Monte Carlo simulation of the rise and the fall of languages

Details Monte Carlo simulation of the rise and the fall of languages Monte Carlo simulation of the rise and the fall of languages

2004-11-08

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0411162v2

Physics

Condensed Matter

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

8 pages including all figs., for IJMPC. New version with new results at end

Scientific paper

10.1142/S0129183105007479

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.

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