Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall created this map using the relative size of regions to express how many languages they have produced. Papua New Guinea is quite a linguistic superpower. Aaron Hotfelder explains why:
Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups' languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.
Link via Marginal Revolution
There used to be a gazillion languages spoken by the natives of South America, but it seems that it was ignored. Unless only "live" languages should be considered. These languages were killed like their native speakers.
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Well, the article says "the ten shaded countries are those in which more than 200 languages are in use," so it does look you would need to find another map to account for places where so many native languages have been killed off.
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(Agree, though, that the description here is misleading.)
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Oh, it's only live languages? I imagine Europe was just as diverse as any other continent until Roman times.
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I don't think that map is accurate enough. There are 6 languages in spain (spanish, catalonian, valenciano, galego, asturiano and euskera, 4 in switzerland and just one in portugal... and i see no diffference between country's real sizes and depending-upon-number-of spoken-languages sizes. Not to mention the 7 or 8 languages spoken in Venezuela, kind of 20 in brazil an so on.
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Does it correspond inversely with wealth distribution?
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The map seems to underrepresent the Caucasus region where dialects, like in PNG, are geographically separated.
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Only a swed
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The Philippines are supposed to contain a plethora of languages -- same internal geographical isolation as Papua New Guinea.
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