Linguistic Diversity (Hardcover)

There are some 6,500 different languages in the world, belonging to around 250 distinct families, and conforming to numerous grammatical types. This text investigates and seeks to explain that diversity. Daniel Nettle examines why diversity evolved at all, given that the biological mechanisms underlying language are the same in all normal human beings. He then considers whether the distribution of diversity may be linked with the major patterns of human geography and prehistory. Human languages and language families are not distributed evenly: there are few in Eurasia compared to the thousands in Australasia, the Pacific, and the Americas. There is also a marked correlation between bio- and linguistic diversity. The author explains how and why this diversity arose. To do so he returns to the earliest origins of language, reconstructing the processes of linguistic change and diffusion that occurred when humans first filled the continents and, thousands of years later, turned to agriculture. He concludes by examining the causes of linguistic mortality, and why the number of the world's languages may halve before 2100. The text draws on work in anthropology, linguistics, geography, ar