Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.

Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.

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