The "Other Languages" in Ethnologue & Glottolog- isolates, contact languages, sign languages etc
Hello everyone, In this post, we will tackle the following questions: What is a language family? How many language families are there in the world? What is an isolate? How many isolates are there? How many sign languages might there be in the world? How many contact languages might there be in the world? What is the difference when it comes to these categories with respect to Glottolog and Ethnologue? Does it matter? Hopefully this might be useful to people interested in language history and/or users of Glottolog and Ethnologue. As usual, I will use headings so feel free to skim and skip things that are not interesting to you and only read what you find relevant. It's been few posts lately by me (Hedvig), will try and change that. Right now I'm out travelling in Europe, going to workshops and visiting friends and getting a lot of inspiration. Already been at two workshops: Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics in Leiden and befor...