Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Emerging Field of Language Dynamics

Author's Introduction The field of language dynamics encompasses the study and modeling of how languages develop (language evolution), change, and interact (language competition). It contrasts with traditional historical linguistics in several ways: the focus is on the world's linguistic diversity rather than just on specific languages or language families; methods are quantitative rather than qualitative; computer simulations are employed for elucidating situations that are not immediately observable, being too complex or pertaining to prehistory; the data used are systematic ones gathered in large databases rather than data that happen to be available for select languages. A crucial feature of the methodology is the fine‐tuning of simulation models through empirical observations of quantitative distributions such as those of speaker populations or of grammatical features shared among languages. Author Recommends Among the following papers the two first are recommended because of the great impact on the field of language dynamics that they have had, and the following three are recommended because they provide useful and up‐to‐date overviews. 1. Abrams, Daniel, and Steven H. Strogatz, ‘Modelling the dynamics of language death’, Nature 424 (2003): 900. A now‐classic paper proposing a simple differential equation (macroscopic model) for the competition between two languages. Using the fractions of speakers of the two languages and a prestige measure as the only two variables the authors set up a function that may be fitted to empirical data for the decline of Scottish Gaelic, Quechua, and Welsh. 2. Sutherland, William J., ‘Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species’, Nature 423 (2003): 276–279. This paper compares extinction risks and causes for languages and biological species and also compares correlates of linguistic diversity and biodiversity. 3. Castellano, Claudio, Santo Fortunato, and Vittorio Loreto, ‘Statistical physics of social dynamics’ (2007). http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3256. Reviews work by physicists on various social phenomena, including languages. It also contains a section describing some social models often used. 4. Schulze, Christian, Dietrich Stauffer, and Søren Wichmann, ‘Birth, survival and death by Monte Carlo simulation’, Communications in Computational Physics 3.2 (2008): 271–294. A review of studies of language competition with a focus on the agent‐based (microscopic) Schulze and Viviane models. 5. Ke,