Studies show the African continent contains the highest genetic diversity of any place in the world, but whether or not that correlates to the highest variation in language isn’t as clear.

With more than 2,000 distinct languages, Africa has a third of the world’s languages with less than a seventh of the world’s population. By comparison, Europe, which has about an eighth of the world’s population, has only about 300 languages.

Africa’s linguistic diversity can even be found among individual Africans. For instance, a study of 100 inhabitants in a city in western Uganda found that the average speaker knows 4.34 actual languages.

So why is this anyway? To help explain diversity, linguists borrow tools from evolutionary biologists:  linguists explore the relationships between distinct languages in the same way evolutionary biologists explore family relationships and speciation of living things. Given the parallels in these two fields, it’s no coincidence that Africa, the place of highest genetic diversity, contains rich linguistic diversity as well. More.

See: The Christian Science Monitor

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