Related papers: Birth, survival and death of languages by Monte Ca…
Following Abrams and Strogatz 2003 and Patriarca and Leppanen 2004, five other physics groups independently started to simulate the competition of languages, as opposed to the evolution of a human language out of ape sounds, or the learning…
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
Similar to biological evolution and speciation we define a language through a string of 8 or 16 bits. The parent gives its language to its children, apart from a random mutation from zero to one or from one to zero; initially all bits are…
Our earlier language model is modified to allow for the survival of a minority language without higher status, just because of the pride of its speakers in their linguistic identity. An appendix studies the roughness of the interface for…
This paper presents Monte Carlo simulations of language populations and the development of language families, showing how a simple model can lead to distributions similar to the ones observed empirically. The model used combines features of…
Recent computer simulations of the competition between thousands of languages are reviewed, and some new results on language families and language similarities are presented.
During the last decade, much attention has been paid to language competition in the complex systems community, that is, how the fractions of speakers of several competing languages evolve in time. In this paper we review recent advances in…
Recently, individual-based models originally used for biological purposes revealed interesting insights into processes of the competition of languages. Within this new field of population dynamics a model considering sexual populations with…
Biological, linguistic, sociological and economical applications of statistical physics are reviewed here. They have been made on a variety of computers over a dozen years, not only at the NIC computers. A longer description can be found in…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…
We use Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory in order to study the evolution of words and the population dynamics of a system comprising two interacting species which initially speak two different languages.…
For the longest time, languages have been competing for their speakers to survive, although this problem has only recently gained rigorous attention from the scholarly community as a means to address the risk of losing speakers for the…
Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…
Computer simulation of languages is an old subject, but since the paper of Abrams and Strogatz (2003) several physics groups independently took up this field. We shortly review their work and bring more details on our own simulations.
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
In order to analyze the dynamics of two languages in competition, one approach is to fit historical data on their numbers of speakers with a mathematical model in which the parameters are interpreted as the similarity between those…
We investigate the evolution of competing languages, a subject where much previous literature suggests that the outcome is always the domination of one language over all the others. Since coexistence of languages is observed in reality, we…
Thousands of different forms (words) are associated with thousands of different meanings (concepts) in a language computer model. Reasonable agreement with reality is found for the number of languages in a family and the Hamming distances…