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- 3.2. Language group sizes
these were most likely carried over from earlier editions of the Ethnologue, where a citation for population had not originally been recorded, and no other more current population information had been located. This may in fact be true for the “none” category, which by definition is not associated with a date in Table 2, but the “not indicated” figures are concentrated in the more recent years, and may be census or almanac figures. Language entries without population estimates accounted for roughly 3% of those in our sample; this might be higher than we would hope, but little can be done.
Table 3 compares the dates of population estimates in the sample of Ethnologue language entries with geographic region. The data for the different regions appears to be about equally current, although there appears to be a somewhat greater number of older estimates in Africa, particularly in the 1966-1975 period. Entries where a date is not indicated for a population estimate appear to be a bit more common in Europe and North America, The estimates from Oceania, Southeast Asia and Africa, where greater numbers of languages are found, tends to be better documented in this regard.
Table 3. Date of population estimates of Ethnologue language entries by region. Not ind. 1920-5 1956-65 1966-75 1976-85 1986-95 1996-pres. Africa 44
2 2 29 49 160
309 E Asia 6 0 0 0 7 15 38
S & Cent. Asia 25
0 0 1 13 40
100 SE Asia 19
0 0 1 68 91
162 W Asia 4 0 0 0 4 7 12
N America 16
0 1 0 12 26
39 S Am & Carib. 28
0 0 1 14 97
105 Europe 23
0 0 0 4 27
30 Oceania 19
0 0 5 127 63
156
Table 4 compares source type and region among the language entries. Here we are interested in understanding whether particular sources specialize in particular regions of the world. It appears that this is the case: a chi-test for independence on only the rows and columns with sufficient data (rows: SIL, Academic, Government, WCD, Missionary, Not indicates; columns: Africa, North America, South America, South and Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania) is significant (chi-square= 434.8426, df = 25, p<0.0001). Inspecting the residuals,we find that WCD is cited more for Africa and Southeast Asia than for other regions, other Christian Missionary sources are cited more for Africa and South America, and SIL is cited more for Oceania, North and South America. Academic sources are more cited for North America and Oceania (not surprising given that Wurm and Hattori 1981, a comprehensive reference for the Pacific, is cited 135 times in our sample), and government sources are important to South America and South and Central Asia. Overall numbers of languages in the sample from East Asia, West Asia and Europe are a bit too low to know if these regions utilize different sources in any patterned way. Population estimates with no source indicated appear with the greatest preponderance in South and Central Asia, and to a less extreme extent in Africa, suggesting that source documentation could be improved by a systematic effort to update these regions. A country-by-country comparison of the full Ethnologue database could potentially reveal where particular problem areas are.
Table 4. Source of population estimates of Ethnologue language entries by region. Africa N Amer S Amer E Asia SC Asia SE Asia W Asia Europe Oceania SIL 144
30 92
0 2 96 1 1 153 Academic 88
36 25
28 27
115 8 29 121 Government 54
10 54
10 39
19 3 13 43 WCD 76
0 18
5 15
37 2 3 4 Missionary 60
1 18
0 5 13 2 10
12 Not indicated 121
0 10
17 65
40 5 5 19 None 43
16 28
6 25
19 4 23 18 Other 9 1 0 0 1 2 2 0 0
Of central concern in our evaluation of the language entries are the population sizes. It is from these that we potentially have the most to learn about the processes by which languages grow or shrink, or become endangered. Grimes (1986), using an earlier version of the Ethnologue’s database (approximately the 10 th edition), observed that language population sizes are log-normally distributed, and that different regions had different typical sizes. Nearly a full generation has transpired, and with it, major changes in the size and comprehensiveness of the Ethnologue, but the basic observation has been shown to hold for updated versions of the data (e.g. Paolillo 2005, for the 14 th edition). The same observation can be made from our sample of language entries as well, as in Figure 1, where the probability density is plotted against the logarithm of the population size. 2
The central tendency of this distribution is 5661 (95% confidence interval between 4907 and 6531), and 95% of the language populations lie in the range from 13 individuals to 2.53 million. While this may seem to be a small population size, given that there are languages such as Mandarin Chinese that have nearly a billion speakers, there are very few such languages, and though they happen to account for a large proportion of the world’s people, there are many more languages that are smaller in size. Moreover, this result is reasonably robust, and compares well with earlier work. The notion of what a typical speaker experiences is a different one which we take up subsequently.
2 We use a logarithmic scale of population size so as to bring out the central tendency in the data. Other scales (e.g. linear, or sorted log-log plots) tend to conceal this structure.
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