A national language diversity index from ethnologue.com rating the likelihood of two randomly chosen people in a single country being native speakers of the same language.
Greenberg’s index is interesting because it shows that the number of languages spoken in a given country doesn’t necessarily means that you’ll find a larger or smaller diversity in everyday life. For instance, Brazil has close to 200 indigenous languages (probably not counting immigrant languages), but only handfuls of people speak those languages, often not more than groups of a thousand people. The vast majority of the population is now Portuguese-speaking only (although some people of immigrant background still keep their heritage languages).
In South Africa, the total number of languages is only 24, but no language is spoken by a majority of people. The most spoken language is Zulu, the mother-tongue of about a quarter of the population. Xhosa has 17.6%, and Afrikans 13.3%.
The only problem is that they took the data from ethnologue, which in my opinion is not very reliable and outdated - most data date from the 80’s or early 90’s
(via hummussexual)
