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Figure 2. Lieberson’s Diversity Index of countries by continent
(based on the data from Ethnologue)
As the chart illustrates, countries in the African continent have the highest
language diversity among the continents, followed by Asia, Europe, America
(North and South America included) and Oceania.
Local Language Ratio
In the previous section, we reviewed the overall condition of linguistic diversity
of the world based on data by Ethnologue that reflects the situation in the real
world. And what about language diversity in the cyber world
Since being launched, the Language Observatory has focused its attention on
two continents, Asia and Africa. The first observation results were reported
during a workshop organized at UNESCO headquarter in February 2005; they
are fully documented in an article published in 2008 [3]. Recently, the project
has completed another round of surveys of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean
region based on 2009 data. The following sections will introduce an overview
of this most recent study.
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