Linguistic Fragmentation

Hi there.
In the previous video we

looked at ethnicity and
we examined attempts to measure it.
We also described
the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index.
We'll be using this same
index in this video.
But this time we're going to be
focusing on linguistic diversity.
Now if ethnicity had seemed complicated,
language may offer a back doorway
into the same sort of questions.
Indeed, one author refers to
differences in languages as
cultural fractionalization.
So, having seen the difficulties we
experienced in measuring ethnicity,
you could have been forgiven for thinking,
that languages will be much easier.
All you have to do is to see
what language people speak.
Well, if only that were the case.
Well, let's start with the idea
of your mother's tongue.
Is that the language spoken at home or
the language generally used?
Think of someone in a migrant family,
first or second generation.
Who may indeed speak his or
her mother's language in the home.
But the host language, of course,
will be spoken outside.
Or think of multinational lingual
communities that are genuinely bilingual.
As in the case of Wales,
where everyone that speaks Welsh can
also speak English and often has to.
Similarly in Belgium many citizens can
converse in either French or in Flemish.
And in mixed families they may do so
at home as well.
In Africa too many language groups are so
similar that people can
freely switch between them.
This bring us, naturally,
to a second problem.
When is a language a language?
When is it a dialect?
This is essentially if we're trying
to establish linguistic diversity.
The usual criteria employed is
one of mutual intelligibility.
A language does not count as
a separate language if it
can be understood from another language.
Okay.
Let's have a look, make it easier.
Let's have a look at Scandinavia.
Norwegians can understand both Swedish and
Danish, and Danes and

Swedes can understand each other, although
the Danes have a bit more difficulty.
And yet they all claim to
speak separate languages, and
they are always usually listed as such.
So, let's have a look
at the evidence then.
The paper produced by Alesina and
his associates in 2002 used exclusively,
Encyclopedia Britannica.
From this source they managed to distill
1,055 language groups for 201 countries.
They choose to ignore the evidence
collected by the Ethnologue Project.
Now this is a group of linguists
interested in preserving languages.
And in the 2013 edition of their handbook,
they listed over seven thousand languages.
Seven thousand one hundred and
five to be precise.
So now we've got an obvious
discrepancy between the two sources.
Well, fortunately,
the Ethnologues offer a further breakdown.
They have 682 languages as official
language, officially recognized as such,
by some national or
international authority.
They categorize a further
2,500 languages as vigorous.
Which means they're used in face-to-face
communication by all generations.
Another 1,500 or so
languages are defined as developing.
So, these 4,700 languages are spoken by
almost 99% of the world's population.
So we don't need the rest to suspect
that the encyclopedia's been
a little enthusiastic in
compressing the language groups.
So I did a second test for myself.
According to Wikipedia Papua New Guinea
with over eight hundred and
fifty languages is a most
linguistically diverse place on Earth.
Now the ethnology project
nuances this picture a little.
Twelve of the languages are already
extinct, thirty six are dying and
a further hundred also are in trouble.
All presumably because they
don't have many speakers.
And because of that, they're unlikely
anyway to impact on a fragmentation index.
Whereas calculated as such,
the small percentage in the total
doesn't count for much.
Now, the Ethnologue's calculate
Papua's fractionalization score
at 1.990 making it indeed the most

fragmented country on earth.
Alacenia and
Associates calculated 0.35 making
it less linguistically
diverse than the Netherlands.
Now one way of resolving this
discrepancy is to introduce a concept of
language distance.
It's not a difficult concept to grasp.
French and Italian are closer to each
other than either of them are to English.
But all three are closer to each
other than any of them is to Chinese.
Now, linguistics construct linguistics
construct linguistic trees to
capture the degree of similarity and
differences between languages.
By applying criteria of vocabulary and
syntax to the world's languages
listed by the Ithalog database.
One doesn't have to make a crude
distinction between language and dialect.
The effect of this basically,
is to decrease the diversity in
Central Africa where most languages
are rooted in different versions of Bantu.
And to increase the range
in Latin America,
where there's a large gulf between
the European languages and
the native languages stemming
from before the conquest.
The result of this exercise leaves Papua
New Guinea with a score of naught .6 and
the third in the world.
And the Netherlands now has a much
more believable score of not .13.
Now I will we could say that we could
now conclude the discussion, but
there's one more question
we have to address.
All of this data relates
to native languages.
None of the data makes any attempt to
capture the languages spoken by first or
second generation migrants.
In fact none of the studies
even mention it as a problem.
But if languages form a mean of
communication in society and
migrant groups don't
speak the host language.
It's certainly going to damage
the formation of trust.
Now one solution in the past was for
the host population to translate
the information and then in this form
it would act as a way of socialization.
When I visited the local
history museum in Chicago I

was struck by a poster calling
the workers to go on strike.
That's nothing unusual, but
the poster was in English and in German.
Another solution is simply to wait for
the problem to disappear.
The second generation would speak
their native language at home,
their host language outside.
The third generation would learn a few
sentences to talk to grandmother and
by the fourth,
it would be totally assimilated.
But this model no longer works.
Because transport costs have fallen, so
every generation has the opportunity
to return to their home country.
They might even migrate back.
As a result there's an incentive in
maintaining native language fluency.
And again as migrant communities
plug into satellite television, so
they recreate more of their
home culture around themselves.
And this, again, reduces the incentive
to adapt linguistically.
Much of the relative linguistic
homogeneity in Europe conceals a potential
social and economic problem, and one that
might undermine the high trust goals that
they still have and they still for
the time being manage to register.
So let's sum up then.
In this video we've looked at the
phenomenon of linguistic diversity, and
we've looked at the difficulties
in defining it and measuring it.
In the next video we're going to
turn our attention on religion.
Meanwhile, we'd like you to look at
a visualization of the world's map of
linguistic diversity that
we've constructed for you.

Linguistic Fragmentation

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Hi there.

In the previous video we

Danish, and Danes and

at 1.990 making it indeed the most

history museum in Chicago I

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