A language competition model for new minorities

Abstract

This article presents a new model describing a language competition situation between a local majority language and a migrant minority language. Migrants enter the society, form families, and produce offspring. Adults raise their children in either one of the two languages or both. Children then attend school, learn additional languages as adults, and produce a new cohort with its own linguistic repertoire. Families and adults are utility maximizing actors, who take into account instrumental aspects of languages, such as their communicative range, as well as identity-related aspects. A general macro-level model describes how the linguistic composition of a population facing migration changes over time. Furthermore, a specific functional form of the general model is proposed and steady states are analyzed. Finally, for illustrative purposes, the model is applied to the case of Spanish and English in the United States.

Language Competition and Language Shift in Friuli-Venezia Giulia: Projection and Trajectory for the Number of Friulian Speakers to 2050

“…To increase their relevance and acceptance among linguists, therefore, newer models consider a variety of relevant sociolinguistic parameters and base their analysis on empirical data. This can be seen, for example, in [35,36]. First, these two contributions expand Wickström's model [31] as well as its subsequent developments by including language education, adult language learning, and migration, in addition to family formation and intergenerational language transmission.…”

“…The approach developed by Templin [35][36][37] considers five pivotal factors that are crucial to the language dynamics in any (modern) society, and it uses only parameters that can be estimated with existing empirical data. The five factors are the following: (i) couple/family formation; (ii) intergenerational language transmission; (iii) language acquisition in formal education; (iv) language learning by adults, including migrants; and (v) migration flows.…”

“…In the model, the concentration of speakers is represented by a single concentration parameter (as a concentration measure, we use the index of dissimilarity, cf. [35]), and this parameter is a number between 0 and 1. If the parameter has value 0, the speakers of the minority/regional language are distributed evenly throughout the territory.…”

Competition of Ethnic and National Languages within the Home Domain: Insights from Multilingual Sasak Family Language Choice, Lombok – Indonesia

“…However, this study is not viewed as recent linguists conceptualize language competition as language dynamic models, describing "how the size of certain language groups or the geographical distribution of certain languages change over time within a given territory" (Templin, 2019;Patriarca M and Heinsalu E (2009);Wickstrom, 2005;etc). In the literature of this model, linguists distinguished two types of dynamic models, one influenced by economic theory and the other by physics and biology.…”

“…In the literature of this model, linguists distinguished two types of dynamic models, one influenced by economic theory and the other by physics and biology. Linguists perceive the dynamic models of a language as a form of human capital that provide economic benefit for minority groups as migrants and their descendants in a host country, like Turkish in Germany or Spanish in the United States and aids in their survival (Templin, 2019). In the current study however, language competition is simply assessed as an indigenous language struggling against the geo-linguistic side of a more powerful language, using Mackey"s (1973) three concepts: first, language power (demographics, dispersion, mobility, economics, ideology, and culture); second, "language attraction" (the attractiveness of a given target language which is mathematically a function of its status, territorial considerations, and interlingual similarities and differences); and lastly "language pressure" (a variety of language attraction that occurs when language territories coincide and language groups interpenetrate).…”