Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

For 20 years many authors have attempted to model language competition. Some models involve two different languages, others include also a bilingual population. The issues are to understand one language extinction or to determine in which parameter range coexistence is possible. A key parameter is the prestige of one language compare to the other. If this parameter remains constant, coexistence is not sustainable. However, prestige may vary with time. In this article, thanks to the viability theory concepts and tools, we study a set of prestige variations which would allow language coexistence in presence of a bilingual population. Among this set, we emphasise slow viable evolutions with the lowest prestige variations that guarantee coexistence.

We study the viability and resilience of languages, using a simple dynamical model of two languages in competition. Assuming that public action can modify the prestige of a language in order to avoid language extinction, we analyze two cases: (i) the prestige can only take two values, (ii) it can take any value but its change at each time step is bounded. In both cases, we determine the viability kernel, that is, the set of states for which there exists an action policy maintaining the coexistence of the two languages, and we define such policies. We also study the resilience of the languages and identify configurations from where the system can return to the viability kernel (finite resilience), or where one of the languages is lead to disappear (zero resilience). Within our current framework, the maintenance of a bilingual society is shown to be possible by introducing the prestige of a language as a control variable.