Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

woops I spent ages working on a conlang and now it's snooze time

goodnight!

naming things is hard...

I found a long, fascinating, and (seemingly) well researched and cited answer to a question on a forum. The person who posted it is even a Professor!

But it just so happens that I know it to be completely and utterly wrong.

it's important to note: this is only according to what's in phoible's database, it's not a definitive answer (especially since defining segments is.... harder than it seems)

I downloaded the phoible database of language inventory sizes, and wrote some code to calculate the average number of segments in a language:

35.2125

I think I can actually use phoible's database for this...

@violet I'm looking for something that basically says

"the average language has between 20–30 segments (depending on how you define segment)"

I just want to get a basic idea of "how many sounds an average language has"

Actually, I'm more interested in the average number of *phonemes* in a language, which should be much easier to know

I'm trying to find somewhere that will tell me the average number of segments in a language, but I can't seem to find anything.

Does anyone know of a database or resource that has an answer to this? I don't need it to be an accurate answer, but I do need it to be justified

so ['fɔɪ.bɫ] (phoible) has a list of phonetic segments (sounds) used in all the world's languages. There's approximately 2,160 segments.

1,800 of them are in less than 1% of the world's languages.

Only 19 of them are in more than 50% of languages.

https://phoible.org/parameters