Modelling cultural shift: application to language decline and extinction

Abstract

Cultural shift is present in many aspects of human history. Here we present a model developed to study the particular case of language shift when a minority language is in competition with another language, which is perceived by the population as being socially and economically more advantageous (Isern and Fort, J. R. Soc. Interface 2014). We show that this model can describe satisfactorily the decline on the fraction of Welsh speakers over the last century. We also apply our language shift model as an interaction term into a reaction-diffusion equation and use it to predict the spread of retreat of the area of prevalence of the Welsh language. We find that the predictions are consistent with observational data