn our attention on religion. Meanwhile, we'd like you to look at a visualization of the world map of linguistic diversity that we've constructed for you.
