The big question for this segment is, how does human language interact
with increasing social complexity in a unified global network?
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This course come to you from Sydney, Australia,
a city characterized by great linguistic diversity.
According to 2011 censor statistics,
almost 40% of Sydney siders speak a language other than English at home.
And they speak around 250 different languages.
Some of these languages have large numbers of speakers such as Arabic,
which is spoken by more 175,000 Sydney residents.
That's a bit over 4% of the population.
Other languages spoken by more than 100,000 Sydneysiders include Mandarin,
Hindi, and Cantonese.
However, most of Sydney's languages have lower numbers of speakers.
75 languages spoken in Sydney have more than 1,000 speakers each,
that is 0.05% of speakers in the population each.
And the remaining 175 languages have even lower numbers of speakers.
Viewed this way, Sydney is highly linguistically diverse.
But there is also another way of looking at languages in Sydney.
And that is through the lens of English.
More than 60% of Sydney households speak only English.
And the vast majority of people who speak a home language other than English
are bilingual in English.
The number of Sydney residents who do not speak English or
do not speak it well is only around 5% of the population.
So we can observe two different and
seemingly contradictory linguistic facts about Sydney.
First, the linguistic organization of Sydney is highly complex.
A large minority of residents speak a great variety of languages.
Second, the linguistic organization of Sydney is quite simple.
The overwhelming majority of the population speaks English, and
the majority speaks only English.
In fact, Sydney is not unusual.
Most, if not all major cities today, are characterized by the tension between
linguistic diversity and linguistic homogeneity I just have described.
While the specific characteristics of this tension are locally different in different
places, linguistic diversity today is tied to migration, and
linguistic homogeneity to nation building and In globalization.