Multi-Agent Simulation of Emergence of Schwa Deletion Pattern in Hindi

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in multi-agent simulation techniques for exploring the nature of language change. However, a lack of appropriate validation of simulation experiments against real language data often calls into question the general applicability of these methods in modeling realistic language change. We try to address this issue here by making an attempt to model the phenomenon of schwa deletion in Hindi through a multi-agent simulation framework. The pattern of Hindi schwa deletion and its diachronic nature are well studied, not only out of general linguistic inquiry, but also to facilitate Hindi grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, which is a preprocessing step to text-to-speech synthesis. We show that under certain conditions, the schwa deletion pattern observed in modern Hindi emerges in the system from an initial state of no deletion. The simulation framework described in this work can be extended to model other phonological changes as well.