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You can download it yourself at http://wals.info/export . And given enough effort, you can quite quickly reverse engineer which 21 features were used.
That's the thing, he reduced the dataset from 2677 languages with 192 features to 239 languages with 21 features. That's usually the hardest part of any analysis, so it would be nice if he shared the results of his hard work with us...
It's interesting to me how Norwegian is one of the top 25 strangest languages in the world on that list, but Danish and Swedish isn't. Maybe it was on the lower end of the top 25.
Swedish: 0.86 Danish: 0.85 Norwegian: 0.82
Seems like OP should have considered a popularity weighting. Among the 25 weirdest we see Mandarin and Spanish, the world's two most popular languages by native speaker count. That's a hint that what you're measuring isn't exactly weirdness. Meanwhile I see Hungarian, famous for being the hardest language to learn, is fifth least weird. Even stranger, Cantonese, which is almost exactly the same in writing as 'weird'…
Seems like OP should have considered a popularity weighting. Among the 25 weirdest we see Mandarin and Spanish, the world's two most popular languages by native speaker count. That's a hint that what you're measuring isn't exactly weirdness. Meanwhile I see Hungarian, famous for being the hardest language to learn, is fifth least weird. Even stranger, Cantonese, which is almost exactly the same in writing as 'weird'…
> Meanwhile I see Hungarian, famous for being the hardest language to learn Source? It's hard to determine which language is hardest to learn since it all depends on what languages you already speak. People who are familiar with Finnish and Estonian probably won't find Hungarian too hard, because the three languages are related. Another example: Is English hard to learn? Probably not if your native language is a Germ…
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As I understand it dialects which somehow qualify as language are weighted more than English and all it's dialects? Definitions of languages tend to be quite arbitrary or even politically motivated at times; look no further than the Balkans or Moldovan [1]. "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Controversy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_…
Yes, as for the Balkans, some would argue that Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian are all just dialects of the same basic language.
(A language is a dialect with an army and navy)
-- Max Weinreich