On Measuring Languages
STUART CARTER DODD · Journal of the American Statistical Association · 1949
This paper proposes ten criteria by which the suitability of any language for use as an international language might be measured. These criteria fall into two classes. The first three are criteria of familiarity—that is, they measure the extent to which a candidate language is already familiar to the people who would have to learn it. The remaining seven are criteria of excellence, and are intended to rate languages according to such properties as their freedom from local idioms, from exceptions to the rules of grammar, from inflections, and so on. Such criteria have three purposes. First, they would rank the candidate languages by familiarity and excellence. Second, they would diagnose weaknesses in each candidate: from this diagnosis a living language could be simplified towards the ideal regularity of an artificial language, while preserving more of familiarity to the world's population than an artificial language possesses. Finally, they would indicate any progress that the world may be making from decade to decade towards achieving a single language.