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Languages with large numbers of adult learners tend to be less morphosyntactically complex than languages where adult learners are rare (Wray & Grace, 2007; Lupyan & Dale, 2010; Bentz & Winter, 2013; Trudgill, 2011). This correlation between the composition of populations and linguistic complexity is often attributed to deficiencies in adult language learning. Here we investigate an additional or alternative mechanism: rational accommodation by native speakers to non-native interlocutors. Humans have a general aptitude for reasoning about the knowledge, beliefs and motivations of other individuals, including their linguistic knowledge (e.g. Clark, 1996; Ferguson, 1981). While our interlocutors’ linguistic knowledge will often be close to our own, this may not be the case in a population with many nonnative speakers. We introduce a rational model of interactions between individuals capable of reasoning about the linguistic knowledge of others, and investigate the case of a non-native speaker interacting with an native speaker who reasons about their linguistic knowledge and accommodates accordingly. Our model shows that this accommodation mechanism can lead to the non-native speaker acquiring a language variant that is less complex than the original language. We assume a simple model in which a language consists of a distribution over linguistic variants (e.g. past tense forms). Language simplification is modelled as regularisation, whereby the most frequent variant becomes more frequent; this corresponds to, and can be measured as, entropy reduction. We model the interaction between a non-native speaker and a native speaker as interaction between two rational (Bayesian) agents. Both agents have the same initial priors and update their beliefs about the language from data in the same way, but the non-native speaker has simply seen much less data. Within an interaction, the native speaker has a parametrisable tendency to accommodate to the non-native speaker: instead of simply using their own language, they use the version of the language that they believe the non-native speaker may have acquired at this stage of their learning, given limited exposure. Importantly, the native speaker does not know exactly what data the non-native has seen. Instead, the native speaker models the non128

A rational model of linguistic accommodation and its potential role in language simplification