  Following Abrams and Strogatz 2003 and Patriarca and Leppanen 2004, five
other physics groups independently started to simulate the competition of
languages, as opposed to the evolution of a human language out of ape sounds,
or the learning of a language by a child. This talk concentrates on the models
of Christian Schulze et al and of Viviane de Oliveira et al which allow the
simulation of a large number of languages, similar to today's 8,000 human
languages. The first model deals with a continuous process of random mutations
of a language, transfer from and to other languages, and flight away from
languages spoken by only a few people. The second model combines these flight
and mutation aspects, ignores transfer and describes the colonization of a
large geographical region by people starting at one lattice point. The size of
a language is defined by the number of people speaking it. The first model
gives a realistic log-normal shape for the histogram of language sizes but the
numbers are bad. For the second model our Monte Carlo simulations give sizes up
to thousand million, but not the nearly log-normal shape. A meeting is planned
for mid-September 2006 in Poland.
