A simple branching model that reproduces language family and language population distributions

摘要

Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known overlanguage evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct asimple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of reallanguages. The model bases on the recent findings that language changes occurindependently on the population size. We find agreement with the dataadditionally assuming that languages may be distinguished by having at leastone among a finite, small number of different features. This finite set is usedalso in order to define the distance between two languages, similarly tolinguistics tradition since Swadesh.