Global Linguistic Diversity - Adapting the Leinster-Cobbold Framework from Ecology for Humanities Research

Abstract

In this paper, we adapt the Leinster-Cobbold Framework from ecology and apply it to linguistic diversity. Thereby, we enable a unified framework of linguistic diversity that can account for richness, relative abundance and similarity between languages. By analyzing global linguistic diversity at the country and continent levels using the framework, we demonstrate how diversity can be interpreted as an effective number from three different perspectives. By doing this, we show that accounting for different aspects of diversity substantially influences how diversity is perceived, and conclude that a multivariate view is crucial for future endeavors to model linguistic diversity statistically.