Modelling Opinion Dynamics and Language Change: Two Faces of the Same Coin

摘要

While opinion dynamics models and language change models seem to be very different at first sight, we demonstrate in this paper that they are more similar than they look like. Here, we analyse the similarities and differences between the Social Influence with Recurrent Mobility model (Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 158701) and the Utterance Selection Model of language change (Phys. Rev. E 73, 046118), two models that simulate a stochastic dynamics on a complex network, and show that their mesoscopic dynamic is strikingly similar. By drawing an analogy between the two models, we discuss possibilities of cross-fertilization of research between the two problems.