Remember the Great Language Game? Well, its creator, Lars Yencken, has analyzed the over 16,000,000 results and made the results available for download, and you can read a summary, with some nice graphs, here. A taste: “Out of all the 78 languages currently featured in the game, players find it easiest to recognize French (Romance, Indo-European) and the hardest to tease out is Shona (Bantu, Atlantic-Congo). There is so much data, that, at some point, every language has been confused with every other language.”
Wow! I just played it. That was fun!
It is indeed immense fun.
Analysis was actually done by Hedwig Skirgard with help from Sean Roberts, both at the MPI for Psycholinguistics. The game itself, of course, is form Yencken, who graciously made the data available.
That’s Hedvig Skirgård, who is also a somewhat sporadic blogger at the Swedish language blog Lingvistbloggen. Her latest post is about this very analysis.
(Sorry, but I sensed misspelled Scandinavian.)