Similarity Network of European Languages Based on Clothing Items

Abstract

Similarity network of 14 European languages based on an analysis of common bigrams, or pairs of consecutive letters, in words describing clothing items. The vertices represent languages and presence of edges between them implies language similarity. In particular, vertex size is proportional to vertex degree (number of other languages they are similar to) and edge thickness is proportional to how similar the two connected languages are. Each vertex is plotted based on the relative location of the capital of the country in which its language is spoken. Similarity was calculated using the Jaccard similarity index. For more information about the Image of Research--Undergraduate Edition go to: http://go.library.illinois.edu/imageofresearch_uredition