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Those of you who are concerned that linguistic globalisation will eventually steamroller local tongues into extinction should take heart from a study by a team from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, which has mathematically proved that two languages can live together in peace and harmony.

Jorge Mira Pérez and colleagues considered the co-existence of Castilian and Galician in Spain's northwestern province of Galicia. The former, commonly referred to as "Spanish", is of course a language of international importance, while the latter is spoken by around three million people, mainly in its native territory.

This hasn't happened with Castilian and Galician, but there's a specific set of reasons for this. According to the researchers, the continued survival of both can happen "only where there is a stable bilingual group, and this is possible only if the competing languages are sufficiently similar".

The team has applied some hefty maths to prove their point. The full-fat workings of The importance of interlinguistic similarity and stable bilingualism when two languages compete can be found down at the New Journal of Physics, but the upshot of the matter is that since Castilian and Galician share a similar "status" among the population and both are closely related, or "similar", Romance tongues, there's every reason to believe they will continue to live side-by-side.*

Pérez explained: “If the statuses of both languages were well balanced, a similarity of around 40 per cent might be enough for the two languages to coexist.

"If they were not balanced, a higher degree of similarity (above 75 per cent, depending on the values of status) would be necessary for the weaker tongue to persist.”

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