

Why does Africa have so many languages? - sergeant3
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Science-Notebook/2015/0421/Why-does-Africa-have-so-many-languages

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Osmium
A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think
this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't
help but think it's the wrong question to ask.

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galago
If one were to employ the same test/criteria, I wonder how many languages are
spoken in North America? It also makes me wonder how many people in North
America don't speak any significant amount of Spanish or English. There are
some for various reasons, but not many. At the same time, the article refers
to an SSIL document which lists USA as having 422 living languages--which
would be 7th in the world for most active languages. However, in practice most
public life is carried out in Spanish or English. Will the same phenomenon in
store for Africa?

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indubitably
There are millions of people in the Americas that don't speak English or
Spanish. (Even ignoring the 200 million speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.)

If you combine just Mayan, Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Zapotec you're already in the
millions.

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MarcScott
I lived in Papua New Guinea for two years, where linguistic diversity is
higher than any other country.

There was however a few languages that everyone spoke. Tok Pisin was a pidgin
language spoke by almost everyone, and English (due to it being the language
used in schools) ran a close second.

Despite the relatively few languages spoken in Europe, we don't have a
universal dialect that everyone understands. The vast majority of us are
monolingual.

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skj
> we don't have a universal dialect that everyone understands.

Isn't that the role filled by English?

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lukaslalinsky
If you get stuck outside of large cities in most European countries, you will
not have much luck with English. Young people will probably know some, but if
you need help from an average person, you better know at least some words in
their language.

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panglott
The appropriate question shouldn't be "Why does Africa have so many
languages?" but rather "Why do developed nation-states have so few?"

High levels of synchronic linguistic diversity should be considered the pre-
modern norm, even aside from the usual troubles of distinguishing languages
from dialects. And nation-states are very common these days.

The answer is probably mostly language standardization, promotion of elite
lects, network effects, and official promotion of the standard language, often
alongside the abuse of minority language communities.

