this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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Linguistics
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I think languages per capita (or "languages per 10 000 inhabitants") would be already better, and a low-hanging fruit.
A more invested option would be to disregard countries, split the world into ~200 geographical areas with ~40M inhabitants each, and then count the languages in each of those areas. This would be specially useful because, in large countries, most of the linguistic diversity is clustered into a few regions.
That's a much better proposal actually. Would also make especially good sense for regions of Africa, where country lines have very little to do with the distribution of languages for the most part.