LINGACON
Language Connectivity Research

How many languages do people speak — and can any two of them understand each other?

LINGACON is an independent research project built around two questions that global statistics have never answered in a comparable way. The first is about people: how many languages does a person actually speak? The second is about everyone else: pick two human beings at random — what are the chances they share a language at all?

Both questions sound simple. Neither had a defensible global answer, because the world's language data was never collected to be comparable: different surveys ask different questions, apply different proficiency thresholds, and mean different things by "speaks". LINGACON builds the measurement standard that makes those sources comparable, applies it country by country, and publishes the result together with the data behind it.

1.59
languages spoken by the average person on Earth — the ALPS Index
11.6%
chance that two randomly chosen people can understand each other — the GLCI
235
countries and territories measured, covering some 97% of humanity

That 11.6% is if we count everyone — neighbours included. The number drops to 8.3% if we randomly choose two people from different countries, and rises to about 57% within a single country. Put the other way round: more than nine out of ten cross-border pairs of human beings have no language in common at all.

Mission

LINGACON Philosophy and Mission

We believe that most of humanity's hardest problems — from climate to conflict to pandemics — are, at bottom, coordination problems. They are not failing for lack of knowledge or resources. They fail because cooperation at planetary scale is hard, and cooperation begins with the plain ability of two people to understand one another.

Language is where that ability is won or lost. Every additional language a person speaks is an advantage to that person — and, quietly, a small increase in the connective tissue of humanity as a whole. Our long-term aim is to see that connectivity grow: better mutual understanding between people, and through it, better human cooperation across every domain and every border.

Measurement comes first, because nothing improves that no one can see. You cannot argue about the world's linguistic connectivity, let alone raise it, while the basic numbers do not exist. So we build the numbers, publish them openly, and let anyone check them.

A note on where the science ends. Our indices measure how much connectivity there is. They are silent on how much there ought to be. That multilingualism is a good worth increasing is our premise, stated openly as a premise — not a finding derived from our data. We keep the two apart deliberately, and we would rather our measurements be used by people who disagree with us than bend them toward our own conclusions.

What we work on

Standard

L-MAS

The LINGACON Multilingualism Assessment Standard: a five-level framework that lets any survey, census, or organization measure multilingualism comparably — from one added question at zero cost to a full national audit. It is free, open, and CEFR-aligned.

l-mas.com →

Index

The ALPS Index

Average Languages a Person Speaks: a population-weighted estimate built for 235 countries and territories from censuses, survey programmes, and national statistics, harmonized to a single proficiency threshold — conversational ability at CEFR A2 and above.

Connectivity

The GLCI

The Global Linguistic Connectivity Index turns the question around: not how many languages people know, but what those languages achieve. It measures the probability that two people drawn at random can understand each other — within countries, across borders, and worldwide.

Research in progress

Three papers document the framework and its first global applications, each released with the data behind it. A fourth line of work asks what the numbers mean — whether learning languages still pays in an age of machine translation, and what a multilingualism deficit costs a country.

Forthcoming

The LINGACON ALPS Index

The first global, population-weighted estimate of how many languages the average person speaks, with every national figure documented and audited against independent sources.

Forthcoming

The Global Linguistic Connectivity Index (GLCI)

How connected is humanity, language by language? Pairwise connectivity computed across the world's population, decomposed within and between countries, and tested against the role of bridge languages.

The full research programme, including planned studies →

Working with LINGACON

Institutional cooperation is central to this project, not a sideline. Governments and statistical offices can add standardized multilingualism measurement to surveys they already run. Companies, cities, and regions can commission an assessment of their own workforce or population. Research institutions can license data; partners can reach an audience that cares about language through our platforms; and an API for programmatic access is in development.

The project takes no external funding, so partnerships and contributions are what let the work continue and stay open.

Partnership options   Support the research