Languages and Cultures : An Economic and Evolutionary Analysis

Languages and cultures are mediums of transmitting information. Their value rests on their ability to lower variable costs in communication. Lower variable cost systems entail higher fixed costs. Each culture or language has evolved to adapt to the local environment. As the environment changes, however, different cultural systems may fare differently under the new conditions. We develop an analytical framework based on the thermodynamic theory of economics to study the performance and evolution of a cultural or language system with respect to its fixed cost and variable cost in the different environments. Many questions about the distribution and evolution of cultures and languages and how they co-evolve with the social and economic systems can be answered with this analytical framework in a very consistent way. This is because the cultural and language processes, which are thermodynamic processes, are directly modeled with the analytical thermodynamic theory. theory