The fate of bilingualism in a model of language competition

Abstract

In the general context of dynamics of social consensus, we study an agent based model for the competition between two socially equivalent languages, addressing the role of bilingualism and social structure. In a regular network, we study the formation of linguistic domains and their interaction across the boundaries. We analyse also a small world social structure, in order to capture the effect of long range social interactions. In both cases, a final scenario of dominance of one language and extinction of the other is obtained, but with smaller times for extinction in the latter case. In addition, we compare our results to our previous work on the agent based version of Abrams-Strogatz model.