Related papers: How individuals change language
We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
Individuals signal aspects of their identity and beliefs through linguistic choices. Studying these choices in aggregate allows us to examine large-scale attitude shifts within a population. Here, we develop computational methods to study…
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 multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
Populations have often been perceived as a structuring component for language to emerge and evolve: the larger the population, the more structured the language. While this observation is widespread in the sociolinguistic literature, it has…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
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…
The iterated learning model is an agent-based model of language evolution notable for demonstrating the emergence of compositional language. In its original form, it modelled language evolution along a single chain of teacher-pupil…
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.…
The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human…
_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…