A world of languages – and how many speak them (Infographic)

6 thoughts on “A world of languages – and how many speak them (Infographic)”

1. I saw this the other day. Fascinating.

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2. This reminds me of some interesting related research if you’re interested:http://boffosocko.com/2016/02/01/global-language-networks/http://boffosocko.com/2015/06/08/a-world-of-languages-and-how-many-speak-them-infographic/

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3. Watched Learner Identities by Dr. Mary Kalantzis from YouTube

   Human Diversity and Learner Transformation
   [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nETgJKKYEQE?rel=0&w=560&h=315%5D

   I really like this video quite a bit. It definitely has an air of Big History to it, or at least Big History on the human scale portion of the timeline. I recognize and have written a bit about one of the smaller infographics from the video, though here it’s far too small to see what it is or what she’s referring to.
   Learner identities, Big History, and collective learning also generally remind me about shrinking numbers of languages, which I’ve mentioned before. In teaching and passing on knowledge, we will need to be even far more accomodating about culture and language, or eventually we’ll loose all of the diversity of languages we’ve got today.
   In digging around a bit I note that Dr. Kalantzis has some interesting course content available on Coursera that might be worth delving into shortly as well.

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4. Read Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History by Louis Menand (The New Yorker)

   The political scientist argues that the desire of identity groups for recognition is a key threat to liberalism.

   I can’t help but wonder what Jonah Goldberg’s review of this book will be given his prior effort earlier this year?
   I’m also reminded here of Mark Granovetter’s ideas that getting a job is more closely tied to who you know. One’s job is often very closely tied to their identity, and even more so when the link that got them their job was through a friend or acquaintance.
   I suspect that Fukuyama has a relatively useful thesis, but perhaps it’s not tied together as logically and historically as Menand would prefer. The difficult thing here is that levels of personal identity on large scales is relatively unknown for most of human history. Tribalism and individuality are certainly pulling at the threads of liberal democracy lately. Perhaps it’s because of unfulfilled promises (in America at least) of the two party system? Now that we’ve reached a summit of economic plenty much quicker than the rest of the world (and they’re usurping some of our stability as the rest of the world tries to equilibrate), we need to add some additional security nets for the lesser advantaged. It really doesn’t cost very much and in turn does so much more for the greater good of the broader society.
   Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

   Fukuyama’s argument was that, with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the last ideological alternative to liberalism had been eliminated.  ❧

   “Last” in the sense of a big, modern threat. We’re still facing the threats of tribalism, which apparently have a strong pull.
   August 27, 2018 at 10:26AM

   There would be a “Common Marketization” of international relations and the world would achieve homeostasis.  ❧

   Famous last words, right?!
   These are the types of statements one must try very hard not to make unless there is 100% certainty.
   I find myself wondering how can liberal democracy and capitalism manage to fight and make the case the the small tribes (everywhere, including within the US) that it can, could and should be doing more for them.
   August 27, 2018 at 10:29AM

   But events in Europe unfolded more or less according to Fukuyama’s prediction, and, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. The Cold War really was over.  ❧

   Or ostensibly, until a strong man came to power in Russia and began its downturn into something else. It definitely doesn’t seem to be a liberal democracy, so we’re still fighting against it.
   August 27, 2018 at 10:32AM

   This speculative flourish recalled the famous question that John Stuart Mill said he asked himself as a young man: If all the political and social reforms you believe in came to pass, would it make you a happier human being? That is always an interesting question.  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:33AM

   George Kennan, who was its first chief. In July of that year, Kennan published the so-called X article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in Foreign Affairs. It appeared anonymously—signed with an “X”—but once the press learned his identity the article was received as an official statement of American Cold War policy.  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:33AM

   Fukuyama’s article could thus be seen as a bookend to Kennan’s.  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:36AM

   The National Interest, as the name proclaims, is a realist foreign-policy journal. But Fukuyama’s premise was that nations do share a harmony of interests, and that their convergence on liberal political and economic models was mutually beneficial. Realism imagines nations to be in perpetual competition with one another; Fukuyama was saying that this was no longer going to be the case.  ❧

   And here is a bit of the flaw. Countries are still at least in competition with each other economically, at least until they’re all on equal footing from a modernity perspective.
   We are definitely still in completion with China and large parts of Europe.
   August 27, 2018 at 10:38AM

   Fukuyama thinks he knows what that something is, and his answer is summed up in the title of his new book, “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).  ❧

   Get a copy of this to read.
   August 27, 2018 at 10:39AM

   The demand for recognition, Fukuyama says, is the “master concept”  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:40AM

   Fukuyama covers all of this in less than two hundred pages. How does he do it? Not well.  ❧

   Scathing!
   Now I have to read it.
   August 27, 2018 at 10:41AM

   Fukuyama gives this desire for recognition a Greek name, taken from Plato’s Republic: thymos. He says that thymos is “a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed.”  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:43AM

   To say, as Fukuyama does, that “the desire for status—megalothymia—is rooted in human biology” is the academic equivalent of palmistry. You’re just making it up.  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:45AM

   Rationality and transparency are the values of classical liberalism. Rationality and transparency are supposed to be what make free markets and democratic elections work. People understand how the system functions, and that allows them to make rational choices.  ❧

   But economically, we know there isn’t perfect knowledge or perfect rationality (see Tversky and Khaneman). There is rarely even perfect transparency either which makes things much harder, especially in a post-truth society apparenlty.
   August 27, 2018 at 10:48AM

   Liberalism remains the ideal political and economic system, but it needs to find ways to accommodate and neutralize this pesky desire for recognition.   ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:50AM

   Enrollment was small, around twenty, but a number of future intellectual luminaries, like Hannah Arendt and Jacques Lacan, either took the class or sat in on it.  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:52AM

   For Kojève, the key concept in Hegel’s “Phenomenology” was recognition. Human beings want the recognition of other human beings in order to become self-conscious—to know themselves as autonomous individuals.  ❧

   This is very reminiscent of Valerie Alexander’s talk last week about recognizing employees at work. How can liberal democracy take advantage of this?
   August 27, 2018 at 10:53AM

   Kojève thought that the other way was through labor. The slave achieves his sense of self by work that transforms the natural world into a human world. But the slave is driven to labor in the first place because of the master’s refusal to recognize him. This “master-slave dialectic” is the motor of human history, and human history comes to an end when there are no more masters or slaves, and all are recognized equally.  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 10:55AM

   Kojève’s lectures were published as “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,” a book that went through many printings in France.  ❧

   Maybe it was Kojève and not Covfefe that Trump was referencing?! 😛
   August 27, 2018 at 10:56AM

   Encouraged by his friend Saul Bellow, he decided to turn the article into a book. “The Closing of the American Mind,” which Simon & Schuster brought out in February, 1987, launched a campaign of criticism of American higher education that has taken little time off since.  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 11:00AM

   In 1992, in the essay “The Politics of Recognition,” Taylor analyzed the advent of multiculturalism in terms similar to the ones Fukuyama uses in “Identity.”  ❧

   August 27, 2018 at 11:03AM

   Fukuyama acknowledges that identity politics has done some good, and he says that people on the right exaggerate the prevalence of political correctness and the effects of affirmative action.  ❧

   There’s a reference to voting theory about people not voting their particular views, but that they’re asking themselves, “Who would someone like me vote for?” Perhaps it’s George Lakoff? I should look this up and tie it in here somewhere.
   August 27, 2018 at 11:05AM

   He has no interest in the solution that liberals typically adopt to accommodate diversity: pluralism and multiculturalism.  ❧

   Interesting to see an IndieWeb principle pop up here! How do other parts dovetail perhaps? What about other movements?
   August 27, 2018 at 11:06AM

   Fukuyama concedes that people need a sense of national identity, whether ethnic or creedal, but otherwise he remains an assimilationist and a universalist.  ❧

   Is it a “national” identity they need? Why not a cultural one, or a personal one? Why not all the identities? What about the broader idea of many publics? Recognition and identity touch on many of these publics for a variety of reasons.
   August 27, 2018 at 11:08AM

   He wants to iron out differences, not protect them. He suggests measures like a mandatory national-service requirement and a more meaningful path to citizenship for immigrants.  ❧

   What if we look at the shrinking number of languages as a microcosm of identity. Are people forced to lose language? Do they not care? What are the other similarities and differences.
   Cross reference: https://boffosocko.com/2015/06/08/a-world-of-languages-and-how-many-speak-them-infographic/
   August 27, 2018 at 11:10AM

   Wouldn’t it be important to distinguish people who ultimately don’t want differences to matter, like the people involved in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, from people who ultimately do want them to matter, like ISIS militants, Brexit voters, or separatist nationalists? And what about people who are neither Mexican nor immigrants and who feel indignation at the treatment of Mexican immigrants? Black Americans risked their lives for civil rights, but so did white Americans. How would Socrates classify that behavior? Borrowed thymos?  ❧

   Some importatnt questions here. They give me some ideas…
   August 27, 2018 at 11:12AM

   History is somersaults all the way to the end. That’s why it’s so hard to write, and so hard to predict. Unless you’re lucky. ♦  ❧

   This is definitely more of a Big History approach…
   August 27, 2018 at 11:12AM

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5. Read Why you should learn the Skwxwú7mesh language (yourcontext.org)

   As the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger puts it, Squamish is a ‘severely endangered’ language. However, the picture is not so gloomy. Current efforts to revitalize the Skwxwú7mesh language, and culture, include the amazing work by Kwi Awt Stelmexw, which has been collaborating with SFU for a full-time immersion program that produces fluent native speakers. Obviously, the venerable goal of this initiative it to ensure future Squamish generations speak their language and live their culture, as their natural, historical right.

   I like where this piece is going, but at the rate we’re losing languages, it’s awfully difficult to know where to start… Sometimes just picking one and going with it can be of immense value.
   This also reminds me of a powerful infographic about languages.

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6. Finding data ❧

   You’re right about data here. I follow some research out of the MIT Media lab by Cesar Hidalgo who may have some interesting data resources if you poke around.
   Some additional starting points:

   https://boffosocko.com/2016/02/01/global-language-networks/
   https://boffosocko.com/2015/06/08/a-world-of-languages-and-how-many-speak-them-infographic/
   Annotated on September 11, 2020 at 09:52AM

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