The Global Language Network
The global language network was a project mapping connections between languages. The project was spearheaded by Shahar Ronen who did this project as part of his Masters at MIT. The global language network was later published as a paper in PNAS (link)
People have long debated about the global influence of languages. The speculations that fuel this debate, however, rely on measures of language importance—such as income and population—that lack external validation as measures of a language’s global influence. Here we introduce a metric of a language’s global influence based on its position in the network connecting languages that are co-spoken. We show that the connectivity of a language in this network, after controlling for the number of speakers of a language and their income, remains a strong predictor of a language’s influence when validated against two independent measures of the cultural content produced by a language’s speakers.Continue reading at PNAS (link)
Source: Links that speak: The global language network and its Association with global fame
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