Spoken Languages

While reading Orality & Literacy I found it interesting that Ong stated that there were around 3000 different languages spoken around the world.  I didn’t realize that there were that many languages spoken around the world, I would have guessed a number in the hundreds. Since this book is an older book I decided to look it up and see if that number is still accurate.  I found out as of  2007 there were 6909 different languages spoken according to the Linguistic Society of America. They also said “Out of Ethnologue’s 6,909, for instance, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia. One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million. That makes the average number of speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any area of the world.” I just found these facts extremely interesting.  Their website http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world goes on to break down the different areas, discussing more than the major languages and the possible disappearance of some of these languages.  As the non-major languages are not taught to the young children they end up dying out and these languages will then be lost and forgotten.