During the last decade, much attention has been paid to language competition in the complex systems community, that is, how the fractions of speakers of several competing languages evolve in time. In this paper, we review recent advances in this direction and focus on three aspects. First, we consider the shift from two-state models to three-state models that include the possibility of bilingual individuals. The understanding of the role played by bilingualism is essential in sociolinguistics. In particular, the question addressed is whether bilingualism facilitates the coexistence of languages. Second, we will analyze the effect of social interaction networks and physical barriers. Finally, we will show how to analyze the issue of bilingualism from a game theoretical perspective. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Co.

We acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation MICINN and FEDER through projects ECO2009-11213-ERDF, FISICOS (FIS2007-60327); MODASS (FIS2011-24785), and SEJ2006-05455; the Basque Government through project GV-EJ: GIC07/22-IT-223-07; the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research through Project No. SF0690030s09 and the Estonian Science Foundation via grant no. 7466.

Preprint of an article submitted for consideration in Advances in Complex Systems © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/acs

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