ABSTRACT
This chapter will give a very basic introduction to the diversity of human language, focusing on the distribution of languages and families as well as their population size. Diversity will be considered from a historical and evolutionary perspective, identifying the different processes, such as the agricultural revolution and the colonial period, which have contributed to the uneven population size of languages and families. Further, the chapter will continue back into the prehistoric period and summarize some of the most important theories on the emergence and evolution of early language. Towards the end, the chapter will summarize how different models can be used to investigate linguistic diversity.
