Economics and Language

fluxo

I've removed a post from the other thread where it did not belong and started this thread instead.

So whats this all about? I was curious about GDP/capita and where the UK stood in relation to other countries. So I looked up a list of this measure for European countries. And - maybe because I've been refining my German language skills - I noticed something rather peculiar. In a GDP/capita table of 45 European countries, there is a block at the top in which all the countries bar one have a Germanic language as their main language. Moreover, no countries of that type are found lower in the table. The exception in the top grouping is San Marino, which is a bit of an odd country.

Now, there are a dozen Germanic language countries in Europe. The chance that a random selection of a dozen plus one states from all the states in Europe would contain those particular countries is 1 in 871,515,810.45.

(For the mathematically inclined, the formula is 45!/((45-12)(45-12)!12!) and I'm assuming that each country would be chosen with equal likelihood.)

There's clearly something afoot here that cannot reasonably be explained by chance alone. What, then, could explain this curiosity?

Note 1: what I mean by "Germanic language country" is a country in which more people speak a Germanic language as their first language than any other language. So Belgium, for example, is such a country because a majority of its citizens speak varities of Dutch, which is Germanic.

Note 2: as always, I may have erred. Corrections welcome!

This is the table of GDP per capita, 2016, in PPP dollars:

                                                                                                                                       

IronGiant

Germanic people are uptight, everyone else is more relaxed

EarthRod

This is surprising as I thought most of our language (British) was Latin based.

...Then I remembered the Nordic raids and subsequent settling in about the 6th century.

...Then there was the Norman conquest in the 11th century.

Hmmm... Still think British is mostly Latin based, not Germanic.

The Dude

I visited Bamburgh castle last year and what seemed like 75% of the suits of armour on display were of Germanic origin.

I think this list has more to do with history than language?

bjd

Isn't it more about geography? Reasonable weather and rainfall for agriculture, reasonable natural resources, on the north west of Europe so likely to only be attacked/invaded from one direction...

Jared Diamond wrote a book "guns and germs" or something along those lines which helped explain why western Europe was so successful

fluxo

Guns Germs and Steel - an excellent thought-provoking book. Well worth a read.

EarthRod

I'm on my phone, so it's a bit awkward to write the reply your comment deserves. But you might wish to take a look at this:

Germanic languages - Wikipedia

Your remarks are very reasonable, though, because English has been influenced by non-Germanic languages and incorporates a large number of words of Latin origin, directly or indirectly acquired.

This is a lovely picture, btw, but please don't take it as linguistically (in the academic sense) authoritative:

                                                                                                                                       

thegeby

Bloody hell fluxo - that is one very technical Wiki write-up on Garmanic languages. I skimmed through it to pick up the essence of the history of language adoption and changes in European countries.

Thanks for highlighting a subject I knew absolutely nothing about. Now will relate it to your original post regarding the relationship between Western Germanic and GDP in European countries.

Further research needed just to get a handle on the first principles

Toko Black

I wonder what number two thinks of being called Germanic

fluxo

Hi Alan, Fluxo is right in placing the UK (english language) in the Germanic language category.
The Northern/North Western European countries tend to originate from the germanic language roots while southern Europe tends to be from Latin. When people refer to French or Italian as the Romance languages, it is because they share the same roots in Latin, like Spanish and Portugese.
We do have many latin and greek root words in the English language, but that is more due to the nature of picking up and incorporating French words for example, as well as the fact that early science and mathematics papers and education was based in Latin in significant part due to the influence of the Church on early Academia and writing.