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Do Language Change Rates Depend on Population Size?
This video was recorded at 4th European Conference on Complex Systems. An earlier study (Nettle 1999b) concluded, based on computer simulations and some inferences from empirical data, that languages will change the more slowly the larger the population gets. We replicate this study using a more complete language model for simulations (the Schulze model combined with a Barab´asi-Albert network) and a richer empirical dataset (the World Atlas of Language Structures edited by Haspelmath et al. 2005). Our simulations show either a weak or stronger dependence of language change on population sizes depending on the parameter settings, and empirical data, like some of the simulations, show a weak dependence.
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This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
