Related papers: Capturing the diversity of multilingual societies
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
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…
Language endangerment is a phenomenon in which approximately 40% of languages spoken worldwide are predicted to disappear within the next few decades, resulting in the loss of cultures associated with these languages. To take effective…
Increasing evidence demonstrates that in many places language coexistence has become ubiquitous and essential for supporting language and cultural diversity and associated with its financial and economic benefits. The competitive evolution…
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 preservation of endangered languages is a widely discussed issue nowadays. Languages represent essential cultural heritage and can provide valuable botanical, biological, and geographical information. Therefore, it is necessary to…
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…
An in-depth analytic study of a model of language dynamics is presented: a model which tackles the problem of the coexistence of two languages within a closed community of speakers taking into account bilingualism and incorporating a…
Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…
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…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
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,…
Social media enables the rapid spread of many kinds of information, from memes to social movements. However, little is known about how information crosses linguistic boundaries. We apply causal inference techniques on the European Twitter…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
Inspired by language competition processes, we present a model of coupled evolution of node and link states. In particular, we focus on the interplay between the use of a language and the preference or attitude of the speakers towards it,…
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…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Twitter is one of the most popular social media. Due to the ease of availability of data, Twitter is used significantly for research purposes. Twitter is known to evolve in many aspects from what it was at its birth; nevertheless, how it…
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…