The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
How many languages are there in the world?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
M. Paul Lewis [+]
SIL International
M. Paul Lewis is a senior consultant in sociolinguistics with SIL International (a nonprofit faith-based language development organization) and from 2005–2016 was the editor of Ethnologue: Languages of the World. He is the co-author, with Gary F. Simons, of Sustaining Language Use: Perspectives on Community-Based Language Development (2016, Dallas: SIL International). He holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University. The twenty-first edition of Ethnologue was published in 2018.
Description
It is not easy to define what is or is not a language, and counting is a matter of definitions. How many languages there are also depends on when you count them. Languages, like people, are born, they change and grow and sometimes have ofspring, and they eventually die.