World-Class Cities And Germanic Languages Correlate

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World-Class Cities And Germanic Languages Correlate

By Thomas Keyes
Nov. 26, 2006

A couple of days ago I posted an article entitled, “Do European Cities Outclass American Cities?” In the article, I quoted a list from Citymayors.com’s website that lists the top 53 cities of the world in respect of quality of living. Though personally disagreeing with their selection, I have to take it for granted that they must have used more objective bases of comparison than I. Shall I say that I assume that they took some sort of approach along the lines of the scientific method, as they claim?

Anyway, I couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of cities from countries whose primary national language is one of the Germanic languages. Ethnologue.com provides a list of all the Germanic languages and dialects, overkilling it by making excessively fine distinctions, and producing a list of 53. But the Germanic languages that have national status are only the following: English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Luxembourgish. The countries where one of these languages is the only or the major national language are the following: US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Ireland and Iceland. At least three of these—Switzerland, Canada and Belgium—are bilingual, but in all three cases the Germanic language is the more widely spoken.

Among the top 30 cities in Citymayors’ list, 29 are in the abovesaid countries. Only Helsinki, where Finnish is the national language, is outside the Germanic family.

According to the US Census Bureau’s International Database (year 2000), the aggregate population of the above 16 countries was 543,000,000, in a world of 6,000,000,000. This means that a fraction of .0905 (9.05%) of the world population live in Germanic-language countries, while .9095 (90.95%) live in other countries.

The odds that 29 out of 30 world-class cities should have turned out to be in Germanic-language countries, if the selection had been made entirely at random, as in bingo or lotto, are astronomical.

I think the formula is this; correct me if I’m wrong:

29! x (30 – 29)! / (30! x .0905^29 x .9095^(30-29))

Here ‘30’ is the total number of cities, and ‘29’ the number in Germanic-language countries. This formula simplifies to this:

1 / (30 x .0905^29 x .9095) = about 6.6 x 10^28

Putting this is ordinary Arabic numerals, we see that the odds against the chance occurrence of such a landslide are about 66,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.

The only possible conclusion is that there is a causal relationship. This is phenomenon that ethnic egalitarians should ponder and explain.

Let me emphasize that I am not beating the drum for any cause. I’m just an observer of the real world as against the fictitious world that is usually propounded nowadays. As for me, I’m Irish and Cherokee, and don’t feel any particular affection for Germanic people.

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About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far.

I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents.

Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com

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