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

David Clingingsmith
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David Clingingsmith: Case Western Reserve University

No et37r, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2017-12-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:et37r

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/et37r

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