Language: A Resource for Nature 137extinction threats facing tropical and other fragile ecosystems on the one hand,
and indigenous peoples on the other, ethnobiologists stressed indigenous peoples’
stewardship over the world’s biological resources and affirmed the existence of an
‘inextricable link’ between cultural and biological diversity on Earth.
Interestingly, at about the same time, linguists were beginning to voice wide-
spread concern on the status of the world’s languages and to warn of another
impending extinction crisis, of a magnitude and pace comparable to, if not greater
than, that affecting biodiversity: one that would dramatically reduce linguistic
diversity through the disappearance of most of the numerically small languages
spoken by indigenous and minority peoples. In linguists’ calls to action vis-à-vis
this crisis, a parallel was often drawn with the loss of biodiversity, as a way of sug-
gesting comparable damage to humanity’s heritage. However, in these initial pro-
nouncements, no significant attempt was made to go beyond such parallels and
ask whether there might be more than a metaphorical relationship between these
phenomena. It is only recently that this question has been explicitly asked and the
idea proposed that, along with cultural diversity, linguistic diversity should also be
seen as inextricably linked to biodiversity.^1 The present article^2 seeks to contribute
to the debate on these issues and linkages.
Linguistic Diversify and Biodiversity
Defining and measuring linguistic diversity
In order to address this issue, let us begin by defining linguistic diversity. As with
biodiversity, there are various definitions of linguistic diversity. Most commonly,
however, the number of different languages spoken on Earth is used as a proxy for
global linguistic diversity. There are an estimated 5000 to 7000 languages spoken
today on the five continents, of which 32 per cent in Asia, 30 per cent in Africa,
19 per cent in the Pacific, 15 per cent in the Americas, and 3 per cent in Europe.
Of these languages, about half are spoken by communities of 10,000 speakers or less;
half of these, in turn, are spoken by communities of 1000 or fewer speakers (Figures
5.1–5.2). Overall, languages with up to 10,000 speakers total about 8 million peo-
ple, less than 0.2 per cent of an estimated world population of 5.3 billion.^3
On the other hand, of the remaining half of the world’s languages, a small group
of less than 300 (such as Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and so forth) are
spoken by communities of 1 million speakers or more, accounting for a total of over
5 billion speakers, or close to 95 per cent of the world’s population (Figure 5.3). The
top ten of these alone actually comprise almost half of this global population.
Indigenous and minority languages at risk
Taken together, these figures show that, while more than nine out of ten people in
the world are native speakers of one, or other, of only about 300 languages, most