Difference between languages (spoken)? I'm trying to perform a hierarchical clustering, to aggregate some "zones" or neighborhoods of a city, based on the language that is used most in that zone
In order to do so, I have at hand a dataset provided by Twitter that gives me the coordinates (long and lat) where a tweet was posted and the language in which it is written
So I need an operative definition of distance between two languages!
Any ideas?
EDIT
I actually found this:
https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/34/
It just doesn't come with a numerical table of distances, but I'll try to ask for one :)
 A: The simplest option might be to ignore distances between languages themselves. You could construct a vector for each neighborhood, where each element corresponds to a language, and the its value corresponds to the number of tweets in that language. The distance function on these vectors would only take into account differences per element, but have no notion of the topology of the elements themselves (e.g. standard $l_2$/cosine/etc. distances).
Adding information about similarity between languages is interesting. Historical linguists have reconstructed trees specifying which languages derived from which others, including reconstructed historical languages like Proto-Indo-European. It's fun to consider measuring distance along these trees, but I have no idea if it would be practically useful.
Maybe it would be possible to do something like look at the extent to which the languages co-occur or are geographically clustered in other parts of the (modern) world. Two languages would be similar if they tend to both be spoken in some other country (or nearby countries).
