Speaking in tongues

Language diversity around the world

DESPITE the idea that English is spoken in America, Chinese in China, and
Russian in Russia, most of the world is far more diverse than the presence of
big national languages suggests. In fact, monolingual countries are hard to
find. The chart below measures language diversity in two very different ways:
the number of languages spoken in the country and Greenberg's diversity
index, which scores countries on the probability that two citizens will share a
mother tongue. America, Russia, Brazil, China and Mexico have over 100
languages each, but score relatively low on the diversity index, because
English, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese and Spanish have grown to the point
where they threaten to destroy the many tiny native languages. By contrast,
linguistic rivalry and relative poverty have kept a single language from
dominating countries like India and Nigeria, which score high on the diversity
index. Geography is an additional factor. The many islands of Indonesia and
the Philippines shelter small languages despite those countries’ middle-income
status. Both poverty and geography combine to make Congo and Papua New
Guinea the most linguistically diverse countries in the world.