Tue, 09 Dec 2008: Ethnologue: Languages of the World
Category: General
by: Richard Russell
Here is an excellent web site giving a plethora of facts about all the languages of the world. With this resource, it’s easy to see which languages are in imminent danger of dying out. From this site, consider the following quote:
A striking fact...is that there is a huge disparity between the mean size of languages and the median size. It turns out that 347 (or approximately 5%) of the world’s languages have at least one million speakers and account for 94% of the world’s population. By contrast, the remaining 95% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the world’s people.