LINGACON

About LINGACON

LINGACON is an independent research project whose overarching theme is the study of human cooperation. Its current work measures 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?

Linguistics knows a great deal about the world's 7,000-odd languages: their structures, their histories, which of them are dying. What we found 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 often incompatible, and for some regions we found 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. The papers, data and code are listed under Publications.

Mission

LINGACON Philosophy and Mission

We take the view that many of humanity's hardest problems are, underneath, coordination problems. With climate, conflict, pandemics and migration, knowledge and resources are often available; acting together at scale is the difficult part. And cooperation at any scale rests, in the end, on something very small: two people being able to understand each other.

Language is one of the places 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 and 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 what no one can see is hard to improve, and we found no comparable figures on the world's linguistic connectivity to argue from. So we build the numbers, publish them openly, and let anyone check them. What is done with them afterwards is 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; it is neither a conclusion derived from the data nor 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 the purpose of the whole exercise.

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, code, assumptions and sensitivity analyses, so that every figure can be checked.

Uncertainty stated

Global estimates are reported with their bands or 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.

Parts of the analysis code were written by contracted programmers under the author's direction, as the papers state. In the mutual intelligibility matrix, values not taken from measurements are pair assessments made by the LINGACON Team under documented rules and reviewed by the author; the papers and the published matrix mark them as assessed values, not measurements.

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