Language ecology

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas & Robert Phillipson
Table of contents

There are probably between 6,500 and 10,000 spoken (oral) languages in the world, and possibly an equal number of sign languages. The most comprehensive listing of the world’s (mostly oral) languages (on-line searchable) is in the 13th edition (1996) of Ethnologue, edited by Barbara F. Grimes of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (http://​www​.sil​.org​/ethnologue/). This lists more than 6,800 languages spoken in 228 countries.

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