MONTE CARLO SIMULATION OF THE RISE AND THE FALL OF LANGUAGES

Christian Schulze and Dietrich Stauffer ()
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Christian Schulze: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Cologne University, D-50923 Köln, Euroland
Dietrich Stauffer: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Cologne University, D-50923 Köln, Euroland

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), 2005, vol. 16, issue 05, 781-787

Abstract: Similar to biological evolution and speciation, we define a language through a string of 8 or 16 bits. The parent gives its language to its children, apart from a random mutation from zero to one or from one to zero; initially all bits are zero. The Verhulst deaths are taken as proportional to the total number of people, while in addition languages spoken by many people are preferred over small languages. For a fixed population size, a sharp phase transition is observed: For low mutation rates, one language contains nearly all people; for high mutation rates, no language dominates and the size distribution of languages is roughly log-normal as for present human languages. A simple scaling law is valid.

Keywords: Sociophysics; phase transition; bit-strings; scaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1142/S0129183105007479

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