An assessment of natural language robustness and how it relates to natural language sustainability: a fuzzy ecological approach to the lives of natural languages

Abstract

All living natural languages may be characterized in terms of their overall ‘robustness’. The concept may be defined as relating directly to the health/vitality /wellbeing (i.e. sustainability) of these languages. In the paper, an attempt is made to further define the concept in terms of a set of parameters as well as to show that natural languages differ as to the degree of their overall robustness.