Linguistic Typology· 2026Q1
Global hotspots of linguistic diversity: mapping richness and endemism
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- 2026year
Short summary
A new approach, linguistic endemism, quantifies the uniqueness of languages, genealogies, and structural features within geographical areas, revealing distinct global hotspots compared to traditional language richness measures.
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Key points
- Introduces linguistic endemism as a new metric for quantifying linguistic diversity, focusing on uniqueness.
- Maps global hotspots for linguistic richness and endemism for languages, genealogies, and structural features.
- Assesses the spatial congruence between richness and endemism hotspots.
- Suggests that combinations of richness and endemism may indicate past human movements.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract Understanding the uneven distribution of linguistic diversity over the globe is one of the central issues in linguistics, and the subject of a steadily growing body of studies. However, the majority of these studies focus on just one aspect of linguistic diversity: language richness, the number of languages spoken in a given area. While language richness might be suitable for answering some questions about the origins and drivers of linguistic diversity, for others it might not be the most appropriate measure. Here, we introduce a new approach to quantifying patterns of diversity: linguistic endemism. This measure quantifies an overlooked aspect of linguistic diversity: the degree of uniqueness of a given geographical unit in terms of its languages, genealogies or structural features, opening up the way to new questions relating to the origins and distribution of linguistic diversity. We illustrate our approach by identifying global hotspot regions where high linguistic diversity values are significantly clustered. We map these hotspots for richness and endemism for languages, genealogies and structural features, and assess their spatial congruence. We discuss endemism-richness combinations, and suggest how overlapping and disjoint hotspot regions may be indicative of the human past.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Linguistic Typology, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Cultural Studies
Cultural StudiesSocial Sciences