My 7-year-old son Parker asked me this good question last night: how many words are there in the world? I started by saying, well, it’s not an infinite number (he understands about infinity), and I happen to know (from a really fun project for my work) that one source, Ethnologue, lists about 14,000 existing languages. If you assume that most of those languages have far fewer than the 1 million sometimes attributed to English, and you assume some rate of language extinction over the last 30,000 years, you wind up with a SWAG of maybe 100,000 languages in human history, with 100,000 words, each, or 10^10 — that’s 10 billion words — that have ever existed. Then, of course, new words are already being created.
Such is the power of synchronicity in life that no sooner had I gone through this calculation than I got an email from my alma mater, Swarthmore College, mentioning that a professor there is an expert on language extinction. So I thought I would ask him for his opinion on the question: how many words are there in the world?
Swarthmore College | News | Swarthmore Linguist Calls Attention to Dying Languages
Speakers of thousands of the world’s languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate. What is lost when a language dies? And what are the implications?“Languages are the repository of thousands of years of a people’s science and art – from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths,” says Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison (right),
Technorati Tags: linguistics, Swarthmore, language extinction
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