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Last week I attended a research workshop on an island in the South Pacific.
上周，我参加了南太平洋一个岛屿上的一个研讨会。
Thirty people were present and all except me came from the island, called Makelua, in the nation of Vanuatu.
共有30人出席，除我以外，都来自瓦努阿图国一个名叫马基鲁瓦的岛。
They live in 16 different communities and speak 16 distinct languages. In many cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community.
他们生活在16个不同的社区，说16种不同的语言。在很多情况下，你可以站在一个村庄的边缘，看到下一个社区的郊区。
Yet the residents of each village speak a completely different language.
然而每个村庄的居民说着完全不同的语言。
According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, this island, just 100 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, is home to speakers of perhaps 40 different indigenous languages.
根据我在马克斯普朗克人类历史科学研究所(Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)的同事们最近的研究，这个只有100公里长、20公里宽的岛屿上生活着的人讲着大约40种不同土著语言。
Why so many? We could ask the same question of the entire globe. People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful.
为什么那么多？我们可以向全世界提出同样的问题。人们没有说一种通用的语言，甚至不同的几种都没有。
Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7, 000 distinct languages, and these languages are not spread randomly across the planet.
相反，今天我们人类共同使用超过7000种不同的语言，而这些语言并不是随机分布在地球上的。
For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the mild zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages.
例如，在热带地区发现的语言比在温带多得多。热带岛屿新几内亚有900多种语言。
Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely.
俄罗斯国土面积要大20倍，有105种本土语言。即使在热带地区，语言的多样性也有很大的差异。
For example, the 250, 000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.
例如，生活在瓦努阿图80个岛屿上的25万人讲110种不同的语言，但在孟加拉国，人口是瓦努阿图的600多倍，只讲41种语言。
How come humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet?
为什么人类会说这么多语言？为什么它们在地球上分布得如此不均匀？
As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.
事实证明，对于人类如何沟通的这些基本问题，我们几乎没有明确的答案。
Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions.
对于这些有趣的问题，大多数人都能很容易地想出可能的答案。
They hypothesize that language diversity must be about history, cultural differences, mountains or oceans dividing populations.
他们假设，语言多样性一定与历史、文化差异、山脉或海洋分隔人口有关。
But when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific.
但是，当我们由来自6个不同学科和8个不同国家的多样化研究人员组成的团队开始回顾已知的情况时，我们感到震惊的是，此前已经完成的研究只有12项，其中包括我们自己完成的一项关于太平洋地区语言多样性的研究。
These prior efforts all examined the degree to which different environmental, social and geographic variables correlated with the number of languages found in a given location.
这些先前的研究都审查了不同的环境、社会和地理变量与某一地点所发现的语言数目之间的关系。
The results varied a lot from one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged.
不同的研究结果有很大的差异，没有清晰的模式出现。
The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical saying—correlation does not equal causation.
这些研究还遇到了许多方法论上的挑战，其中最大的挑战集中在旧的统计说法上——相关性并不等于因果关系。
19. What does the speaker say about the island of Makelua?
19. 关于马基卢阿岛，讲者说了什么？
20. What do we learn from the talk about languages in the world?
20. 我们从关于世界语言的演讲中学到了什么？
21. What have the diversed team of researchers found about the previous studies on language diversity?
21. 这个由不同研究人员组成的团队在之前的语言多样性研究中发现了什么？
