What is 'language physics' in which physicists dynamically analyze the spread and evolution of language?
Although physics is fundamentally a field of natural science, the methods and tools of physics can be applied in a variety of ways, leading to the development of fields such as
The physics of languages – Physics World
https://physicsworld.com/a/the-physics-of-languages/
Although the application of physics to other fields is pervasive in various fields, the application of physics to linguistics is less pervasive compared to social and economic physics. Language, like living species, has the property of spreading, evolving, competing, and becoming extinct, and physics methods are sometimes used to track and analyze these properties.
A paper published in 2011 by a group of physicists from Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute and Kyushu University studies how Japanese swear words spread across the country.
The study created a linguistic map showing the distribution of 21 types of swear words by region and analyzed it. They found that most of these words spread from Kyoto, and concluded that ``new words emerge in Kyoto with each generation, and spread throughout the country with Kyoto as the center of culture.'' The paper also suggests that Japan's elongated shape greatly simplifies the process of language spread.
Below is a map showing how the investigated abusive words spread. The spread of the 21 types of swear words is represented by different colored waveforms, but the map shows that they are all centered either north or south of Kyoto. Also, as shown by the gray dotted line on the map below, the epithet 'idiot' was once mainstream in Kyoto, but it has spread to Tokyo, and in the meantime, 'idiot', indicated by the brown dotted line, has become mainstream in Kyoto and the Chugoku region. The map also shows the language replacement that is spreading to the Chubu region.
A similar linguistic map is known in Japan for being shown in the 1991 project ``The Boundary Line between Idiots and Idiots'' on ABC TV's variety show `
As a result, a map called the 'Idiot/Idiot Distribution Map' was created based on interviews and viewer submissions. Osamu Matsumoto, the program's producer, has summarized the process from investigation to research and presentation in a book titled `` A Study on the Distribution of Idiots and Idiots Across the Nation: A Far-reaching Voyage of Words .'' The ``Idiot/Idiot Distribution Map'' created here also shows the form of the dialect circumcirculation theory, in which the same epithets are spread in concentric circles around Kyoto.
The wave-shaped scenario seen in this linguistic map is also seen in ecology, where new species establish, spread, or invade. From this point of view, there are many mathematical similarities between language physics and ecology.
There are cases where not only words and idiomatic expressions, but also features such as phonetic characteristics and syntactic structures are spread across similar models. This may occur due to large-scale movement such as migration, but it can also occur when there is some kind of linguistic innovation within a language community, or when the characteristics of a language have an impact on the entire population through contact between communities that use different languages. It has been thought that cases of exposure to language are the cause of language change. Furthermore, language dispersion occurs in parallel with language evolution, and as a result, 'dialects' arise even within the same language and develop independently.
Language evolution is an important and complex aspect of language mechanics. In addition to often being analyzed using mathematical descriptions applied from ecological and genetic evolutionary models, analytical methods that were also influenced by social science models such as game theory became mainstream. In addition, in the field of language physics, language change on a smaller, more precise scale is viewed as an important study of ``linguistic competition,'' in which speakers of two languages choose whether to use language A or language B to express a certain phrase. It's a topic.
In addition, Physics World cited ``analysis of written texts'' as another way in which physics is useful for language research. Most language research focuses on spoken language, such as finding speakers of minority languages through fieldwork and interviewing speakers, and then analyzes the collected data using mathematical methods. On the other hand, statistical physics is good at analysis that reveals the regularities and statistical laws of written texts. A typical example is the `` law of brevity ,'' which states that the more frequently used words are shorter, and the less frequently used words are longer. The law of simplicity has been shown to apply to 1000 languages from 80 different language families, as large digital databases are now available for easy computer analysis.
The rise of social media has also led to a variety of new approaches to language research. In a study published in 2021 by IFISC , a Spanish physics research institute, data was collected on 100 million posts collected from 16 countries and regions between 2015 and 2019 on Twitter (currently known as X). As a set, we used them to construct a linguistic image that captures the diversity of society. At this time, we can identify the posted language and the nationality of the poster, calculate the percentage of speakers of a particular language and geographical location, understand the differences in topics that are popular in each region, and identify the differences between the same topics. It seems that Twitter data was very useful for collecting data by region where different phrases are used even in the same language.
According to Physics World, the connection between physics and linguistics always sparks discussion when explaining the physics of language to non-physicists. Physics World says, ``Physics has the potential to help us understand the mechanisms of language evolution and dissemination through the tools and models of complex systems theory, and to help form and support societies that are not only scientifically interesting but also linguistically inclusive.'' It also has a certain social impact. Just as the invasion of other ecosystems often has negative effects on the original species, the spread of physics into linguistics has made it difficult for linguistics to avoid negative effects. I hope that language physics and language physics can coexist,' he said, regarding the development of language physics.
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