Recent developments in computer simulations of language competition

A common property of many physicist-led simulations conducted during the past 50 years is that they deal with individuals (atoms, humans, and so on). This paper summarizes a trend in physics triggered by Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz (2003) computer simulations of language competition. The world has thousands of living languages, as well as several dying languages that have just one surviving speaker. Can we explain this language-size distribution n_s with simple models? Will we all eventually speak the same language and its dialects (Sutherland, 2003; Stauffer et al., 2006)? Here, we summarize several models and present variants of our own language model in greater detail (Schulze and Stauffer, 2005; Stauffer and Schulze, 2005)