What are the Most and Least Linguistically Diverse Countries?

Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world, but what are the least linguistically diverse countries? Watch for a journey through the diverse and not-so diverse lands!
Ethnologue LDI list: www.ethnologue...
‪@LinguaPhiliax‬'s Yakko's World Parody: • Horton's Map (A Yakko'...
Patreon: / lingolizard
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:39 Top 10
4:15 Top 50
8:05 Top 100
11:07 Unique Chapter Title
13:43 Bottom 10
17:35 Outro

[@LingoLizard]

Music Timestamp: 0:00-2:38 The garden (Purrgatory OST) 2:39-9:58 Back to the Holler (Night in the Woods OST) 10:11-13:42 Pierogies in the Dark (Night in the Woods OST) 13:43-16:23 Lands Untamed (Bug Fables OST) 16:24-18:28 Ol’ Pickaxe (Night in the Woods OST)

[@andgelha08]

NITW LET'S GOOO!!!

[@stuartjohnson9019]

Thanks a lot for the music playlist : ) Sincerely

[@bappityyyy]

When I heard that Bug Fables music randomly I was just like "...are my ears deceiving me or is that what I think it is" Anyways Bug Fables mentioned! Lovely game, glad to see it randomly around sometimes!

[@B3Band]

It's funny how Americans are "known" for not learning other languages. Meanwhile, most of the countries at the bottom of this list are Spanish speaking countries, whose people come to the United States and never bother learning English.

[@Genesukt64]

PURRGATORY SPOTTED YEAH (loved the vid btw :3)

[@albertmiller2electricbooga897]

Bolivia making every Indigenous language official, presumably including the languages of uncontacted tribes and therefore having an indeterminable number of official languages is pretty cool trivia

[@sohopedeco]

"Official language" means nothing when you can request any public services in that language.

[@migueljoserivera9030]

@@sohopedeco It does mean something. You can request public services to be adressed by your name and titles in your language. For instance i can't write my name in English or US paperwork but I could in Bolivia. Also, it means that if they integrate into the Bolivian society they can teach their lessons and govern their municipalties in their own language.

[@DrVictorVasconcelos]

Yeah, they're against the US empire though so the US staged a coup to remove the responsible parties by arguing they defrauded the elections. Then in the next election they won again with an extremely similar margin and they returned to power.

[@DrVictorVasconcelos]

That was in 2022, let's hope the US doesn't starve their country into submission like they did with Venezuela after Maduro won 2018 in a landslide.

[@albertmiller2electricbooga897]

@@DrVictorVasconcelos really not related but Maduro very clearly rigs elections, this year exit polls said 80% against him and yet he still “won”…

[@djelilikejam]

btw that french speaking number in haiti is almost certainly overblown. most ppl lie about(or at the very least exaggerate) french proficiency bc it’s a proxy for education (that’s a whole different can of worms). i tend to say 10% or at the very most 20% if i’m being super generous. but yeah haiti is pretty linguistically homogenous if you count kreyòl as one single language but there are 3 distinct dialects with Kreyòl Okap(of the north) being the least mutually intelligible with the others, having a different grammar structure and vocab but honestly i don’t have a problem calling Ayiti the least linguistically diverse country. i was kinda expecting it when i started the vid

[@scorb-]

who up celebrating linguistic diversity rn

[@TikSkygd]

Straight up celebrating it rn, and by “it” well, haha, let’s just say… linguistic diversity 😏

[@T.h.e.T.i.n.o]

I meen, Its Good to have a Universal Langauge in a Country or people that are supose to hold Together, but at the same time language has a Rich Cultur build in, Best is everyone knows 2 Languages, Their "in Group" and their "Out Group"

[@kakahass8845]

Meanwhile I'm dying over here as a Brazilian.

[@Jac4_]

im up celebrating linguistic diversity rn! (scorbing rn as well)

[@GraveUypo]

@@TikSkygd is that an AI post? because it reads exactly like one

[@KawaiiJagaimo]

Brazil flag on thumbnail so as a Brazilian I legally need to comment that I am a Brazilian.

[@yveltheyveltal5166]

Brazil mentioned!

[@albertmiller2electricbooga897]

"COME TO BRAZIL"

[@brigadeiroirritado8117]

Marcando presença nesse comentário

[@Finity_twenty_ten]

You like playing F U T E B O L . . .

[@anotparticularlynotableguy]

BRAZIL DETECTED: DEPLOYING BRAZILIANS

[@abarusso]

Small correction concerning Belgium: the French variety spoken in Belgium is Belgian French, not Walloon. Walloon is a language in its own right, albeit non official, that is quickly dying out due to being harshly repressed in the past century or so.

[@djpizzarocks27]

Hi South African here I just wanted to comment that we recently made South African Sign Language our 12th official language! SASL (South African Sign Language) even has dialects although the reason for this is rather depressing as it is linked to the oppression of deaf people under Apartheid.

[@MaizeSnallygaster]

That’s cool

[@gamermapper]

Why are Khoisan languages not official yet?

[@djpizzarocks27]

@@gamermapper They aren't official languages since they are either barely spoken or if spoken are never done so in a city or formal context. Khoisan people don't live thier traditional lifestyle anymore and haven't for a long time. It's really sad. But having every government building have someone being able to speak one of the many Khoisan languages is probably impossible. It's horrific what has happened to the Khoisan people.

[@DinoBryce]

​@@djpizzarocks27Racism against the Khoisan!

[@martinsloan3098]

Khoisan is also no longer considered a language family. Various languages with clicks were grouped together but research shows they actually arent related

[@losered]

im linging SO diversely rn

[@epsilon7571]

she ling on my guistic till i diverge

[@stevemustang7102]

😩 🔉🔤

[@wholenote1231]

me when the languages are diverse

[@danukil7703]

KZbin has decided that this comment is not in English. Thus, you are indeed linging diversely

[@nzubechukwu]

That Yakko’s World parody was epic.

[@Diwie8]

Here in Aruba 🇦🇼, almost everyone speaks Papiamento (a Portuguese-based creole), English, Spanish and Dutch at often high levels of fluency (Dutch a bit less though generally). The neighboring islands of Curaçao 🇨🇼 and Bonaire 🇧🇶 also speak these languages (although with higher Dutch fluency and lower Spanish fluency). Some people here even speak 5 or 6 languages. The Dutch Caribbean is very diverse in people groups, cultures & languages so thats why. Edit: Aruba and Curaçao are countries within the Dutch kingdom, so technically a country but not really as we aren't fully sovereign. New Caledonia and Guam did get a mention though, so i suppose we still count.

[@AvaEvaThornton]

The number for North Korea is surprisingly high, implying something like 1 in 40 or about half a million people in North Korea aren't native Korean speakers. TBH, I'm not sure I believe it.

[@diannelovesyou]

It's not that they aren't native "Korean" speakers, I would assume that the majority of this diversity comes from dialects going so far away from "the standard" that they lose a lot of intelligibility

[@Daniel-bn2lm]

Maybe they also include Chinese and Russian people who work there? There's not that many but also it wouldn't be surprising if a number of Koreans are bilingual in either of those languages.

[@robert9016]

There are Chinese and Japanese speaking citizens of North Korea.

[@TheAnonymousKnightOfJustice]

i think you forgot north korea borders north china and manchuria, a place where jurchens artic Inuit,Chinese even mongols come in and settle as koreans.

[@Gulitize]

​@@diannelovesyou Yep Yukjin in the north east and China is its own language descendent from middle Korean, that is most likely the reason for diversity.

[@Evelyn-vd9qd]

I've been working in a Brazilian company as part of the HR department for over six years, being responsible for testing applicants' level of English in interviews for positions that require it. And let me tell you that regarding Brazil, unlike countries like Haiti, which has a large part of the population speaking a second or third language, Brazil stands out as a country with very few people able to speak anything other than Portuguese. For many Brazilians Spanish falls into the category of: 'I've never studied but I can speak Spanish at a basic level'. This lie is often told because a Portuguese speaker will naturally have some understanding of Spanish, which makes many claim knowledge of the language even if they don't really have it. When it comes to English, most of the people I interacted with who claimed to know the language had a very basic knowledge of it, or only demonstrated a more advanced level in reading and writing, failing to meet the minimum criteria for using the language in a 100% English-speaking work environment. I believe that after a certain point, a country's 'monolingualism' generates a side effect of the average citizen's lack of notion of what it really means to be able to use a language, which results in a huge amount of the population claiming to know a language even if they can't properly use it.

[@Evelyn-vd9qd]

Just to be clear, I have no intention of offending any Brazilians with my comment. The effort to learn a new language is commendable in itself, no matter where you are on the path.

[@RogerRamos1993]

Too late, I'm Brazilian and I'm offended.

[@diannelovesyou]

This idea is very poignant. After all lizard mentions the US's anglophones notoriety (and that goes for many British people as well) for monolingualism. And I would say, too, that most Americans/Brits are happy to say "I'm familiar with Spanish/French/German" while only knowing a few basic phrases, 0 grammar, and maybe some imitation swear words

[@VinnieMF]

Brazilian here. Very accurate, especially on the common overselling of our Spanish proficiency and the fragmented proficiency in English.

[@Oceanwaves-d8l]

@@diannelovesyou Agreed, unfortunately. That's why I actually try to know French. A lot of people don't understand what actually knowing the language is, or how little they know of it, unless they decide to immerse. They also forget their language knowledge from school because our school system is literally just endless cramming which is very inefficient for both learning and long-term memory so we know a lot for tests but don't remember anything long-term, as well as the fact they never end up using it and you naturally forget languages you don't use.

[@nzubechukwu]

I like how you added music! 🎶

[@海王星クショックス]

Any names? Specifically the music used starting 13:43 ?

[@nzubechukwu]

@@海王星クショックス He has a pinned comment with each of the songs, but it’s Lands Untamed by Bug Fables.

[@joshuasims5421]

When I saw Brazil in the thumbnail, I was so skeptical I thought it was clickbait. LDI is a fascinating index, great video! I wonder what the LDI of the entire earth is…

[@dws49]

8:49 you mean Belgian French! Walloon is a separate language!!

[@海王星クショックス]

To my knowledge it is not.

[@leroybrown2610]

​@@海王星クショックス well your knowledge is incorrect. Walloon is a separate language from Belgian French just look it up

[@mickeyrube6623]

Awesome video! I've always wondered which countries were the least linguistically diverse! Okay, now maybe you can answer a question I've not been able to answer for a very long time: With language has the largest amount of monolingual speakers? This can be answered in a few ways: 1. Which language simply has the most monolingual speakers in total, 2. Which language's monolingual speakers make up the largest percentage of its total speakers, and 3. Which language's monolingual speakers make up the largest percent of the Earth's population. You may find this impossible to answer, because I sure have! But if you could even shed the smallest amount a light on this subject, I really think it would make an awesome video! Either way, keep up the language related videos!

[@aaronmarks9366]

Great question! Off the top of my head, I'd expect Mandarin to fit #3, and maybe #1 and #2 as well. There are 900 million native Mandarin speakers in China as the video pointed out, and I assume a rather small proportion of them know international languages like English, or another China-internal language like Yue, Wu, or non-Chinese Indigenous languages. But that must still leave a very large number of monolingual Mandarin speakers: I'd guess at least 500 million, probably more. It's difficult to judge considering how many urban Chinese people are studying English now, but how many of them can say a handful of words or basic sentences vs. can take a trip to an Anglophone country and communicate effectively.

[@mickeyrube6623]

@@aaronmarks9366 I also arrived at this conclusion based on the small amount of data I could find. After Mandarin, it is hard to say what other languages might make up a top 10 list. As Arabic is a very useful lingua franca, if it is your native tongue, and you live your whole life in an Arabic speaking country, there seems there would be no real drive to learn a second language. Ofc, then the argument of Arabic not really being one language will come up. There is on going joke about gamers from Russia refusing to learn English, yet still engaging with the international online gaming community. As you would guess, most people that attempt to play with strangers start with English, and go from there, but not Russians! (I'm sure this is just an awful stereotype, but it does hint at the reality of the former USSR being culturally and politically separate from the rest of Europe, which is much more used to cultural mixing.) Other than that, maybe English and French? For the same "well there are a lot of people who speak my language everywhere, why learn another language" reasons as Arabic? Spanish, because...uh...Latin America? Oh, and Japanese seems like it has a large percentage of monolingual speakers with in itself, that don't necessarily make up a large percentage of monolingual speakers world-wide. I wish I had some real data to judge this, because right now I'm just guessing based on stereotypes, unfortunately.

[@cmyk8964]

I’m from Japan and I expected it to be in the bottom 10 instead of the 20th least diverse. I see that smaller single-ethnic-group countries and tiny island nations with 0 or 1 indigenous languages padded the ranks below Japan.

[@FOLIPE]

There's no credible source saying 3 million people speak a variety of German in Brazil natively. In fact, if you look at the last census in which language was counted in Brazil back in 1950, it was spoken by just a few percentage points of people mostly in the south, and it was decreasing. Imagining it had a massive resurgence and made the south of Brazil as linguistically diverse as Spain is pretty... Absurd

[@leondenizard3800]

In the south german is spoken in the countryside but yeah portuguese is the most spoken language,after portuguese is german in the south the most spoken language

[@pliniojr95]

These who claim this nonsense are wannabe germans. If anything, the most spoken language besides portuguese is spanish or some native american language.

[@FOLIPE]

@@pliniojr95 it's probably Spanish and then Chinese or Haitian creole due to immigration

[@FOLIPE]

@@leondenizard3800 Some German is spoken by some people in the countryside. Brazil is about 80% urban and 20% rural. Do you think half of the people in the countryside of the south speak German natively? That's quite... Impossible. It wasn't the case even in 1950 and then the language was most likely more widely spoken than now, as it was getting weaker over time

[@davidsenra2495]

I seriously doubt more than 100k people in Brazil can speak German natively. As someone commented above, those who claim this are n*zi lunatics who believe the "Aryan south is superior" or some other lunacy.

[@largedarkrooster6371]

8:49 Walloon is a separate language from French and is very endangered. Most Wallonian Belgians speak Belgian French/ Wallonian French which is not too different from Standard French. Walloon however, while still being a Gallo-Romance language, is completely different enough to not be intelligible with French

[@deleted-something]

(thumbnail snipe), technically, since the languages of "uncontacted tribes" are the least related languages to any know language family, brazil would be very high, although that would be basically .01% of the population who doesn't even identify themselves with the nation or state of "brazil", so fair enough.

[@mithrillis]

I think the "shared first language" metric is quite flawed, especially considering most people in linguistically diverse regions would likely be multilingual, different languages may be equally prominent but in different social scenarios, and the "first language" might not be many people's actual most used language. I understand that compressing a complex topic down to a single metric will always miss some crucial details, but I think maybe a fairer metric would be trying to measure how much information on average we need to determine which languages a person from a region speaks. In a linguistically unified country we only have to know the name of the language everybody speaks, but in a diverse country you will have to split the population in to more and more subgroups. The nice thing about this idea is that it is not too difficult to implement it crudely. You create a list of every individual's every language, one line per person (or approximate this list from statistics), lexically sort the list, compress the file containing the list, then divide the file size by population number. There you have it, the approximate information per capita you need to determine languages a person in that country speaks.

[@gamermapper]

In post Soviet states a lot of people speak Russian when speaking between different nationalities like is an Azeri goes to Kazakhstan he'll speak Russian or if a Moldovan wants to speak to a Gagauz he'll speak Russian. The number of Russian speakers is especially high in Belarus and Ukraine. However they all have their own national and ethnic languages too even which sometimes are their main ones.

[@andgelha08]

Eeeeeeexcellent choice of music

[@MooImABunny]

I really expected the US and France to be pretty low on the list, but apparently there are 80-something countries lower on the list.. They are still below half-way through the list, but I'm still surprised. Also, it's funny that because agreeing on what counts as separate languages is so hard we get a list whose top entries are pretty agreeable, but the bottom is dubious, and very sensitive to altering your counting.. also also, Tok Pisin is still the funniest language name. I have friends who hate it when I Tok while Pisin

[@adrianblake8876]

Both US and France have a significant immigrant population speaking Spanish and Arabic respectively, so it raises their LDI. The lowest countries would be those that are monolingual and have very low immigrant population, say DPRK which is shown in the thumbnail...

[@migueljoserivera9030]

@@adrianblake8876 Or, like Colombia, have a lot of inmigrants who are native speakers of the same language as the locals.

[@jayolovitt5969]

@@migueljoserivera9030which is probably a missing measure of diversity here. Some variants of Spanish in South America would be pretty distinct and have totally different slang- same with Hindi, Chinese and Arabic. I think that gets missed in these counts. You might have two neighbouring New Guinean languages with only a little difference vs two dialects of Arabic that are more or less separate languages.

[@gamermapper]

France has overseas territories that have a lot of different languages that are still actively spoken. French Guyana, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, etc. The US too has overseas territories like the Hawaiian Islands or Eastern Samoa although some of them don't speak their own language anymore as the main language like Hawaii (which technically isn't even American under international law but it's another question).

[@adrianblake8876]

@@jayolovitt5969 According to mainstream linguistics, most Spanish and Arabic dialects differ between countries, rather than between one country, so it doesn't make much of a difference for the purpose of this video...

[@vampyricon7026]

Malaysia also has multiple Chinese languages spoken there, with Cantonese in Kuala Lumpur, Hakka in Sabah, and Hokkien in Penang. These are all spoken in other regions but those are the first that come to mind. And given the reason for China's ranking, I highly doubt it should be that low, as Sichuanese is also considered "Mandarin", but is clearly a separate language. The same goes for if "Min" is simply taken as one language, as it is potentially paraphyletic, and in any case has extreme levels of mutual unintelligibility. The same goes for every major "Chinese dialect group", they all consist of multiple languages. "Ping" is also clearly paraphyletic, with Southern Pinghua being clearly Cantonesic, while Northern Pinghua is not.

[@bereccc]

This is one of the most interesting videos I've ever seen. Keep it up!

[@RonnieAttema]

It's so weird to see Norway score so low on this score. The differences between dialects here are so big that it would beat most, if not all, European countries in linguistic diversity. Especially the Netherlands (where I am originally from). I also live in the far north where the Sámi and Kven languages are still the primary languages in some villages, but this are ofcourse very few people compared to how many people are living in the south

[@TanJulia]

To think Mexico around the XIX century was still majorly indigenous and Spanish was not the main language

[@migueljoserivera9030]

Yes, Mexico purged their indigenous languages heavily the first century after their independence. Northern languages where erased either through genocide, expulsion or reeducation campaigns. Most of the remaining native speakers are Mayan and Tlaxcalan since those languages were more protected and used under the Spanish crown and had more literature and grammar books, sometimes used/studied in academia.

[@gamermapper]

Imagine if Aztecs today still drew these beautiful Mesoamerican glyphs and we still had Tenochitlan... It's so sad it's nit actually the case... ☹️ Although why should we be sad, it's not impossible to make that a reality! If the Nahua people mobilise themselves and create a grassroots nationalist movement to revive their pre colonial culture and glory it can definitely happen! 😊

[@justaguy9224]

Montenegro’s case is so funny, since Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are essentially different names for the same language, Serbo-Croatian. They are all based on the same Shtokavian dialect. Someone speaking Montenegrin wouldn’t have problem understanding someone speaking Serbian and vice versa. In fact, the differences between these “languages” are smaller than between American and British English.

[@mintsjams8862]

Just so you know, you said the LDIs for some of the least diverse countries wrong. You forgot to say another zero after the point in 0.017, for example. Not a big deal, but it caught me off guard so I thought I'd tell you.

[@siyabongamviko8872]

Some context for South Africa: 1. We have 12 official languages now, including SA Sign Language. 2. We have 2 West Germanic languages out of the 11 languages cited above, those being English and Afrikaans. 3. Out of the remaining 9 languages, we can roughly reduce them to just 4 for reasons I will share. i. IsiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele and Siswati may be considered a dialect continuum of one language generally called Nguni. These languages share extremely high mutual intelligibility despite apparent huge differences. They are in many ways comparable to Scots and English in terms of distance between them. During the colonial period, missionaries used isiXhosa speakers that were familiar with English or Dutch, to interpret between them and speakers of Nguni languages in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal province. Those isiXhosa speakers had not been previously exposed to the varieties which eventually became standardised as Zulu. However, they were able to communicate with ease. ii. Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana can also all be considered one language for similar reasons given for Nguni (Ndebele, Swati, Xhosa & Zulu). Speakers of these languages may meet for the first time without previous exposure and will chat away without problems except for a word here and there, as soon as their ears become accustomed to the pronunciation differences. The more distance varieties of the languages are not recognised and those will offer more difficulty to understand, for speakers of other languages that are not used to hearing them. iii. Tshivenda is more unique and a standalone. iv. Xitsonga is also more unique and a standalone.

[@mysteriousDSF]

8:35 the Romans who ran away from the Pompei vulcano event really didn't want to go back anywhere near that vulcano

[@rommelrivera6131]

EL SALVADOR MENTIONED!! 🇸🇻🇸🇻🇸🇻 But at what cost... 😔 I'm trying to learn Nawat, it's so sad seeing a core part of what became Salvadorean culture disappear before my very eyes, and seemingly no one cares.

[@UmQasaann]

Lenca people too

[@rommelrivera6131]

@@UmQasaann I'mma be real with you chief, I had no idea Lenca speakers were still around.

[@gamermapper]

Is it really Salvadorean culture? El Salvador is merely the settler state that occupies their land, they have their own distinct indigenous culture and this state has nothing to do with it. It's very weird this tendency of characterising world cultures only by the current political entity they're a part of. No one says that Belarus is a part of Russian culture even though they're very similar but somehow Hawaiian culture which has been literally destroyed by the US occupation is a part of "American culture"?

[@rommelrivera6131]

@@gamermapper I'd say Salvadorean culture is a mixture of the Spanish settler culture as well as indigenous culture, there are plenty of traditions, food, common vocabulary and local customs that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the indigenous aspects of the overall culture. I'm not saying Salvadorean culture is 1:1 indigenous Nawat culture.

[@Null2-irkutsk]

I like how he mentioned the inhumane, disgusting and heartbreaking past of former Br*t*sh colonies but completely failed to mention the same or worse level of g*nocide and crimes committed by the Sp*n*sh

[@robertm9631]

Reeks of not knowing anything about history beyond what they were taught in school or saw on social media.

[@notpot6886]

The worst happened after spain left (one of independent uruguay first acts was to round up the natives and exterminate them)

[@thevannmann]

And ignores the fact that Aboriginal Australians cause massive problems to the rest of the population. Aborigines commit crimes and exhibit antisocial behaviour at a proportionately huge rate.

[@mysteriousDSF]

Interesting to note how linguistic diversity reflects on the three waves of populating Oceania: first the Melanesians about 50,000 years ago, then the Micronesians, descendants of early Austronesians and then the fairly recent Polynesians who all share a thightly-knit culture and their languages are closely related.

[@ChasMusic]

That's so cool that Zimbabwe recognizes sign languages for the deaf as an official language. 15:20 Taino extinction. I wonder how Juan Luis Guerra got the Taino for his song Naboria/Daca Mayanimacana.

[@Avatarfan10000]

I was expecting Vatican City to be dead last because you must be approved by the Vatican to get a residence permit and Citizenship. The only people who can have Vatican City citizenship would-be workers, so I imagine Speaking Italian would be a requirement for employment.

[@solya404.]

I didn't expected to hear night in the woods soundtrack

[@pupp-et9095]

Glad I’m not the only one who noticed lol.

[@grobbelaarthibaud]

Always lives when lingolizard drops a new vid :D

[@migueljoserivera9030]

That metric is cool but it isn't that useful. I'd rather see the probability of two random people speaking mutually intelligible languages. Ignoring second languages seems wrong to me, and also there are ppolitical reasons to define languages as the same or distinct. You pointed out Serbo-Croatian, which can be 1 language or 4, and turn Bosnia from one of the most diverse to one of the least. Also, some of the more diverse countries still can have a 98% prob. of both speaking the lingua franca, which I find very important as well. In the end two strangers rarely engage in their native languages, they mostly use the lingua franca.

[@Oceanwaves-d8l]

Also, languages which actually come from the same country just seem less "diverse" to me than languages which come from other parts of the world but were brought in.

[@migueljoserivera9030]

@@Oceanwaves-d8l I differ, I think that Xhosa, Afrikaans, Zulu and English are very diverse even if they all are from the same country (South Africa), or French, Dutch and German even if they all are present in Belgium. But I find less diverse having four varieties of Serbocroatian. Spain, for instance, has 5 official languages but I don't find Spain so diverse because Valencian, Catalan and Balear are almost the same, Galician is very similar to Castilian and Portuguese and Basque, which is very distinct and not mutually intelligible, is spoken by 0.5% of the population. Most diversity comes from Arabs, Romanians, Western Europeans and Chinese.

[@Oceanwaves-d8l]

@@migueljoserivera9030 I guess it's mostly because I factor in culture tbf. When a language is imported, culture is usually also imported.

[@problem9222]

JUST GOT HOME FROM WORK AND NEW LINGO LIZARD DROP YASSSSSSSSS

[@therealsimlady]

Super interesting! I always love your videos. One request though: could you put less text at the bottom of the screen? It’s covered up if you put on subtitles 😢

[@FilAnd01]

How come you only did the genocide comment for English speaking countries but not for countries like Mexico and Brazil with a similar history of genocide and atrocities against indigenous people? It is good that you lift up those things when it comes to anglophone nations such as Canada and the US, but then you didn’t even say something like “Brazil with a similar history of indigenous erasure” or anything like that, idk it’s kinda weird ngl… it’s not like indigenous people didn’t get treated poorly in Brazil and Mexico just because their oppressors didn’t speak English Especially with Colombia where native languages are almost entirely extinct you very neutrally said there are tiny languages spoken by a small proportion of the population it just comes off sort of weird that you downplay those people’s suffering for some reason. And with Cuba you just say the languages indigenous to the island “have been extinct for centuries” like either just state the current facts in a neutral way or do the genocide commentary for non Anglo countries too, it’s super weird the way you did it. And before someone thinks I’m a salty American, no I’m not, I’m Swedish…

[@wrenisprobablyb0red]

4:59 Shame is for the weak! Also, NITW music!!

[@big_sad_wolf]

i got pleasantly jump scared and unreasonably happy when the NITW soundtrack started playing

[@thetrawlerman]

Brazil's second most spoken language is german and german dialects. Actually the hunsrickisch is the most spoken dialect It's a mindfuck and most brazilians dont know that

[@energyーy]

4:00 i thought you were making a political statement until tanazania showed up lol

[@bfguy12345]

8:45 Walloon is a heavily endangered language. The 2 largest languages of Belgium are Flemish and French, not Walloon. Although there are still more Walloon-speakers than German-speakers. I predict German will overtake Walloon by the end of this century.

[@mysteriousDSF]

I swear I thought Poland was going to be the least linguistically diverse

[@nimpichu3711]

8:51 what's the point of showing an ultra zoomed in map of the country? I don't even know in what hemisphere Belize is bro

[@ViscosAtlantic]

201st - Been using my platform to revive the joy & flavour dying languages can bring to the boring, harsh modern world

[@Poke9403]

East Timor was ranked higher than Indonesia just a few years ago and now its erased?

[@Sebastian-wo2ib]

Guatemala mentioned! 🥳 11:07

[@patax144]

Colombian here and while yes the video is pretty accurate, we do speak Spanish for the most part with the surviving indigenous languages as an exeption and a fact not mentioned in the insular region they speak an English creole language though most also speak spanish as a second language due to the tourists from the continental portion of the country and other spanish speaking countries.

[@laserwolf65]

Every non-anglophone country in the vid: Just the stats. The Anglophone Nations: DiD yOu KnOw AnGlOs BaD???!!!???!!!

[@kaiosantos2976]

I don't know why you put Brazil's flag in the thumbnail since it's not in the bottom of linguistically diverse countries, me as a brazilian who studies linguistic at the university is very offended because you're spreading misinformation to people

[@uts4448]

Oh wow. 8:24 Im just casually watching this and didn't know my country and language were gonna show up on here lol. I speak Mortlockese (kapasen mochulok).

[@maxandlily6074]

17:30 like that barely exists anymore, the UK gave all of it except Diego Garcia to Mauritius

[@pupp-et9095]

Nice NITW music background

[@mysteriousDSF]

Suriname is a fascinating example. If this index wasn't measuring languages but rather races, Suriname would probably come out number one with Asians (split between Indian and Indonesian), Africans, Native Americans and Europeans all representing themselves in more or less comparable proportions. (And possibly even Middle Easterners but I might be wrong on that one - they're present in many countries in the region)

[@lunan5197]

As someone who's lived in the Maldives, there are sooooo many Indian, Australian and other expats there that I wouldn't call it lingiustically not-diverse by any means. English is also a very common L2 there fwiw.

[@GraveUypo]

this is one ranking i think scoring low is actually a good thing. imagine have a country where people can't understand each other.

[@mysteriousDSF]

13:49 the way you said Colombia omg 😅 native Spanish speaker spotted

[@TypekMD]

what about the sovereign military order of malta?

[@pptenshi3900]

Kinda sad how many indigenous languages of Brazil have been brought to extinction or otherwise un-used 🙁 many of them are very interesting and beautiful !!

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

Australia is NOT linguistically diverse by a long shot! Most Australian schools treat the curriculum requirement to teach a "Language Other Than English" (LOTE) as a joke. Most parents wish schools would "stop wasting time" on it. Most Australians only speak English, except for migrants and often their children, but they only speak other languages in their own communities. The vast majority of Aboriginal languages are moribund with a few rare exceptions like Arrernte, which is spoken in the middle of the desert by around 30,000 people who are largely ignored by the rest of the country. People who don't speak their mother tongue should not be counted in the LDI.

[@akansomi1452]

Lol, I should have expected last place. I somehow thought France was down there

[@s1ddh4r7h.p]

As an Indian, I await the day mr lizard makes a video about my mother tongue, cuz i think there's a lot to be said :0 also yes I've watched basically every video on the channel and live for rare lang mentions lmao

[@Muladeseis]

Excelent criteria, because all the other lists of countries and languages diversity give an excessive but not realistic importance to indigenous languages.

[@JR13751]

If country a has 2 people with different native languages, and country b has 10 people with 5 having one native language and 5 other with other native language, is country a more diverse?

[@donovandownes5064]

glad to hear genocide being called out in Canada, the United States, and Australia. But is there a reason that this wasn't called out in other countries too? For example Russia or China?

[@enkor9591]

Only western people are bad.

[@billyd7628]

westoids bad

[@n_worder]

English bad Unga bunga good

[@SQh7]

Talk about linguo-labials please.

[@Los_Altos_Mapper_89]

In india a lot of languages exist but are catagorized as dialects

[@Poke9403]

Where the hell is Timor Leste

[@falpsdsqglthnsac]

HOLY SHIT PURRGATORY SOUNDTRACK??

[@dr.woozie7500]

Bro talked about the English/American genocide of natives but completely ignored the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of America, which arguably wiped out more indigenous peoples and languages... most Latin American countries are LESS linguistically diverse than the United States with the exception of places like Bolivia or Paraguay.

[@robertberger4203]

How about Russia , which is extremely diverse linguistically ? Almost everyone speaks. Russian , but there are well over 100 languages spoken there . The Caucasus is on of the most linguistically diverse. regions in the world .

[@enkor9591]

In Poland 98% percent of people speak Polish natively, and yet the supposed LDI is 0.17, how come?

[@enkor9591]

Korea with 2,4% also very suspicous

[@T.h.e.T.i.n.o]

To High Linguistically Diverse: Hard to have Unity... To Low Linguistically Diverse: Alot of Cultur Lost... How to Solve? POLYGLOT!

[@GermanBallX]

Wasn't Cape Verde settled by Portugal first, shouldn't they have one of the lowest scores?

[@skippitysmithsonshorts]

Let me save time 1st to 10th least diverse in order: Vatican City, Haiti, Maldives, El Salvador, Cuba, Burundi, Tuvalu, Tonga, NorthKorea, Colombia

[@Rockbullet-su9go]

I'm guessing either Vatican or San Marino EDIT: YOOOOOO

[@matt92hun]

So really high linguistic diversity basically means that colonizers drew the borders with absolutely no regards to the locals.

[@gamermapper]

Why is Papua New Guinea the most diverse country? Indonesia occupies half of New Guinea too, West Papua, and so will have just as much languages, as well as all the different Malay languages spoken in the Nusantara archipelago too.

[@sem5263]

@@gamermapper This specific metric isn't about the number of languages, so it does make sense, considering that much of the Indonesian population speaks languages like Javanese and Sundanese natively. Though it *is* pretty skewed and confusing since western Indonesia happens to be much more populated than eastern Indonesia.

[@gaymoder]

tanzania flag on thumbnail so as a peruvian i legally need to comment that i am a somali

[@strwberry_mist]

what is happening with the bgm this is scary😥

[@anti-mate407]

i hope myanmar will be mentioned

[@Dobjob]

Id like to know what the least linguistic diversity is natively. Im guessing korea and japan, as they don't really have any indigenous peoples other than the Ainu in Japan

[@freopt]

no way Belgium is that high

[@flavi9692]

Blud loves talking about mass killings💀🗿

[@Finity_twenty_ten]

Don't forget, it must SUCK to live in a linguistically-diverse country! It would be very hard to talk to people!

[@stick101x2]

Not really since you can just learn multiple languages. And when you are exposed to many different languages it makes it much easier to learn them.

[@Finity_twenty_ten]

@@stick101x2 Is it better than living in a monolingual country?

[@FairyCRat]

Kudos for daring to mention the mistreatment of workers in the UAE. When I and a few people did that on a Drew Binsky videos, we got shitstormed in the replies. Also, while most Dutch speakers in Belgium do speak the Flemish dialects, most French speakers in Belgium don't speak Walloon, they just speak standard French.

[@randomguy-tg7ok]

How does Belgium get so high with what effectively amounts to two languages?

[@Hamaak]

It was explained in the beginning 1:15

[@randomguy-tg7ok]

Yeah, but, again, Belgium has two languages, three if you include German. How does it get a score in the .7s?

[@Hamaak]

​@@randomguy-tg7okMust've been caused by the sheer amount of people speaking those two languages, it's almost an even split. Whereas some countries further down the list had more languages overall but some of those languages had very few speakers so it was less statistically likely to find two people from that country that spoke different languages. Idk, they had to arrive at those calculations somehow, it was surprising to me too

[@belstar1128]

they have many dialects that are nit really the same language

[@randomguy-tg7ok]

@@Hamaak If it were an even split, though, wouldn't it be around .5?

[@XVYQ_EY]

Ok, you can't name a language "lingua franca" if it's not french. Lingua franca literally means language french. So language like hindi is "lingua indica" and english is "lingua anglica".

[@grzegorzha.]

"Lingua franca" doesn't mean "French language", it means "Frankish language". And back in medieval times "Frankish" could describe anyone from Western Europe (all crusaders were called Franks during the First Crusade by the Muslims and during the Fourth crusade by the Greeks - hence Frankokratia). So lingua franca can mean any Western European language - and if you know anything about linguistics, you probably know that definitions change over time, so it doesn't matter what the word originally meant anyway.

[@hadiisaboss5307]

Lingua franca isn't mean literaly it's used because French was a very common lingua franca and so the term continued even when not about French

[@enkor9591]

You can't name it "franca" if it is not spoken by the Frankish kings.

[@simpleflareon]

Is that purrgatory music...??

[@avaraportti1873]

Oh we speak [indoeuropean language] but we have large minorities of people who speak [indoeuropean language] and [indoeuropean language], and an indigenous population which speaks [indoeuropean language].

[@billyd7628]

FREE CATALONIA!! THEY ARE TOTALLY A DIFFERENT PEOPLE BECAUSE THE SAY SOME WORDS SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WITH A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT ACCENT AND THEREFOR DESERVE TO BE A COUNTRY!! DOWN WITH IMPERIALIST SPAIN! WHO SPEAKS A SLIGHTY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE WHICH BASICALLY SOUNDS THE SAME AND HAVE THE SAME ETHNICITY OF PEOPLE! LETS BALKANIZE EVERYTHING INTO TINY COUNTRIES THAT HAVE NO POWER JUST BECAUSE THE CITY NEXT DOOR SAYS CHEESE WITH A SLIGHT LISP!!

[@hadiisaboss5307]

Yeah that's how language families work bro

[@billyd7628]

@@hadiisaboss5307 based

[@bedrock6443]

Bro using music now.

[@avus-kw2f213]

Who are people speaking other then Korean in north Korea ? I know there's a few thousand Chinese but surely that's not enough make them come 5th also there was no gen🅾️cℹ️des and that is lies

[@pain4066]

not enough filler

[@akitteninabowl8872]

comment for the algorhitm

[@kakahass8845]

As a Brazilian this one hurt. Honestly I think it should be a requirement to learn at least 1 indigenous language.

[@RogerRamos1993]

Why? And nothing is stopping you. I don't discard learning some Guarani as it's spoken in Paraguay, but why should everyone be required to learn indigenous languages?

[@kakahass8845]

@@RogerRamos1993 To keep the languages alive. Also why are you specifically fine with Avañe'ẽ?

[@devofficialchannel]

In my home country Indonesia, students are required to learn at least three languages: bahasa Indonesia (to be able to speak with different ethnic groups), at least one indigenous language like Sudanese or Javanese (to keep in touch with indigenous roots) and English (to communicate with foreigners and apply for jobs overseas).

[@kakahass8845]

@@devofficialchannel Rare Indonesian W.

[@VinnieMF]

​​​​@@kakahass8845 Languages dying and/or evolving is a natural process. Trying to maintain them alive and/or the same never works artificially. If there's no incentive to learn it, it will be forgotten. If it survives, it will evolve. Overall we should simply make sure all languages are as documented as possible - their history, writing and phonetics - so the language is immortalized as knowledge but pushing against the river is fruitless. Despite that, of course, every individual is open to learn as many languages as they wish, regardless of its trajectory and amount of speakers.