Linguistic Diversity

"David Nettle is an anthropologist of language. Although the publishers say this book is a volume of “Oxford linguistics”, this is like no linguistics that I was ever taught when I was studying for my doctorate in the subject. What he does is go through language in its different general properties as a human phenomenon, trying to work out how the diversity can be modelled as having come about. He uses computer simulations to show what sort of processes might have produced the type of language diversity that we find. That’s his first major way of looking at diversity and the results he comes up with are comparable with the generally rather dry things anthropologists tend to say about humanity as a whole – for instance, the role of language in social selection. Where his book comes alive is in the later chapters where he has a map showing the diversity of language. What it shows is that the thickness of languages on the ground – how many languages there are per unit of area – correlates very well with the temperature. Just as there are more species per unit of area in the equator, so there are more languages more thickly spread in the equatorial areas than there are in the rest of the world. So equatorial countries – particularly in Africa and south-east Asia – have far more languages per unit area than anywhere else. He conjectures some explanations as to why this should be. He says it has to do with the need of human beings to make their living, and the fact that it’s easier to live in a small community in an equatorial area where things grow easily than it is in temperate areas, where you need to trade with other communities or create large-scale empires to survive and which cause one language to spread across a large area. So this book gives you a completely different explanation of the patterning of languages in the world. He then combines this geographic view of diversity with some interesting discussion about human history and the discovery and spread of different agricultural practices."