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Passage Four

How would you rank “important” languages? If asked to rattle them off, many people start with English, but after that are reluctant to go further. Important how, they ask. One approach would be to look at people and money ； surely a language is important if it is spoken by lots of people, in countries with great wealth (and presumably, therefore, power). But in December came a new approach. A group of scholars approached the task by first looking at how languages are connected to one another, rather than viewing them in isolation. They then decided

to see if this was a good predictor of how many famous people spoke a given language. If a language is well connected to others (a “ hub ” language with many bilinguals)，its speakers will tend to be famous. And the names of the connected languages turn out to be rather interesting.

To find links between languages, the researchers created a “global language network”(GLN) three different ways. One was Wikipedia editors: a bilingual Wikipedian who edits articles in both Arabic and English counts as strengthening the bond between Arabic and English. The second was

Twitter: users who had tweeted at least six full sentences in a second language were treated as strengthening the bond between those two languages. The third was a more formal, old-fashioned metric: book translation. UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization, keeps a database of translated books, and each of the 2.2m translations was counted as a bond strengthening the two languages. (These bonds, of course, are asymmetrical: some languages have more books translated out of them than into them and vice versa.)

The resulting networks are striking in many ways. English is central to all of them. But with many other languages, their connectivity has little to do with their home country’s modem power. Take the network implied by book-translation. The data come from 1979—2011, and so Russian is an important node in the network. Not only were books translated between Russian and other languages of the former Soviet Union (Armenian, Kirgiz and Latvian, say) , but Russian is significantly connected to languages from South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. The contrast with Wikipedia and

Twitter, which skew much more modem, is striking: Russian suddenly becomes a peripheral node. Chinese, too, is peripheral in the authors’ networks. In the book-translation network, the world’s most spoken language is isolated, connected mainly to other Chinese languages plus a few in South-East Asia, notably Vietnamese. This may make sense given the time-frame of the book- translation database skewed to decades before China’s spectacular rise. But Chinese is also a bit-player on Twitter, as a result of the popularity of Sina Weibo, a competing Twitter-like service in China.

The same is true of Wikipedia: here Chinese is somewhat better connected, but it is still much less than its size or GDP would predict, possibly thanks to the existence of a Wikipedia-like Baidu Baike collaborative encyclopedia. The upshot is clear: big languages are not necessarily global, and vice versa. Arabic and Hindi— two other languages with hundreds of millions of speakers—are as peripheral as Chinese and Russian.

The big nodes in the networks besides English are predictable: French, Spanish and German, especially. The first two were successfully flung far and wide by colonialism. German has centuries of prestige in science, philosophy and literature, despite the failures of Germany’s colonial efforts. But these results must be handled with care, the authors note. The paper says nothing about the inherent qualities of any language, or the cleverness of its speakers. Cesar Hidalgo, one of the authors, notes that the paper is really about elites. Bilinguals with time to edit Wikipedia are not typical people, nor are book translators (or even bilingual Twitter users). But they do play an outsized role in the transmission of culture across borders. The main finding of the paper is that people are more likely to become globally famous (as measured, in part, among people with Wikipedia entries in at least 25 languages) if they speak one of the most networked languages. The world’s most brilliant person may be a speaker of Hmong or Nahuatl, but the road to fame leads through other languages.

16. The phrase “rattle them off” in the first line of Paragraph One is closest in meaning to

A. utter a list of them quickly

B. write down a list of them effortlessly

C. prepare a list of them formally

D. arrange a list of them one by one

17. We can infer from the first two paragraphs that .

A. ranking languages by looking at how they are connected is a better approach

B. ranking languages by looking at people and money might be an isolated approach

C. speakers of a well connected language tend to be more famous

D. language can be used as a good predictor of the number of famous people

18. According to the new approach, which of the following is true?

A. English stands in the center of all three minor networks.

B. Russian is an important node in the network of book-translation.

C. Chinese is peripheral in the networks implied by Twitter and Wikipedia.

D. Russian is an important language on Twitter and Wikipedia.

19. According to the passage, the author seems to believe that ?

A. important languages must be big languages

B. Hindi is an important, but not big, language

C. German is not an important language because Germany failed in its colonial efforts

D. the most important languages are English, French, Spanish and German

20. How should we look at the results of the paper based on the new approach?

A. We should take these important results seriously.

B. We should regard them as just some of the possible results.

C. We should not believe these are correct results.

D. We should take these results for granted.

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