Abstract
Increasing evidence demonstrates that in many places language coexistence has become ubiquitous and essential for supporting language and cultural diversity and associated with its financial and economic benefits. The competitive evolution among multiple languages determines the evolution outcome, either coexistence, or decline, or extinction. Here, we extend the Abrams-Strogatz model of language competition to multiple languages and then validate it by analyzing the behavioral transitions of language usage over the recent several decades in Singapore and Hong Kong. In each case, we estimate from data the model parameters that measure each language utility for its speakers and the strength of two biases, the majority preference for their language, and the minority aversion to it. The values of these two biases decide which language is the fastest growing in the competition and what would be the stable state of the system. We also study the system convergence time to stable states and discover the existence of tipping points with multiple attractors. Moreover, the critical slowdown of convergence to the stable fractions of language users appears near and peaks at the tipping points, signaling when the system approaches them. Our analysis furthers our understanding of evolution of various languages and the role of tipping points in behavioral transitions. These insights may help to protect languages from extinction and retain the language and cultural diversity.
Highlights
Language is for its speaker an essential component of their culture with great importance for business and economic activities, especially those involving international knowledge transfer [1], interdisciplinary research [2], or international management processes [3]
We investigate the behavioral transitions of the languages by perturbing their parameters
To model the real world language competitions, we use dataset of languages used in Singapore, languages used in the Chinese community of Singapore, languages used in Indian Community of Singapore, and languages used in Hong Kong
Summary
Language is for its speaker an essential component of their culture with great importance for business and economic activities, especially those involving international knowledge transfer [1], interdisciplinary research [2], or international management processes [3]. [9], language coexistence, or unification of close languages into one This process is affected by both internal and external factors. External factors account for social, political and economic influences, such as “The Speak Good English Movement” in Singapore [11] and implementation of standardized Mandarin in China [12]. Both factors influence how people choose their languages and indirectly determine the fraction of speakers of languages, leading to equilibrium with different fractions of speakers for those languages. Languages under the multiple language competitive dynamics may be in one of three different states: (i) dominate state, i.e., entire population only speak this language; (ii) coexistence state, i.e., there are positive fractions of the population using this language; (iii) extinction state, no one speaks this language
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