Birth, survival and death of languages by Monte Carlo simulation
Physics and Society
2007-05-23 v1
Abstract
Simulations of physicists for the competition between adult languages since 2003 are reviewed. How many languages are spoken by how many people? How many languages are contained in various language families? How do language similarities decay with geographical distance, and what effects do natural boundaries have? New simulations of bilinguality are given in an appendix.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0704.0691,
title = {Birth, survival and death of languages by Monte Carlo simulation},
author = {C. Schulze and D. Stauffer and S. Wichmann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0704.0691},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
24 pages review, draft for Comm.Comput.Phys., plus appendix on bilinguality