# Still no evidence for an effect of the proportion of non-native speakers on language complexity -- A response to Kauhanen, Einhaus & Walkden (2023)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00217/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Locally Typical Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00666/) (2022)
- [Are All Languages Equally Hard to Language-Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03743/) (2018)
- [What Kind of Language Is Hard to Language-Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04726/) (2019)
- [Global-scale phylogenetic linguistic inference from lexical resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06079/) (2018)
- [The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure - large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03587/) (2016)
- [Model Averaging and its Use in Economics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08221/) (2017)
- [Identification of Probabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01611/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Language Evolution, Kauhanen, Einhaus & Walkden (https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzad005, KEW) challenge the results presented in one of my papers (Koplenig, Royal Society Open Science, 6, 181274 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181274), in which I tried to show through a series of statistical analyses that large numbers of L2 (second language) speakers do not seem to affect the (grammatical or statistical) complexity of a language. To this end, I focus on the way in which the Ethnologue assesses language status: a language is characterised as vehicular if, in addition to being used by L1 (first language) speakers, it should also have a significant number of L2 users. KEW criticise both the use of vehicularity as a (binary) indicator of whether a language has a significant number of L2 users and the idea of imputing a zero proportion of L2 speakers to non-vehicular languages whenever a direct estimate of that proportion is unavailable. While I recognise the importance of post-publication commentary on published research, I show in this rejoinder that both points of criticism are explicitly mentioned and analysed in my paper. In addition, I also comment on other points raised by KEW and demonstrate that both alternative analyses offered by KEW do not stand up to closer scrutiny.