Research

Language data is abundant and almost useless for comparison. One census asks which languages you speak at home; a survey next door asks which you "know"; a third records only your mother tongue and your best foreign language. A person counted as bilingual under one instrument fails to qualify under another, and nobody can say whether two national figures describe the same thing.

The LINGACON research programme addresses this in three steps: build a measurement standard, apply it worldwide to produce comparable indices, and publish both the results and everything needed to check them. Each step is documented in its own paper, released with its underlying data.

How we work

One definition, everywhere

Every estimate is produced under a single explicit threshold — conversational competence at CEFR A2 and above — and a single set of counting rules. Sources that use other thresholds are harmonized to ours, with the adjustment documented rather than hidden.

Every number traceable

Each national figure is assembled from that country's best available evidence and audited against independent sources. Where sources disagree, we report the disagreement instead of averaging it away, and we state which way the remaining uncertainty is likely to point.

Open by default

Papers ship with their datasets, their assumption registers, and their sensitivity analyses. Anything that cannot be checked by a reader is not worth publishing — and a result that survives being checked is worth far more.

Publications

Standard · published

L-MAS — The LINGACON Multilingualism Assessment Standard

Hovhannisyan, A. (2026). LINGACON Project.

The foundation of everything else. L-MAS is a five-level framework for measuring multilingualism at population level, scaling from a single survey question (Level 1, effectively zero cost) through a four-question module and a full battery to a national audit and a longitudinal tracker. Every level produces the same core metric — ALPS — so that a country measuring at Level 1 and a country measuring at Level 4 still produce comparable numbers.

The standard is free, open, CEFR-aligned, and designed for immediate adoption: the Level 1 question can be added to any survey already in the field. The full specification, the question wording in each level, and guidance for statistical offices are published on the standard's own site.

Read the standard at l-mas.com

Measuring a company, a city, or a country? L-MAS assessments are conducted on request — see Partnerships.

Paper 1 · forthcoming

The LINGACON ALPS Index

Hovhannisyan, A. (forthcoming). LINGACON Project.

The first global, population-weighted estimate of the average number of languages a person speaks, constructed for 235 countries and territories. The paper documents the sources behind every national figure, the harmonization procedure that reconciles incompatible instruments, the audit trail, and the uncertainty around the global estimate — reported as an interval, not a single confident number.

Paper 2 · forthcoming

The Global Linguistic Connectivity Index (GLCI)

Hovhannisyan, A. (forthcoming). LINGACON Project.

How disconnected is humanity? The GLCI computes pairwise linguistic connectivity across the world's population and decomposes it: within countries against across borders, by region, and by the contribution of individual bridge languages. It also asks what would move the number — and finds that which languages people learn matters incomparably more than how many.

Paper 3 · in preparation

Consequences and Ideas of Multilingualism — the Multilingualism Deficit: Costs and Pathways

Hovhannisyan, A. (in preparation). LINGACON Project.

Where the first two papers measure, this one asks what the measurements mean. What does a multilingualism deficit cost a country, a company, a person? Which pathways actually raise connectivity, and at what price? And the question everyone now asks: in an age of automatic translation and AI interpreters, is there still a reason to learn a language at all — and if so, what does that reason rest on, for the individual, for a nation, and for humanity as a whole?

Planned studies

The following are on the research agenda and will proceed as funding allows. They are listed here because the questions matter more than our own schedule — and because researchers working on the same ground are welcome to get in touch.

Planned

ALPS and GLCI for the states of the United States

National averages conceal enormous internal variation. Measuring each US state separately would show how a country's linguistic connectivity is distributed inside its own borders — and whether a national figure means anything at all for a federation of that size.

Planned

India: diversity without connectivity

India is among the most linguistically diverse places on Earth, yet its connectivity to the rest of humanity is far lower than that diversity might suggest. Measuring every state separately would let us ask why — and what it would take to change.

Planned

China: size is not reach

Mandarin is spoken by more people than any other language, and yet China's outward linguistic connectivity is among the world's lowest. The size of a language and its reach across borders turn out to be entirely different properties — a case worth studying in its own right.

Interested in supporting or collaborating on any of these? Write to research@lingacon.com, or see Contribute.