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Social Dynamics in Linguistically Diverse Communities
In summer 2024, I helped Linhao Chen, a visiting PhD candidate (philosophy) from South China Normal University, secure funding from the China Scholarship Council. Supported by the scholarship, Linhao moved to Hull in October 2024 to spend a year with me and Dr Dionysios Demetis (Hull University Business School).
I taught Linhao the Python programming language and guided him as he coded Schelling's model of segregation. Then, we modified it by incorporating linguistic dimensions. Based on the expanded model, we created tens of thousands of artificial societies with different distributions of linguistic resources and ideologies. In these virtual environments, we simulated the dynamics of segregation and integration.
The results reveal major differences between segregation by race and segregation by language. For example, when language is the axis of differentiation, integration is at the expense of fragmentation. Our results also suggest that certain linguistic dimensions matter more than the others (like intra-group versus inter-group attitudes), but there is not a single predictor of segregation. Finally, different mechanisms operate at different levels of segregation.
