3 ms·

Nearly half of languages of the world continue to have no writing system: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0 htt

• oh_sigh 10y ago
  Sure, but how many people do those 3000+ languages actually cover? I'd imagine a lot of languages with 1-100 speakers don't have a writing system...
  • lgessler 10y ago
    The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the world. For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life. E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M speakers, does not have a writing system. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet