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The Measurement of Linguistic Diversity
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1956
Year
Endangered LanguagesRelative UniformityMultilingualismLinguistic EcologyEducationLanguage VariationApplied LinguisticsIndigenous LanguageWorld LanguagesCultural DiversityLinguistic DiversityLanguage StudiesIndigenous LanguagesNew GuineaSociolinguisticsLinguisticsLanguage DiversityAnthropologyGreat Diversity
Maps of linguistic distributions reveal regions of high diversity, such as New Guinea and the Nuba Hills, and regions of relative uniformity, such as the Eastern Woodlands of North America and the United States, with intermediate areas in between. The study aims to develop quantitative measures of linguistic diversity to objectively compare regions and correlate diversity with nonlinguistic factors. 1.
1. The examination of any map of linguistic distributions for an extended area will show some regions of great diversity (e.g. New Guinea, the Nuba Hills in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan) and others of relative uniformity (e.g. the aboriginal Eastern Woodlands area of North America, the contemporary United States), while still others seem to be intermediate between these extremes. The problem considered here is that of developing quantitative measures of this diversity in order to render such impressions more objective, allow the comparing of disparate geographical areas, and eventually to correlate varying degrees of linguistic diversity with political, economic, geographic, historic, and other nonlinguistic factors.