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The network nature of language endangerment hotspots

Language endangerment is one of the most urgent issues of the twenty-first century. Languages are disappearing at unprecedented rates, with dire consequences that affect speaker communities, scientific community and humanity. There is impetus for understanding the nature of language endangerment, an...

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Autores principales: Lee, Nala H., Siew, Cynthia S. Q., Ng, Nadine H. N.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9232642/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35750712
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14479-1
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author Lee, Nala H.
Siew, Cynthia S. Q.
Ng, Nadine H. N.
author_facet Lee, Nala H.
Siew, Cynthia S. Q.
Ng, Nadine H. N.
author_sort Lee, Nala H.
collection PubMed
description Language endangerment is one of the most urgent issues of the twenty-first century. Languages are disappearing at unprecedented rates, with dire consequences that affect speaker communities, scientific community and humanity. There is impetus for understanding the nature of language endangerment, and we investigate where language endangerment occurs by performing network analysis on 3423 languages at various levels of risk. Macro-level analysis shows evidence of positive assortative mixing of endangerment statuses—critically endangered languages are surrounded by similarly endangered languages, indicating the prevalence of linguistic hotspots throughout the world. Meso-level analysis using community detection returned 13 communities experiencing different levels of threat. Micro-level analysis of closeness centrality shows that more geographically isolated languages tend to be more critically endangered. Even after accounting for the statistical contributions of linguistic diversity, the structural properties of the spatial network were still significantly associated with endangerment outcomes. Findings support that the notion of hotspots is useful when accounting for language endangerment but go beyond that to establish that quantifying spatial structure is crucial. Language preservation in these hotspots and understanding why endangered languages pattern the way they do in their environments becomes more vital than ever.
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spelling pubmed-92326422022-06-26 The network nature of language endangerment hotspots Lee, Nala H. Siew, Cynthia S. Q. Ng, Nadine H. N. Sci Rep Article Language endangerment is one of the most urgent issues of the twenty-first century. Languages are disappearing at unprecedented rates, with dire consequences that affect speaker communities, scientific community and humanity. There is impetus for understanding the nature of language endangerment, and we investigate where language endangerment occurs by performing network analysis on 3423 languages at various levels of risk. Macro-level analysis shows evidence of positive assortative mixing of endangerment statuses—critically endangered languages are surrounded by similarly endangered languages, indicating the prevalence of linguistic hotspots throughout the world. Meso-level analysis using community detection returned 13 communities experiencing different levels of threat. Micro-level analysis of closeness centrality shows that more geographically isolated languages tend to be more critically endangered. Even after accounting for the statistical contributions of linguistic diversity, the structural properties of the spatial network were still significantly associated with endangerment outcomes. Findings support that the notion of hotspots is useful when accounting for language endangerment but go beyond that to establish that quantifying spatial structure is crucial. Language preservation in these hotspots and understanding why endangered languages pattern the way they do in their environments becomes more vital than ever. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-06-24 /pmc/articles/PMC9232642/ /pubmed/35750712 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14479-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Lee, Nala H.
Siew, Cynthia S. Q.
Ng, Nadine H. N.
The network nature of language endangerment hotspots
title The network nature of language endangerment hotspots
title_full The network nature of language endangerment hotspots
title_fullStr The network nature of language endangerment hotspots
title_full_unstemmed The network nature of language endangerment hotspots
title_short The network nature of language endangerment hotspots
title_sort network nature of language endangerment hotspots
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9232642/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35750712
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14479-1
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