The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
5. How Many Languages are there in the World?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
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
Counting languages is a matter of definitions. How many languages there are depends on how you define "a language" and when you count. Languages, like people, are born, change and grow, sometimes have offspring, and eventually die.