The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity

The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity
	The links between language, culture and the environment suggest that biological, cultural and linguistic diversity should be studied together, as distinct but closely and necessarily related manifestations of the diversity of life on Earth. Researchers have referred to this new field of study as “biocultural diversity”.

Sharing a World of Difference: the Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity, accompanied by the map "The World’s Biocultural Diversity: People, Languages and Ecosystems" is an educational material co-published by UNESCO, Terralingua and the the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) directed at students and the general public, that introduces the concept of “biocultural diversity” in terms of sustainable development.

Ethnologue , one of the most widely used catalogues of the world’s languages, reports that 6,809 languages were in use (mostly spoken, but also, including 114 sign languages) in 228 countries as of the year 2000. Yet, fewer than 300 of this large number of languages spoken around the world had populations of speakers of over 1 million, the top ranked being Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and English. Moreover, just as there are hotspots of biodiversity, there are also hotspots of linguistic diversity, that is, areas of the world with especially high concentrations of different languages, such as Papua New Guinea and Nigeria.

The world’s languages represent an extraordinary wealth of human creativity. They contain and express the total “pool of ideas”, nurtured over time through heritage, local traditions and customs communicated through local languages. The diversity of ideas carried by different languages and sustained by different cultures is as necessary as the diversity of species and ecosystems for the survival of humanity and of life on our planet. In many cases the knowledge of natural cures and remedies for illnesses transmitted by languages through generations and linked to local plant life have been lost due to the abandonment of languages and cultures, and the destruction of natural habitat.

Cultural diversity is as necessary for the world as biodiversity is for our planet. Yet, similar to the growing crisis of extinction faced by the world’s environment, the world’s cultural diversity, particularly the diversity and richness of languages is being threatened with extinction. Ethnologue lists over 400 languages that reached near extinction at the end of the twentieth century, while UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing (2001) edition estimates that half of the world’s languages are in varying degrees of endangerment.

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