Bit-strings and other modifications of Viviane model for language competition

Abstract

The language competition model of Viviane de Oliveira et al is modified by associating with each language a string of 32 bits. Whenever a language changes in this Viviane model, also one randomly selected bit is flipped. If then only languages with different bit-strings are counted as different, the resulting size distribution of languages agrees with the empirically observed slightly asymmetric log-normal distribution. Several other modifications were also tried but either had more free parameters or agreed less well with reality.