Importance of Linguistic Diversity

The diversity Linguistics reflects the culture of the peoples that are part of a geopolitically delimited territory, to value and classify as one of its most representative aspects, and in this way accompany its state at instances of predominant languages ​​and the possibility of attacks politicians who seek to reduce their presence, focusing in particular on native peoples who have suffered massacres throughout their history. The conservation of the least spoken languages ​​constitutes an invaluable element, to avoid their extinction, which is sentenced as dead language. Regarding the Hispanic world, Mexico reports around 250 language variants, followed by Brazil with 180, and then Colombia and Peru appear below, each around 80, according to data obtained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

The linguistic diversity It consists, in simple terms, of estimating the number of different languages ​​spoken in a defined area. Unlike what happened in ancient times, in the modern world it is possible to recognize a marked

diversity of languages as a consequence of two important phenomena. On the one hand, the colonial influence of different European powers throughout the 19th century (England and France, especially) and the cultural and political repercussions of the dominant nations of the 20th century (the United States, China and the former Soviet Union) have given rise to the diffusion of their respective languages ​​in neighboring countries or distant. On the other hand, the growing migratory flows and the greater number of international trips have motivated cultural diffusion and, with it, a growth of linguistic diversity.

As a consequence of these variables, the distribution of the languages It is very diverse depending on the continents. Thus, although the European continent includes less than 5% of the world's languages, these languages ​​are spoken by most of the inhabitants of the Earth, either as a mother tongue or as a second language. Likewise, of the six official languages ​​of the United Nations Organization, four have originated in Europe (English, French, Spanish and Russian). As an obvious counterpart, the nations of the planet with greater linguistic diversity They are located outside that continent, since they are Papua New Guinea (Oceania), Indonesia (Asia), Nigeria (Africa) and India (Asia). It is worth recognizing that close to 95% of the contents of Internet they are distributed in only twelve languages ​​of the around 7000 existing in the world today.

This great complexity makes it difficult to form an objective analysis of linguistic diversity of a nation. Among the parameters proposed to be able to compare this variable between different geographical areas, the so-called greenberg index, which is an indicator of the probability that two inhabitants of the same nation are characterized by different mother tongues. The index fluctuates between zero (total homogeneity of the language of a population) and one (maximum diversity of languages ​​for an area). Thus, while the linguistic diversity of India, with 12 official languages ​​and hundreds of minor languages, is close to one, in most of the European nations this level is close to zero.

Without a doubt, the importance of linguistic diversity resides in the preservation cultural, historical and ethnological of the different peoples of the world.

Updated in February 2022