2007/06/13 by Soeren Wichmann, Wichmann, Soeren, Dietrich Stauffer +5
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0706.1842
20 pages including all figures for a linguistic journal
arxiv created 2007/06/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
An earlier study (Nettle 1999b) concluded, based on computer simulations and some inferences from empirical data, that languages will change the more slowly the larger the population gets. We replicate this study using a more complete language model for simulations (the Schulze model combined with a Barabasi-Albert net- work) and a richer empirical dataset (the World Atlas of Language Structures edited by Haspelmath et al. 2005). Our simulations show either a weak or stronger dependence of language change on population sizes depending on the parameter settings, and empirical data, like some of the simulations, show a weak dependence.