Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2011 Jun;83(6):066116. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.83.066116. Epub 2011 Jun 28.

Modeling the spatial dynamics of culture spreading in the presence of cultural strongholds.

Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics

Ludvig Lizana, Namiko Mitarai, Kim Sneppen, Hiizu Nakanishi

PMID: 21797450 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.83.066116

Abstract

Cultural competition has throughout our history shaped and reshaped the geography of boundaries between humans. Language and culture are intimately connected and linguists often use distinctive keywords to quantify the dynamics of information spreading in societies harboring strong culture centers. One prominent example, which is addressed here, is Kyoto's historical impact on Japanese culture. We construct a minimal model, based on shared properties of linguistic maps, to address the interplay between information flow and geography. We show that spreading of information over Japan in the premodern time can be described by an Eden growth process with noise levels corresponding to coherent spatial patches of sizes given by a single day's walk (~15 km), and that new words appear in Kyoto at times comparable to the time between human generations (~30 yr).

Publication Types

• Journal Article
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't