Languages: A Very Short Introduction

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The object of inquiry in linguistics is human language, and in particular, the extent and limits of diversity in the world’s languages. It might be supposed, therefore, that linguists would have a clear and reasonably precise notion of how many languages there are in the world. As we explore various ways of approaching this question in the course of the present book, though, we will find that there is no such definite count — or at least, no such count that has any status as a scientific finding of modern linguistics. The reason for this gap is not (just) that parts of the world such as highland New Guinea or the forests of the Amazon have not been explored in sufficient detail to ascertain the range of people who live there and the languages they speak. The problem is rather that the very notion of enumerating languages is a lot more complicated than it might seem.

A recent discussion on the blog ‘Language Log’ puzzled over an article in a Canadian newspaper:

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