Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages. The model is based on the recent findings that language changes occur independently of the population size. We find agreement with the data additionally assuming that languages may be distinguished by having at least one among a finite, small number of different features. This finite set is used also in order to define the distance between two languages, similarly to linguistics tradition since Swadesh.

The language competition model of Viviane de Oliveira et al. is modified by associating with each language a string of 32 bits. Whenever a language changes in this Viviane model, also one randomly selected bit is flipped. If then only languages with different bit-strings are counted as different, the resulting size distribution of languages agrees with the empirically observed slightly asymmetric log-normal distribution. Several other modifications were also tried but either had more free parameters or agreed less well with reality.