Teaching & Learning Guide for

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, Jinyun, Tao Gong, and William S.‐Y. Wang , ‘Language change and social networks’, Communications in Computational Physics 3.4 (2008): 935–949. The diffusion of linguistic variants is simulated for four different kinds of networks: regular, small‐world, random, and scale‐free networks. Online Materials The World Atlas of Language Structures Online http://wals.info/ This website makes freely available the data and maps from The World Atlas of Language Structures , edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie and published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. Languages of the world (Jazyki Mira) database http://dblang2008.narod.ru/ A database of typological features for 315 Eurasian languages. It is still mainly in Russian. The Automated Similarity Judgment Program http://email.eva.mpg.de/~wichmann/ASJPHomePage.htm A regularly updated webpage devoted to a project of lexical comparison among the world's languages. The Typological Database System project http://languagelink.let.uu.nl/tds/index.html A system for making queries across several typological databases. Ethnologue http://www.ethnologue.com/ A catalogue of the world's languages. Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography and Resources http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/ A website privately maintained by Jun Wang that indexes literature on the computational aspects of language dynamics. Sample Syllabus Week 1: Language evolution Kirby, Simon, ‘Syntax without natural selection: how compositionality emerges from vocabulary in a population of learners’ in The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form , eds. Chris Knight, James R. Hurford and Michael Studdert‐Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 302–23. Steels, Luc. ‘The synthetic modeling of language origins’, Evolution of Communication 1(1), 1997, pp. 1–34. Week 2: Language competition: macroscopic vs. microscopic models Abrams, Daniel, and Steven H. Strogatz, ‘Modelling the dynamics of language death’, Nature 424 2003, p. 900. Schulze, Christian, and Dietrich Stauffer, ‘Monte Carlo simulation of the rise and fall of languages’, International Journal of Modern Physics C 16, 2005, pp. 781–7. de Oliveira, Viviane M., Marcelo A. F. Gomes, and Ing Ren Tsang, ‘Theoretical model for the evolution of linguistic diversity’, Physica A 361, 2006, pp. 361–70. Weeks 3–4: Social networks Latané, Bibb, ‘The psychology of social impact’, American Psychologist 36, 1981, pp. 343–356

Competition model · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Prestige · Sociology · Welsh · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Artificial Intelligence