Competition between languages

Following Abrams and Strogatz [1] and Patriarca and Leppanen [2], five other physics groups independently started to simulate the competition of languages, as opposed to the evolution of a human language out of ape sounds, or the learning of a language by a child [3]. This talk concentrates on the models of Christian Schulze et al [4] and of Viviane de Oliveira et al [5] which allow the simulation of a large number of languages, similar to today's 8,000 human languages. The model of ref.4 deals with a continuous process of random mutations of a language, transfer from and to other languages, and flight away from languages spoken by only a few people. The model of ref.5 combines these flight and mutation aspects, ignores transfer and describes the colonization of a large geographical region by people starting at one lattice point. The size of a language is defined by the number of people speaking it. The first model [4] gives a realistic log-normal shape for the histogram of language sizes but the numbers are bad. For the second model [5] our Monte Carlo simulations give sizes up to thousand million, but not the nearly log-normal shape. A meeting is planned for mid-September 2006 in Poland

[1] D.M. Abrams and S.H. Strogatz, Nature 424, 900 (2003).
[2] M. Patriarca and T. Leppänen, Physica A 338, 296 (2004).
[3] D. Stauffer, S. Moss de Oliveira, P.M.C. de Oliveira and J.S. Sa Martins, Biology, Sociology, Geology by Computational Physicists, Elsevier, Amst. 2006
[4] C. Schulze and D. Stauffer, Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 16, 781 (2005); Physics of Life Reviews 2, 89 (2005); AIP Conference Proceedings 779, 49 (2005).
[5] V.M. de Oliveira, M.A.F. Gomes and I.R. Tsang, Physica A 2006 (two papers).