EVERYTHING ABOUT —YOUR CONNECTIVITY —
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Two strangers usually can't talk.
Roughly one pair in nine shares a language.
How it’s measured
GLCI 0.116166 MIC-adjusted
The average person speaks about one and a half languages.
How it’s measured
1.6028, range 1.53–1.67
Thousands of languages, spread unevenly across the planet.
How it’s measured
897 indexed
What LINGACON is.
LINGACON — short for Lingual Connectivity — is an independent research project built around a single question: how many languages would each of us need to speak so that any two people, meeting anywhere on Earth, could understand one another?
Answering it means mapping the real world: more than 7,000 living languages spread unevenly across 8.2 billion people, where five languages reach billions and thousands are spoken by only a few hundred. We treat every person as a point in a vast network, draw a link between any two who share a language well enough to hold a conversation, and apply random-graph mathematics to the result.
The answer is sobering. Pick two humans at random today and there is roughly an 8% chance they share a language — the planet is about 92% linguistically disconnected. LINGACON measures that gap across 235 jurisdictions covering 98.55% of the world’s population, names the languages that hold the connection together, and models the paths that could close it.
Everything on this site — the calculators, the atlas, the papers — is built from that work, and free to explore.
of all the world’s linguistic connectivity rests on English alone. Remove it and the planet splinters.
languages — English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, French, Bengali, Urdu — carry 91% of global connectivity.
people live in China and India — two neighbours whose populations share no native language.
The world is far more disconnected than it feels.
From inside a shared language, the world looks connected. Step outside it and the picture inverts: pick two people at random, and there is only an 8% chance they can hold a conversation.
The average person speaks just 1.6 languages. A handful of giant languages stitch together most of the connection that does exist — and that dependence is invisible until you measure it. Between Asia and Africa, two strangers share a language barely 4% of the time.
Source: The Periodic Self — “The World, Disconnected”, original LINGACON research.
Two numbers describe the whole planet.
Everything on Linguistic Planet is built from two measures — one counts languages, the other counts connection. Each keeps its own colour throughout the site.
The average human speaks just over one and a half languages. ALPS maps that number across every country, from 1.0 to 3.2+.
An 8% chance that two random people share a language. GLCI quantifies connection — between people, countries and whole continents.
Find where you stand — and how to improve.
Your languages → the share of humanity you can talk to. Calc 1a
Your country’s GLCI vs the world — no input needed. Calc 1b
Your languages + a destination → how well you’ll get by. Calc 2
Your country’s GLCI vs its regional neighbours. Calc 3
Browse the 214×214 matrix — can any two countries talk? Calc 4
Languages-per-person for a region or any custom set. Calc 6
Built on peer-reviewed science.
Linguistic Planet is the public face of LINGACON, an independent research project applying random-graph theory to the real topology of human language.
About LINGACON →An independent research project — not a company.
LINGACON exists to make the structure of global language visible — and to ask what it would take to connect more of the world. The work builds on decades of scholarship on linguistic diversity and fractionalisation, is peer-reviewed, and is published in the open. Every subscription and data product funds the next round of research rather than shareholders.
Read the full About page →Free to explore. Subscribe to go deep.
Every headline number is free, no signup. And every cent of a subscription funds independent research on multilingualism.
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