(Roughly) Daily

Damián Blasi delves into historic and current efforts to catalog the planet’s 7,000-plus languages…

As a scientist who has researched language diversity for a decade and a half, I recently joined a team to work on a task that even some linguists think is “ultimately unobtainable”: helping catalog and count the world’s complex and ever-changing languages. I am part of an international team of experts assembled by UNESCO to create a World Atlas of Languages. This catalog will hopefully generate updated estimates of the number of active languages and information on how these languages are being used.

Typically, when I present research, one of my gimmicks is to begin with a rough estimate of the number of natural languages in use today: between 7,000 and 8,000. My point is to communicate that there are many languages and, therefore, an incredible diversity of ways humans think, reason, and feel. But pinpointing a more precise number opens the door to all sorts of problems.

For example, the Central African Republic hosts about 70 languages. The speakers of many of these languages live deep within roadless rainforests in villages that are very difficult for government representatives and other researchers to access. It’s hard to fathom how resource-intensive it would be to form an accurate linguistic picture of this country alone.

Of course, our project is far from the first to attempt to categorize and quantify languages. Many groups and individuals have done this in the past and continue to do so.

My task set me on a path to understanding the history and craft of counting languages. While I expected to read a dull sequence of estimates, I instead found a riveting tale involving Christian missionaries, post-war idealists, a colonialist opium agent, and more. I also gained even more appreciation for the potentially impossible task of counting languages…

A fascinating read: “Tackling the Impossibility—and Necessity—of Counting the World’s Languages,” from @blasi_lang and @WennerGrenOrg.

Apposite: “Disappearing languages“

* Federico Fellini

###

As we total up tongues, we might spare a thought for Søren Kierkegaard; he died on this date in 1855. a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author widely considered to be the first Christian existentialist philosopher, he wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, all displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Among his major works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death. It may come as no surprise that he was a major influence on Dostoevsky.

Kierkegaard wrote in Danish and the reception of his work was initially limited to Scandinavia, but by the turn of the 20th century his writings were translated into French, German, and other major European languages. By the mid-20th century, his thought exerted a substantial influence on philosophy, theology, and Western culture in general.