'Status' drives extinction of languages

[Dennis Baron]

This four-year-old article, by Daniel M. Abrams and Steven H.  
Strogatz, "Modelling the dynamics of language death," Nature 424,  
Aug. 21, 2003, p. 900, is written by two members of Cornell's Dept.  
of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and makes some "interesting"  
assumptions:

1. they posit a highly connected population, with no spatial or  
social structure, in which all speakers are monolingual
2. that the attractiveness of a language increases with both its  
numbers and its perceived status
3. that no one will adopt a language that has no speakers (do they  
actually have to say this because they're engineers?)

And they conclude:

"The model therefore predicts that two languages cannot coexist  
stably -- one will eventually drive the other to extinction."  (They  
also do admit that bilingualism can exist.)

To reverse declining language use, they recommend "policy-making,  
education and advertising, in esssence increasing an endangered  
language's status."

I am certainly relieved that reversing language death is so simple  
that it can be reduced to calculus and a graph, but am concerned that  
the model predicts an eventual return to a pre-Babel linguistic state  
(is this how creationism works in linguistics? perhaps we should just  
make English the official world language and be done with it).

Anyway, more to come later, as you might expect . . .

Dennis


Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage




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