Tongues Breaking the Language Barrier Most of the world's illiterate people live in nations in which scores or even hundreds of languages are spoken. The developing countries contain most of the world's 6,170 living languages. Though individual language communities can be relatively small, they may, when put together, make up a large portion of the population of a given country. In Papua New Guinea, the ratio is about 98 percent and in a number of African countries, close to 100 percent.
Language can be a major barrier to literacy.
When a person speaks an unwritten language and is expected to learn to read in a language he does not understand, becoming literate can be a confusing and frustrating process. Many give up permanently, convinced that reading and writing are beyond their grasp. More often than not, this type of education has been the cause of native children dropping out of school and experiencing psychological trauma, resulting in their failure to learn to read and write. A good mother-tongue literacy program begins with linguistically sound materials. Similarly, SIL requires its field linguists and literacy specialists to have a solid background in linguistic theory and field methodology before beginning fieldwork.