The relative abundance of languages: Neutral and non-neutral dynamics.

ABSTRACT: Credible estimates suggest that a large number of the nearly 7000 languages in the world could go extinct this century, a prospect with profound cultural, socioeconomic, and political ramifications. Despite its importance, we still have little predictive theory for language dynamics and richness. Critical to the language extinction problem, however, is to understand the dynamics of the number of speakers of languages, the dynamics of language abundance distributions (LADs). Many regional LADs are very similar to the bell-shaped distributions of relative species abundance predicted by neutral theory in ecology. Using the tenets of neutral theory, here we show that LADs can be understood as an equilibrium or disequilibrium between stochastic rates of origination and extinction of languages.

SUBMITTER: Borda-de-Agua L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8716027 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature