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1. Introduction

Linguistic diversity in the world today is an issue of growing social importance

because a majority of all living languages are threatened in their continued existence.

How they can be sustained is a matter of study and debate. Changes in the vitality of a

language has important implications for individuals and societies. Multilingualism is acommon and increasing phenomenon in present day society which can be studied

from different perspectives. The purpose of the position paper is to focus on language

as a cultural asset and to establish the relationship between linguistic diversity and

human welfare from an economic perspective.

Nowadays there are around 7,000 languages being spoken in the world. It is difficult

to know the exact number of languages because the distinction between a language

and a dialect is not always clear. In fact languages are not isolated entities and in

many cases there are no clear boundaries between them, it is rather a continuum that

extends along a geographical area.

Linguistic diversity has been defined in a broad sense as the range of variations

exhibited by human languages. The most common definition uses a simple count of

languages: the more languages, the more Linguistic Diversity.

Distribution of languages by area of origin

Continent Languages Count Percent

Africa 2,092 30.3

Americas 1,002 14.5

Asia 2,269 32.8

Europe 239 3.5

Pacific 1,310 19.0

Totals 6,912 100.0

This table shows that Africa and Asia have a much larger number of languages thanEurope. Most of the worlds languages are spoken in a broad area on either side of the

Equator - in South-east Asia, India, Africa, and South America.

The languages included in this table are living languages with speakers who have

these languages as a first language and languages are only counted once as their

country of origin even if they are spoken in more than one country.

While less than ten thousand people (0.00015%) of the worlds population speak 52%

(about 3640) of the worlds languages as natives, over a 100 million people (40%) of

the worlds population speak only eight languages (0.1%) as their native language. In

all, while a great majority of the worlds popu- lation (94%) speak only 5% of the

worlds languages as their native languages, only a few people of the worldspopulation (6%) speak the remaining 95% of the worlds languages as their native

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lan- guages. For example, 50% of the worlds languages are spoken in 8 countries

only.

Although diversity has been shown to have a number of benefits, including enhanced

employee creativity and competence, this recognition is often found more in theory

than actual practice.

Intercultural communication has become a necessity in most workplaces due to the

forces of globalization. There may be no other region where this necessity is more

clearly evident than in the Arabian Gulf, and more specifically, the United Arab

Emirates. This is especially evident in the UAE where an excessively large ratio of

the workforce is foreign.

IMPORTANCE OF LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

1) Loss of cultural information- There may be a lot of interesting and useful

cultural information captured by a language's lexicon that is lost when the languagedies. For example, a language might make a lexical distinction between two different

types of plants that may ultimately have medical benefit. Ultimately, Language has

been called "the DNA of culture." (Bruce Cole)

2)Loss of linguistic information- Not only do linguists care about this, but the

general public might, too. Understanding how language works can ultimate provide

insight into rehabilitating aphasia, dealing with dyslexia, helping children with

specific language impairment, helping older people with hearing loss and may help

with degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. If there are only a handful of languages

to study, then we do not have enough data to really understand how language actually

works in the brain.

3) Loss of cultural identity- Language is an important way of establishing and

maintaining cultural identity. This may not seem important to you, but to a lot of

cultures and peoples, it makes them happy to not assimilate 100% to the dominant

culture.

4) Loss of HistoryLanguages are ancient, they can be a hundred or even thousands

of year old. Each language has its importance in history and to understand history,

understanding its language is the most important.

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