Some countries have a lot more diversity than others. But which ones are the most linguistically diverse?
We’ve downloaded the data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (as of 2009) to produce this map showing global linguistic diversity.
The computation of the diversity index is based on the population of each language as a proportion of the total population. The index cannot fully account for the vitality of languages.
Also, the distinction between a language and a dialect is fluid and often political. A great number of languages are considered to be dialects of another language by some experts and separate languages by others. The index does not consider how different the languages are from each other, nor does it account for second language usage; it considers only the total number of distinct languages, and their relative frequency as mother tongues.
Below is a table of the data used to create the map. This data has been sourced from Wikipedia.
