Practice question · True or false
About half of the world's roughly 7,000 languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers.
Hints
- The distribution of speakers across languages is extremely uneven.
- A handful of languages hold about half of all speakers.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and the two halves of that sentence are the same fact seen twice: a small number of very large languages leaves a very long tail. The consequence is that most of the world's linguistic diversity sits in languages most people have never heard of.
Practise The Branches and What They Are For
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Languages I is free to start.
More questions on The Branches and What They Are For
- Why does Labov's department-store study show that variation is structured rather than random?
- Which are legitimate reasons for documenting an endangered language?
- Sort each activity by whether it is primarily DESCRIPTIVE research or an APPLICATION of linguistics.
- Approximately how many living languages are there, to the nearest thousand?
- Arrange the stages of a language documentation project in order.
- Machine translation and speech recognition improved mainly by encoding more hand-written grammatical rules.
- Linguistic subfields are distinguished by evidence rather than subject matter. What follows from this…