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It's hard for me imagine that there are 7,000 different languages spoken around the world! There are only 195 countries so it seems like 7,000 is an unsustaina

• gumby 11y ago
  > It's hard for me imagine that there are 7,000 different languages spoken around the world! ...Perhaps it's my English-speaking hubris to think this way. Indeed it is. First of all, there are 7Bn people on the planet, and many languages have a small number of speakers. Loosely, today, less technology, the more languages (because there is less intercommunication). What we call France used to have hundreds of not-particularly-mutually-comprehensible languages until the Louis XIII and XIV made a point of eliminating them -- but it took the television to pull it off. Likewise, incomprehensible English dialects survived well into the 20th century. In India there are dozens of languages that have never had a written form that gain an alphabet each year. BTW What's a "language" and what's a "dialect" is a very political issue. It was said in the 1800s that you could walk from Paris to Rome, with each village speaking a dialect that its neighbors could understand, but by the time you arrived you'd gone from French-speaking Paris to Italian-speaking Rome. Also, politically, there is one "Chinese" language with other Chinese languages called "dialects." As a kid I heard Mandarin and Cantonese daily, and never would have called them the same languages, but I had neighbors who would have virulently argued the opposite.