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by A_Beer_Clinked
3920 days ago
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I was curious about this;
Ethnologue, which seems to be the base reference on this says: The exact number of unwritten languages is hard to determine. Ethnologue (17th edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,105 living languages, 3,570 have a developed writing system. We don't always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. That is, while an alphabet may exist there may not be very many people who are literate and actually using the alphabet. We have data to indicate that 696 languages are unwritten. And for the remaining 2,839 languages we have no data.
Source: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages... Also of intrest on the same site is this page:
http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size
which shows the distribution of first-languages by number of speakers. The top 90 languages account for 80% of the world. The bottom 1% of languages ~5765 have a cumulative ~70M speakers. |
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