# Parent Oriented Teacher Selection Causes Language Diversity

## TL;DR

This paper presents an evolutionary model showing how parent-oriented teacher selection within small social groups can lead to the emergence of diverse languages, with high comprehension within subcommunities.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel model where language diversity arises from parent-based teacher selection in small groups, highlighting the role of social structure in language evolution.

## Key findings

- High comprehension within subcommunities.
- Number of languages follows a power law relative to imitation set size.
- Language diversity emerges from social and spatial constraints.

## Abstract

An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are physically close to each other. Clearly these groups are relatively small compared to the entire population. We restrict selection of the teachers from such small groups, called imitation sets, around parents. Then the child learns language from a teacher selected within the imitation set of her parent. As a result, there are subcommunities with their own languages developed. Within subcommunity comprehension is found to be high. The number of languages is related to the relative size of imitation set by a power law.