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Words compete for survival in each language. Some researchers
investigated what causes the rise and fall of English words in two ways.
One is an experiment where thousands of participants read English-
language stories and rewrote them to be read by other participants, who
then rewrote them for others. The other is a linguistic analysis of English
historical text data that cover the past two centuries. The researchers
found that the competition among words is closely associated with how
humans use language: words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete,
and more stimulating are more likely to survive. From the previous two
experiments, they determined that there are at least over 7,000 languages
in the world at this moment, but will these numbers increase or decrease in
the future? These findings may contribute toward interpreting the patterns
of language change over generations of English language speakers.
