Language competition in a population of migrating agents

Abstract

Influencing various aspects of human activity, migration is associated also with language formation. To examine the mutual interaction of these processes, we study a Naming Game with migrating agents. The dynamics of the model leads to formation of low-mobility clusters, which turns out to break the symmetry of the model: although the Naming Game remains symmetric, low-mobility languages are favoured. High-mobility languages are gradually eliminated from the system and the dynamics of language formation considerably slows down. Our model is too simple to explain in detail language competition of migrating human communities, but it certainly shows that languages of settlers are favoured over nomadic ones.