The Emerging Field of Language Dynamics

Abstract

Large linguistic databases, especially databases having a global coverage, such as the World Atlas of Language Structures, the Automated Similarity Judgment Program, and Ethnologue, are making it possible to systematically investigate many aspects of how languages change and compete for viability. Agent‐based computer simulations supplement such empirical data by analyzing the necessary and sufficient parameters for the current global distributions of languages or linguistic features. By combining empirical datasets with simulations and applying quantitative methods, it is now possible to address fundamental questions, such as ‘what are the relative rates of change in different parts of languages?’, ‘why are there a few large language families, many intermediate ones, and even more small ones?’, ‘do small languages change faster or slower than large ones?’, or ‘how does the borrowing of words relate to the borrowing of structural features?’

Centers and peripheries: Network roles in language change

“…In recent years, computational methods have become a powerful new tool that allows experimentation with possible worlds of social agents. If used judiciously, these tools can help experiment with the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of various large-scale social phenomena, among them the dynamic process of language change (Wichmann, 2008). In these systems, analogized to speech communities, small incremental changes at the individual level, such as speaker/hearers interactions, can have large consequences and lead to complex emergent phenomena over time (Dras and Harrison, 2003;Harrison and Raimy, 2007).…”

Influence of geography on language competition

“…For the language status, the values s 1 = 1 − s 2 = 0.55 have been assigned. In both examples the initial distributions f i (x, y, t 0 ) are assumed to have the Gaussian shape defined by (7), with x 1 = 20, y 1 = 30, σ 1 = 3, for population 1, and x 2 = 45, y 2 = 5, σ 2 = 1, for population 2; the normalized initial population sizes are N 1 (t 0 ) = 1 − N 2 (t 0 ) = 0.37. The size of the simulation area is 50 × 50 with ∆x = ∆y = 1, the time step is ∆t = 0.01, and the reaction constant k = 1000.…”

Issues in the genetic classification of contact languages

“…Furthermore, the overlap of this historical and comparative approach with computational typology is increasingly recognised, and there is a greater understanding of the potential benefit that searchable, quantifiable databases can bring to both areas in what Wichmann (2008) calls "the emerging field of language dynamics" (and see now the journal Language Dynamics and Change). Such expanded databases also offer the opportunity of comparison beyond the lexis, introducing the option of a focus on structural features.…”