A Matemática Pode Ajudar a Salvar Línguas com o Pé na Cova?

Tem gente que insiste no inútil e impossível, como salvar línguas que não servem pra nada, como o caso de um dialeto celta falado pelos hillbillies da Escócia. Vejam o caso desse modelo matemático [uma simples extensão de um modelo de doença transmissível] bolado para salvar a língua: The model the mathematicians built blends together numbers from all aspects of Scottish life to sketch a picture of Gaelic’s progress. Some of the numbers are obvious—you must know how many people in the population you’re working with speak just Gaelic, how many speak just English, and how many are bilingual, as well as the rate of loss of Gaelic speakers. But also in the model are numbers that stand for the prestige of each language—the cultural value people place on speaking it—and numbers that describe a language’s economic value.Put them all together into a system of equations that describe the growth of the three different groups—English speakers, Gaelic speakers, and bilinguals—and you can calculate what inputs are required for a stable bilingual population to emerge. In 2010, Kandler found that using the most current numbers, a total of 860 English speakers will have to learn Gaelic each year for the number of speakers to stay the same.