LINGACON is independent research: no institutional budget, no external funding, no sponsor setting the agenda. Everything the project publishes — the standard, the indices, the open datasets — has been built on its own resources. Support, in any of the forms below, directly determines how much more of it there can be.
Linguistic research of this kind has an awkward property: it only means anything at world scale. A study of one country tells you little, because the entire value lies in comparison — knowing that a figure for Rwanda and a figure for Japan were produced the same way. So the unit of work is not a country but a planet, and the cost scales accordingly.
What that involves in practice: acquiring national survey and census data, much of it neither free nor conveniently formatted; reconciling instruments that ask different questions under different thresholds; commissioning primary measurement where no usable source exists at all — which is the situation across much of Asia, the Arab world, and Latin America; building and maintaining the computational machinery behind the indices; and paying the specialists whose work the project depends on.
There is also a stubborn asymmetry. The cost of measuring a country is driven by its linguistic diversity, not by its population — a nation of 14 million speaking dozens of languages requires a larger, stratified sample and far more careful fieldwork than a monolingual country of 125 million. The places where the data is most missing are precisely the ones that are most expensive to reach.
Contributions go to the work itself. Concretely, these studies are designed and waiting on resources rather than on ideas:
What a multilingualism deficit actually costs a country, a company, and a person; which interventions raise connectivity and at what price; and whether learning a language still makes sense in an age of machine translation — a question we intend to answer with evidence rather than sentiment.
Measuring ALPS and connectivity for each US state separately, to show how a large federation's linguistic capacity is distributed inside its own borders — and what a single national figure conceals.
One of the most linguistically diverse places on Earth, and far less connected to the rest of humanity than that diversity suggests. Measuring each state separately would let us ask why, and what would change it.
The world's largest language by speakers is also one of its least outward-facing. Examining how a language can be enormous and still barely cross a border — and what that implies for global connectivity.
Every dataset published free for academic use is one not sold to fund the next study. Contributions are what make that choice sustainable rather than a permanent sacrifice.
We are currently setting up a donation channel, and will publish it here as soon as it is live. In the meantime, if you would like to support the project — with a one-off contribution, a standing arrangement, or by underwriting one of the studies above — write to research@lingacon.com and we will find a way that works.
Institutions and companies: sponsoring a named study, licensing data, or commissioning an assessment are described on the Partnerships page.
Much of the world's language data sits in national censuses, ministry reports, and surveys that never circulate internationally. If you know of a source for your country — especially outside Europe and North America — telling us about it is a real contribution to the global dataset.
Survey modules need careful translation, and national estimates benefit from expert eyes on the ground. If you know your country's linguistic situation well, your review of our figures for it is genuinely valuable.
An introduction to a statistical office, a survey programme, or a research group can be worth more than a grant. Adding one standardized question to a survey already in the field produces a national estimate at almost no cost.
Replication, criticism, and corrections are welcome and taken seriously. The datasets are published to be checked; finding an error in them is a service, not an attack.