There are plenty of people thinking there are only a few dozen languages in the world.  Either they are the only languages one can come up with oneself.  Or people count how many countries there are.  They subtract the countries they know have an official language in common with another.  Then they take it for granted it is the county’s only language.  As if colonialism had replaced loads of languages in itself.  In reality most languages in Africa and Asia have survived.  Many of the indigenous languages in the Americas still exist.  The same applies to Australia.

How many languages there are varies by the exact definition.  However, all linguists agree that it is a matter of thousands.  Most have just a few hundred or a few thousand speakers.  Neither do they have any established orthography.  To the extent they have been written they have only been documented in modern times.  This makes it hard to determine if they are related to each other.  Which in turn means it becomes hard to systematise.

My main definition of language is a group of mutually understandable dialects.  I have some trouble with dialect continuums.  For example, North Germans understand what Dutchmen say but Swiss don’t.  Then I mean the German-speaking part of Switzerland’s population.  (The country has several minority languages rather different from each other.)  In cases such as German and Dutch I try to be practical.

In addition they can define themselves by creating an orthography.  The result is certain languages being mutually understandable.  Some I know about are:

• Bulgarian and Macedonian.

• Czech and Slovak.

• Dutch and Afrikaans.

• Farsi, Dari and Tajik.

• Finnish and Tornedalian.

• German and Yiddish.

• Hindi and Urdu.

• Icelandic and Faroese.

• Indonesian and Malaysian.

• Kazakh and Karakalpak.

• Luganda and Lusoga.

• Portuguese and Galician.

• Rwandan and Burundian.

• Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian.

• Spanish, Corsican, Italian, Ladino, Moldavian and Romanian.

• Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

• Thailandic and Dambroese.

• Turkish and Azeri.

I don’t know if Montenegrin has its own spelling norm.  If the Montenegrins have a such they have the right to call it a language.

 

Uploaded on the 18th of October 2024.