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Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology and share some underlying ideas -- e. g. the search for minimal schemes to explain complex situations or the notion that languages are extant entities in a societal context and, accordingly, that objective, mathematical laws emerge driving the aforementioned dynamics. Different proposals pay attention to distinct aspects of such systems: Some of them emphasize the distribution of the population in geographical space, others research exhaustively the role of bilinguals in idealized situations (e. g. isolated populations), and yet others rely extremely on equations taken unchanged from physics or biology and whose parameters bear actual geometrical meaning. Despite the sources of these models -- so unrelated to linguistics -- sound results begin to surface that establish conditions and make testable predictions regarding language survival within populations of speakers, with a decisive role reserved to bilingualism. Here we review the most recent works and their interesting outcomes stressing their physical theoretical basis, and discuss the relevance and meaning of the abstract mathematical findings for real-life situations.
Simulations of physicists for the competition between adult languages since 2003 are reviewed. How many languages are spoken by how many people? How many languages are contained in various language families? How do language similarities decay with ge
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In this work we study a simple compartmental model for drinking behavior evolution. The population is divided in 3 compartments regarding their alcohol consumption, namely Susceptible individuals $S$ (nonconsumers), Moderate drinkers $M$ and Risk dri