Linguistic Distance: A Quantitative Measure of the Distance Between English and Other Languages

By Barry R. Chiswick, Paul W. Miller. Social Science Research Network, 2005

499 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper develops a scalar or quantitative measure of the ‘distance’ between English and a myriad of other (non-native American) languages. This measure is based on the difficulty Americans have learning other languages. The linguistic distance measure is then used in an analysis of the determinants of English language proficiency among adult immigrants in the USA and Canada. It is shown that, when other determinants of English language proficiency are the same, the greater the measure of linguistic distance, the poorer is the respondent's English language proficiency. This measure can be used in research, evaluation and practitioner analyses, and for diagnostic purposes regarding linguistic minorities in English-speaking countries. The methodology can also be applied to develop linguistic distance measures for other languages.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d5d973725979cf14798658b2bfe78c11c544652

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Citations in the corpus

Using Artificial Tokens to Control Languages for Multilingual Image Caption Generation (2017, background): “In order to investigate if it is possible to train a unified captioning model across multiple languages, we experiment with English and Japanese, which are the most distant language pair among major languages [1] and thus should be particularly challenging.”
International Migration and the Economics of Language (2014, methodology): “14 Isphording and Otten (2012) argue that the linguistic distance measure of Chiswick and Miller (2005a) could be biased by incentives for learning a foreign language, while the measure based on Levenshtein distance should be devoid of any such bias.”
Host country language ability and expatriate adjustment: the moderating effect of language difficulty (2015, background): “For the purpose of this investigation, language difficulty refers to the complexity of the host country language itself as well as to the extent of difficulty with which resident adult foreign nationals may be able to learn the host country language due to some country-specific circumstances (Chis”
Informal urban green space: A trilingual systematic review of its role for biodiversity and trends in the literature (2015, unknown): “Such socio-ecological aspects can be important for biodiversity because urban residents’ contact with nature likely influences conservation efforts beyond the local urban area (Dunn et al., 2006; Millard, 2010; Miller, 2005).”
Fast morphological effects in first and second language word recognition (2011, background): “Over and above the script change between those language combinations, it is noteworthy that the distance between Spanish and English and Dutch and English is considerably smaller (Chiswick & Miller, 2004; Serva & Petroni, 2008).”
Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration (2019, unknown): “59Chiswick and Miller (2005)’s measure is an increasing function of how diffi cult it is for English (native) speakers to learn foreign languages.”
The impact of language barriers on trust formation in multinational teams (2014, background): “Where possible, we also aimed for MNTs with a high linguistic distance (Chiswick & Miller, 2005) between members’ native languages.”