Emergence: from chaos to order
Emergence: from chaos to order
Complexity: A Guided Tour
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this paper we implement an agent-based model using RePast Simphony 2.0 to explore constraints placed on language choice in multilingual situations. Efforts to explain why language A is used in context (i) and language B is used in context (ii) have met with very little success in traditional linguistic research. By creating an artificial society, we are able to disentangle the complex interplay of linguistic, psychological and socioeconomic variables involved in these language contact phenomena and to pinpoint underlying regularities in language choice. We introduce an indicator of language choice that we coin the LINgUini index, based on a standard economic measure of income inequality known as the Gini index (Gini 1912). We additionally define an Accumulated LINgUini Coefficient (ALC) as a measure of observed linguistic inequality, analogous to wealth inequality measured by the Gini index. The LINgUini focuses on the primary process by which linguistic knowledge is acquired and/or reinforced, while the ALC measures the resulting language distribution.