LINGACON

About LINGACON

LINGACON is an independent research project devoted to measuring multilingualism and linguistic connectivity — turning two questions anyone can ask into numbers that can be compared across the world. How many languages do people speak? And can two people, picked at random, understand one another at all?

Linguistics knows a great deal about the world's 7,000-odd languages: their structures, their histories, which of them are dying. What has been missing is the demographic layer — standardized, comparable measurement of how many languages people actually speak, and of how far a population can communicate beyond its own language boundaries. Existing sources are rich and mutually incompatible; entire regions have no standardized multilingualism data at all.

LINGACON's contribution is a common measurement standard (L-MAS), two global indices built under it (ALPS and the GLCI), and open publication of the results together with everything needed to check them.

Mission

LINGACON Philosophy and Mission

We take the view that most of humanity's hardest problems are, underneath, coordination problems. Climate, conflict, pandemics, migration — these are not failing for lack of knowledge or resources so much as for the difficulty of acting together at scale. And cooperation at any scale reduces, in the end, to something very small: two people being able to understand each other.

Language is where that ability is won or lost. We hold that every additional language a person speaks is an advantage to that person — wherever they live, whatever they do — and, less visibly, a small addition to the connective tissue of humanity as a whole. Our long-term aim is to see the world's linguistic connectivity rise: more mutual understanding between people, and through it, better human cooperation across domains and borders.

Measurement comes first, because nothing improves that no one can see. Until now it has not been possible even to argue seriously about the world's linguistic connectivity, because the basic numbers did not exist. So we build the numbers, publish them openly, and let anyone check them. What is done with them afterwards is properly a matter for policy, education, and public debate — that is, for other people.

Where the science ends and our position begins. The indices measure how much connectivity there is; they say nothing about how much there ought to be. That multilingualism is a good worth increasing is our premise, stated openly as a premise — not a conclusion derived from the data, and not something our figures can establish. We keep the two apart on purpose. A measurement that only serves people who already agree with us would not be worth making.

Principles

One definition, everywhere

Every figure we publish is produced under the same explicit threshold and the same counting rules. Comparability is not a nice property of the data — it is the entire point of it.

Every number traceable

National estimates are documented to their sources and audited against independent evidence. Where sources disagree we report the disagreement rather than quietly averaging it away.

Open by default

Papers are released with their data, their assumptions, and their sensitivity analyses. Anything that cannot be checked is not worth publishing.

Uncertainty stated, not hidden

Global estimates are reported as intervals, and the assumptions that move them are listed with the direction in which they push. A confident single number would be easier to quote and less honest.

Measurement above advocacy

Our own position is stated once, clearly marked, and kept out of the analysis. Data bent toward a conclusion stops being evidence for it.

Independence

No external funding, no institutional sponsor, no agenda set by anyone but the questions. Partnerships and contributions support the work; they do not direct it.

The founder

LINGACON was founded in 2025 by Areg Hovhannisyan (ORCID 0009‑0009‑7546‑8728), an independent researcher based in Yerevan, Armenia. The project has no institutional affiliation and receives no external funding; its research agenda is set by the questions themselves and by what can be measured honestly with the evidence available.

Specialists have contributed to individual components of the work — data engineering, the mutual intelligibility matrix, computational analysis — and are acknowledged in the papers to which they contributed.

Questions, collaboration proposals, and media inquiries: research@lingacon.com.