The importance of interlinguistic similarity and stable bilingualism when two languages compete

Mira, J.; Seoane, Luís F.; Nieto, Juan J.

doi:10.1088/1367-2630/13/3/033007

Cited by 43 publications

(78 citation statements)

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“…Why has Breton historically disappeared first in towns, while other minority languages still thrive in urban settingssuch as Picard, in the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing, whereas most rural varieties are endangered? Similarity between the dominant and the dominated languages has been assumed as an asset for minority language maintenance, fostering bilingualism instead of language shift [13][14][15]. Nevertheless, after nearly 30 years of cultural autonomy, it seems that Galician is relatively less successful than Basque in terms of language shift reversal, when taking into account the similarity of the former language with Spanish, and the challenge of learning the latter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An instance is based on the similarity between the competing languages, considered in the model of Mira et al [13][14][15]. Furthermore, a suitable form of population dynamics can generate stable bilingualism [3,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Surprisingly enough, the idea that mutual intelligibility (and consequently, structural similarity) might be an asset for the weaker competing language, giving it more chance to disappear less quickly, modeled in [13][14][15], is not much debated in current sociolinguistic literature. The reason is probably that we can also observe that throughout history, it can also happen the other way round -a mutually intelligible language Y gets scorned and despised because its similarity with the dominant language X allows to consider it as a dialect of the latter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Role of Bilinguals in Language Competition

Heinsalu

Patriarca

Léonard

2014

Advs. Complex Syst.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Role of Bilinguals in Language Competition

Heinsalu

Patriarca

Léonard

2014

Advs. Complex Syst.

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“…Baker conducted computer simulation on AS model [16]. Considering the bilinguals, Mira et.al conducted similarity and stability analysis of the two languages in competition [17]. Castello et.al described the language competition through social network [18].…”

Section: Analysis Of Related Work and Defini-tion Of Language Endangementioning

confidence: 99%

Social Computational Model of Language Endangerment and Recovery

Jian¹,

Li²,

Liu³

et al. 2015

TOCSJ

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How to protect the endangered languages is a typical and important social problem around the world. Now, the existing social computational models of language evolution are generally short of language endangerment warning and language recovery. These two parts are very important for language evolution. In this paper, an artificial society is cultivated based on multi-agents with purpose of observing language endangerment and its recovery phenomenon. In view of endangerment factor of population language, resilience inner protective factor and resilience composite protective factor, corresponding social computational model is given. From experimental results we can see that the computational model draws the endangerment trend of the weaker one in the language competition and the recovery process of weaker endangered language under the effect of resilience composite protective factor. To break through research bottleneck for high cost of language endangerment experiment in real society, the proposed computational model is working in an artificial society. The introduction of artificial society plays an important and practical role in the design and evaluation of endangered language protection scheme.Keywords: Language competition, endangered language protection, agents, social computing, artificial society.According to data provided by Ethnologue, authoritative publication journal gathering language information all over the world, there are 7202 known languages in the world [1]. Based on the prediction admitted by most scholars, more than half of these languages will disappear after a century. Language is very important for the heritage and spread of human culture. Each language contains the quintessence of one country or one nation, so language extinction means culture extinction. Known this, it's not surprising that language endangerment and extinction has become a worldwide social problem.Based on MAT (Multi-Agents Technology), a social computational model for language endangerment and recovery is proposed in this paper. The computational model draws the endangerment trend and the recovery process under the effect of "resilience protection factor" of the weaker one in language competition in the artificial society. This paper is structured as follows. Related research work is introduced in Section 1 and boundary of language endangerment status is presented. Social computational model on language endangerment and recovery and related computational experiments to prove the validity of the model are given in Section 2. The paper is concluded in Section 3. ANALYSIS OF RELATED WORK AND DEFINI-TION OF LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT STATUSLanguage endangerment is a typical social problem. Now, it has attracted much attention from many linguists in many countries. But there is a difficulty we can't solve in traditional social science research. Language endangerment is the fact we can't avoid in history and culture. Like other traditional social science problem, it's impossible to conduct computational experiments that c...

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“…This issue becomes more serious in recent modeling studies of language dynamics (1)(2)(3)(4)(5), especially competition (the process whereby local tongues are being replaced by hegemonic languages due to population migration and sociocultural exchange) (6).…”

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confidence: 99%

Principles of parametric estimation in modeling language competition

Zhang

Gong

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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It is generally difficult to define reasonable parameters and interpret their values in mathematical models of social phenomena. Rather than directly fitting abstract parameters against empirical data, we should define some concrete parameters to denote the sociocultural factors relevant for particular phenomena, and compute the values of these parameters based upon the corresponding empirical data. Taking the example of modeling studies of language competition, we propose a language diffusion principle and two language inheritance principles to compute two critical parameters, namely the impacts and inheritance rates of competing languages, in our language competition model derived from the Lotka-Volterra competition model in evolutionary biology. These principles assign explicit sociolinguistic meanings to those parameters and calculate their values from the relevant data of population censuses and language surveys. Using four examples of language competition, we illustrate that our language competition model with thus-estimated parameter values can reliably replicate and predict the dynamics of language competition, and it is especially useful in cases lacking direct competition data.prestige | Fourier's law of heat conduction | Hardy-Weinberg genetic inheritance principle | logistic curve | lexical diffusion dynamics H ow to define informative parameters in mathematical models of real-world phenomena remains a tough problem; in particular, how to assign explicit meanings to parameters and interpret their values in models of social phenomena critically affects the explanatory power of these models. This issue becomes more serious in recent modeling studies of language dynamics (1-5), especially competition (the process whereby local tongues are being replaced by hegemonic languages due to population migration and sociocultural exchange) (6).Among the numerous modeling approximations of two-language competition (7-15), the most influential one was the Abrams and Strogatz (AS) model (8). It defined prestige (the socioeconomic status of the speakers of a language) of competing languages to determine the dynamics of language competition, and reported well-fitting curves to some historical data under a fixed range of prestige value. However, this abstract parameter lacked explicit sociocultural meanings; it remained unclear what were the characteristics of a language having a prestige value, say 1.2, and what was the sociocultural condition corresponding to the difference between two languages having prestige values, say 1.2 and 1.3, respectively. Lacking such empirical foundations, the prestige value had to be obtained via curve fitting, thus making this model useless in cases lacking sufficient empirical data. Although many recent models (9-15) extended the AS model in certain aspects [e.g., the Mira and Paredes (MP) model (9) incorporated bilinguals into competition, the Stauffer and Schulze (SS) model (10) adopted network structures to confine language contact, and the Minett and Wang (MW) model (11) revealed ...

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The importance of interlinguistic similarity and stable bilingualism when two languages compete

Cited by 43 publications

References 13 publications

The Role of Bilinguals in Language Competition

The Role of Bilinguals in Language Competition

Social Computational Model of Language Endangerment and Recovery

Principles of parametric estimation in modeling language competition

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