“Albeit”, “pão”, “manteau”; vocabularies you may expect to hear in European countries. Indeed, these are respectively German, Portuguese, and French vocabularies that settled into the very core of Korean language to a degree where most Koreans believe them as ‘pure Korean words’. Can you imagine Koreans on the street literally saying ‘give me some pão’ or ‘I’m doing albeit (part-time job)’ without context? Not surprisingly, Japanese also has corresponding words, whose usage is no less common than their Korean counterparts. This is no coincidence. 34 years of Japanese occupation left Koreans with no choice other than assimilation into Japanese culture and language, which were under heavy influence of the axis powers themselves. In other words, a language reflects the country’s history — wars, trades, and international relationships. 3 decades of exposure to Japanese language was enough to implant exotic French vocabularies into the base of Korean. What would it take, then, for all the countries’ languages to implant themselves into others, in the globalizing world faster and more intertwined than ever?

I’m going to make a visual representation of interrelationships of different languages over time, using Wolfram language. Specifically, I’m going to focus on the influence of English on other languages whose speakers live afar from the West, as spread of so-called American cultures such as Mc. Donald’s, Starbucks, Coca-cola, are often referred as the most prominent evidence of globalization. Increase of English vocabularies in countries traditionally disconnected from the West (e.g. China) will effectively prove the consequences of globalization being reflected in languages.

First of all, a dataset for all the vocabularies and their root should be obtained for individual languages. This part is still in a maze, as the Wolfram’s built-in database seems to provide only English dictionary without word roots. Access to online dictionaries that contain word root information could be suggested for that. Obtained word root information could be recorded into a local ‘map’ instance and used later.

After organizing each words and the roots for individual languages, a method will numerically analyze certain language’s dependence, or influence from other languages by calculating the frequency of vocabularies derived from them. This could be possibly done by determining the percentage a foreign language accounts for in the vocabulary. An influence indices for each foreign languages then will be mapped to the target language, which will be visualized by using Graph[ (Association) ] in Wolfram. Distances between individual languages will be adjusted according to their ‘influence index’ using options for Graph[]. As a result, a web diagram representing the world’s languages’ influences over each other will be produced. This is to be reproduced for appropriate time intervals, for instance, yearly, to animate its progress over time.