Data from: Social media enhances languages differentiation: a mathematical description

Understanding and predicting the evolution of competing languages is a topic of high interest in a world with more than 6000 languages competing in a highly connected environment. We consider a reasonable mathematical model describing a situation of competition between two languages and analyze the effect the speakers’ connectivity (i.e. social networks). Surprisingly, instead of homogenizing the system, a high degree of connectivity helps to introduce differentiation for the appropriate parameters.

在当今全球逾6000种语言于高度互联的环境中相互竞争的背景下，理解并预测竞争语言的演化进程是极具学术价值的研究课题。我们构建了一套合理的数学模型以刻画两种语言的竞争场景，并分析了语言使用者的社交联结（即社会网络）所产生的影响。令人意外的是，高联结度非但不会使系统趋于同质化，反而可在适配的参数条件下催生语言分化。