Related papers: Scaling relations for diversity of languages
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,…
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…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
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…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
This article investigates scaling laws within language families using data from over six thousand languages and analyzing emergent patterns observed in Zipf-like classification graphs. Both macroscopic (based on number of languages by…
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…
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…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
A simple spatial computer simulation model was recently introduced to study the evolution of the linguistic diversity. The model considers processes of selective geographic colonization, linguistic anomalous diffusion and mutation. In the…
Using demographic data of high spatial resolution for a region in the south of Europe, we study the population over fixed-size spatial cells. We find that, counterintuitively, the distribution of the number of inhabitants per cell increases…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
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…
In recent years several novel models were developed to process natural language, development of accurate language translation systems have helped us overcome geographical barriers and communicate ideas effectively. These models are…
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…
The aim of this review article is to give a comprehensive description of the scaling properties detected for the distribution of cosmic structures. Due to the great variety of statistical methods to describe the large-scale structure of the…
Natural language exhibits statistical dependencies at a wide range of scales. For instance, the mutual information between words in natural language decays like a power law with the temporal lag between them. However, many statistical…
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 time evolution of Earth with her cities, languages and countries is considered in terms of the multiplicative noise and the fragmentation- processes, where the related families, size distributions, lifetimes, bilinguals, etc. are…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…