TY  - JOUR
U1  - Zeitschriftenartikel, wissenschaftlich - begutachtet (reviewed)
A1  - Koplenig, Alexander
T1  - Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers
JF  - Royal Society Open Science
N2  - 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.
KW  - Sprachstatistik
KW  - linguistic niche hypothesis
KW  - language complexity
KW  - Non-native speaker
KW  - Native speaker
UN  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-85368
SN  - 2054-5703 (Online)
SS  - 2054-5703 (Online)
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181274
DO  - https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181274
N1  - The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access fund of the Leibniz Association
VL  - 6
IS  - 2
SP  - 1
EP  - 11
PB  - Royal Society of London
CY  - London
ER  -