Boundary effects in a three-state modified voter model for languages

The standard three-state voter model is extended by including the outside pressure favouring one of the three language choices and by adding some biased internal noise. The Monte Carlo simulations are motivated by states with the population divided into three groups of various affinities to each other. We show the crucial influence of the boundaries for moderate lattice sizes like 500 x 500. By removing the fixed boundary at one side, we demonstrate that this can lead to the victory of one single choice. Noise in contrast stabilizes the choices of all three populations. In addition, we compute the persistence probability, i.e., the number of sites who have never changed their opinion during the simulation, and we consider the case of "rigid-minded" decision makers. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.