Non-equilibrium and irreversible simulation of competition among languages

Abstract: The bit-string model of Schulze and Stauer (2005) is applied to non-equilibrium situations and then gives better agreement with the em-pirical distribution of language sizes. Here the size is the number of peo-ple having this language as mother tongue. In contrast, when equilibrium is combined with irreversible mutations of languages, one language always dominates and is spoken by at least 80 percent of the population