Modeling two-language competition dynamics

During the last decade, much attention has been paid to language competition in the complex systems community, that is, how the fractions of speakers of several competing languages evolve in time. In this paper we review recent advances in this direction and focus on three aspects. First we consider the shift from two-state models to three state models that include the possibility of bilingual individuals. The understanding of the role played by bilingualism is essential in sociolinguistics. In particular, the question addressed is whether bilingualism facilitates the coexistence of languages. Second, we will analyze the effect of social interaction networks and physical barriers. Finally, we will show how to analyze the issue of bilingualism from a game theoretical perspective.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; published in the Special Issue of Advances in Complex Systems "Language Dynamics

Demographic growth and the distribution of language sizes

It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is proposed as a model for the population dynamics of individual languages, and applied over a period spanning the last ten centuries. The model disregards language birth and death. A straightforward fitting of the two parameters, which statistically characterize the population growth rate, predicts a distribution of language sizes in excellent agreement with empirical data. Numerical simulations, and the study of the size distribution within language families, validate the assumptions at the basis of the model.Comment: To appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys. C (2008

DYNAMICS OF INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE IN ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION

The seriousness of environmental issue has been brought to the fore, not only because of its significance to human sustainability but also due to its degeneration to communal conflicts, as well as emergence of miscreants and hoodlums who find expression of their destructive tendencies in environmental problems. This paper calls for a reappraisal of method of communicating environmental messages in particular reference to the language of communication. It begins with identification of environmental problems, the goal that environmental communication is meant to achieve and the inappropriateness of the English language packaged messages to achieving the goals. It stresses the significance of indigenous language use in communicating environmental massages and rounds off with examples of indigenous language communication

Language competition with bilinguals in social networks

Several models have been proposed to study the dynamics of competition between languages. Among them, and starting from the dynamics of endangered languages, recent approaches have addressed the issue of bilingualism. Along these lines we consider the dynamics of language use, allowing for bilingualism, within a social network in the case where the two languages are equivalent. Understanding this case is a first step to describe the case of an endangered language competing against a language with higher status. Local effects are analyzed, studying interface dynamics and growth laws of the system. Power laws for the decay of interface density and bilingual population density are obtained. A final state is reached, where one of the languages disappears. We also study the stability of bilingual communities, which suggests possible explanations for the difficulty of coexistence of languages in the long term.Complex systems, Language competition, social networks

An Intuitive Automated Modelling Interface for Systems Biology

We introduce a natural language interface for building stochastic pi calculus models of biological systems. In this language, complex constructs describing biochemical events are built from basic primitives of association, dissociation and transformation. This language thus allows us to model biochemical systems modularly by describing their dynamics in a narrative-style language, while making amendments, refinements and extensions on the models easy. We demonstrate the language on a model of Fc-gamma receptor phosphorylation during phagocytosis. We provide a tool implementation of the translation into a stochastic pi calculus language, Microsoft Research's SPiM