Modeling the emergence of contact languages

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Computational Social Science
• Evolutionary Biology

Background:

• Language evolution is driven by contact and transmission, similar to biological evolution.
• Historically, creole languages emerged from intense contact between European colonists and enslaved populations.
• Quantitative tools for studying language contact phenomena have been limited.

Observation:

• This research models creole language emergence using a dynamical process inspired by the Naming Game (NG).
• The model incorporates demographic data of colonial populations (Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, Bozal slaves) within an interaction network.
• The study focuses on the specific ecological context of 17th and 18th-century plantation colonies.

Findings:

• The developed model successfully discriminates territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not with high accuracy.
• Demographic information and interaction networks are sufficient to predict creole formation outcomes.
• The dynamical process effectively mimics creole formation in historical plantation ecologies.

Implications:

• The approach offers a novel quantitative tool for investigating language emergence in contact situations.
• It provides insights into the peopling and population structures of historical territories.
• The methodology can be applied to diverse cultural contact phenomena, including dialect emergence and globalization.