The Measurement of Linguistic Diversity

The examination of any map of linguistic distributions for an extended area will show some regions of great diversity (e.g. New Guinea, the Nuba Hills in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan) and others of relative uniformity (e.g. the aboriginal Eastern Woodlands area of North America, the contemporary United States), while still others seem to be intermediate between these extremes. The problem considered here is that of developing quantitative measures of this diversity in order to render such impressions more objective, allow the comparing of disparate geographical areas, and eventually to correlate varying degrees of linguistic diversity with political, economic, geographic, historic, and other non-linguistic factors.