On the coexistence of competing languages
This addresses the theoretical gap in language evolution models for linguists and sociologists, offering insights into real-world multilingualism, though it is incremental in refining existing frameworks.
The study tackled the problem of competing languages, challenging the assumption that one language always dominates, and found that coexistence emerges through symmetry breaking in scenarios like population imbalance or spatial heterogeneity, with quantitative conditions and predictions for the number of surviving languages.
We investigate the evolution of competing languages, a subject where much previous literature suggests that the outcome is always the domination of one language over all the others. Since coexistence of languages is observed in reality, we here revisit the question of language competition, with an emphasis on uncovering the ways in which coexistence might emerge. We find that this emergence is related to symmetry breaking, and explore two particular scenarios -- the first relating to an imbalance in the population dynamics of language speakers in a single geographical area, and the second to do with spatial heterogeneity, where language preferences are specific to different geographical regions. For each of these, the investigation of paradigmatic situations leads us to a quantitative understanding of the conditions leading to language coexistence. We also obtain predictions of the number of surviving languages as a function of various model parameters.