Are The World's Languages Consolidating? The Dynamics and Distribution of Language Populations

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• 作者：David Clingingsmith
• 刊名：The Economic Journal
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：127
• 期：599
• 页码：143-176
• 全文大小：1514K
• ISSN：1468-0297

文摘

Scholars have conjectured that the return to speaking a language increases with the number of speakers. Long-run economic and political integration would accentuate this advantage, increasing the population share of the largest languages. I show that, to the contrary, language size and growth are uncorrelated except for very small languages (< 35,000 speakers). I develop a model of local language coordination over a network. The steady-state distribution of language sizes follows a power law and precisely fits the empirical size distribution of languages with ≥ 35,000 speakers. Simulations suggest the extinction of 40% of languages with < 35,000 speakers within 100 years.