Languages and steady-state

There may not be much of a tendency for seldom-used languages to disappear

A natural question (for those who think about languages at all) is: what number of fluent speakers is necessary for the language to be a rational continuing project?

Assume that there is some mental energy exerted in learning a language, and continuing to use it over time enough to be "in practice," that is, to be one of those fluent speakers. Some portion of your language-using brain is freed up when you (a multi-lingual person) abandon one of your languages to the forces of erosion or rust or whatever.

So: the more fellow speakers of that language you have, the more worthwhile to you are the costs of maintaining that ability.

On such assumptions, it is reasonable to expect that there is some number of speakers X which is the minimum for a sustainable language.

What is that number? David Clingingsmith thinks it is rather small: steady state (a language that is neither growing nor shrinking) requires only 35,000 speakers. See his 2013 paper on this topic (pdf).

Scholars have long conjectured that the return to knowing a language increases with the number of speakers. Recent work argues that long-run economic and political integration accentuate this advantage, leading larger languages to increase their population share. I show that, to the contrary, language size and growth are uncorrelated for languages with ≥ 35,000 speakers. I incorporate this finding into an evolutionary model of language population dynamics. The model’s steady-state follows a power law and precisely fits the size distribution of the 1,900 languages with ≥35,000 speakers. Simulations suggest the extinction of 40% of languages with < 35,000 speakers within 100 years.

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