In an article recently published by PNAS, Shahar Ronen et al. “introduce a metric of a language’s global influence based on its position in the network” of co-spoken languages. They show that the “connectivity of a language in this network … remains a strong predictor of a language’s influence”. In other words the more likely a language is to show up on a polyglot’s resume, the more influential it is. The authors provide a super cool user-friendly web-based visualization tool to explore the data!
Read the full article here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/52/E5616.abstract
Check out the super cool interactive language mapping tool here: http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books