Language community: a discrete-event computer simulation
Donald M. Morrison · 1990
This paper describes the motivation, development, and testing of a discrete-event computer simulation of a bilingual language community. The program is written in the Pascal programming language. Individual speakers in the community are implemented as objects. Attributes of these objects include age, sex, marital status, mother tongue, ethnicity, family role, occupation, and language proficiency (both oral and literate) in two different languages. Methods (procedures) associated with these objects include algorithms for aging, job selection, and language acquisition. Families, also implemented as are linked lists of individual speakers. Families reside in one of two neighborhoods: a (economically dominant) neighborhood, or a peripheral neighborhood. The language community itself (also an object) is a linked list of families. Attributes of the language community include a description of language use in school (by neighborhood), and in different occupations (also by neighborhood). Another community attribute, social distance, is a measure of the proportion of ethnic minorities residing in the core neighborhood. Sample runs of the simulation demonstrate how manipulation of community-level parameters (school language, language of employment in blue-collar and white-collar occupations, and starting social distance) produce complex behaviors in the system as a whole similar to those that obtain in real-world language communities. Since the behavior of this larger system is based on the behavior of the individual speaker objects, the simulation provides a credible means of modeling the relationship between macro- and microsociolinguistic processes.