| Marcelo Dascal Endangered Languages | 
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Of the six thousand living languages of the world,
about one thousand are spoken in a single island -- Papua/New Guinea
(281k)
In this map you see half of the island (the one which is an independent state; the other half belongs to Indonesia).
Notice the density of different languages
(98k)
There are not only many languages, but they belong
to VERY different types. Just as biologists classify organisms
into phyla, families, genera, and species, so too linguists classify
languages into stocks, families, groups and sub-groups.
Language Diversity (48k)
"Our" linguistic family -- the family where Hebrew has its
ancestors, cousins, and other relatives, looks like
this:
The Semitic Family (49k)
