Music Timestamp: 0:00-2:38 The garden (Purrgatory OST) 2:39-9:58 Back to the Holler (Night in the Woods OST) 10:11-13:42 Pierogies in the Dark (Night in the Woods OST) 13:43-16:23 Lands Untamed (Bug Fables OST) 16:24-18:28 Ol’ Pickaxe (Night in the Woods OST)
When I heard that Bug Fables music randomly I was just like "...are my ears deceiving me or is that what I think it is" Anyways Bug Fables mentioned! Lovely game, glad to see it randomly around sometimes!
It's funny how Americans are "known" for not learning other languages. Meanwhile, most of the countries at the bottom of this list are Spanish speaking countries, whose people come to the United States and never bother learning English.
Bolivia making every Indigenous language official, presumably including the languages of uncontacted tribes and therefore having an indeterminable number of official languages is pretty cool trivia
@@sohopedeco It does mean something. You can request public services to be adressed by your name and titles in your language. For instance i can't write my name in English or US paperwork but I could in Bolivia. Also, it means that if they integrate into the Bolivian society they can teach their lessons and govern their municipalties in their own language.
Yeah, they're against the US empire though so the US staged a coup to remove the responsible parties by arguing they defrauded the elections. Then in the next election they won again with an extremely similar margin and they returned to power.
Which people? I'm guessing you mean those that are not familiar with the Romance languages. But to be fair, Spanish and Portuguese share a large portion of vocabulary and even similar syntactic structure, which might let a lot of people think that their the same.
@@Huck5-7 I don't think you get what I mean, sure it's hard to differenciate portuguese from spanish, but what I'm talking about is that people think Brazil speaks spanish. It's like if people thought Ukrain spoke russian.
btw that french speaking number in haiti is almost certainly overblown. most ppl lie about(or at the very least exaggerate) french proficiency bc it’s a proxy for education (that’s a whole different can of worms). i tend to say 10% or at most 20% if i’m being super generous. but yeah haiti is pretty linguistically homogenous if you count kreyòl as one single language but there are 3 distinct dialects with Kreyòl Okap(of the north) being the least mutually intelligible with the others, having a different grammar structure and vocab but honestly i don’t have a problem calling Ayiti the least linguistically diverse country. i was kinda expecting it when i started the vid
Hi South African here I just wanted to comment that we recently made South African Sign Language our 12th official language! SASL (South African Sign Language) even has dialects although the reason for this is rather depressing as it is linked to the oppression of deaf people under Apartheid.
@@gamermapper They aren't official languages since they are either barely spoken or if spoken are never done so in a city or formal context. Khoisan people don't live thier traditional lifestyle anymore and haven't for a long time. It's really sad. But having every government building have someone being able to speak one of the many Khoisan languages is probably impossible. It's horrific what has happened to the Khoisan people.
Khoisan is also no longer considered a language family. Various languages with clicks were grouped together but research shows they actually arent related
Small correction concerning Belgium: the French variety spoken in Belgium is Belgian French, not Walloon. Walloon is a language in its own right, albeit non official, that is quickly dying out due to being harshly repressed in the past century or so.
Another thing regarding Belgium is that the LDI in the video doesn't match the numbers presented. 59% Dutch speakers gives a 35% chance two random people are both Dutch speakers, which alone will bring the LDI well below 0.7.
Montenegro’s case is so funny, since Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are essentially different names for the same language, Serbo-Croatian. They are all based on the same Shtokavian dialect. Someone speaking Montenegrin wouldn’t have problem understanding someone speaking Serbian and vice versa. In fact, the differences between these “languages” are smaller than between American and British English.
It's just language secessionism, you see it all the time (hindi/urdu, malaysian/indonesian, farsi/tajik/dari, "filipino"). Linguistic identities being viewed as ethnic/national identities. It's because of nationalism
If you go to the Balkans and buy a food package, you will notice basically the same ingredient list written 6 times under different flags. Only Slovenian and Macedonian might differ slightly. It's ridiculous.
Here in Aruba 🇦🇼, almost everyone speaks Papiamento (a Portuguese-based creole), English, Spanish and Dutch at often high levels of fluency (Dutch less though generally). The neighboring islands of Curaçao 🇨🇼 and Bonaire 🇧🇶 also speak these languages (although with higher Dutch fluency and lower Spanish fluency). Some people here even speak 5 or 6 languages. The Dutch Caribbean is very diverse in people groups, cultures & languages so thats why. Edit: Aruba and Curaçao are countries within the Dutch kingdom, so technically countries but not really as we aren't fully sovereign. New Caledonia and Guam did get a mention though, so i suppose we still count.
@@iwatchthemooooon3002 For me personally i can catch a couple words from Brazilian & European Portuguese in speech but the rest is completely unintelligible for me. In writing i can understand it quite well. We can understand Cape Verdeans (their creole) pretty well though. I will give an example of Papiamento in text at the end of my comment for those who want to see it. Also i should note that Papiamento itself is split into 2 dialects. That of Aruba (Papiamento) and that of Curaçao and Bonaire (Papiamentu). Aruba's dialect is (historically) more influenced by Spanish (& recently English). If you want to hear the differences, check out the news channels "24ora" (Aruba) and "Telecuraçao" (Curaçao). Bon nochi, mi ta papiando Papiamento (di Aruba) awo. Lo ta interesante pa wak si Brasileñonan por compronde Papiamento. Papiamento tin influencia di varios otro idioma tambe, incluyendo Spaño, Hulandes, linguanan Africano y di e lingua Caquetio (Arawak). Laga'mi sa si hende por compronde e texto ki.
@@Diwie8Wow, I actually can understand a bit with 100% certainty, but theres some tricky words too: "Good night, I am now speaking Papiamento from Aruba. I'm interested to see if Brazilians can understand Papiamento (this part I'm not sure). Papiamento has influence of other languages as well, like Spanish, Dutch, African languages and of the language Caquetio. Tell me if you can understand this text." Is that it?
@@cuidadocomomatheus That was almost perfectly translated (nice). In text and written form i believe that Papiamento is easier to understand for Spanish and Portuguese speakers. But in speech Papiamento is harder to understand at times as we often throw in words from English, Spanish and Dutch (and even Portuguese, Chinese, German, French or Italian etc in the case of some recent immigrants) in the mix and switch between languages mid-conversation, this is especially common in the younger generation.
I meen, Its Good to have a Universal Langauge in a Country or people that are supose to hold Together, but at the same time language has a Rich Cultur build in, Best is everyone knows 2 Languages, Their "in Group" and their "Out Group"
I've been working in a Brazilian company as part of the HR department for over six years, being responsible for testing applicants' level of English in interviews for positions that require it. And let me tell you that regarding Brazil, unlike countries like Haiti, which has a large part of the population speaking a second or third language, Brazil stands out as a country with very few people able to speak anything other than Portuguese. For many Brazilians Spanish falls into the category of: 'I've never studied but I can speak Spanish at a basic level'. This lie is often told because a Portuguese speaker will naturally have some understanding of Spanish, which makes many claim knowledge of the language even if they don't really have it. When it comes to English, most of the people I interacted with who claimed to know the language had a very basic knowledge of it, or only demonstrated a more advanced level in reading and writing, failing to meet the minimum criteria for using the language in a 100% English-speaking work environment. I believe that after a certain point, a country's 'monolingualism' generates a side effect of the average citizen's lack of notion of what it really means to be able to use a language, which results in a huge amount of the population claiming to know a language even if they can't properly use it.
Just to be clear, I have no intention of offending any Brazilians with my comment. The effort to learn a new language is commendable in itself, no matter where you are on the path.
This idea is very poignant. After all lizard mentions the US's anglophones notoriety (and that goes for many British people as well) for monolingualism. And I would say, too, that most Americans/Brits are happy to say "I'm familiar with Spanish/French/German" while only knowing a few basic phrases, 0 grammar, and maybe some imitation swear words
@@JohnSearleFangirl Agreed, unfortunately. That's why I actually try to know French. A lot of people don't understand what actually knowing the language is, or how little they know of it, unless they decide to immerse. They also forget their language knowledge from school because our school system is literally just endless cramming which is very inefficient for both learning and long-term memory so we know a lot for tests but don't remember anything long-term (one could write a book about how students who are actually curious and enjoy properly understanding information get completely screwed over as the system prefers those who only care about grades and empty memorisation), as well as the fact they never end up using it and you naturally forget languages you don't use.
8:49 Walloon is a separate language from French and is very endangered. Most Wallonian Belgians speak Belgian French/ Wallonian French which is not too different from Standard French. Walloon however, while still being a Gallo-Romance language, is completely different enough to not be intelligible with French
Brazil's second most spoken language is german and german dialects. Actually the hunsrickisch is the most spoken dialect It's a mindfuck and most brazilians dont know that
I’m from Japan and I expected it to be in the bottom 10 instead of the 20th least diverse. I see that smaller single-ethnic-group countries and tiny island nations with 0 or 1 indigenous languages padded the ranks below Japan.
As a Georgian, I'd say that the Caucasus is the most diverse region when it comes to linguistical diversity per capita. Unfortunately, all this diversity is overshadowed by the fact that most people speak predominantly Russian (although it's _not_ their native/first language), but still, the amount of individual languages present is quite crazy. Georgia alone is very linguistically diverse too, with the native languages being the titular Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan, Laz, with many North Caucasian languages spoken, on top of Armenian, Turkish, Azerbaijani and the obligatory Russian.
Awesome video! I've always wondered which countries were the least linguistically diverse! Okay, now maybe you can answer a question I've not been able to answer for a very long time: With language has the largest amount of monolingual speakers? This can be answered in a few ways: 1. Which language simply has the most monolingual speakers in total, 2. Which language's monolingual speakers make up the largest percentage of its total speakers, and 3. Which language's monolingual speakers make up the largest percent of the Earth's population. You may find this impossible to answer, because I sure have! But if you could even shed the smallest amount a light on this subject, I really think it would make an awesome video! Either way, keep up the language related videos!
Great question! Off the top of my head, I'd expect Mandarin to fit #3, and maybe #1 and #2 as well. There are 900 million native Mandarin speakers in China as the video pointed out, and I assume a rather small proportion of them know international languages like English, or another China-internal language like Yue, Wu, or non-Chinese Indigenous languages. But that must still leave a very large number of monolingual Mandarin speakers: I'd guess at least 500 million, probably more. It's difficult to judge considering how many urban Chinese people are studying English now, but how many of them can say a handful of words or basic sentences vs. can take a trip to an Anglophone country and communicate effectively.
@@aaronmarks9366 I also arrived at this conclusion based on the small amount of data I could find. After Mandarin, it is hard to say what other languages might make up a top 10 list. As Arabic is a very useful lingua franca, if it is your native tongue, and you live your whole life in an Arabic speaking country, there seems there would be no real drive to learn a second language. Ofc, then the argument of Arabic not really being one language will come up. There is on going joke about gamers from Russia refusing to learn English, yet still engaging with the international online gaming community. As you would guess, most people that attempt to play with strangers start with English, and go from there, but not Russians! (I'm sure this is just an awful stereotype, but it does hint at the reality of the former USSR being culturally and politically separate from the rest of Europe, which is much more used to cultural mixing.) Other than that, maybe English and French? For the same "well there are a lot of people who speak my language everywhere, why learn another language" reasons as Arabic? Spanish, because...uh...Latin America? Oh, and Japanese seems like it has a large percentage of monolingual speakers with in itself, that don't necessarily make up a large percentage of monolingual speakers world-wide. I wish I had some real data to judge this, because right now I'm just guessing based on stereotypes, unfortunately.
Some context for South Africa: 1. We have 12 official languages now, including SA Sign Language. 2. We have 2 West Germanic languages out of the 11 languages cited above, those being English and Afrikaans. 3. Out of the remaining 9 languages, we can roughly reduce them to just 4 for reasons I will share. i. IsiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele and Siswati may be considered a dialect continuum of one language generally called Nguni. These languages share extremely high mutual intelligibility despite apparent huge differences. They are in many ways comparable to Scots and English in terms of distance between them. During the colonial period, missionaries used isiXhosa speakers that were familiar with English or Dutch, to interpret between them and speakers of Nguni languages in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal province. Those isiXhosa speakers had not been previously exposed to the varieties which eventually became standardised as Zulu. However, they were able to communicate with ease. ii. Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana can also all be considered one language for similar reasons given for Nguni (Ndebele, Swati, Xhosa & Zulu). Speakers of these languages may meet for the first time without previous exposure and will chat away without problems except for a word here and there, as soon as their ears become accustomed to the pronunciation differences. The more distance varieties of the languages are not recognised and those will offer more difficulty to understand, for speakers of other languages that are not used to hearing them. iii. Tshivenda is more unique and a standalone. iv. Xitsonga is also more unique and a standalone.
I think the "shared first language" metric is quite flawed, especially considering most people in linguistically diverse regions would likely be multilingual, different languages may be equally prominent but in different social scenarios, and the "first language" might not be many people's actual most used language. I understand that compressing a complex topic down to a single metric will always miss some crucial details, but I think maybe a fairer metric would be trying to measure how much information on average we need to determine which languages a person from a region speaks. In a linguistically unified country we only have to know the name of the language everybody speaks, but in a diverse country you will have to split the population in to more and more subgroups. The nice thing about this idea is that it is not too difficult to implement it crudely. You create a list of every individual's every language, one line per person (or approximate this list from statistics), lexically sort the list, compress the file containing the list, then divide the file size by population number. There you have it, the approximate information per capita you need to determine languages a person in that country speaks.
In post Soviet states a lot of people speak Russian when speaking between different nationalities like is an Azeri goes to Kazakhstan he'll speak Russian or if a Moldovan wants to speak to a Gagauz he'll speak Russian. The number of Russian speakers is especially high in Belarus and Ukraine. However they all have their own national and ethnic languages too even which sometimes are their main ones.
What does the LDI do with native bilinguals? I'm a native trilingual; while English is my first native language, some people could not so easily pick a first.
@osasunaitor you literally only have to do a survey or pull some survey data, convert it to a list, then scale the size of the list from different regions to be the same. Exactly the same difficulty as any other survey.
Little correction about Belgium: it's not Walloon but french that's mainly spoken in the southern part, Walloon is also a language (or group of languages) mainly spoken by elderly people from the Southern part. There is also a small part which speaks German natively, and a lot of people in Brussels speak other languages natively, as their is a lot of diversity in the capital (and also in the other big cities, but not as much I'd think)
13:16 If this nation comes up in future videos in discussions of the Caribbean or so, it is pronounced "grenade-ah". That also goes for another island to its north often confused with a Spanish nation with a similar name: Dominica is stressed on the second "i" and not the first, so "domin-EE-kah". But I've been giving your videos thumbs up because they're pretty well done and I enjoy the topic a lot, so I really hope you keep going because there's so much out there worth exploring!
How come you only did the genocide comment for English speaking countries but not for countries like Mexico and Brazil with a similar history of genocide and atrocities against indigenous people? It is good that you lift up those things when it comes to anglophone nations such as Canada and the US, but then you didn’t even say something like “Brazil with a similar history of indigenous erasure” or anything like that, idk it’s kinda weird ngl… it’s not like indigenous people didn’t get treated poorly in Brazil and Mexico just because their oppressors didn’t speak English Especially with Colombia where native languages are almost entirely extinct you very neutrally said there are tiny languages spoken by a small proportion of the population it just comes off sort of weird that you downplay those people’s suffering for some reason. And with Cuba you just say the languages indigenous to the island “have been extinct for centuries” like either just state the current facts in a neutral way or do the genocide commentary for non Anglo countries too, it’s super weird the way you did it. And before someone thinks I’m a salty American, no I’m not, I’m Swedish…
In Brazil and Mexico was more a cultural erasure than a ethnic genocide, in the USA they just shoot then and segregated, while in Brazil and Mexico the natives mixed with Europeans, and later they descendants mixed with africans, especially in Brazil
Because frankly there was far less killing in Mexico's case and far more cultural assimilation. Mexico, the US and their policies are not comparable in their results. Brazil on the other hand is lot more complicated. The indigenous population' manages to be even lower, but Brazil is so mixed ethnically that there are still a lot of people with indigenous ancestry walking around, especially in the North. Still, their history is dark enough that it comes close to giving the US and Canada a run for their money.
@@aenzontll86 less killing? Ok cool what happened to the native populations of Hispaniola and Cuba? They were enslaved en masse and completely wiped out. Read up about the encomienda system and the massive slave mines the Spaniards had in places like Cerro Potosi. Read about how the Spaniards treated the Inca, maya and Aztecs, along with other mesoamerican nations. Read about the extremely strict racial hierarchy the Spaniards codified in their empire (limpieza de sangre) which inspired Nazi racial policies. Claiming the Spanish empire was in any way better than the US, Canada, or Australia, is absurd. It might be true in some cases that the successor states of the Spanish empire treated the native populations better, but there are also many examples where they did not. That doesn’t change the fact that it is really weird to not bring the genocide point up when talking about Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, but mentioning it in anglophone countries. As I said it diminishes the suffering of colonisation and it is pretty gross to me to go on a tirade about the awful treatment of natives in anglophone countries and then stating in a very neutral way that the indigenous Caribbean languages “went extinct centuries ago” as if the reason they went extinct wasn’t systematic genocide and slavery on a scale only rivalled by the Holocaust. America isn’t uniquely evil, and that includes the treatment of the natives. It was (and in many ways still is) appalling of course but that should not serve to trivialise the ill treatment of indigenous populations in other countries. It is true that there was more mixing, but that’s more about the sheer quantity of people the Spanish empire conquered. In less densely populated places the natives were entirely wiped out.
@@FilAnd01 I explicitly stated that we should not be comparing them. Attempting to find some lesser of evils here is stupid. You were talking about Mexico and Brazil, and I only responded to those two. The Spanish Caribbean is an entirely different conversation. I'm well aware of Spanish atrocities. But they are not the same as each other either. Spanish and Anglo colonies weren't even really created for the same purposes. Most of the former existed to be exploited more than settled, while most of the latter were there to be first cleansed, then settled. Outside of the Caribbean, natives were seen as a resource to be exploited, not obstacles to settlement. This is why even with all the death in Potosi's mines natives still form a majority both there and in most of Andean Bolivia. However, the Southern cone is a little different in this regard. Uruguay is the worst offender there.
thank you for this comment!!! i'm a native person in the united states, but i have good friends of mine who are also native, the only difference is that their communities are from south of the border, yet we are treated so different. our histories are talked about differently, our communities are talked about differently, our struggles are talked about differently, etc etc. we're treated as a completely different race all together when we're not. we're both natives. the border was invented by colonizers to divide and conquer and its working!!!!!
Because the writer is probably most familiar with the history of English speaking countries, same with the intended audience. Plus, pretty much every country has had some atrocity or genocide happen in its history that has changed which languages are spoken there. Going into detail on every single one would be pretty boring.
I find it very annoying how you mention the Canadian and Australian crimes against the natives, yet nothing on Chinas similar practices that go on to this day!
@@eltucuyo518 over half a million speakers, officially UN recognized as endangered language, formally recognized as indigenous regional language by Belgium
Malaysia also has multiple Chinese languages spoken there, with Cantonese in Kuala Lumpur, Hakka in Sabah, and Hokkien in Penang. These are all spoken in other regions but those are the first that come to mind. And given the reason for China's ranking, I highly doubt it should be that low, as Sichuanese is also considered "Mandarin", but is clearly a separate language. The same goes for if "Min" is simply taken as one language, as it is potentially paraphyletic, and in any case has extreme levels of mutual unintelligibility. The same goes for every major "Chinese dialect group", they all consist of multiple languages. "Ping" is also clearly paraphyletic, with Southern Pinghua being clearly Cantonesic, while Northern Pinghua is not.
Just so you know, you said the LDIs for some of the least diverse countries wrong. You forgot to say another zero after the point in 0.017, for example. Not a big deal, but it caught me off guard so I thought I'd tell you.
Australia is NOT linguistically diverse by a long shot! Most Australian schools treat the curriculum requirement to teach a "Language Other Than English" (LOTE) as a joke. Most parents wish schools would "stop wasting time" on it. Most Australians only speak English, except for migrants and often their children, but they only speak other languages in their own communities. The vast majority of Aboriginal languages are moribund with a few rare exceptions like Arrernte, which is spoken in the middle of the desert by around 30,000 people who are largely ignored by the rest of the country. People who don't speak their mother tongue should not be counted in the LDI.
Agreed I'm an Australian and it has to be the least linguistically diverse country in the world While I think there are many migrants frankly their children all speak and read English 😆 Australia is a graveyard of languages
Papua New Guinea is crazy! Ive been there. Almost every district has a different language. So they speak a form of pidgin used during the colonial era to communicate with each other. Also, not only are they diverse in language, they are also diverse in skin tone. From sub saharan black to white. Even their temperment. I always pictured Pacific islanders to be peaceful but nah, this place has the Swiss to the Afghanis. All living side by side. Got robbed twice while I was there. Still don't regret having visited the place.
It's so weird to see Norway score so low on this score. The differences between dialects here are so big that it would beat most, if not all, European countries in linguistic diversity. Especially the Netherlands (where I am originally from). I also live in the far north where the Sámi and Kven languages are still the primary languages in some villages, but this are ofcourse very few people compared to how many people are living in the south
A lot of this is internal politics. For example, I doubt a linguistic diversity score made 50 years ago would have Italy particularly high, but it IS true that Italian isn't really the mother-tongue of a majority of Italians, and that has only really gotten recognition in recent times. The same is ofc. The case with standard norwegian, and Norway is extremely diverse in dialects as well, but my impression is that Norway finds distinct dialects to be a feature of the language, rather than distinguishing it as many different, but closely related languages. You might be able to correct me here, but my impression also is that Norwegians don't code-switch that much? As in, change their dialect when speaking to people not from their neck of the woods.
@@loran1212 We do somewhat change how we speak, using words that are more likely to be in common when speaking with those that don't speak our dialect. And there are several dialects that are definitely harder to understand the further away from it you grew up and the less exposure you had to it. At least one, but possibly several dialects should arguably be catecorised as their own languages, but aren't for nationalistic reasons, I guess. But, the dialects in Norway vary far more than the ones in Sweden for instance, while Norway also has a fair number of immigrants as as well as other languages spoken natively in Norway. But a big part of the issue is honestly with figuring out where the line between dialect and language lies. Most dialects in Norway differ more from each other than "standard" Norwegian does from standard Swedish, yet those two are considered different languages.
glad to hear genocide being called out in Canada, the United States, and Australia. But is there a reason that this wasn't called out in other countries too? For example Russia or China?
Yes, Mexico purged their indigenous languages heavily the first century after their independence. Northern languages where erased either through genocide, expulsion or reeducation campaigns. Most of the remaining native speakers are Mayan and Tlaxcalan since those languages were more protected and used under the Spanish crown and had more literature and grammar books, sometimes used/studied in academia.
Imagine if Aztecs today still drew these beautiful Mesoamerican glyphs and we still had Tenochitlan... It's so sad it's nit actually the case... ☹️ Although why should we be sad, it's not impossible to make that a reality! If the Nahua people mobilise themselves and create a grassroots nationalist movement to revive their pre colonial culture and glory it can definitely happen! 😊
@@migueljoserivera9030That’s not true, we have close to 30 million indigenous people, they were under the caste system but the extermination that the Spaniards and castizos were doing stopped when Vicente Guerrero the second president, abolished slavery and gave land back to the indigenous people, a practice that went on to be reinstated under Benito Juarez a decades later, he was the first native president in Mexico as well. It’s insane trying to white wash America by lying about the history of native peoples in Latin America is insane what you people are trying to do.
@@migueljoserivera9030 it was at a point in time where the term “indian” actually held legal power and people with said title would usually own lands and wealth, etc. It was that same criollo movement for homogenization and other similar events happening in neighboring countries that took the prestige around the term all away (one of the first thing new governments like that of mexico did was to disown the lands of a lot of the noble indigenous that had been given those privileges by the crown of spain). That’s also why now we have situations where the descendant of moctezuma lives in Spain today and is quite a spaniard actually.
When I saw Brazil in the thumbnail, I was so skeptical I thought it was clickbait. LDI is a fascinating index, great video! I wonder what the LDI of the entire earth is…
I was genuinely surprised by how low Brazil and South America as a whole was. I know native languages don't make up a huge percentage outside of Peru (and maybe Bolivia?) but I thought they'd make up something more.
@@amelialonelyfart8848 Amerindian DNA is only 10% of Brazil's gene pool, Brazil was an empty jungle, it's expected to be like this, the other countries surprised me more.
There's no credible source saying 3 million people speak a variety of German in Brazil natively. In fact, if you look at the last census in which language was counted in Brazil back in 1950, it was spoken by just a few percentage points of people mostly in the south, and it was decreasing. Imagining it had a massive resurgence and made the south of Brazil as linguistically diverse as Spain is pretty... Absurd
In the south german is spoken in the countryside but yeah portuguese is the most spoken language,after portuguese is german in the south the most spoken language
These who claim this nonsense are wannabe germans. If anything, the most spoken language besides portuguese is spanish or some native american language.
@@leondenizard3800 Some German is spoken by some people in the countryside. Brazil is about 80% urban and 20% rural. Do you think half of the people in the countryside of the south speak German natively? That's quite... Impossible. It wasn't the case even in 1950 and then the language was most likely more widely spoken than now, as it was getting weaker over time
I seriously doubt more than 100k people in Brazil can speak German natively. As someone commented above, those who claim this are n*zi lunatics who believe the "Aryan south is superior" or some other lunacy.
It would be interesting to see what the results were if the index weren't "probability of having the same mother tongue", but "probability of speaking a common language", as in many places, people are at least bilingual. And the next question would be where these indices differ the most.
LingoLizard: mentions how genocide by Western European colonists led to loss of linguistic diversity: Russia: *10 steps below US with LDI of 0.283 despite having ~125 recognised languages spoken its territory that is larger than US 1.7 times*
In cases like France, they did not replace indigenous African languages, many just made it lingua franca. In cases like Russia, Russians didn't replaced them, they just decided they have control over them. Siberian natives are STILL very much extant and intact. There may have been cultural killings but not as grave as anglophone eradication and replacement. For China's case, they just outnumbered them, even before the population of Han already outnumbered them, though they may have had culture killing they actually celebrate diversity for the diversity points. Not saying it is working, it's just that the diversity is kept alive but surviving and not thriving. I don't know about the Arabian world tho
Interesting isn't it? You're starting to notice the double standards too eh? Frankly I don't even care anymore. They can cope all they want. As the saying goes, "the dogs bark yet the caravan moves on."
China didn’t exactly have systematic cultural assimilation on the same level as Canada. The dominance of Han culture/language happened over a way longer stretch of time (we’re talking like centuries or even millennia), and evolved into many regional dialects that are still spoken by many ppl till this day. If you consider regional dialect as speaking different language, there is a pretty high chance a random person on the street don’t speak the same “mother tongue” as the person next to him. While there are debate about teaching dialect/language in school(like young people not longer speak Cantonese as well as their parent), these dialect/language are still alive. children’s of minority culture in China are simply just not taught their own culture in public school system because it’s public school at the end of the day. That’s the unfortunate reality of being minority. What makes China’s declining regional dialect/language different from Canada’s is, at least the children’s aren’t forcibly kidnapped away from their parent and molested in boarding school.
(thumbnail snipe), technically, since the languages of "uncontacted tribes" are the least related languages to any know language family, brazil would be very high, although that would be basically .01% of the population who doesn't even identify themselves with the nation or state of "brazil", so fair enough.
EL SALVADOR MENTIONED!! 🇸🇻🇸🇻🇸🇻 But at what cost... 😔 I'm trying to learn Nawat, it's so sad seeing a core part of what became Salvadorean culture disappear before my very eyes, and seemingly no one cares.
Is it really Salvadorean culture? El Salvador is merely the settler state that occupies their land, they have their own distinct indigenous culture and this state has nothing to do with it. It's very weird this tendency of characterising world cultures only by the current political entity they're a part of. No one says that Belarus is a part of Russian culture even though they're very similar but somehow Hawaiian culture which has been literally destroyed by the US occupation is a part of "American culture"?
@@gamermapper I'd say Salvadorean culture is a mixture of the Spanish settler culture as well as indigenous culture, there are plenty of traditions, food, common vocabulary and local customs that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the indigenous aspects of the overall culture. I'm not saying Salvadorean culture is 1:1 indigenous Nawat culture.
@@rommelrivera6131 I don't believe that the settler state of El Salvador had a right to appropriate the Indigenous traditions simply because they occupy their lands right now. It's funny too, even though Russia and Ukraine have very similar cultures, if anyone would dare to say that Ukrainian culture is often also a part of Russian culture they'd be mocked but saying that Nawat culture is a part of "Salvadorian" culture is okay apparently, when in reality Spanish settlers and indigenous people have literally nothing in common?
That's so cool that Zimbabwe recognizes sign languages for the deaf as an official language. 15:20 Taino extinction. I wonder how Juan Luis Guerra got the Taino for his song Naboria/Daca Mayanimacana.
8:48 Small correction, but Walloon is not the same as Belgian French: Belgian French is what most of the population of Wallonia speaks and is basically a form of Francien, while Walloon is an endangered minority language that's rather distinctive among other Oïl varieties. Walloon is not the only such variety of Oïl spoken in Wallonia, with Picard, Lorrain, and Champenois also spoken in areas. Belgian French is much closer to standard French than it is to Walloon.
If we rank countries by number of languages spoken by the average citizen, many Asian countries will top the list. India and Philippines would definitely be ranked high because an average citizen of those countries speak at least 3-5 languages.
Super interesting! I always love your videos. One request though: could you put less text at the bottom of the screen? It’s covered up if you put on subtitles 😢
Gotta love how you stopped to talk about language imposition specifically in Anglosphere countries despite the fact that similar things happened basically everywhere
Interesting to note how linguistic diversity reflects on the three waves of populating Oceania: first the Melanesians about 50,000 years ago, then the Micronesians, descendants of early Austronesians and then the fairly recent Polynesians who all share a thightly-knit culture and their languages are closely related.
6:05 85% are non-Emiratis, but the expats in the UAE come from all over which contributes to the linguistic diversity too. South Indians are the largest groups, with Indians and Pakistanis both making up more of the population than Emiratis, but after that it's Bangladesh, the Philippines, Iran, Egypt, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Syria, the UK, China, Jordan, Afghanistan, Palestine, European Union (idk why the statistics put them all together either), South Africa, and Lebanon.
Good video! I found it odd however that you (rightly) harp on the anglosphere's lack of linguistic diversity due to their colonial past, but then when discussing Latin America at the bottom of the list there's suddenly no mention of the fact that their even greater lack of diversity is due to an even more thorough and brutal colonial past. If you're going to bring up colonialism, you should be even handed in applying its critique of the past.
También es cierto que entre más trabajo antropológico se hace en el país, más lenguas autóctonas son reconocidas, especialmente cuando se contactan a poblaciones que viven en lugares de difícil acceso. Una consulta rápida en internet me indica que en Colombia se hablan 71 idiomas diferentes, 70 lenguas indigenas y el español, pero desconozco si en esa sumatoria se incluyen o no a lenguas minoritarias no indígenas como el palenquero, el criollo sanandresano, etc. Saludos.
240 is a very low estimate for Brazil. Do note that portuguese may be stated as the native tongue by a big number of native ethnicities that still speak their ancestral tongues at least in ceremonies (also, some of these people may only state that they speak portuguese predominantly while not doing so in their private lives). There's also the prevalence of african languages as ceremonial languages (in the same way arab is spoken by muslim populations worldwide), but that's another conversation entirely
I really expected the US and France to be pretty low on the list, but apparently there are 80-something countries lower on the list.. They are still below half-way through the list, but I'm still surprised. Also, it's funny that because agreeing on what counts as separate languages is so hard we get a list whose top entries are pretty agreeable, but the bottom is dubious, and very sensitive to altering your counting.. also also, Tok Pisin is still the funniest language name. I have friends who hate it when I Tok while Pisin
Both US and France have a significant immigrant population speaking Spanish and Arabic respectively, so it raises their LDI. The lowest countries would be those that are monolingual and have very low immigrant population, say DPRK which is shown in the thumbnail...
@@migueljoserivera9030which is probably a missing measure of diversity here. Some variants of Spanish in South America would be pretty distinct and have totally different slang- same with Hindi, Chinese and Arabic. I think that gets missed in these counts. You might have two neighbouring New Guinean languages with only a little difference vs two dialects of Arabic that are more or less separate languages.
France has overseas territories that have a lot of different languages that are still actively spoken. French Guyana, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, etc. The US too has overseas territories like the Hawaiian Islands or Eastern Samoa although some of them don't speak their own language anymore as the main language like Hawaii (which technically isn't even American under international law but it's another question).
@@jayolovitt5969 According to mainstream linguistics, most Spanish and Arabic dialects differ between countries, rather than between one country, so it doesn't make much of a difference for the purpose of this video...
0:40 Sorry to be a stickler, but I think you meant the likelihood that they do NOT speak the same native language. If a score of 1 is a perfect score for language diversity, then that means it’s 100% certain that two randomly selected people will not speak the same language, right?
In India languages changed every district but the government didn't wanted to make all the languages important they rather marked them as dialects But as a dialect speaker I would say I have seen many people who hardly understand Hindi the main language and almost all people wouldn't understand another dialect
3:15 I think for the index population doesn't directly matter, though larger countries might tend to have more and more evenly distributed languages. Like, the E.U. probably has a higher score than most of the countries in it, India probably has a higher score than its constituent polities, etc. So it's impressive for a small country to have a higher score, but it doesn't have a high score because it has a lot of languages per capita, compared to other countries with a similar total number of languages.
Colombian here and while yes the video is pretty accurate, we do speak Spanish for the most part with the surviving indigenous languages as an exeption and a fact not mentioned in the insular region they speak an English creole language though most also speak spanish as a second language due to the tourists from the continental portion of the country and other spanish speaking countries.
As an Indian, I await the day mr lizard makes a video about my mother tongue, cuz i think there's a lot to be said :0 also yes I've watched basically every video on the channel and live for rare lang mentions lmao
I need to disagree with the index used. If a large number of the population are bi-, tri- or multi-lingual, those factors should be considered as linguistic diversity.
Great video! Always fun to learn about. Why did you only talk about English settler colonialism? It felt pretty weird to go from talking about them to then running into a ton of examples of French and Spanish colonialism and not touching on it once?
As someone who's lived in the Maldives, there are sooooo many Indian, Australian and other expats there that I wouldn't call it lingiustically not-diverse by any means. English is also a very common L2 there fwiw.
8:45 Walloon is a heavily endangered language. The 2 largest languages of Belgium are Flemish and French, not Walloon. Although there are still more Walloon-speakers than German-speakers. I predict German will overtake Walloon by the end of this century.
Oh wow. 8:24 Im just casually watching this and didn't know my country and language were gonna show up on here lol. I speak Mortlockese (kapasen mochulok).
The UK has a overwhelming majority of English speakers, but there are thousands of different dialects there. Most are 30,000 speakers or less and are dying out.
6:35 there are even more than 30% people in Indonesia speak Javanesee with different dialects and accents. Since the Javanese are almost everywhere in Indonesia. Sundanese is far behind that number but still can be considered as the second largest. What is happening now is Indonesian tend to mix their native languages with bahasa Indonesia to communicate. So I'm not sure if there are Indonesian people who speak 100% bahasa Indonesia all the time.
8:48 Correction: Walloon is a distinct language and is different from French (unlike Flemish, which is generally considered a dialect of Dutch (although separate regional languages exist, like West Flemish))
Brazil is quite a sad case, since the 1930/40 our gorvernment tried multiple different policies in order to unify the country under only one language, and well, it is quite effective in its goal.
I was expecting Vatican City to be dead last because you must be approved by the Vatican to get a residence permit and Citizenship. The only people who can have Vatican City citizenship would-be workers, so I imagine Speaking Italian would be a requirement for employment.
In the 90s I knew some kids in rural areas of the south that only spoke a German dialect. But I believe that after the internet popularized, it's highly unlikely that someone do not know how to speak portuguese here. Maybe in some remote indigenous tribes, but average Brazilians rarely have any contact with them.
That metric is cool but it isn't that useful. I'd rather see the probability of two random people speaking mutually intelligible languages. Ignoring second languages seems wrong to me, and also there are ppolitical reasons to define languages as the same or distinct. You pointed out Serbo-Croatian, which can be 1 language or 4, and turn Bosnia from one of the most diverse to one of the least. Also, some of the more diverse countries still can have a 98% prob. of both speaking the lingua franca, which I find very important as well. In the end two strangers rarely engage in their native languages, they mostly use the lingua franca.
Also, languages which actually come from the same country just seem less "diverse" to me than languages which come from other parts of the world but were brought in.
@@Oceanwaves-d8l I differ, I think that Xhosa, Afrikaans, Zulu and English are very diverse even if they all are from the same country (South Africa), or French, Dutch and German even if they all are present in Belgium. But I find less diverse having four varieties of Serbocroatian. Spain, for instance, has 5 official languages but I don't find Spain so diverse because Valencian, Catalan and Balear are almost the same, Galician is very similar to Castilian and Portuguese and Basque, which is very distinct and not mutually intelligible, is spoken by 0.5% of the population. Most diversity comes from Arabs, Romanians, Western Europeans and Chinese.
Music Timestamp:
0:00-2:38 The garden (Purrgatory OST)
2:39-9:58 Back to the Holler (Night in the Woods OST)
10:11-13:42 Pierogies in the Dark (Night in the Woods OST)
13:43-16:23 Lands Untamed (Bug Fables OST)
16:24-18:28 Ol’ Pickaxe (Night in the Woods OST)
NITW LET'S GOOO!!!
Thanks a lot for the music playlist : ) Sincerely
When I heard that Bug Fables music randomly I was just like "...are my ears deceiving me or is that what I think it is"
Anyways Bug Fables mentioned! Lovely game, glad to see it randomly around sometimes!
It's funny how Americans are "known" for not learning other languages. Meanwhile, most of the countries at the bottom of this list are Spanish speaking countries, whose people come to the United States and never bother learning English.
PURRGATORY SPOTTED YEAH
(loved the vid btw :3)
Bolivia making every Indigenous language official, presumably including the languages of uncontacted tribes and therefore having an indeterminable number of official languages is pretty cool trivia
"Official language" means nothing when you can request any public services in that language.
@@sohopedeco It does mean something.
You can request public services to be adressed by your name and titles in your language. For instance i can't write my name in English or US paperwork but I could in Bolivia.
Also, it means that if they integrate into the Bolivian society they can teach their lessons and govern their municipalties in their own language.
Yeah, they're against the US empire though so the US staged a coup to remove the responsible parties by arguing they defrauded the elections. Then in the next election they won again with an extremely similar margin and they returned to power.
That was in 2022, let's hope the US doesn't starve their country into submission like they did with Venezuela after Maduro won 2018 in a landslide.
@@DrVictorVasconcelos really not related but Maduro very clearly rigs elections, this year exit polls said 80% against him and yet he still “won”…
Even tho >99% of Brazil speaks portuguese, people still think we speak spanish...
98%*
Which people? I'm guessing you mean those that are not familiar with the Romance languages. But to be fair, Spanish and Portuguese share a large portion of vocabulary and even similar syntactic structure, which might let a lot of people think that their the same.
@@MustraOrdo it's just a generic way of saying "people who don't speak portuguese or spanish"
I mean you can’t blame them, it’s like trying to tell the difference between Ukrainian and Russian. For English speakers its basically the same
@@Huck5-7 I don't think you get what I mean, sure it's hard to differenciate portuguese from spanish, but what I'm talking about is that people think Brazil speaks spanish. It's like if people thought Ukrain spoke russian.
btw that french speaking number in haiti is almost certainly overblown. most ppl lie about(or at the very least exaggerate) french proficiency bc it’s a proxy for education (that’s a whole different can of worms). i tend to say 10% or at most 20% if i’m being super generous. but yeah haiti is pretty linguistically homogenous if you count kreyòl as one single language but there are 3 distinct dialects with Kreyòl Okap(of the north) being the least mutually intelligible with the others, having a different grammar structure and vocab
but honestly i don’t have a problem calling Ayiti the least linguistically diverse country. i was kinda expecting it when i started the vid
That’s false lol the research is correct it’s 42% the 5%-10%is false they basically saying only the elite speak it which is false
Also 20%of the population speaks Spanish
Hi South African here I just wanted to comment that we recently made South African Sign Language our 12th official language! SASL (South African Sign Language) even has dialects although the reason for this is rather depressing as it is linked to the oppression of deaf people under Apartheid.
That’s cool
Why are Khoisan languages not official yet?
@@gamermapper They aren't official languages since they are either barely spoken or if spoken are never done so in a city or formal context. Khoisan people don't live thier traditional lifestyle anymore and haven't for a long time. It's really sad. But having every government building have someone being able to speak one of the many Khoisan languages is probably impossible. It's horrific what has happened to the Khoisan people.
@@djpizzarocks27Racism against the Khoisan!
Khoisan is also no longer considered a language family. Various languages with clicks were grouped together but research shows they actually arent related
Small correction concerning Belgium: the French variety spoken in Belgium is Belgian French, not Walloon. Walloon is a language in its own right, albeit non official, that is quickly dying out due to being harshly repressed in the past century or so.
Another thing regarding Belgium is that the LDI in the video doesn't match the numbers presented. 59% Dutch speakers gives a 35% chance two random people are both Dutch speakers, which alone will bring the LDI well below 0.7.
@yastreb. Maybe they count flemish and Dutch as separate and languages like Limburgish
Not counting the immigrants
Montenegro’s case is so funny, since Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are essentially different names for the same language, Serbo-Croatian. They are all based on the same Shtokavian dialect. Someone speaking Montenegrin wouldn’t have problem understanding someone speaking Serbian and vice versa. In fact, the differences between these “languages” are smaller than between American and British English.
Or Scots and English
Da, da, da, da. 🇷🇸 🇲🇪 🇧🇦 🇭🇷
It's just language secessionism, you see it all the time (hindi/urdu, malaysian/indonesian, farsi/tajik/dari, "filipino"). Linguistic identities being viewed as ethnic/national identities. It's because of nationalism
If you go to the Balkans and buy a food package, you will notice basically the same ingredient list written 6 times under different flags. Only Slovenian and Macedonian might differ slightly.
It's ridiculous.
Here in Aruba 🇦🇼, almost everyone speaks Papiamento (a Portuguese-based creole), English, Spanish and Dutch at often high levels of fluency (Dutch less though generally). The neighboring islands of Curaçao 🇨🇼 and Bonaire 🇧🇶 also speak these languages (although with higher Dutch fluency and lower Spanish fluency). Some people here even speak 5 or 6 languages. The Dutch Caribbean is very diverse in people groups, cultures & languages so thats why.
Edit: Aruba and Curaçao are countries within the Dutch kingdom, so technically countries but not really as we aren't fully sovereign. New Caledonia and Guam did get a mention though, so i suppose we still count.
I speak Brazilian Portuguese. I wonder if we would understand each other if we spoke our languages lol
@@iwatchthemooooon3002 For me personally i can catch a couple words from Brazilian & European Portuguese in speech but the rest is completely unintelligible for me. In writing i can understand it quite well. We can understand Cape Verdeans (their creole) pretty well though. I will give an example of Papiamento in text at the end of my comment for those who want to see it.
Also i should note that Papiamento itself is split into 2 dialects. That of Aruba (Papiamento) and that of Curaçao and Bonaire (Papiamentu). Aruba's dialect is (historically) more influenced by Spanish (& recently English). If you want to hear the differences, check out the news channels "24ora" (Aruba) and "Telecuraçao" (Curaçao).
Bon nochi, mi ta papiando Papiamento (di Aruba) awo. Lo ta interesante pa wak si Brasileñonan por compronde Papiamento. Papiamento tin influencia di varios otro idioma tambe, incluyendo Spaño, Hulandes, linguanan Africano y di e lingua Caquetio (Arawak). Laga'mi sa si hende por compronde e texto ki.
I doubt I could understand it if I heard it, but as an italian speaker, I understood 95%. @@Diwie8
@@Diwie8Wow, I actually can understand a bit with 100% certainty, but theres some tricky words too: "Good night, I am now speaking Papiamento from Aruba. I'm interested to see if Brazilians can understand Papiamento (this part I'm not sure). Papiamento has influence of other languages as well, like Spanish, Dutch, African languages and of the language Caquetio. Tell me if you can understand this text."
Is that it?
@@cuidadocomomatheus That was almost perfectly translated (nice). In text and written form i believe that Papiamento is easier to understand for Spanish and Portuguese speakers.
But in speech Papiamento is harder to understand at times as we often throw in words from English, Spanish and Dutch (and even Portuguese, Chinese, German, French or Italian etc in the case of some recent immigrants) in the mix and switch between languages mid-conversation, this is especially common in the younger generation.
im linging SO diversely rn
she ling on my guistic till i diverge
😩 🔉🔤
me when the languages are diverse
UA-cam has decided that this comment is not in English. Thus, you are indeed linging diversely
i love how UA-cam doesn't consider any of these comments as English.
who up celebrating linguistic diversity rn
Straight up celebrating it rn, and by “it” well, haha, let’s just say… linguistic diversity 😏
I meen, Its Good to have a Universal Langauge in a Country or people that are supose to hold Together, but at the same time language has a Rich Cultur build in, Best is everyone knows 2 Languages, Their "in Group" and their "Out Group"
Meanwhile I'm dying over here as a Brazilian.
im up celebrating linguistic diversity rn! (scorbing rn as well)
@@TikSkygd is that an AI post? because it reads exactly like one
I've been working in a Brazilian company as part of the HR department for over six years, being responsible for testing applicants' level of English in interviews for positions that require it. And let me tell you that regarding Brazil, unlike countries like Haiti, which has a large part of the population speaking a second or third language, Brazil stands out as a country with very few people able to speak anything other than Portuguese.
For many Brazilians Spanish falls into the category of: 'I've never studied but I can speak Spanish at a basic level'. This lie is often told because a Portuguese speaker will naturally have some understanding of Spanish, which makes many claim knowledge of the language even if they don't really have it.
When it comes to English, most of the people I interacted with who claimed to know the language had a very basic knowledge of it, or only demonstrated a more advanced level in reading and writing, failing to meet the minimum criteria for using the language in a 100% English-speaking work environment.
I believe that after a certain point, a country's 'monolingualism' generates a side effect of the average citizen's lack of notion of what it really means to be able to use a language, which results in a huge amount of the population claiming to know a language even if they can't properly use it.
Just to be clear, I have no intention of offending any Brazilians with my comment. The effort to learn a new language is commendable in itself, no matter where you are on the path.
Too late, I'm Brazilian and I'm offended.
This idea is very poignant. After all lizard mentions the US's anglophones notoriety (and that goes for many British people as well) for monolingualism. And I would say, too, that most Americans/Brits are happy to say "I'm familiar with Spanish/French/German" while only knowing a few basic phrases, 0 grammar, and maybe some imitation swear words
Brazilian here. Very accurate, especially on the common overselling of our Spanish proficiency and the fragmented proficiency in English.
@@JohnSearleFangirl Agreed, unfortunately. That's why I actually try to know French. A lot of people don't understand what actually knowing the language is, or how little they know of it, unless they decide to immerse. They also forget their language knowledge from school because our school system is literally just endless cramming which is very inefficient for both learning and long-term memory so we know a lot for tests but don't remember anything long-term (one could write a book about how students who are actually curious and enjoy properly understanding information get completely screwed over as the system prefers those who only care about grades and empty memorisation), as well as the fact they never end up using it and you naturally forget languages you don't use.
8:49 Walloon is a separate language from French and is very endangered. Most Wallonian Belgians speak Belgian French/ Wallonian French which is not too different from Standard French. Walloon however, while still being a Gallo-Romance language, is completely different enough to not be intelligible with French
Brazil's second most spoken language is german and german dialects. Actually the hunsrickisch is the most spoken dialect
It's a mindfuck and most brazilians dont know that
and even though its the second most spoken, its spoken by only around 2% of the population. its crazy.
Yeah, the 3rd most spoken language is mineiro
@@iwatchthemooooon3002The most spoken is Paulista lol
I’m from Japan and I expected it to be in the bottom 10 instead of the 20th least diverse.
I see that smaller single-ethnic-group countries and tiny island nations with 0 or 1 indigenous languages padded the ranks below Japan.
The most spoken foreign language in Japan is Portuguese - thanks to 300,000 Brazilians living there. Most of these Brazilians are half-Japanese
As a Georgian, I'd say that the Caucasus is the most diverse region when it comes to linguistical diversity per capita. Unfortunately, all this diversity is overshadowed by the fact that most people speak predominantly Russian (although it's _not_ their native/first language), but still, the amount of individual languages present is quite crazy. Georgia alone is very linguistically diverse too, with the native languages being the titular Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan, Laz, with many North Caucasian languages spoken, on top of Armenian, Turkish, Azerbaijani and the obligatory Russian.
Awesome video! I've always wondered which countries were the least linguistically diverse!
Okay, now maybe you can answer a question I've not been able to answer for a very long time:
With language has the largest amount of monolingual speakers?
This can be answered in a few ways:
1. Which language simply has the most monolingual speakers in total,
2. Which language's monolingual speakers make up the largest percentage of its total speakers, and
3. Which language's monolingual speakers make up the largest percent of the Earth's population.
You may find this impossible to answer, because I sure have! But if you could even shed the smallest amount a light on this subject, I really think it would make an awesome video! Either way, keep up the language related videos!
Great question! Off the top of my head, I'd expect Mandarin to fit #3, and maybe #1 and #2 as well. There are 900 million native Mandarin speakers in China as the video pointed out, and I assume a rather small proportion of them know international languages like English, or another China-internal language like Yue, Wu, or non-Chinese Indigenous languages. But that must still leave a very large number of monolingual Mandarin speakers: I'd guess at least 500 million, probably more. It's difficult to judge considering how many urban Chinese people are studying English now, but how many of them can say a handful of words or basic sentences vs. can take a trip to an Anglophone country and communicate effectively.
@@aaronmarks9366 I also arrived at this conclusion based on the small amount of data I could find. After Mandarin, it is hard to say what other languages might make up a top 10 list.
As Arabic is a very useful lingua franca, if it is your native tongue, and you live your whole life in an Arabic speaking country, there seems there would be no real drive to learn a second language. Ofc, then the argument of Arabic not really being one language will come up.
There is on going joke about gamers from Russia refusing to learn English, yet still engaging with the international online gaming community. As you would guess, most people that attempt to play with strangers start with English, and go from there, but not Russians! (I'm sure this is just an awful stereotype, but it does hint at the reality of the former USSR being culturally and politically separate from the rest of Europe, which is much more used to cultural mixing.)
Other than that, maybe English and French? For the same "well there are a lot of people who speak my language everywhere, why learn another language" reasons as Arabic? Spanish, because...uh...Latin America?
Oh, and Japanese seems like it has a large percentage of monolingual speakers with in itself, that don't necessarily make up a large percentage of monolingual speakers world-wide.
I wish I had some real data to judge this, because right now I'm just guessing based on stereotypes, unfortunately.
Some context for South Africa:
1. We have 12 official languages now, including SA Sign Language.
2. We have 2 West Germanic languages out of the 11 languages cited above, those being English and Afrikaans.
3. Out of the remaining 9 languages, we can roughly reduce them to just 4 for reasons I will share.
i. IsiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele and Siswati may be considered a dialect continuum of one language generally called Nguni. These languages share extremely high mutual intelligibility despite apparent huge differences. They are in many ways comparable to Scots and English in terms of distance between them.
During the colonial period, missionaries used isiXhosa speakers that were familiar with English or Dutch, to interpret between them and speakers of Nguni languages in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal province. Those isiXhosa speakers had not been previously exposed to the varieties which eventually became standardised as Zulu. However, they were able to communicate with ease.
ii. Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana can also all be considered one language for similar reasons given for Nguni (Ndebele, Swati, Xhosa & Zulu). Speakers of these languages may meet for the first time without previous exposure and will chat away without problems except for a word here and there, as soon as their ears become accustomed to the pronunciation differences. The more distance varieties of the languages are not recognised and those will offer more difficulty to understand, for speakers of other languages that are not used to hearing them.
iii. Tshivenda is more unique and a standalone.
iv. Xitsonga is also more unique and a standalone.
I think the "shared first language" metric is quite flawed, especially considering most people in linguistically diverse regions would likely be multilingual, different languages may be equally prominent but in different social scenarios, and the "first language" might not be many people's actual most used language. I understand that compressing a complex topic down to a single metric will always miss some crucial details, but I think maybe a fairer metric would be trying to measure how much information on average we need to determine which languages a person from a region speaks. In a linguistically unified country we only have to know the name of the language everybody speaks, but in a diverse country you will have to split the population in to more and more subgroups.
The nice thing about this idea is that it is not too difficult to implement it crudely. You create a list of every individual's every language, one line per person (or approximate this list from statistics), lexically sort the list, compress the file containing the list, then divide the file size by population number. There you have it, the approximate information per capita you need to determine languages a person in that country speaks.
In post Soviet states a lot of people speak Russian when speaking between different nationalities like is an Azeri goes to Kazakhstan he'll speak Russian or if a Moldovan wants to speak to a Gagauz he'll speak Russian. The number of Russian speakers is especially high in Belarus and Ukraine. However they all have their own national and ethnic languages too even which sometimes are their main ones.
@@gamermapper How well could an Azeri and a Kazakh understand each other speaking their languages, which are both Turkic?
What does the LDI do with native bilinguals? I'm a native trilingual; while English is my first native language, some people could not so easily pick a first.
"It is not too difficult to implement"
"Just create a list of every individual's every language"
Bruh...
@osasunaitor you literally only have to do a survey or pull some survey data, convert it to a list, then scale the size of the list from different regions to be the same. Exactly the same difficulty as any other survey.
Little correction about Belgium: it's not Walloon but french that's mainly spoken in the southern part, Walloon is also a language (or group of languages) mainly spoken by elderly people from the Southern part. There is also a small part which speaks German natively, and a lot of people in Brussels speak other languages natively, as their is a lot of diversity in the capital (and also in the other big cities, but not as much I'd think)
13:16 If this nation comes up in future videos in discussions of the Caribbean or so, it is pronounced "grenade-ah". That also goes for another island to its north often confused with a Spanish nation with a similar name: Dominica is stressed on the second "i" and not the first, so "domin-EE-kah".
But I've been giving your videos thumbs up because they're pretty well done and I enjoy the topic a lot, so I really hope you keep going because there's so much out there worth exploring!
That Yakko’s World parody was epic.
This is one of the most interesting videos I've ever seen. Keep it up!
How come you only did the genocide comment for English speaking countries but not for countries like Mexico and Brazil with a similar history of genocide and atrocities against indigenous people? It is good that you lift up those things when it comes to anglophone nations such as Canada and the US, but then you didn’t even say something like “Brazil with a similar history of indigenous erasure” or anything like that, idk it’s kinda weird ngl… it’s not like indigenous people didn’t get treated poorly in Brazil and Mexico just because their oppressors didn’t speak English
Especially with Colombia where native languages are almost entirely extinct you very neutrally said there are tiny languages spoken by a small proportion of the population it just comes off sort of weird that you downplay those people’s suffering for some reason. And with Cuba you just say the languages indigenous to the island “have been extinct for centuries” like either just state the current facts in a neutral way or do the genocide commentary for non Anglo countries too, it’s super weird the way you did it.
And before someone thinks I’m a salty American, no I’m not, I’m Swedish…
In Brazil and Mexico was more a cultural erasure than a ethnic genocide, in the USA they just shoot then and segregated, while in Brazil and Mexico the natives mixed with Europeans, and later they descendants mixed with africans, especially in Brazil
Because frankly there was far less killing in Mexico's case and far more cultural assimilation. Mexico, the US and their policies are not comparable in their results. Brazil on the other hand is lot more complicated. The indigenous population' manages to be even lower, but Brazil is so mixed ethnically that there are still a lot of people with indigenous ancestry walking around, especially in the North. Still, their history is dark enough that it comes close to giving the US and Canada a run for their money.
@@aenzontll86 less killing? Ok cool what happened to the native populations of Hispaniola and Cuba? They were enslaved en masse and completely wiped out. Read up about the encomienda system and the massive slave mines the Spaniards had in places like Cerro Potosi. Read about how the Spaniards treated the Inca, maya and Aztecs, along with other mesoamerican nations. Read about the extremely strict racial hierarchy the Spaniards codified in their empire (limpieza de sangre) which inspired Nazi racial policies. Claiming the Spanish empire was in any way better than the US, Canada, or Australia, is absurd. It might be true in some cases that the successor states of the Spanish empire treated the native populations better, but there are also many examples where they did not. That doesn’t change the fact that it is really weird to not bring the genocide point up when talking about Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, but mentioning it in anglophone countries. As I said it diminishes the suffering of colonisation and it is pretty gross to me to go on a tirade about the awful treatment of natives in anglophone countries and then stating in a very neutral way that the indigenous Caribbean languages “went extinct centuries ago” as if the reason they went extinct wasn’t systematic genocide and slavery on a scale only rivalled by the Holocaust.
America isn’t uniquely evil, and that includes the treatment of the natives. It was (and in many ways still is) appalling of course but that should not serve to trivialise the ill treatment of indigenous populations in other countries.
It is true that there was more mixing, but that’s more about the sheer quantity of people the Spanish empire conquered. In less densely populated places the natives were entirely wiped out.
@@FilAnd01 I explicitly stated that we should not be comparing them. Attempting to find some lesser of evils here is stupid. You were talking about Mexico and Brazil, and I only responded to those two. The Spanish Caribbean is an entirely different conversation. I'm well aware of Spanish atrocities. But they are not the same as each other either. Spanish and Anglo colonies weren't even really created for the same purposes. Most of the former existed to be exploited more than settled, while most of the latter were there to be first cleansed, then settled. Outside of the Caribbean, natives were seen as a resource to be exploited, not obstacles to settlement. This is why even with all the death in Potosi's mines natives still form a majority both there and in most of Andean Bolivia. However, the Southern cone is a little different in this regard. Uruguay is the worst offender there.
thank you for this comment!!! i'm a native person in the united states, but i have good friends of mine who are also native, the only difference is that their communities are from south of the border, yet we are treated so different. our histories are talked about differently, our communities are talked about differently, our struggles are talked about differently, etc etc. we're treated as a completely different race all together when we're not. we're both natives. the border was invented by colonizers to divide and conquer and its working!!!!!
Why do only English Places get the "Btw, alot of bad things happend" Treatment While Places like China Get just Pased by 😅
Can someone Clarify what the one above me ment?
Because the writer is probably most familiar with the history of English speaking countries, same with the intended audience. Plus, pretty much every country has had some atrocity or genocide happen in its history that has changed which languages are spoken there. Going into detail on every single one would be pretty boring.
LingoLizard is mexican so I can understand why he would focus more on USA and Canadian problems...
@@Lulu_Catnapsbecause the author is some coping turd. That's why.
@@diamdanteyet he doesn't bring up the genocide of natives in Mexico. 🤔🤔🤔
I find it very annoying how you mention the Canadian and Australian crimes against the natives, yet nothing on Chinas similar practices that go on to this day!
8:49 you mean Belgian French! Walloon is a separate language!!
To my knowledge it is not.
@@海王星クショックス well your knowledge is incorrect. Walloon is a separate language from Belgian French just look it up
@@leroybrown2610 but actually spoken by millions? it is recognized language by UN or some governing body?
@@eltucuyo518 over half a million speakers, officially UN recognized as endangered language, formally recognized as indigenous regional language by Belgium
Malaysia also has multiple Chinese languages spoken there, with Cantonese in Kuala Lumpur, Hakka in Sabah, and Hokkien in Penang. These are all spoken in other regions but those are the first that come to mind.
And given the reason for China's ranking, I highly doubt it should be that low, as Sichuanese is also considered "Mandarin", but is clearly a separate language. The same goes for if "Min" is simply taken as one language, as it is potentially paraphyletic, and in any case has extreme levels of mutual unintelligibility. The same goes for every major "Chinese dialect group", they all consist of multiple languages.
"Ping" is also clearly paraphyletic, with Southern Pinghua being clearly Cantonesic, while Northern Pinghua is not.
I like how you added music! 🎶
Any names? Specifically the music used starting 13:43 ?
@@海王星クショックス He has a pinned comment with each of the songs, but it’s Lands Untamed by Bug Fables.
Just so you know, you said the LDIs for some of the least diverse countries wrong. You forgot to say another zero after the point in 0.017, for example. Not a big deal, but it caught me off guard so I thought I'd tell you.
Australia is NOT linguistically diverse by a long shot! Most Australian schools treat the curriculum requirement to teach a "Language Other Than English" (LOTE) as a joke. Most parents wish schools would "stop wasting time" on it. Most Australians only speak English, except for migrants and often their children, but they only speak other languages in their own communities. The vast majority of Aboriginal languages are moribund with a few rare exceptions like Arrernte, which is spoken in the middle of the desert by around 30,000 people who are largely ignored by the rest of the country. People who don't speak their mother tongue should not be counted in the LDI.
Agreed
I'm an Australian and it has to be the least linguistically diverse country in the world
While I think there are many migrants frankly their children all speak and read English 😆
Australia is a graveyard of languages
I'm using Google Translate. Brazil lost more than 800 languages due to the Portuguese invasion.
Papua New Guinea is crazy! Ive been there. Almost every district has a different language. So they speak a form of pidgin used during the colonial era to communicate with each other. Also, not only are they diverse in language, they are also diverse in skin tone. From sub saharan black to white. Even their temperment. I always pictured Pacific islanders to be peaceful but nah, this place has the Swiss to the Afghanis. All living side by side. Got robbed twice while I was there. Still don't regret having visited the place.
It's so weird to see Norway score so low on this score. The differences between dialects here are so big that it would beat most, if not all, European countries in linguistic diversity. Especially the Netherlands (where I am originally from). I also live in the far north where the Sámi and Kven languages are still the primary languages in some villages, but this are ofcourse very few people compared to how many people are living in the south
A lot of this is internal politics. For example, I doubt a linguistic diversity score made 50 years ago would have Italy particularly high, but it IS true that Italian isn't really the mother-tongue of a majority of Italians, and that has only really gotten recognition in recent times.
The same is ofc. The case with standard norwegian, and Norway is extremely diverse in dialects as well, but my impression is that Norway finds distinct dialects to be a feature of the language, rather than distinguishing it as many different, but closely related languages.
You might be able to correct me here, but my impression also is that Norwegians don't code-switch that much? As in, change their dialect when speaking to people not from their neck of the woods.
@@loran1212 We do somewhat change how we speak, using words that are more likely to be in common when speaking with those that don't speak our dialect. And there are several dialects that are definitely harder to understand the further away from it you grew up and the less exposure you had to it.
At least one, but possibly several dialects should arguably be catecorised as their own languages, but aren't for nationalistic reasons, I guess.
But, the dialects in Norway vary far more than the ones in Sweden for instance, while Norway also has a fair number of immigrants as as well as other languages spoken natively in Norway.
But a big part of the issue is honestly with figuring out where the line between dialect and language lies.
Most dialects in Norway differ more from each other than "standard" Norwegian does from standard Swedish, yet those two are considered different languages.
glad to hear genocide being called out in Canada, the United States, and Australia. But is there a reason that this wasn't called out in other countries too? For example Russia or China?
Only western people are bad.
westoids bad
English bad
Unga bunga good
@@n_worderDamn right
You acknowledge your nation is a genocidal settler colony and yet still use its emblem for your profile picture, average westerner
In Poland 98% percent of people speak Polish natively, and yet the supposed LDI is 0.17, how come?
Korea with 2,4% also very suspicous
If I had to guess, he probably counted English speakers.
To think Mexico around the XIX century was still majorly indigenous and Spanish was not the main language
Yes, Mexico purged their indigenous languages heavily the first century after their independence. Northern languages where erased either through genocide, expulsion or reeducation campaigns. Most of the remaining native speakers are Mayan and Tlaxcalan since those languages were more protected and used under the Spanish crown and had more literature and grammar books, sometimes used/studied in academia.
Imagine if Aztecs today still drew these beautiful Mesoamerican glyphs and we still had Tenochitlan... It's so sad it's nit actually the case... ☹️
Although why should we be sad, it's not impossible to make that a reality! If the Nahua people mobilise themselves and create a grassroots nationalist movement to revive their pre colonial culture and glory it can definitely happen! 😊
The same for peru and other countries.
@@migueljoserivera9030That’s not true, we have close to 30 million indigenous people, they were under the caste system but the extermination that the Spaniards and castizos were doing stopped when Vicente Guerrero the second president, abolished slavery and gave land back to the indigenous people, a practice that went on to be reinstated under Benito Juarez a decades later, he was the first native president in Mexico as well.
It’s insane trying to white wash America by lying about the history of native peoples in Latin America is insane what you people are trying to do.
@@migueljoserivera9030 it was at a point in time where the term “indian” actually held legal power and people with said title would usually own lands and wealth, etc. It was that same criollo movement for homogenization and other similar events happening in neighboring countries that took the prestige around the term all away (one of the first thing new governments like that of mexico did was to disown the lands of a lot of the noble indigenous that had been given those privileges by the crown of spain).
That’s also why now we have situations where the descendant of moctezuma lives in Spain today and is quite a spaniard actually.
When I saw Brazil in the thumbnail, I was so skeptical I thought it was clickbait. LDI is a fascinating index, great video! I wonder what the LDI of the entire earth is…
I was genuinely surprised by how low Brazil and South America as a whole was. I know native languages don't make up a huge percentage outside of Peru (and maybe Bolivia?) but I thought they'd make up something more.
@@amelialonelyfart8848 Amerindian DNA is only 10% of Brazil's gene pool, Brazil was an empty jungle, it's expected to be like this, the other countries surprised me more.
Eeeeeeexcellent choice of music
There's no credible source saying 3 million people speak a variety of German in Brazil natively. In fact, if you look at the last census in which language was counted in Brazil back in 1950, it was spoken by just a few percentage points of people mostly in the south, and it was decreasing. Imagining it had a massive resurgence and made the south of Brazil as linguistically diverse as Spain is pretty... Absurd
In the south german is spoken in the countryside but yeah portuguese is the most spoken language,after portuguese is german in the south the most spoken language
These who claim this nonsense are wannabe germans. If anything, the most spoken language besides portuguese is spanish or some native american language.
@@pliniojr95 it's probably Spanish and then Chinese or Haitian creole due to immigration
@@leondenizard3800 Some German is spoken by some people in the countryside. Brazil is about 80% urban and 20% rural. Do you think half of the people in the countryside of the south speak German natively? That's quite... Impossible. It wasn't the case even in 1950 and then the language was most likely more widely spoken than now, as it was getting weaker over time
I seriously doubt more than 100k people in Brazil can speak German natively. As someone commented above, those who claim this are n*zi lunatics who believe the "Aryan south is superior" or some other lunacy.
It would be interesting to see what the results were if the index weren't "probability of having the same mother tongue", but "probability of speaking a common language", as in many places, people are at least bilingual. And the next question would be where these indices differ the most.
Agreed as Australia would be at the bottom
LingoLizard: mentions how genocide by Western European colonists led to loss of linguistic diversity:
Russia: *10 steps below US with LDI of 0.283 despite having ~125 recognised languages spoken its territory that is larger than US 1.7 times*
I dislike that you pointed out the extinction of native dialects in the US, Australia and Canada but not in China, the Arabian World or even France.
USA, Canada and Australia are easy targets for criticism. Russia and China get a free pass.
In cases like France, they did not replace indigenous African languages, many just made it lingua franca.
In cases like Russia, Russians didn't replaced them, they just decided they have control over them. Siberian natives are STILL very much extant and intact. There may have been cultural killings but not as grave as anglophone eradication and replacement.
For China's case, they just outnumbered them, even before the population of Han already outnumbered them, though they may have had culture killing they actually celebrate diversity for the diversity points. Not saying it is working, it's just that the diversity is kept alive but surviving and not thriving.
I don't know about the Arabian world tho
Interesting isn't it? You're starting to notice the double standards too eh? Frankly I don't even care anymore. They can cope all they want.
As the saying goes, "the dogs bark yet the caravan moves on."
@@artemesiagentileschini7348 What about France proper, mate? They literally caned children at school for speaking Breton, Occitan, Basque...
China didn’t exactly have systematic cultural assimilation on the same level as Canada.
The dominance of Han culture/language happened over a way longer stretch of time (we’re talking like centuries or even millennia), and evolved into many regional dialects that are still spoken by many ppl till this day. If you consider regional dialect as speaking different language, there is a pretty high chance a random person on the street don’t speak the same “mother tongue” as the person next to him.
While there are debate about teaching dialect/language in school(like young people not longer speak Cantonese as well as their parent), these dialect/language are still alive.
children’s of minority culture in China are simply just not taught their own culture in public school system because it’s public school at the end of the day. That’s the unfortunate reality of being minority.
What makes China’s declining regional dialect/language different from Canada’s is, at least the children’s aren’t forcibly kidnapped away from their parent and molested in boarding school.
putting your source behind a paywall
(thumbnail snipe), technically, since the languages of "uncontacted tribes" are the least related languages to any know language family, brazil would be very high, although that would be basically .01% of the population who doesn't even identify themselves with the nation or state of "brazil", so fair enough.
8:35 the Romans who ran away from the Pompei vulcano event really didn't want to go back anywhere near that vulcano
Always lives when lingolizard drops a new vid :D
Glad you put that *disclaimer in about the UAE "immigrants" because my neck snapped back quick!
CAN YOU PLEASE MAKE A VIDEO ABOUT THE MOST UNDERRATED AFRICAN LANGUAGES?
I can't help but notice that at 4:01 you also colored is CAR while its not in the top 10 😊
EL SALVADOR MENTIONED!! 🇸🇻🇸🇻🇸🇻
But at what cost... 😔
I'm trying to learn Nawat, it's so sad seeing a core part of what became Salvadorean culture disappear before my very eyes, and seemingly no one cares.
Lenca people too
@@UmQasaann I'mma be real with you chief, I had no idea Lenca speakers were still around.
Is it really Salvadorean culture? El Salvador is merely the settler state that occupies their land, they have their own distinct indigenous culture and this state has nothing to do with it. It's very weird this tendency of characterising world cultures only by the current political entity they're a part of. No one says that Belarus is a part of Russian culture even though they're very similar but somehow Hawaiian culture which has been literally destroyed by the US occupation is a part of "American culture"?
@@gamermapper I'd say Salvadorean culture is a mixture of the Spanish settler culture as well as indigenous culture, there are plenty of traditions, food, common vocabulary and local customs that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the indigenous aspects of the overall culture. I'm not saying Salvadorean culture is 1:1 indigenous Nawat culture.
@@rommelrivera6131 I don't believe that the settler state of El Salvador had a right to appropriate the Indigenous traditions simply because they occupy their lands right now. It's funny too, even though Russia and Ukraine have very similar cultures, if anyone would dare to say that Ukrainian culture is often also a part of Russian culture they'd be mocked but saying that Nawat culture is a part of "Salvadorian" culture is okay apparently, when in reality Spanish settlers and indigenous people have literally nothing in common?
That's so cool that Zimbabwe recognizes sign languages for the deaf as an official language.
15:20 Taino extinction. I wonder how Juan Luis Guerra got the Taino for his song Naboria/Daca Mayanimacana.
A language being extinct means that there are no living native speakers, it doesn't mean the language is completely lost
6:05 you misspelled “indentured servants”
I didn't expected to hear night in the woods soundtrack
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed lol.
8:48 Small correction, but Walloon is not the same as Belgian French: Belgian French is what most of the population of Wallonia speaks and is basically a form of Francien, while Walloon is an endangered minority language that's rather distinctive among other Oïl varieties. Walloon is not the only such variety of Oïl spoken in Wallonia, with Picard, Lorrain, and Champenois also spoken in areas. Belgian French is much closer to standard French than it is to Walloon.
If we rank countries by number of languages spoken by the average citizen, many Asian countries will top the list. India and Philippines would definitely be ranked high because an average citizen of those countries speak at least 3-5 languages.
Super interesting! I always love your videos. One request though: could you put less text at the bottom of the screen? It’s covered up if you put on subtitles 😢
Gotta love how you stopped to talk about language imposition specifically in Anglosphere countries despite the fact that similar things happened basically everywhere
He did mention how UAE and similar countries are basically just high up because most of their population is "immigrant workers" aka modern slaves
Interesting to note how linguistic diversity reflects on the three waves of populating Oceania: first the Melanesians about 50,000 years ago, then the Micronesians, descendants of early Austronesians and then the fairly recent Polynesians who all share a thightly-knit culture and their languages are closely related.
this is one ranking i think scoring low is actually a good thing. imagine have a country where people can't understand each other.
And why in this metric, most developed countries score quite low
I wouldn’t say that a country being more linguistically diverse is a good thing. A state should be centralized with a common culture or heritage
Interestingly the bulk of Indonesia's languages come from Western Papua, or the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea.
6:05 85% are non-Emiratis, but the expats in the UAE come from all over which contributes to the linguistic diversity too. South Indians are the largest groups, with Indians and Pakistanis both making up more of the population than Emiratis, but after that it's Bangladesh, the Philippines, Iran, Egypt, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Syria, the UK, China, Jordan, Afghanistan, Palestine, European Union (idk why the statistics put them all together either), South Africa, and Lebanon.
JUST GOT HOME FROM WORK AND NEW LINGO LIZARD DROP YASSSSSSSSS
Good video! I found it odd however that you (rightly) harp on the anglosphere's lack of linguistic diversity due to their colonial past, but then when discussing Latin America at the bottom of the list there's suddenly no mention of the fact that their even greater lack of diversity is due to an even more thorough and brutal colonial past. If you're going to bring up colonialism, you should be even handed in applying its critique of the past.
Here in Colombia we have 61 languages but in all my life only found 1 person that only spoke his indigenous language and not Spanish
También es cierto que entre más trabajo antropológico se hace en el país, más lenguas autóctonas son reconocidas, especialmente cuando se contactan a poblaciones que viven en lugares de difícil acceso. Una consulta rápida en internet me indica que en Colombia se hablan 71 idiomas diferentes, 70 lenguas indigenas y el español, pero desconozco si en esa sumatoria se incluyen o no a lenguas minoritarias no indígenas como el palenquero, el criollo sanandresano, etc. Saludos.
Thanks for mentioning. 9:57
240 is a very low estimate for Brazil. Do note that portuguese may be stated as the native tongue by a big number of native ethnicities that still speak their ancestral tongues at least in ceremonies (also, some of these people may only state that they speak portuguese predominantly while not doing so in their private lives).
There's also the prevalence of african languages as ceremonial languages (in the same way arab is spoken by muslim populations worldwide), but that's another conversation entirely
I really expected the US and France to be pretty low on the list, but apparently there are 80-something countries lower on the list..
They are still below half-way through the list, but I'm still surprised.
Also, it's funny that because agreeing on what counts as separate languages is so hard we get a list whose top entries are pretty agreeable, but the bottom is dubious, and very sensitive to altering your counting..
also also, Tok Pisin is still the funniest language name. I have friends who hate it when I Tok while Pisin
Both US and France have a significant immigrant population speaking Spanish and Arabic respectively, so it raises their LDI. The lowest countries would be those that are monolingual and have very low immigrant population, say DPRK which is shown in the thumbnail...
@@adrianblake8876 Or, like Colombia, have a lot of inmigrants who are native speakers of the same language as the locals.
@@migueljoserivera9030which is probably a missing measure of diversity here. Some variants of Spanish in South America would be pretty distinct and have totally different slang- same with Hindi, Chinese and Arabic. I think that gets missed in these counts. You might have two neighbouring New Guinean languages with only a little difference vs two dialects of Arabic that are more or less separate languages.
France has overseas territories that have a lot of different languages that are still actively spoken. French Guyana, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, etc. The US too has overseas territories like the Hawaiian Islands or Eastern Samoa although some of them don't speak their own language anymore as the main language like Hawaii (which technically isn't even American under international law but it's another question).
@@jayolovitt5969 According to mainstream linguistics, most Spanish and Arabic dialects differ between countries, rather than between one country, so it doesn't make much of a difference for the purpose of this video...
Where the hell is Timor Leste
0:40
Sorry to be a stickler, but I think you meant the likelihood that they do NOT speak the same native language. If a score of 1 is a perfect score for language diversity, then that means it’s 100% certain that two randomly selected people will not speak the same language, right?
In India languages changed every district but the government didn't wanted to make all the languages important they rather marked them as dialects
But as a dialect speaker I would say I have seen many people who hardly understand Hindi the main language and almost all people wouldn't understand another dialect
3:15 I think for the index population doesn't directly matter, though larger countries might tend to have more and more evenly distributed languages. Like, the E.U. probably has a higher score than most of the countries in it, India probably has a higher score than its constituent polities, etc. So it's impressive for a small country to have a higher score, but it doesn't have a high score because it has a lot of languages per capita, compared to other countries with a similar total number of languages.
Good video
Colombian here and while yes the video is pretty accurate, we do speak Spanish for the most part with the surviving indigenous languages as an exeption and a fact not mentioned in the insular region they speak an English creole language though most also speak spanish as a second language due to the tourists from the continental portion of the country and other spanish speaking countries.
Don't worry, "expats" from the USA and elsewhere are going to add "linguistical diversity" to Colombia soon enough.
As an Indian, I await the day mr lizard makes a video about my mother tongue, cuz i think there's a lot to be said :0
also yes I've watched basically every video on the channel and live for rare lang mentions lmao
I need to disagree with the index used. If a large number of the population are bi-, tri- or multi-lingual, those factors should be considered as linguistic diversity.
He already stated that he can’t make one that is this accurate in the beginning so your comment is kinda pointless as seen on 1:52
@@litinup haha you're right, wasn't paying attention
Native language matters the most when considering linguistic diversity imo.
Vanuatu is supposed to be the most linguistically diverse country in the world (it has hundreds of languages for a population below that of Iceland)
I love this video ❤
Imagine how interesting it would be if a country had a LDI of 1. Of course it'd be impossible but still the idea is interesting
Great video! Always fun to learn about.
Why did you only talk about English settler colonialism? It felt pretty weird to go from talking about them to then running into a ton of examples of French and Spanish colonialism and not touching on it once?
There should be a second order LDI where you randomly pick 3 people and see if 2 of them speak the same language!
As someone who's lived in the Maldives, there are sooooo many Indian, Australian and other expats there that I wouldn't call it lingiustically not-diverse by any means. English is also a very common L2 there fwiw.
I swear I thought Poland was going to be the least linguistically diverse
Poland had drastically different borders less than a century ago. It was never a contender.
Poland has Silesian, Kashubian, and Podlachian
Edit: Podlachian not Polabian
Never thought Brazil would tank the list
8:45 Walloon is a heavily endangered language. The 2 largest languages of Belgium are Flemish and French, not Walloon. Although there are still more Walloon-speakers than German-speakers. I predict German will overtake Walloon by the end of this century.
Oh wow. 8:24 Im just casually watching this and didn't know my country and language were gonna show up on here lol. I speak Mortlockese (kapasen mochulok).
great video but the music was too loud
i got pleasantly jump scared and unreasonably happy when the NITW soundtrack started playing
The UK has a overwhelming majority of English speakers, but there are thousands of different dialects there. Most are 30,000 speakers or less and are dying out.
6:35 there are even more than 30% people in Indonesia speak Javanesee with different dialects and accents. Since the Javanese are almost everywhere in Indonesia. Sundanese is far behind that number but still can be considered as the second largest.
What is happening now is Indonesian tend to mix their native languages with bahasa Indonesia to communicate. So I'm not sure if there are Indonesian people who speak 100% bahasa Indonesia all the time.
18 minute video that could have been 5 with the same info covered
4:09 it's you-ganda
8:48 Correction: Walloon is a distinct language and is different from French (unlike Flemish, which is generally considered a dialect of Dutch (although separate regional languages exist, like West Flemish))
I didn't find Nauru and San Marino, which I thought should also have a low LDI.
1:16 "Country A and Country B"
my brain: Ethiopia+Somalia and Calabria
Brazil is quite a sad case, since the 1930/40 our gorvernment tried multiple different policies in order to unify the country under only one language, and well, it is quite effective in its goal.
I was expecting Vatican City to be dead last because you must be approved by the Vatican to get a residence permit and Citizenship. The only people who can have Vatican City citizenship would-be workers, so I imagine Speaking Italian would be a requirement for employment.
Lived in Brazil 30+ years never knew a single Brazilian that doesnt speak Portuguese
In the 90s I knew some kids in rural areas of the south that only spoke a German dialect.
But I believe that after the internet popularized, it's highly unlikely that someone do not know how to speak portuguese here. Maybe in some remote indigenous tribes, but average Brazilians rarely have any contact with them.
I'm surprised Poland is so high
That metric is cool but it isn't that useful. I'd rather see the probability of two random people speaking mutually intelligible languages. Ignoring second languages seems wrong to me, and also there are ppolitical reasons to define languages as the same or distinct. You pointed out Serbo-Croatian, which can be 1 language or 4, and turn Bosnia from one of the most diverse to one of the least. Also, some of the more diverse countries still can have a 98% prob. of both speaking the lingua franca, which I find very important as well.
In the end two strangers rarely engage in their native languages, they mostly use the lingua franca.
Also, languages which actually come from the same country just seem less "diverse" to me than languages which come from other parts of the world but were brought in.
@@Oceanwaves-d8l I differ, I think that Xhosa, Afrikaans, Zulu and English are very diverse even if they all are from the same country (South Africa), or French, Dutch and German even if they all are present in Belgium.
But I find less diverse having four varieties of Serbocroatian.
Spain, for instance, has 5 official languages but I don't find Spain so diverse because Valencian, Catalan and Balear are almost the same, Galician is very similar to Castilian and Portuguese and Basque, which is very distinct and not mutually intelligible, is spoken by 0.5% of the population. Most diversity comes from Arabs, Romanians, Western Europeans and Chinese.
@@migueljoserivera9030 I guess it's mostly because I factor in culture tbf.
When a language is imported, culture is usually also imported.