Immigrant languages in Ethnologue

By -
More Ethnologue-facts, it seemed relevant.

Ethnologue makes a distinction between languages spoken indigenously in a country and immigrant languages. They define immigrant languages in the following manner:

 Immigrant languages. Immigrant languages are categorized as such if they are spoken by relatively recently arrived or transient populations which do not have a well-established, multi-generational community of language users in the country. Population estimates, if known, are shown in parentheses immediately following the language name. These languages do not have a separate language entry in the language listings for the country and are not included in the language counts for the country. Given the transitory nature of these populations and the difficulty in obtaining up-to-date information, this listing may be incomplete. Updated information on immigrant languages is welcomed.

It is not clear to me that any other resource that exists or might come to exist on speaker/signer populations would use this distinction, it seems hard to apply. I'm to go and read Ulrich Ammon's work on statistics of the languages of the world soon, I'll let you know how he deals with the matter. (I'm more keen on how he draws the line between native and non-native speakers (see related post here), but then heritage and immigrant status usually plays in there.)

When you view the list of languages for a country page on Ethnologue, you only see those classified as "indigenous". Same goes for when you go to a language page and see where it's spoken, again only "indigenous". To see the counts of immigrant languages you have to look under the label "immigrant languages" on the front page of the country, or subtract the sum of the populations in countries listed for the language from the total population.

Example: Samoan in New Zealand is classified as an immigrant language. It is not visible in the list of languages for New Zealand, nor in the countries where Samoan is spoken at the language's page. It is however listed at the front page of the New Zealand country page. If we subtract the populations in Samoa + American Samoa from the total speaker population, we find out that the "diaspora" is 157,557. If we look at the front page of New Zealand, we see a count of  86,400 Samoan speakers in the country.

Find any of these classifications problematic? For example: should German, Norwegian and Dutch be indigenous to USA just like Plautdietsch? To complain, go here.

For your entertainment and enlightenment, here is the top-10 countries with most languages spoken as "immigrant".


Indige-
nous		Immi-
grant
United States216206
Canada8985
United Kingdom1343
France2339
Germany2739
Russian Federation10535
Australia21233
Kazakhstan1430
Uzbekistan930
Kyrgyzstan528

And now I've run out of free views for the month, oh well. Copied and saved down the countries statistics, so I'm good for a while.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Global Tree of Languages

By -
Image
I was a reviewer for the Evolution of Language (Evolang) conference for the first time this year, a tedious-sounding task that turned out to be hilarious.  The conference attracts some bizarre manuscripts on the origins of language, one particularly imaginative one I wanted to devote a blogpost to, but regretfully cannot because of reviewer confidentiality. Also in my inbox to review was the most exciting paper about language that I’d ever seen.  I recommended acceptance obviously, even though it was only tangentially related to the theme of the conference, and it was accepted as a poster and published in the conference proceedings (available here ).  The paper was by Gerhard Jäger and Søren Wichmann, about constructing a world family tree of languages using a database of basic vocabulary, the ASJP database .  Claims about how language families may be related are nothing new but are normally statistically uninformed (such as work by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Gr...
Read more

Language family maps

By -
Image
Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie's (2017) chapter 'The Languages of the World' (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It's a basic overview of the world's language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments. This blog has featured posts on maps before, by  Hedvig on how to best represent linguistic diversity on maps and by  Matt on new approaches to ethnographies-linguistic maps . It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data...
Read more

My ELAN workflow for segmenting and transcription

By -
Image
Hello everyone, Hedvig here. I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis, hence the lack of writing here. Hopefully I'll be able to pick it up after submission, there's a lot of drafts lying on blogger waiting for completion. If you really, really miss me in particular, you could listen to my ramble at Talk the Talk - a weekly show about linguistics. Now that the shameless plug and excuses are done with, let's get down and talk about: THE TRANSCRIPTION CHALLENGE! In this blog post, I will focus on a part of this challenge¹ - the workflow for segmenting and transcribing  audio material. This is a rough guide, if it turns out people appreciate something like this I'll re-write it more thoroughly. This is a bit sloppily written in places, but trust me - if I do this "properly" right now I will lose days of work time that I should be spending on my thesis... so, I'll only do it if people really want it - and I might wait a while until I do. Sor...
Read more