Bibliographic record
Abstract
Language is the most human of all human abilities.It may be the defining characteristic of Homo sapiens.Wherever humans exist, language exists.Although no one knows the precise number of languages in the world, something in the order of 6,000 to 6,600 is a good estimate, the exact number depending on one's definition of language versus dialect.(For the layman, the term 'dialect' often connotes a substandard deformation of a standard language or, sometimes, an unwritten language spoken by a small tribal group.As a technical linguistic term, 'dialect' simply refers to any socially or geographically recognizable variant of a language, e.g.Standard American English, Oxbridge English, Australian English, Indian English, Appalachian English, cockney and black vernacular English are all 'dialects of English'.)Considering that the world is populated by billions of people, the number of distinct languages is actually rather small.In addition, a large portion of the world's population speaks only a small handful of these thousands of languages: Chinese (Mandarin), English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Indonesian/Malay count among the extra-large languages with hundreds of millions of speakers.English can rightfully be considered the world's most widespread language, especially when one takes into account second-language users, but it is not the language with the most speakers.Mandarin Chinese, with close to a billion speakers, can claim this first spot.Although some 6,000+ distinct languages exist, most of them can be grouped into families of related languages in the same way that different plants and animals can be grouped into species, genera and families.There are a few isolates, such as Basque and Hadza (Tanzania), but these are rare.Better-known families are Indo-European, to which English belongs, Sino-Tibetan (East Asia), Athabaskan (North America) and Niger-Congo (Africa south of the Sahara).Lower-level families such as Bantu and Semitic are easily recognizable whereas historically much deeper and larger superfamilies such as Nostratic (Europe, Northern Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East) and Amerind (almost all native languages of the New world from southern Canada to Patagonia) are more tenuous groupings that are subject to ongoing debate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.280 | 0.216 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".