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3. Languages of the world
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Some details on categorization and statistics
of languages:
- International Partners in
Language Development (SIL)
counts 7,000 different languages (see Grimes,
2002)
- Languages are grouped into families / phyla
- Ca. 100 families and phyla
- More than 75% of the known languages belong to
10% of the families
- 2/3 of the world population speak languages belonging
to only 2 families: Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan
- For toponymy, numbers of speakers are not
the sole criterium of importance.
For more information click ![Click here for more information](../../../_graphs/information.gif)
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