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Information Flow in Global Language Network

The figure below is Global Language Network (GLN) cited from an interactive website which is constructed according to a project by the MIT Media Lab Macro Connections group. There are options to configure the GLN so that it presents the network from different perspectives.

book translation network

The GLN derived from their method reveals the hierarchical structure of the world’s languages, in which English serves as the central hub, surrounded by other intermediate hubs such as German, French and Spanish. The result is fairly reasonable since the large number of multilingual speakers make information flow in between these languages very easy.

But wait…how about other languages, like Chinese, Arabic and Russian, that also possess a huge number of speakers? This is somewhat hard to judge from common sense.  But the GLN model gives a better way to quantify the influence of a language other than simply looking at the size of the population who speaks that language. The model uses eigenvector centrality to determine the relative position of languages. It shows that the small amount of information flow into these peripheral languages prevents knowledge from exchanging into or out of these worlds. Such obstacle limits the global influence of these languages.

Compared with previous studies which approximated the influence of a language using population and wealth, the GLN model certainly presents a more direct measure on the influence of languages. Moreover, the model also provides the possibility to observe the dynamics in the network regarding how different languages would develop in the long term. However, the authors do admit that the analysis could not give the theoretically unbiased result by data collected only from printed translations, Wikipedia and Twitter.

Based on the result of this research, there are many comments on the social media, the majority of which suggest that learning French or Spanish might be a better choice over Chinese. However, I personally think targeting at the top of a ranking can never give a good recommendation for everyone. Global influence does not necessarily mean the importance for a certain person. The NLP actually implies that there are huge potential values hidden in those weak links. Imagine what the world would be like if these weak links between global hub English and peripherals are further strengthened. I guess there would probably be a lot of exciting knowledge exchange that can benefit both sides – given that ideas has developed into some sort of agreement in the world that has already been connected by those intermediate hubs. So, in my opinion, for non-English speaker, it is never a bad idea to master English; while, for those who has been fluent in English, why not take the challenge to unlock a very different world?

Source:

Why learning Spanish not mandarin is the best way to globalize your ideas?

http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books

https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/ronen-et-al-book-translations.jpeg?quality=80&strip=all&w=640

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