Home▸Society & Economics▸Language Change: How a Word Variant Takes Over

🗣️ Language Change: How a Word Variant Takes Over

Seed a new word variant among a few simulated speakers and watch it spread through a social contact network until it dominates or dies out.

Society & Economics3DEasy60 FPS

A 3D social network of simulated speakers shows a new word variant spreading, or dying out, purely through contact between neighbors — the same social-diffusion process that drives real sound change and vocabulary shift.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Each speaker adopts the new variant based on the fraction of neighbors already using it, amplified or dampened by a prestige parameter — producing the classic S-shaped adoption curve linguists observe in real sound changes.

🎮 How to Use

Set the innovation's social prestige, contact rate, network reach, and how many speakers start out as innovators, then watch amber "new variant" speakers spread — or shrink back to blue-grey — across the network in real time.

💡 Did You Know?

Sociolinguists William Labov and Gillian Sankoff first documented the S-curve pattern of language change by tracking real sound shifts like the "cot–caught" merger across generations of speakers.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D population network where seeding a new word variant among a few simulated speakers shows it spreading through social contact until it dominates or dies out.

language-changelinguistic-diffusionsociolinguisticsagent-based-modelingcultural-evolutionsociety

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install