Understanding aand mmeasuring bbiocultural ddiversity
Table 1. Unadjusted language diversity index (LD-RICH)
no. of languages
(L) log LLD-RICH
(log Li/log Lworld)World 6,800 3.83 1.000
Papua New
Guinea (highest)^833 2.92 0.762Mali (average) 45 1.65 0.431
Bermuda
(lowest)^1 0.00 0.000As noted above, to compensate for the fact
that large countries tend to have a greater
biological and cultural diversity than small
ones simply because of their greater area
(or greater population), we calculated two
additional diversity values for each country
by adjusting first for land area (BCD-AREA)
and second for population size (BCD-POP).
This was done by measuring how much
more or less diverse a country is in compari-son with an expected value based on its
area or population alone. The method used
is a modified version of that used by
Groombridge and Jenkins.^4 As an example of
the methods used, calculations for the lan-
guage indicator value are shown Tables 2
and 3. The process was repeated for the
other four indicators to derive BCD-AREA
and BCD-POP.Table 2. Area-adjusted language diversity index (LD-AREA)
country or
territory area (km(^2) ) log A
total no.
of
languages
L
log L
expected
log L
value
deviation
from
expected
value
LD-
AREA
World/max.
value 136,605,342 8.14 6,800 3.83 2.33 1.50 1.000
Papua New
Guinea (highest) 462,840 5.67^833 2.92 1.56 1.36 0.952
Turkmenistan
(average) 488,100 5.69^37 1.57 1.57 0.00 0.500
Greenland
(lowest) 2,175,600 6.34^2 0.30 1.77 -1.47 0.011
Negative
world/min.
value
299,112 5.48 1 0.00 1.50 -1.50 0.000