PM_ME_A_PLANE_TICKET t1_irs5lb7 wrote
Are they just counting dialects as whole languages or what? how many of those 1599 languages share a large percentage of words?
Chicawhappa t1_irseq03 wrote
It's a very very old civilization with plenty of outsiders pouring in over the millenia, so the diversity of genetics and languages is hardly surprising. See the diversity in the UK between York and Birmingham, without counting the 20th century immigrants. If that can happen in 2000 years (4-7 cultures indigenous picts/celts/Welsh, Spaniards and Italians in the form of Romans, Norwegians, Danish, French, German pouring into the island from across Europe), then imagine a land that was regularly trading with pre-greek ancient Egypt and even ancient Somalia and Chad when they were prosperous cultures (mentioned in our old texts). It's not that surprising.
ZhouDa t1_irs8jhc wrote
Not sure, but I doubt their basis for classifying them as languages is different than anywhere else in the world. For example Spanish and Portuguese I hear has a good degree of intelligibility yet are classified as separate languages, same with Russian and Ukrainian.
PM_ME_A_PLANE_TICKET t1_irsi10g wrote
meanwhile, high and low German are dialects and change merely in pronunciation for the most part.
WhereToSit t1_is14tlm wrote
Russian and Ukrainian only have like a 50% vocab overlap which like you can generally convey important information with that but having a full blown conversation is a different story.
TENTAtheSane t1_irsd4ja wrote
They probably are, but sometimes it's justified. Like, I can't even understand the same language, my native language which is one of the blue ones in the op picture, spoken in the northern half of my state, while from what some friends from there tell me, different languages of different countries in Scandinavia or the Balkans are completely mutually intelligible
SystemOfASideways t1_iruqu2d wrote
The census simply recorded people's responses for what their native language was, so the number is significantly overinflated due to some languages having multiple names or people claiming for religious reasons that they spoke dead languages when they actually didn't. Most sources I can find say that India has around 450 spoken languages
The discrepancies in how the census counts languages between different years is how you end up with vastly different numbers. One year there are said to be ~2600 languages, then ~19,500 (Nearly 3 times the amount of languages estimated to exist in the whole world), and then ~1600
AmishTechno t1_irsuerg wrote
A huge percentage.
sjiveru t1_irt69ta wrote
Yeah, this seems to be using a very permissive definition of 'language'. Ethnologue - which at least tries to do things on a purely scientific basis - counts on the order of 600 or so languages in India.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments