Most influential languages

Name the 30 most influential languages.

Extinct and current languages

Ranked by Eigenvector Centrality (based on the connections between languages)

Source: http://language.media.mit.edu/rankings/books

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Last updated: December 20, 2014

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First submitted	December 20, 2014
Times taken	1,423
Average score	70.0%
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Centrality	Answer
0.89803531	English
0.29695532	French
0.26334749	German
0.09374308	Italian
0.08565274	Russian
0.08539987	Spanish
0.04398496	Japanese
0.03955701	Dutch
0.03404642	Latin
0.03363697	Swedish

Centrality	Answer
0.03020216	Danish
0.02802628	Hungarian
0.02775867	Czech
0.02696108	Serbo-Croatian
0.02361634	Hebrew
0.02271051	Polish
0.02250273	Ancient Greek
0.02105229	Portuguese
0.01588606	Arabic
0.01396375	Chinese

Centrality	Answer
0.01328133	Romanian
0.01322228	Estonian
0.01160693	Finnish
0.01143029	Modern Greek
0.0106394	Norwegian
0.00949586	Catalan
0.00815953	Sanskrit
0.00570555	Moldovian
0.0043465	Persian
0.00428489	Slovenian

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12 Comments

Level 74

Dec 21, 2014

Moldovan and Romanian are the same language!!

Level 37

Dec 21, 2014

No Indian languages? Or African languages? This seems very Europe-focused.

Level 37

Dec 21, 2014

(other than sanskrit)

Level 43

Dec 21, 2014

Yeah, I'd like to know by what measure Catalan is more influential than Hindi.

Level 67

Dec 22, 2014

This is probably influenced heavily by the amount of research material coming out in that language. That would probably explain why the Scandinavian languages are so high despite only being spoke by a relatively small number of people: they have a very high research output per person.

Level 39

Jan 20, 2016

That makes sense. English might be widely used for research in India for exemple. Because by that mean, that would explain the very large superiority of english in this list.

Level 72

Jan 19, 2019

"Here we use the structure of the networks connecting multilingual speakers and translated texts, as expressed in book translations, multiple language editions of Wikipedia, and Twitter, to provide a concept of language importance that goes beyond simple economic or demographic measures"

Quote from the site. It has nothing to do with scientific publications.

Influental is a broad word, influental in what way, sports, music, porn? And even if that is established, it is still quite subjective.

Level 51

Dec 22, 2014

I got Catalan and missed Russian. Typical.

Level 51

Apr 11, 2015

Slovenian should be Slovene.

Level 46

May 11, 2021

No Hindu, Urdu, Bengalí, Malay, Thai, Tagalog OR EVEN MANDARIN???

Level 64

Aug 12, 2021

Ik, it seems so wrong.

(Chinese is on it but lots of people, unfortunately, consider all languages in china to be Chinese - wu, Cantonese, mandarin, Xiang, Hakka, gan, Tibetan, jin, Minnan, Minbei and so many more that are completely different!)

Level 66

Apr 6, 2023

Could you accept Farsi for Persian and Slovene for Slovenian? Thanks!