Research

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

Authors

• David Clingingsmith

Published

Economic Journal, October (4th Quarter/Autumn) 2012

Website

http://www.res.org.uk/view/economichome.html

Abstract

Scholars have long conjectured that the return to knowing a language increases with the number of speakers. Recent work argues that long-run economic and political integration accentuate this advantage, leading larger languages to increase their population share. I show that, to the contrary, language size and growth are uncorrelated for languages with 35,000 speakers. I incorporate this finding into an evolutionary model of language population dynamics. The model’s steady-state follows a power law and precisely fits the size distribution of the 1,900 languages with 35,000 speakers. Simulations suggest the extinction of 40% of languages with <35,000 speakers within 100 years.