language competition

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation e...

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.

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.

In this work we analyze the language competition problem by using an interacting agent-based model which interpolates the classical Schelling and Voter models. Briefly, an agent may change its place of residence or his language when he is surrounded by more individuals of the other kind than the ones he can tolerate. We analyze this dynamic process in terms of the free space to move in, the pressure to change the language, and the propensity to change location. We identify the different regimes and the relationship with the language competition problem.

We work on a model that has succeeded in describing real cases of coexistence of two languages within a closed community of speakers, taking into account bilingualism and incorporating a parameter to measure the distance between languages. The dynamics of this model depend on a characteristic exponent, which weighs the power of the size of a group of speakers to attract new members. So far, this model had been solved only when this characteristic exponent is greater than 1. In this article, we have managed to solve the nature of the stability of all the possible situations for this characteristic exponent, that is, when it is less or equal than 1 and covering also the situations produced when it is 0 or negative. We interpret these new situations and find that, even in such exotic scenarios, there are configurations of the resulting societies where all the languages coexist. V