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New Study Reveals Most Influential LanguagesDecember 16, 2014 | by Lisa Winter

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What makes a language important on a global scale? Is it the oldest? The one spoken by themost people? What about the one that has the greatest ability to reach other people by beingtranslated? A multidisciplinary research team has examined the languages of the world andcategorized them on how widely certain forms of media are translated into other languages.Csar Hidalgo of MIT led the research, and the paper was published in the Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences.

Of the many languages that have ever been spoken, only a few of them have been able toachieve global prominence, they have been important enough to become a global language,Hidalgo told Serious Science.

The researchers began to form their Global Language Network by identifying sources of mediathat had been translated into multiple languages. This included analyzing data from books,Wikipedia, and Twitter. The data set for the books included 2.2 million volumes thatrepresented over 1,000 languages. Books that were translated from one language intoanother were connected in their data map. Articles on Wikipedia that had been edited byhumans, not bots, were analyzed to see if editors were writing in multiple languages. TheTwitter data consisted of tweets sent by 17 million users, spanning 73 languages. If a Twitteruser sent out tweets in multiple languages, say French and Italian, those two languages wereconnected.

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New Study Reveals Most Influential Languages | IFLScience 17/12/2014

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The map shows what languages are connected to one another, with the thickest linesindicating the strongest links. An interactive version of this map is available on MITs website.Credit: S. Ronen et al., PNAS 2014

Ultimately, English turned out to be the largest hub for information to be translated from onelanguage into another in all three data sets. Other languages including Russian, German, andSpanish also serve as hubs to other languages, but to a lesser extent compared to English.

Hidalgo pointed out that while over 50% of all communication on the internet is in English, thatmight not be a bias towards the language. If English is the prevailing language of the internetand the internet is the way that most people are communicating now, that speaks to theability of English to connect people across all languages.

The ability to communicate with a wider number of people confers a certain amount of power,because of an ability to influence a greater number of people.

Basically, being born into highly connected language is a better predictor of whether thatperson is going to be important or not, than being born into language that is very populous,or that is spoken by people that are very wealthy, Hidalgo continued. [T]he centrality of alanguage in the global language network is a significantly strong predictor of whether thatlanguage produces a large number of successful people after controlling for their income andthe population of the language.

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