Language endangerment and linguistic diversity

Linguistic diversity is a feature of specific geographic areas which tries to quantify how “diverse” that particular area is linguistically. You can think of linguistic diversity as “linguistic density”.

The majority of the world’s languages are endangered, which means that they will disappear while being replaced by other languages (usually, historically colonising languages).

An interesting question is whether areas that are more diverse are also those areas with the greatest proportion of endangered languages.

You can try and answer that question using the Glottolog data: coretta2022/glot_status.rds.