Sign language geography
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Detalles
We have a fairly good idea of how many spoken languages exist, at least to the nearest thousand. There are websites, encyclopedias and language atlases which survey known spoken languages based on reports and language surveys; one such source, ethnologue.com, lists 6,912 known living languages as of 2005. Listing all the spoken languages of the world is on the one hand a classificatory problem: how do we determine that a pair of languages is similar enough to be counted as dialects of one language, not separately as two languages? Conversely, how do we determine that two apparent “dialects” are more accurately two different languages? On further inquiry, we can investigate whether a group of languages are genetically related and can be called members of the same “language family.”
En: Mathur, G. & Napoli, D.J. (Eds.). "Deaf Around the World" (2010).