Complexity in Language Variation and Change (COMPILA 2023)

Methods inspired by statistical mechanics have been successfully applied to linguistic phenomena. The celebrated Zipf law points to universal traits across languages, whereas the the pioneering work of Abrams and Strogatz published exactly 20 years ago triggered subsequent theoretical developments that deepened our understanding on how some languages prevail while others disappear.

Yet, these approaches do not take into account that languages are heterogeneous, subjected to variations in space and changes in time. The complexity of the problem calls for new concepts and methods possibly from game theory, agent-based models and reaction-diffusion systems. Complexity in Language Variation and Change 2023 (COMPILA23) aims at exploring the manifold interplay between language dynamics, history and the social fabric from a quantitative viewpoint. Importantly, the recent advent of massive data to linguistic studies (big corpora, social networks) provides a unique opportunity to achieve this goal.

Our satellite proposal builds upon the successful event COMPILA22, a satellite meeting within the Conference on Complex Systems 2022, where 8 speakers and around 30 participants gathered together to discuss the evolution of language, its connection with optimal communication, the issue of gender grammar, and models for language competition and language change, just to mention a few exciting topics. Therefore, the new event COMPILA23 will be of interest to an interdisciplinary community of quantitative linguists, statistical physicists, applied mathematicians and computational sociolinguistics practitioners. 

Organizers:

Yoshifumi Kawasaki (University of Tokyo, Japan)

David Sanchez (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems IFISC, Mallorca, Spain)

Marco Patriarca (National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics, Tallinn, Estonia)