Cellular Automata For Modeling Language Change

This paper describes the use of cellular automata to model dialect feature diffusion as the adaptive aspect of the complex system of speech. We show how a feature, once established, can spread across an area, and how the distribution of a dialect feature as it stands in Linguistic Atlas data could either spread or diminish. Throughout hundreds of iterations, we can watch regional and social distribution patterns emerge as a consequence of update rules. We validate patterns with respect to the linguistic distributions known to occur in the Linguistic Atlas Project.