Second Law of Info-Dynamics and the Language Diversity Decline

Language diversity decline has been theoretically studied in this paper using a simple mathematical model. Our simulations are consistent with data showing the dynamics of decline in global Indigenous Linguistic Diversity (ILD) in America and Africa, for the time segment 1970 to 2005. Results consistently indicate that the dominant language population grows over time at the expense of the minority language populations, to the point of complete language extinctions over a sufficiently long period of time. The process is applicable at local geographical areas, countries, continents and possibly at planetary scale over very large periods of time. We also tested our model on the Inuktut language in Nunavut and the predictions on the linguistic evolution of the Inuktut language are rather accurately within 8% error margin of the real data. Most interestingly, we also show that this process is formally compatible with the second law of info-dynamics, because the linguistic diversity decline is associated with a reduction in the total information entropy of all languages in circulation.