2007/09/06 by Paulo Murilo Castro de Oliveira, Dietrich Stauffer, de Oliveira, Paulo Murilo Castro +6
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #FOS: Physical sciences #Language and cultural evolution #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0709.0868
15 pages including numerous figures; for a linguistic journal. Revised form to be published in Journal of Linguistics
openalex publication_date 2007/09/06 · arxiv created 2008/08/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper presents Monte Carlo simulations of language populations and the development of language families, showing how a simple model can lead to distributions similar to the ones observed empirically. The model used combines features of two models used in earlier work by phycisists for the simulation of competition among languages: the "Viviane" model for the migration of people and propagation of languages and the "Schulze" model, which uses bitstrings as a way of characterising structural features of languages.