# Patterns of Persistence and Diffusibility across the World's Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01698 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01698/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning Language Representations for Typology Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09569/) (2017)
- [Global-scale phylogenetic linguistic inference from lexical resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06079/) (2018)
- [On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02747/) (2018)
- [Conceptual similarity and communicative need shape colexification: an experimental study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11024/) (2021)
- [From Phonology to Syntax: Unsupervised Linguistic Typology at Different Levels with Language Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09375/) (2018)
- [SIGTYP 2020 Shared Task: Prediction of Typological Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08246/) (2020)
- [A Crosslingual Investigation of Conceptualization in 1335 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08475/) (2023)
- [Crosslingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Languages Based on Multilingual Colexification Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12818/) (2023)
- [Does Typological Blinding Impede Cross-Lingual Sharing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11888/) (2021)
- [A Probabilistic Generative Model of Linguistic Typology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10950/) (2019)
- [Tracking Typological Traits of Uralic Languages in Distributed Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05468/) (2017)
- [Uncovering Probabilistic Implications in Typological Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07389/) (2019)
- [Colexifications for Bootstrapping Cross-lingual Datasets: The Case of Phonology, Concreteness, and Affectiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02646/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we shed light on the linguistic causes of cross-lingual similarity in colexification and phonology, by exploring genealogical stability (persistence) and contact-induced change (diffusibility). We construct large-scale graphs incorporating semantic, genealogical, phonological and geographical data for 1,966 languages. We then show the potential of this resource, by investigating several established hypotheses from previous work in linguistics, while proposing new ones. Our results strongly support a previously established hypothesis in the linguistic literature, while offering contradicting evidence to another. Our large scale resource opens for further research across disciplines, e.g.~in multilingual NLP and comparative linguistics.