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Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective

While many languages are in danger of extinction worldwide, multilingualism is being adopted for communication among different language groups, and is playing a unique role in preserving language and cultural diversities. How multilingualism is developed and maintained therefore becomes an important...

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Autor principal: Wu, Zhijun
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7654808/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33171482
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241980
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author Wu, Zhijun
author_facet Wu, Zhijun
author_sort Wu, Zhijun
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description While many languages are in danger of extinction worldwide, multilingualism is being adopted for communication among different language groups, and is playing a unique role in preserving language and cultural diversities. How multilingualism is developed and maintained therefore becomes an important interdisciplinary research subject for understanding complex social changes of modern-day societies. In this paper, a mixed population of multilingual speakers and bilingual speakers in particular is considered, with multilingual defined broadly as zero, limited, or full uses of multiple languages or dialects, and an evolutionary dynamic model for its development and evolution is proposed. The model consists of two different parts, formulated as two different evolutionary games, respectively. The first part accounts for the selection of languages based on the competition for population and social or economic preferences. The second part relates to circumstances when the selection of languages is altered, for better or worse, by forces other than competition such as public policies, education, or family influences. By combining competition with intervention, the paper shows how multilingualism may evolve under these two different sources of influences. It shows in particular that by choosing appropriate interventional strategies, the stable co-existence of languages, especially in multilingual forms, is possible, and extinction can be prevented. This is in contrast with major predictions from previous studies that the co-existence of languages is unstable in general, and one language will eventually dominate while all others will become extinct.
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spelling pubmed-76548082020-11-18 Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective Wu, Zhijun PLoS One Research Article While many languages are in danger of extinction worldwide, multilingualism is being adopted for communication among different language groups, and is playing a unique role in preserving language and cultural diversities. How multilingualism is developed and maintained therefore becomes an important interdisciplinary research subject for understanding complex social changes of modern-day societies. In this paper, a mixed population of multilingual speakers and bilingual speakers in particular is considered, with multilingual defined broadly as zero, limited, or full uses of multiple languages or dialects, and an evolutionary dynamic model for its development and evolution is proposed. The model consists of two different parts, formulated as two different evolutionary games, respectively. The first part accounts for the selection of languages based on the competition for population and social or economic preferences. The second part relates to circumstances when the selection of languages is altered, for better or worse, by forces other than competition such as public policies, education, or family influences. By combining competition with intervention, the paper shows how multilingualism may evolve under these two different sources of influences. It shows in particular that by choosing appropriate interventional strategies, the stable co-existence of languages, especially in multilingual forms, is possible, and extinction can be prevented. This is in contrast with major predictions from previous studies that the co-existence of languages is unstable in general, and one language will eventually dominate while all others will become extinct. Public Library of Science 2020-11-10 /pmc/articles/PMC7654808/ /pubmed/33171482 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241980 Text en © 2020 Zhijun Wu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Wu, Zhijun
Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective
title Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective
title_full Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective
title_fullStr Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective
title_full_unstemmed Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective
title_short Why multilingual, and how to keep it—An evolutionary dynamics perspective
title_sort why multilingual, and how to keep it—an evolutionary dynamics perspective
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7654808/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33171482
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241980
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