HOW would you rank “important” languages? If asked to rattle them off, many people start with English, but after that are reluctant to go further. Important how, they ask. One approach would be to look at people and money: surely a language is important if it is spoken by lots of people, in countries with great wealth (and presumably, therefore, power).

But in December came a new approach. A group of scholars* approached the task by first looking at how languages are connected to one another, rather than viewing them in isolation. They then decided to see if this was a good predictor of how many famous people spoke a given language. If a language is well connected to others (a “hub” language with many bilinguals), its speakers will tend to be famous. And the names of the connected languages turns out to be rather interesting.

To find links between languages, the researchers created a “global language network” (GLN) three different ways (see graphic). One was Wikipedia editors: a bilingual Wikipedian who edits articles in both Arabic and English counts as strengthening the bond between Arabic and English. The second was Twitter: users who had tweeted at least six full sentences in a second language were treated as strengthening the bond between those two languages. The third was a more formal, old-fashioned metric: book translation. UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organisation, keeps a database of translated books, and each of the 2.2m translations was counted as a bond strengthening the two languages. (These bonds, of course, are asymmetrical: some languages have more books translated out of them than into them and vice-versa.) More.

See: The Economist

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.