As an integral part of our culture and way of life, language is intricately related to the migrations of people. To understand whether and how migration shapes language formation processes, we examine the dynamics of the naming game with migrating agents. (i) When all agents may migrate, the dynamics generates effective surface tension that drives the coarsening. Such behaviour is very robust and appears for a wide range of densities of agents and their migration rates. (ii) However, when only multilingual agents are allowed to migrate, monolingual islands are typically formed. In such a case, when the migration rate is sufficiently large, the majority of agents acquire a common language that spontaneously emerges with no indication of surface-tension-driven coarsening. Relatively slow coarsening that takes place in a dense static population is very fragile, and an arbitrarily small migration rate can most likely divert the system towards the quick formation of monolingual islands. Our work shows that migration influences language formation processes, but additional details such as density or mobility of agents are needed to more precisely specify this influence.
Keywords: language formation; migration; multiagent modeling; naming game.