Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 11: Poster Session

SOE 11.15: Poster

Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 18:05–18:45, P2

Language change in a multiple group society — •Cristina-Maria Pop and Erwin Frey — Arnold Sommerfeld Center and CeNS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Theresienstr. 37, 80333 München, Germany

The use of language in society serves several purposes. On the one hand, the necessity to communicate meaning leads to agreement on a conventional sign for a recurring problem. On the other hand, there is the wish to identify with different social groups depending on the situation. This promotes the use of various linguistic variants. Through innovations in language and the influence of other social groups, novel forms are spread across the speech community, resulting in a competition between variant forms.

A mathematical formulation of the linguistic interactions inside an isolated social group is offered by the Utterance Selection Model [1], which explains the mechanisms inducing variant fixation and analyzes the distribution of variant frequencies.

In the attempt of describing language change in a society consisting of multiple groups, we take the Utterance Selection Model beyond the one-group boundary. The interactions between groups counterbalance the formation of consensus in the individual groups and thus offer a further mechanism for the propagation of linguistic changes.

[1] G. J. Baxter, R. A. Blythe, W. Croft, Phys. Rev. E 73, 046118 (2006)