  The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations
are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and
population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer
simulations of fragmentation dynamics where similar scalings appear. The
language size distribution is also studied and shown to display two scaling
regions: (i) one for the largest (in population) languages and (ii) another one
for intermediate-size languages. It is then argued that these two classes of
languages may have distinct growth dynamics, being distributed on the sets of
different fractal dimensions.
