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 model
s 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.
