Stephen Mayhew

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How Many Languages Per Script?

18 Feb 2016

This afternoon, I found myself asking the following questions:

It turns out that these questions are answerable, but it is not trivial. Wikipedia has a List of Languages by Writing System, but it is a little informal, and is hard to parse automatically. Besides, it seems incomplete. Omniglot has a useful page on this, but it also feels incomplete and is not easy to parse.

So, I turned to scriptsource.org, a website affiliated with SIL that gives a lot of information and resources for the world’s scripts.

First, of the world’s roughly 7000 languages, there are about 3500 that use a writing system of some kind (source).

Then, according to scriptsource, there are between 140 and 250 scripts, depending on whether you count historical and fictional scripts. Each of these is encoded in the ISO15924 standard as a 4 letter code. This suggests that there are an average of 25 languages per script. This is obviously wrong (the distribution is definitely not uniform), but let’s keep looking.

Each script has it’s own page (for example, here’s Mongolian) which includes a list of languages that use the script (for Mongolian, there are 11). I wrote a simple scraper to get this number for each language.

(Note: some languages do not have this number in the page. Most notably, Latin script, the most popular. According to omniglot, 513 languages use Latin script. Just to calibrate, they also say that Cyrillic has 112 languages, which checks out against scriptsource’s 116)

To show the results, I plotted them with individual scripts on the x-axis and number of corresponding languages on the y-axis.

The leftmost script is Latin, with 513 languages. The x-axis is truncated at the 50th script, after which all scripts have a small number of languages (<3).

Here are the top 10 scripts (num languages in parens):

  1. Latin: 513
  2. Devanagari: 182
  3. Arabic: 171
  4. Cyrillic: 116
  5. Nastaliq Arabic: 69
  6. Ethiopic: 43
  7. Bengali: 39
  8. Thai: 35
  9. Tibetan: 33
  10. Myanmar: 27
  11. Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics: 26

Finally, if we add up all languages from all scripts in this list, we get 1695. This falls short of the actual number of ~3500. This suggests that this list is missing many entries.

The full list is here.

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