Non-equilibrium and irreversible simulation of competition among languages

Abstract

The bit-string model of Schulze and Stauffer (2005) is applied to non-equilibrium situations and then gives better agreement with the empirical distribution of language sizes. Here the size is the number of people having this language as mother tongue. In contrast, when equilibrium is combined with irreversible mutations of languages, one language always dominates and is spoken by at least 80 percent of the population.

Statistical physics of social dynamics

“…Modifications of the MR model include: a model where agents can move in space (Galam et al, 2002;Stauffer, 2002a); a dynamics where each agent interacts with a variable number of neighbors (Tessone et al, 2004); an extension to three opinions (Gekle et al, 2005); the introduction of a probability to favor a particular opinion, that could vary among different individuals and/or social groups (Galam, 2005a); the presence of "contrarians", i.e., agents that initially take the majority opinion in a group discussion, but that right after the discussion switch to the opposite opinion (Galam, 2004;Stauffer and Sá Martins, 2004); the presence of one-sided contrarians and unsettled agents (Borghesi and Galam, 2006); the presence of inflexible agents, that always stay by their side (Galam and Jacobs, 2007).…”

Microscopic Abrams–Strogatz model of language competition

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Abstract:The differential equations of Abrams and Strogatz for the competition between two languages are compared with agent-based Monte Carlo simulations for fully connected networks as well as for lattices in one, two and three dimensions, with up to 10 9 agents.Keywords: Monte Carlo, language competition Many computer studies of the competition between different languages, triggered by Abrams and Strogatz [1], have appeared mostly in physics journals using differential equations (mean field approximation [2, 3, 4, 5]) or agent-based simulations for many [6,7,8,9] or few [10, 11] languages. A longer review is given in [12], a shorter one in [13].

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The Emerging Field of Language Dynamics

“…A third also studies language dynamics in a simulated space and has some simple way of representing language structure, typically as a string of binary features (bitstrings) (Kosmidis et al. 2005; Schulze and Stauffer 2005; Stauffer et al. 2006; Tesileanu and Meyer‐Ortmanns 2006; de Oliveira forthcoming).…”