Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame
Name
Ronen-2014-Links that speak_ Th.pdf
Size
1.63 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
53b6d233d55c6f283b4d58ccd62148dc
Author(s)
Ronen, Shahar
Vespignani, Alessandro
Pinker, Steven
Goncalves, Bruno
Hu, Kevin
Hidalgo Ramaciotti, Cesar A.
Date Issued
December 2014
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Ronen, Shahar, Bruno Goncalves, Kevin Z. Hu, Alessandro Vespignani, Steven Pinker, and Cesar A. Hidalgo. “Links That Speak: The Global Language Network and Its Association with Global Fame.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 52 (December 15, 2014): E5616–E5622.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Languages vary enormously in global importance because of historical, demographic, political, and technological forces. However, beyond simple measures of population and economic power, there has been no rigorous quantitative way to define the global influence of languages. Here we use the structure of the networks connecting multilingual speakers and translated texts, as expressed in book translations, multiple language editions of Wikipedia, and Twitter, to provide a concept of language importance that goes beyond simple economic or demographic measures. We find that the structure of these three global language networks (GLNs) is centered on English as a global hub and around a handful of intermediate hub languages, which include Spanish, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese. We validate the measure of a language’s centrality in the three GLNs by showing that it exhibits a strong correlation with two independent measures of the number of famous people born in the countries associated with that language. These results suggest that the position of a language in the GLN contributes to the visibility of its speakers and the global popularity of the cultural content they produce.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1410931111
