SETI public: Fw: Cornell News: mathematical model of language death

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From: cunews_at_cornell.edu
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 5:10 PM
To: CUNEWS-SOCIAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu; CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu
Subject: Cornell News: mathematical model of language death

It's 'status' that decides whether a language survives, Cornell researchers say

FOR RELEASE: Sept. 11, 2003

Contact: Bill Steele
Office: 607-255-7164
E-mail: ws21_at_cornell.edu

ITHACA, N.Y. -- The Tower of Babel might get built after all. While
thousands of different languages are spoken around the world, 90
percent of them are dying and are expected to vanish in the next few
decades.

But Cornell University engineers have come up with a mathematical
model that for the first time quantifies "language death" and may
offer strategies for those who want to preserve an endangered
language.

The key factor is status, according to Cornell graduate student
Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz, Cornell professor of theoretical
and applied mechanics, who described the model in the Aug. 21 issue
of the journal Nature. Others, they say, have used mathematical
modeling to study the evolution of grammar, syntax and other
structural features, but they believe this is the first attempt to
quantify competition between languages.

The "status" of a language is determined by the social and economic
opportunities it offers its speakers, the researchers say in their
paper. In Wales, for example, "Parents want their kids to speak
English for the opportunity," Abrams explains. "If they only speak
Welsh, they're not going to be able to move to London and get a good
job."

The researchers tested the model against historical data on the
decline of Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Quechua, among other endangered
languages. When population figures are plugged in, the model produces
a family of curves depending on the value assigned to status, and in
each case one of the curves agreed with the published data on
language decline. Most of the data came from published census
figures, but in the case of Quechua, Abrams traveled through Peru,
interviewing Catholic priests to find out when the last Mass had been
celebrated in the old language. Quechua, Abrams notes, is a language
that would not be considered endangered by most measures. It was the
common language of the Inca empire and still has some 10 million
speakers scattered over Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia
and Brazil. "It was once what English is today, the common language
people used to interact even when they had their own local language,
but it's now disappearing very quickly," Abrams says, being replaced
by Spanish.

The model predicts that when languages are competing for speakers,
the balance always is unstable. "Multilingual" societies, like
Switzerland, really consist of mostly separate monolingual
populations living side by side, the researchers said. Even bilingual
individuals are not truly so, Abrams says. "People almost always have
a mother tongue, or speak one language better," he says.

"We don't take into account social structure or geographic
distribution," he adds. "The amazing thing is that it still works
very well."

An example of a situation where the model doesn't work is in the
persistence of Spanish in the United States, which he attributes to a
constant resupply of native speakers.

The conclusion is that a language can be preserved by boosting its
status. In Quebec, Abrams points out, 20 years ago French was
disappearing, but the provincial government passed laws requiring its
use in certain places, adopted immigration policies that favored
French speakers and even ran an advertising campaign saying, in
effect, "French is cool."

But in a lot of other places, Abrams says, English has a very high
status and, "This is driving the disappearance of languages around
the world."

The Nature paper is titled "Modeling the Dynamics of Language Death."

-30-

The web version of this release may be found at
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Sept03/language_death.ws.html
--

Cornell University News Service
Surge 3
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-4206
cunews_at_cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu

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