Self Re - organizing of Language triggered by \ Language Contact " Yuichiro Maeda

Language is a type of communication protocol that emerges and develops through a selforganizing process in a multi-agent environment. In this paper, using a language game model, we observe and discuss such dynamic properties of languages among communicative agents. We regard language simply as combinations of \words" (symbols) and \meanings" (semantics), namely vocabularies. In addition to preliminary experiments which demonstrate the processes of language emergence and development, we observe experimentally the phenomena caused by language contact, where di erent languages that have been developed separately among distinct groups of agents are brought into contact with each other. Our investigation into these phenomena shows the following results: (1) the language of a majority group tends to be dominant, (2) \language borrowing" may occur when agents need to refer to meanings that have not been familiar to them, (3) languages with incoherence or ambiguity tend to be more distinct through the \self re-organizing" processes triggered by the language contact.