ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Community size rather than grammatical complexity better predicts Large Language Model accuracy in a novel Wug Test.PloS one · 2026Article
- Contact and complexity in English varieties: The influence of speaker numbers on syntheticity and grammaticity.PloS one · 2026Article
- Assessing the Role of Socio-Demographic Triggers on Kolmogorov-Based Complexity in Spoken English Varieties.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Macroevolutionary analysis of polysynthesis shows that language complexity is more likely to evolve in small, isolated populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Still No Evidence for an Effect of the Proportion of Non-Native Speakers on Natural Language Complexity.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The evolutionary dynamics of how languages signal who does what to whom.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Editor's note and erratum for the Research Article: "Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages" by ShcherbakovaScience advances · 2024Article
- Languages with more speakers tend to be harder to (machine-)learn.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages.Science advances · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Imperfect language learning reduces morphological overspecification: Experimental evidence.PloS one · 2022Article
- A non-parametric significance test to compare corpora.PloS one · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.