news: models of language survival

[s.t. bischoff]

The following may be of interest to some...mathematical modeling to better
understand language survival....from physicsworld.com

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2011/mar/04/bilingualism-key-to-the-survival-of-a-language

Bilingualism key to the survival of a language

Physicists in Spain are challenging the idea that two languages cannot
continue to exist side-by-side within a society. But while the findings may
spell good news for some languages, it still leaves doubts over the
long-term survival of more isolated languages such as Welsh and Quechua.

Jorge Mira Pérez, who led the research, became interested in the issue of
language survival because of the situation in his own region of Galicia in
north-west Spain where the population contains speakers of both Spanish and
the local language, Galician. Teaming up with his colleagues at the
University of Santiago de Compostela, Mira Pérez used a mathematical model
to investigate whether these two languages could continue to coexist in the
years to come.

Their approach built on an earlier study carried out at Cornell University
in the US, which had modelled a two-language society by dividing a fixed
population into two distinct language groups. In the Cornell model,
speakers are free to switch between language groups driven by factors such
as economic incentives, and the weaker language always dies out eventually.
Accounting for bilingualism

Mira Pérez's team realized, however, that this model does not take account
of bilingualism and the impact this could have on the stability of each
language. So they have developed a more advanced model to include three
distinct groups – the two monolinguists and the bilingual – where people
can shift between all three groups.

In Mira Pérez's model, the chance of each language group losing speakers is
related to the "status" of each language, a parameter that takes into
account the social and economic advantages of that language. It is also
related to the number of speakers in each population to start with and the
similarity of the languages in question.

To test against a real-world situation, the researchers compared their
model with historical data for Spanish and Galician spanning the 19th
century to 1975, and found that the fit was quite good. After varying the
parameters with more than 400 different values, in order to span all the
possible combinations of status and similarity, they concluded that it is
possible for two languages to coexist indefinitely.
The key to survival

The key to survival is that two languages must be spoken by enough people
to begin with and they must be sufficiently similar. "If the statuses of
both languages were well balanced, a similarity of around 40% might be
enough for the two languages to coexist," says Mira Pérez . "If they were
not balanced, a higher degree of similarity – above 75%, depending on the
values of status – would be necessary for the weaker tongue to persist."

The findings are good news for languages such as Galician and Catalan,
spoken in autonomous communities in Spain, which have relatively steady
numbers of speakers and share many similarities with Spanish, the dominant
national language. It could spell bad news however, for more distinctive
languages such as Quechua in South America, which is very different from
Spanish and it is already being marginalized to rural communities.

Mira Pérez acknowledges that his model is based on an "ideal" society with
static populations. It does not take into account of many other factors
that could influence the balance between languages, including migration and
the unpredictability of social dynamics.
Political factors

This is a view shared by David Crystal, a linguistics expert at Bangor
University and author of the book *Language Death*. "They seem to be using
a crude notion of lexicostatistics to define similarity, which is not a
measure everyone respects, and they haven't taken important social
variables into account," he says. Crystal also points out that political
factors can also determine the fate of a language, as in the case of Welsh,
which has seen a resurgence in recent years fuelled by two Language Acts
and significant activism.

Andrea Baronchelli, a physicist at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia
who has also developed an interest in the mathematical modelling of
language, agrees that politics does mediate the number of speakers of a
language. But Baronchelli argues that, so long as there is no pretension
that mathematical studies of language can provide a complete picture, then
they can still offer useful insights. "Simplification is however not
automatically a problem. The role of modelling is in this case that of
testing different hypothesis to show their consequences."

Mira Pérez tells *physicsworld.com* that he would now like to develop his
research by applying his model to other language pairings in different
countries. He says he is particularly interested in the case of Belgium
whose population speaks French and Dutch along with a number of minority
languages. "It will be fascinating to see how similar French and Dutch
although the geographical and political situation in Belgium is complex,"
he says.
This research is described in a paper in *New Journal of Physics*. See this
video abstract from the paper:
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