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)

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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

Press Mentions:

  • “When bigger isn't better” (Link)

    The Economist

    Dec 31st 2014

    BY R.L.G. | BERLIN

  • “New Study Reveals Most Influential Languages” (Link)

    IFLScience

Pantheon

Pantheon (2013) is an effort to map our species collective memory by structuring data on the biographies of globally famous indivdiuals. Pantheon 1.0 was developed by Amy Yu, in collaboration with Kevin Hu and Shahar Ronen.

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Regional Studies (2023)
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4.- HOW THE MEDIUM SHAPES THE MESSAGE: PRINTING AND THE RISE OF THE ARTS AND SCIENCES
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3.-THE UNIVERSAL DECAY OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND ATTENTION
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2. PANTHEON 1.0, A MANUALLY VERIFIED DATASET OF GLOBALLY FAMOUS BIOGRAPHIES
Amy Z Yu, Shahar Ronen, Kevin Hu, Tiffany Lu, And César A. Hidalgo
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1. LINKS THAT SPEAK: THE GLOBAL LANGUAGE NETWORK AND ITS ASSOCIATION WITH GLOBAL FAME
Shahar Ronen, Bruno Gonçalves, Kevin Hu, Alessandro Vespignani, Steven Pinker, And César A. Hidalgo
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 10.1073/pnas.1410931111 (2014)
Published Version (PDF)