WHY do some places in the world have lots of small languages, and others have fewer, bigger languages? Earlier studies seemed to show that areas of high altitude, rainfall and temperature had high cultural and linguistic diversity. A brief glance in the direction of the geography and linguistic diversity of the Caucasus, central Africa or New Guinea (pictured) would seem to bear this out.

A new study has narrowed in on the details, and found that two features of the landscape predict language diversity all around the world. Jacob Bock Axelsen and Susanna Manrubia, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at a number of environmental factors including vegetation, temperature, precipitation, altitude, landscape “roughness”, density of rivers, distance from lakes and population density. They carved up the world into squares 222km wide and looked only at the 100 biggest land masses (to correct for the fact that languages spoken on small islands are less likely to spread). They also used some clever statistical work to account for the…Continue reading

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