The structure and implications of the global language network

[摘要] Languages vary enormously in global importance because of historical, demographic, political, and technological forces, and there has been much speculation about the current and future status of English as a global language. Yet there has been no rigorous way to define or quantify the relative global influence of languages. I propose that the structure of the network connecting multilingual speakers or translated texts, which I call the Global Language Network, provides a concept of language importance that is superior to simple economic or demographic measures. I map three independent global language networks (GLN) from millions of records of online and printed linguistic expressions taken from Wikipedia, Twitter, and UNESCO;;s database of book translations. I find that the structure of the three GLNs is hierarchically organized around English and a handful of hub languages, which include Spanish, German, French, Russian, Malay, and Portuguese, but not Chinese, Hindi or Arabic. Finally, I validate the measure of a language;;s centrality in the GLNs by showing that it correlates with measures of the number of illustrious people born in the countries associated with that language. I suggest that other phenomena of a language;;s present and future influence are systematically related to the structure of the global language networks.

[发布机构] Massachusetts Institute of Technology