Question

Asia has 60% of the world's population, but only 20% of the languages dying. Why might that be?

Answer 1

The percentage of languages that are dying out in Asia is only around 20% from the total number of languages dying out in the world, despite it having around 60% of the global population is due to two reasons:

- Number of languages;

Asia, even though it has around 60% of the world's population, it only has around one third of the languages spoken in the world, so automatically there's a big disproportion between the number of population and number of languages, thus giving it a smaller percentage of languages dying out.

- Keeping the tradition;

Lots of Asian nations are not very willing to let their traditional language to die out and continue to speak it. Apart from the traditional point of view, another reason is that Asia has global economic powers, so learning languages like the English or Spanish are not of great benefit in general, so the pressure is much lesser.