SIMULATION OF CREOLIZATION BY EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS
Makoto Nakamura, Takashi Hashimoto, Satoshi Tojo · The Evolution of Language · 2008
The purpose of this abstract is to investigate the characteristics of creole (De-Graff, 1999) using a mathematical formalization of population dynamics. Lin-guistic studies show that the emergence of creole is affected by contact with other languages, the distribution of population of each language, and similarities among the languages. Constructing a simulation model including these elements, we de-rive conditions for creolization from theoretical and numerical analyses. Creoles are full-edged new languages which children of the pidgin speakers acquire as their native languages. Interesting is the fact that children growing up hearing syntactically simplied languages such as pidgins develop a mature form as creoles (DeGraff, 1999). Pidgins and creoles may concern the mechanism for language acquisition of infants. Particularly, some properties of creoles imply the existence of innate universal grammar. Simulation studies of language evolution can be represented by population dy-namics, examples of which include an agent-based model of language acquisition proposed by Briscoe (2002) and a mathematical framework by Nowak, Komarova,