A simple branching model that reproduces language family and language population distributions

Details A simple branching model that reproduces language family and language population distributions A simple branching model that reproduces language family and language population distributions

2008-11-14

arxiv.org/abs/0811.2301v1

Physics

Physics and Society

10 pages, 3 figures

Scientific paper

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. The model bases on the recent findings that language changes occur independently on the population size. We find agreement with the data additionally assuming that languages may be distinguished by having at least one among a finite, small number of different features. This finite set is used also in order to define the distance between two languages, similarly to linguistics tradition since Swadesh.

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