If you were to randomly pick two people from anywhere in the Philippines, there’s a roughly 76% to 84% chance that they grew up speaking different languages.
This is based on the country’s Greenberg Linguistic Diversity Index, which estimates a place’s linguistic richness on a scale of 0 to 1. A place in which every person speaks a different language would have a diversity index of 1, while a country in which every person speaks the same language would have an index of 0.
While the language website Ethnologue pegs the country’s diversity index at 0.84 or 84%, our own computations based on data from the 2010 Philippine Census puts the figure at around 76%. Even at the lower figure of 76%, the Philippines would still be more linguistically diverse than as many as 190 other countries.
This remarkable fact is rarely celebrated during the country’s Buwan ng Wika (Language Month), which, every August, promotes the use of the Tagalog-based national language, Filipino. Yet more than six out of every 10 Filipinos speak languages other than Tagalog at home.
Continue reading full article here: The language landscape of the Philippines in 4 maps