This paper presents Monte Carlo simulations of language populations and the development of language families, showing how a simple model can lead to distributions similar to the ones observed empirically. The model used combines features of two models used in earlier work by phycisists for the simulation of competition among languages: the Viviane model for the migration of people and propagation of languages and the Schulze model, which uses bitstrings as a way of characterising structural features of languages.
Thousands of different forms (words) are associated with thousands of different meanings (concepts) in a language computer model. Reasonable agreement with reality is found for the number of languages in a family and the Hamming distances between languages.
