Breton, Albert (Ed) - Exploring The Economics of Language

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EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE

Edited by Albert Breton Department of Economics University of Toronto TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Albert Breton 1. Language and Trade John F. Helliwell 2. Supply and Demand as Analytical Tools in Language Franois Grin 3. Economics of Language: A Network Externalities Approach Silvana Dalmazzone 4. The Cultural Yield on Languages and Linguistic Assimilation Albert Breton
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect federal government policy or opinion. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Exploring the Economics of Language (New Canadian Perspectives) Issued also in French under title : Explorer l'conomie linguistique. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-662-27867-4 Cat. no. CH3-2/9-1999E 1. Language policy -- Economic aspects -- Canada. 2. Bilingualism -- Economic aspects -- Canada. 3. Linguistic minorities -- Economic aspects -- Canada. I. Breton, Albert. II. Canada. Canadian Heritage. III. Series. P119.32C3 1999 306.44971 C99-980180-5
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Modification : 02/04/2004 18:32:47
EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton
INTRODUCTION A first volume of studies , which I edited, was published last year by the Department of Canadian Heritage in its New Canadian Perspectives series. Those studies investigated various theoretical and empirical aspects of language and bilingualism from an economic point of view. This second volume should be seen as an attempt to explore in more depth issues that were only sketched in the first volume. The present volume, in other words, offers new and important empirical results on the economic worth of languages as well as new insights in theoretically vexing problems. From the earliest applications of economics to language as a form of human capital (see Breton, 1998 and the literature referenced therein), it was shown that when a second language had a positive rate of return, it would be because that language allowed a reduction in the transaction--mostly communication--costs that made gainful trade possible. The paper by John Helliwell, which extends some empirical work that he and others have done on the subject, shows that a common language is an empirically important determinant of bilateral international trade between countries. To establish that result, Helliwell makes use of a model--the gravity model--which has a well-established theoretical foundation as well as a successful history in explaining actual trade flows. By making use of that model, Helliwell is able to hold constant a number of factors--distance between countries, adjacency, membership in preferential trading groups, and others--and show that the effect of a common language can really be attributed to the language and not to some other forces. In other words, it is because of language that English or German-speaking countries trade more with each other than with other countries and not because--as is the case with the German-speaking countries--they are neighbours. This is a very important result. There are exceptions. One, which for good reason retains Helliwell's attention, is that "the language effects on trade that are so apparent across national borders do not appear to characterize trade flows across provincial boundaries in Canada" (p. 17). To explain that reality, Helliwell suggests as a working hypothesis "that there is a sufficiently rich set of common national institutions and knowledge networks, some linguistic and others not, so as to permit a fairly seamless trading system within the country " (p. 18). Franois Grin, one of Europe's foremost student of the economics of language, offers a critical assessment of some of the concepts that have a wide currency in this branch of economic analysis. He pays particular attention to the concepts of supply and demand as applied to language and in particular to what he calls "language-specific goods and services". He extends that critical analysis to prescriptions regarding language policies. Though the study is more methodological than substantive, readers will find in it much that is of great interest and relevance. The economic analysis of language is replete with concepts that have been borrowed from mainstream economic theory. All these concepts have had to be adapted and often reinterpreted. From the very beginning, the idea that some languages serve as lingua franca--as communication vehicles between persons of different languages--has played a central role in the economic approach to language and bilingualism. Of less importance, but always lurking in the background was the notion that a lingua franca had characteristics of a public good--of a good, like a sunset, whose quantity is not reduced when someone consumes some of it. In her study, Silvana Dalmazzone explores in some depth the concept of network externalities which, we now know, undergirds the reality of common languages (linguae francae) and offers what, to my knowledge, is a first analysis of why it is appropriate to think of a lingua franca as a public good. Dalmazzone also examines the limitations of both concepts when applied to language issues. In my own study, I am concerned with the documented reality that, on the average, in excess of one language becomes extinct every week. I try to provide an explanation for that fact. I suggest that there is, in addition to an economic yield to languages, a cultural yield which is related to literary and other forms of creativity. I argue that when the cultural yield is too low, the extinction of languages is inevitable. One implication is that in a context in which that cultural yield is too low, language immersion programs will not replicate the success they have achieved in Canada. There are still many areas and problems in the economics of language that beg for research. It is to be hoped that this volume, like the one preceding it, will stimulate the imagination of a number of persons and lead them to address these problems. Albert Breton Department of Economics University of Toronto
(1)
1. Albert Breton, "An Economic Analysis of Language", in A. Breton, ed., Economic Approaches to Language and Bilingualism, (Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage, New Canadian Perspectives, 1998) 3
LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell(2) Department of Economics University of British Columbia GRAVITY MODELLING OF TRADE FLOWS AND THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE RESULTS USING DATA FOR MERCHANDISE TRADE AMONG OECD COUNTRIES EFFECTS OF COMMON LANGUAGES ON GLOBAL TRADE LANGUAGE AND INTERPROVINCIAL TRADE TABLE 1 LANGUAGE AND OECD MERCHANDISE TRADE, 1992 TABLE 2 EFFECTS OF COMMON LANGUAGES ON OECD MERCHANDISE TRADE 19881992 TABLE 3 EFFECTS OF COMMON LANGUAGES ON GLOBAL MERCHANDISE TRADE, 1992 REFERENCES
The research in this paper was spurred by earlier findings that bilateral merchandise trade flows are higher between pairs of countries that share a common language. This was found for large global samples (Eichengreen and Irwin 1998, Frankel, Stein and Wei 1998, and Helliwell 1998) as well as for trade among the industrial countries of the OECD. (Helliwell 1997b and 1998). The effects of language were found to be robust to the inclusion of other, possibly confounding, variables such as distance, adjacency, and joint membership in a preferential trading group. This paper is an attempt to extend the analysis to see if the effects of a common language apply equally to all languages, as well as to second and third languages. Some attempts will also be made to disentangle the effects of common language from other shared aspects of economic, political and cultural history. Some aspects of common history would be expected to leave a legacy of tighter economic linkages, while others, for example colonial ties ruptured by revolution, might have led to the deliberate fostering of alternative economic pathways. I have argued elsewhere (Helliwell 1998, chapter 7), in the process of explaining the very large extent to which domestic trade intensities are greater than international ones, that trade and other economic relations generally entail mutual dependence of a sort that repays the development and maintenance of predictable and trustworthy relations. These trustworthy contacts are easier and cheaper to develop when they are supported by credible and well-understood legal and political institutions, and where there is a climate of mutual trust. A common language is likely to facilitate the acquisition of information required to support lowcost trading networks, but may also reflect shared culture and values independent of the value of a common language as a factor reducing transactions costs. For both sorts of reason, the use of a common language or languages within a nation state is likely to help explain why economic ties are so much tighter within than between nation states. Language may be part of this story, but cannot be the largest part, because even though the language effects are very large, they are still only a fraction as large as the overall border effects. There are four further sections to the paper. The first presents the gravity model used for empirical analysis and considers some of the theoretical reasoning supporting the idea that linguistic ties should under certain circumstances be expected to lead to larger trade flows. The second section explains and extends the previous results based on OECD data, while the third extends the empirical work to consider a larger sample of countries, and the fourth considers the extent to which linguistic specialization among Canadian provinces affects the resulting patterns of trade, migration and communications. GRAVITY MODELLING OF TRADE FLOWS AND THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE The gravity model has a long and well-established history in the explanation of trade, transportation, migration, and other transactions over space. The basic form of the gravity model, true to its namesake, is an equation, linear in logarithms, explaining a bilateral linkage by the mass of two bodies and by the distance between them: (1) lnSij = a0 + a1lnMi + a2lnMj + a3ln(DISTij) + a4B + eij where Sij is some measure of transaction between i and j, with any movement being from i to j, Mi and Mj are the masses of units i and j, DISTij is the distance between them, B is a variable that takes the value 1.0 for pairs of i and j that possess some characteristic whose importance is to be assessed, and eij is a random error term usually taken to be normally distributed. The gravity equation has always been the most empirically successful means of explaining bilateral trade flows, but has met with differing degrees of theoretical respect depending on the extent to which it was seen to have a 5
LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell
well-established theoretical foundation. Despite its use in many early studies of international trade (e.g. Linnemann 1966), the equation was considered suspect in that it could not easily be shown to be consistent with the dominant Heckscher-Ohlin model explaining net trade flows in terms of differential factor endowments. Anderson (1979) showed that the gravity model could be derived from expenditure share equations assuming commodities to be distinguished by place of production. Anderson also showed that the model should also, to be fully consistent with the generalized expenditure share model, include remoteness measures in bilateral share equations, as we do here. Helpman (1984) and Bergstrand (1985) showed that the gravity model can also be derived from models of trade in differentiated products. Such trade must lie at the core of much of manufacturing trade, given the very large two-way flows of trade in even the most finely disaggregated industry data. Finally, Deardorff (1998) showed that a suitable modelling of transport costs produces the gravity equation as an estimation form even for the Heckscher-Ohlin model. Thus the gravity model has gone from being a theoretical orphan to being the favoured child of all main theories of international trade. This makes it a solid tool for the evaluation of the effects of language on trade, even if it cannot easily be used to discriminate among competing theories of international trade. For a complete explanation of trade flows, it is necessary to recognize that the bilateral trade flows being modelled are segments of a larger multilateral system of trading relations. In principle, within a generalized gravity model, each bilateral flow should depend not just on the economic masses of the two trading parties, and the distance separating them, but also on the economic masses and distances of alternative trading partners. To achieve this, we adopt a measure of the economic remoteness of alternative trading partners that is consistent with the earlier migration models of Feder (1980) and Foot and Milne (1984) and with the theoretical derivation of Wei.(1996). The variable is defined as follows, where the remoteness measure is for country j, applicable to trade with country i. The summation covers all of j=s n trading partners excluding i: (2) REMjit=n, n i(DISTij/GDPit) Many gravity models include population and per capita incomes as separate determinants of trade flows, under the supposition that the pure effects of scale, as represented by population, are likely to be less than those of income per capita. This is consistent with trade models where the demands for tradeable goods, and for increasing variety, grow faster than per capita incomes.(3) This generalization of the gravity model is used here, as it is empirically stronger than the simpler version based only on GDP. As for variables representing special features of trade pathways, there are several used in this paper. The first is a variable called HOME, which takes the value of 1.0 for domestic sales within a country and is expected to attract a positive coefficient if domestic economic linkages are tighter than those across national boundaries. There is also the same variable multiplied by each country=s average GDP per capita relative to that of the country sample as a whole. This is expected to take a negative coefficient if, as is found here and elsewhere, border effects are lower in countries with higher levels of income per capita. If border effects are found to be significant, then we would also expect to find that two countries sharing tight economic, social and linguistic ties would have greater international trade flows between them, and hence would have smaller net border effects. If the range of variables measuring international commonalities or shared features were complete enough, then some combination might, by extrapolation, be able to completely explain the border effects. In this sense, any effects of language and other cross-border ties become part of the explanation of why economic densities are so much greater within than between nations. The first candidate variables are the obvious ones: membership in a common trading bloc. The prime candidate for the OECD countries is membership in the European Union.(4) Variables for adjacency and membership in the Commonwealth are also assessed, primarily to help clarify the reasons behind the effects estimated for common languages. The potential importance of language as a contributor to trade linkages has several foundations, each of which is linked to some aspect of the reasoning behind the importance of national border effects. Perhaps the simplest is an argument based on transactions costs (Williamson 1989), with communication across language barriers being more expensive, thus increasing the economic distance between potential trading partners not sharing a common language.(5) At one remove is the idea that trading opportunities must be chosen from a range of known possibilities, with language affinities providing an automatic channelling of information along linguistic lines.(6) Going further into the role of institutions leads in two ways, first to the importance of known and reliable contractual and legal standards(7), and second to the importance of trust and shared values.(8) These two lines of thought are connected, as trust and a credible system of legal enforcement are often seen as alternative ways of facilitating mutually beneficial trade (Pagden 1988). Common languages may help to build networks of trust and shared institutions by increasing the degree of common cultural, literary and educational material, and by 6
increasing the probability of migration. Migration is encouraged by shared languages and backgrounds, and in turn leads to further increases in the density of internationally shared knowledge and values.(9) If sharing a common language leads to increased trade densities, the results for economic welfare are generally thought to be positive, although the magnitude of possible gains remains uncertain. Recent cross-country evidence on the links between openness and growth suggests that knowledge spillovers (Coe and Helpman 1995, Bayoumi, Coe and Helpman 1998) and economic growth rates are higher for countries that are sufficiently open to enable the reasonably easy reaping of significant gains from trade and technology transfer (Edwards 1997 and Sachs and Warner 1995). On the other hand, at least among the industrial countries, the unexploited gains from trade must not be very large, or else they would lead, in combination with the evidently large border effects on trade, to the counterfactual result that per capita incomes would be significantly higher in larger countries. These two strands of argument could be made consistent if there were diminishing returns to openness to set in at some stage, with national borders defining natural catchment areas(10) for pooling trade and investment so as to reduce the uncertainty facing investors (Richardson 1959, Dixit and Pindyck 1994). Augmented by remoteness, population, border effects, trading bloc and basic language effects, and using the exporter (x) and importer (m) to make explicit the direction of trade between countries i and j, we have the following basic equation for estimation (3) ln(Sxm) = a0 + a1ln(GDPx) + a2ln(GDPm) + a3ln(POPx )+ a4ln(POPm) + a5ln(DISTxm) + a6ln(REMx) + a7ln(REMm) + a8HOME + a9HOME*ln(Y/Ybar) + a10EU+ a11LANGUAGE + exm The results initially make use of international trade flows among 22 OECD countries, and later add 11 developing countries to provide a more global sample. RESULTS USING DATA FOR MERCHANDISE TRADE AMONG OECD COUNTRIES Our data for OECD countries include bilateral trade among 22 countries and own-shipments estimates for 16 countries, for each year 1988 through 1992. Table 1 shows the 1992 results for several different specifications of the gravity model, while Table 2 shows the results of a single specification for each of the years 1988 to 1992. The first equation in Table 1 shows the extended gravity equation that was the stopping point of the analysis in Helliwell (1998). The base assumption about internal trade distances is that they are one-quarter of the distance between a country and its nearest trading partner. Distances between nations are approximated by the distances between their capital cities, following the assumption made previously in Wei (1996) and Helliwell (1997b). Considering the variables in the order that they are shown in Table 1, the first two are the logarithms of the real GDPs (at purchasing power parities) of the exporting and importing countries, respectively, while the next two are the logarithms of the populations of the exporting and importing countries. Equation (i) shows that the elasticities of trade with respect to per capita incomes are higher than those with respect to population, but significantly so only for exporters. This is revealed by the significant negative effect of the logarithm of exporter population in an equation already including the logarithm of aggregate GDP. The net elasticity with respect to income per capita is thus equal to that for GDP, while that for population is equal to the net of the GDP and population coefficients. The elasticity of trade with respect to population is 1.28-0.6=0.68, while that with respect to GDP per capita in 1992 is 1.28. The logarithm of distance is highly significant, as are the effects of importer and exporter GDPs, showing the robust empirical support for the basic gravity model of merchandise trade. The two remoteness variables are next, both showing significant increases in bilateral trade when either the exporter or the importer is more economically remote from alternative markets. The variable HOME takes the value of 1.0 for each observation denoting domestic merchandise shipments. A zero coefficient would imply that globalization was complete, in the sense that internal and external trade densities were equally strong, after taking due account of the trade-generating force of GDP and the tradediminishing effects of distance. A significant positive coefficient implies that domestic trade is denser than international trade, with the degree of greater intensity being given by the antilog of the estimated coefficient. Thus for unrelated OECD countries (i.e. those not linked either by the EU or a common language) the border effect is exp(2.29)=9.9 for a country of OECD-average income per capita. That is, domestic trade intensities in 1992 were approximately ten times greater than international trade linkages among the OECD countries. The variable below the HOME variable is an interaction variable designed to reveal the extent to which border effects change with the level of a country's per capita income. There is theory and empirical evidence to support this extension of the gravity model, as explained in more detail in Chapter 3 of Helliwell (1998). The variable is equal to the product of the HOME variable and per capita income measured relative to the geometric average per capita income in the same year in all of the other countries in the sample, in this case 22 OECD countries(11), so 7
that the coefficient on the HOME variable measures the border effect for a country with OECD-average per capita incomes. The European Union (EU) variable takes the value of 1.0 for observation relating to a trade flow from one EU member to another. It is expected to take a positive coefficient to reflect the lower trade barriers and more harmonized regulations among EU countries than between other pairs of trading partners. Trade among EU members is estimated to be about one-third greater than that between otherwise similar pairs of countries not sharing EU membership. Finally, we reach the variable of central interest in this paper. In Equation (i) the language variable takes the value of 1.0 for each international trade flow from one country to another sharing a common official language. Thus it takes the value of 1.0 for trade between Switzerland and each of France, Germany and Italy, since French, German and Italian are all official languages in Switzerland. The language variable is expected to take a positive coefficient, by reducing the costs and increasing the extent of trans-border contacts and information flows. Since language is not independent of culture, nations that share a common language also often share to some common history, institutions and values. Platteau (1994) argues that shared values and institutions are likely to reduce the costs of making and enforcing contracts, since shared values reduce the extent of uncertainties that otherwise might require negotiation and fine print to sort out, or costly legal actions to resolve. All of this reasoning supporting the likely importance of a common language as a determinant of the tightness of trading links also support the existence of border effects more generally, since national borders, like languages, often serve to delineate populations with shared institutions and values. Sharing a common language has a large and significant effect on trade intensity. Two countries sharing a common language are estimated to have twoway trade flows more than 1.7 times as large (1.75=exp(.564)) as those between two otherwise similar countries. The second equation replaces the language variable by its three largest components: trading pairs having English, French and German as common languages. At least for the OECD countries, having English as a common official language has the largest and most significant trade-generating effect. The coefficient of .84 implies that trade flows between trading pairs sharing English as a common language are 2.3 times larger(2.3=exp(.84)) than those between otherwise similar trading pairs not linked by a common language. The effect for German is somewhat smaller, while that for French is insignificantly negative, suggesting the absence of language-generated trade among the four OECD countries(12) with French as one of their official languages. A Wald test shows that the probability of these three language effects being equal is only .0002, while the English and German effects are not significantly different from one another. To see if the high estimated effect of English as a common language is due to Commonwealth ties that were at one time a focus of preferential tariffs and have for long marked patterns of migration and family ties, Equation (iii) adds a variable that takes the value of 1.0 for each observation covering trade between members of the Commonwealth. The variable takes a positive coefficient, as expected, and the coefficient on English is lowered slightly, becoming much closer to the effect for German. But the English effect remains very large and significant. Since common languages are often spoken in adjacent countries (English being the main exception to this), and since adjacency has sometimes been found to contribute to trade intensity even after allowance for the effects of distance, Equation (iv) adds a variable that takes the value of 1.0 for all trade flows between adjacent countries. The variable is marginally significant, and lowers the estimated effect of German as a common language. This was to be expected, since Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the three countries in question, are all adjacent. Although adding adjacency lowers the estimated size of the German language coefficient, the German effect remains insignificantly below the English effect, mainly because it is imprecisely estimated. The next step is to see if linguistic channels are any different in nature if they relate to official languages that are spoken by a minority of the population. The possibility of such differences was assessed by defining a second language variable that takes the value of 1.0 for any observation relating to a trade flow between two countries sharing a common language that was not the primary language for either or both of the trading partners. Hence this variable would cover trade flows between Switzerland and Italy, France, Belgium and Canada, and those between Canada and France, Belgium and Switzerland. The estimated coefficient on the variable, when applied to any of the equations in Table 2, is essentially zero, with no statistical significance. Thus there is no evidence that second language effects are different from primary language effects. This in turn means that the lack of trade-generating effect from French as a common language is not due to the preponderance of second-language pathways among the French pairs. However, it must be recognized that there is a rather high correlation (r=0.75) between second-language pairs and French language pathways, making it difficult to separate the two possible lines of influence. The final step is to see to what extent the language effects estimated thus far are equally applicable to Canada as to other countries. To show this, each of the key language variables was divided into two components, one covering all trading pairs involving Canada, and the second covering all other country pairs. Column (v) of Table 8
1 shows the coefficients estimated in common and any divided effects relating to the rest of the world (ROW), while column (vi) shows the same effects as they relate to Canada. There is little or no statistical power in most of the individual coefficients applicable to Canada, since they cover so few observations. The intent is rather to summarize the data in a comprehensible form. Looking first at the language effects, Canada is the only country for which having French as a common language is associated with additional trade. Thus treating Canada separately makes the effects of French even more negative in the ROW estimate. For English, the Canadian effect is smaller than elsewhere, thus leading to an increase in the ROW effect. For Canada, the point estimates for French and English are about the same size, both somewhat smaller than the world-average effects of common languages shown in Equation (i). The Commonwealth effect is smaller for Canada than for the ROW, while the adjacency effect is larger for Canada than elsewhere. The Canadian adjacency effect includes the consequences of the US-Canada Auto Pact and FTA, since the United States is Canada=s only adjacent trading partner. The border effects for Canada are highly significant, and somewhat larger than for other countries. Comparison is made slightly more complicated by the addition of a new variable, shown as 'foreign trade' at the bottom of column (vi). This variable takes the value of 1.0 for each trade flow between Canada and some other country. The fact that it takes a significant negative coefficient implies that after allowing for economic size, distance, adjacency, and common languages, Canada trades less than the average OECD country. Canada's internal trade density is somewhat higher than for other countries, so to compare border effects between Canada and other countries it necessary to combine these two differences. The border effect for Canada is larger than that for a typical OECD country by exp(2.47-2.41+.598)=1.75 times. To show the extent to which the results for 1992 are replicated across years, Table 2 shows the same equation estimated separately for each year from 1988 through 1992. Separate estimation is undertaken for each year because Wald tests reject the imposition of common values for several of the key coefficients, especially those relating to GDP and population. Coefficients on exporter GDP show a steady upward trend while those on exporter population become steadily more negative. In any event, even constraining the coefficients to equality across years and hence quintupling the sample size does very little to increase the accuracy of the parameter estimates, even for those parameters that show little variation from year to year. The reason for this is that the error terms are highly correlated from one year to the next, so that very little new information is being added from another year's data. The results in Table 2 show that most of the estimated parameters are very stable from one year to the next. Since the coefficients and the independent variables are very similar from one year to the next, the predicted values are thus also very highly autocorrelated. The simple correlation between the predicted values from the 1991 and 1992 equations is over .999. In the abstract, this might seem a situation where estimating all five years together could increase the effective sample size and hence the accuracy of the coefficients. However, the error terms themselves are very highly autocorrelated, at .955 from 1991 to 1992 compared to .996 for the dependent variables. Hence any estimation method, like the Zellner SUR procedure, which appropriately accounts for the autocorrelation of the error structures does not show any material change in the tightness of the parameter estimates under system estimation. As can be seen from the correlation measures, the independent variables have even more autocorrelation than do the dependent variables or the error terms, so that it is inappropriate to follow the suggestion of Eichengreen and Irwin (1998) to add the lagged dependent variable to the equation. The predictable result of that strategy is a very high coefficient on the lagged dependent variable (about .95) with a corresponding twenty-fold reduction in the estimated size of the other parameters. Since there is so little dynamic structure in the independent variables, and scarcely any more in the dependent variables, there is no scope for making accurate estimates of the dynamic structure of the model. This inability to identify dynamic linkages forces us to be very modest about the conclusions that can be drawn about the effects of language on trade. It remains possible, and indeed likely, that some of the influences ascribed to common languages are related to the circumstances whereby the languages and cultures of the countries became linked in the first place, and have evolved over the subsequent centuries. EFFECTS OF COMMON LANGUAGES ON GLOBAL TRADE In this section the number of bilateral trade flows is more than doubled by adding 11 developing countries to the 22-country OECD group. The increase in sample size is greater than the proportionate increase in the number of countries because the number of bilateral trade flows is equal to n(n-1), where n is the total number of counties. However, the number of own-country sales figures, and hence the data available to estimate border effects rises proportionately with the total number of countries. It actually rises slightly more than proportionately in our case, since we use bilateral trade flows for 22 OECD countries while having directly measured domestic sales for only sixteen. When adding new countries, however, we have included only countries for which there are 9
published data for domestic sales of goods for at least two of the five years 1988 through 1992. Thus the number of countries for which some data are available for the estimation of border effects rises from 16 to 27, although there are full series for domestic sales for only six of the eleven developing countries added to the sample. The international sample is such a small one because it was prepared for the purpose of assessing national border effects on merchandise trade, and not specifically for the purpose of estimating the effects of language on trade. Given the small number and unrepresentative nature of the global sample, the results reported here should be treated as provisional.(13) Table 3 shows the results. The first equation repeats for the larger sample the same equation estimated in Table 2(i) for the OECD countries, with the inconsequential additional of the variable for adjacency. As shown in earlier work (Helliwell 1998), the striking feature of the global results includes that facts that border effects are very large in some of the developing countries, and that the great diversity of these effects is sufficiently explained by their variations in income per capita. Thus equation 3(i), where all countries are assumed to have the same income-dependent pattern of border effects, is statistically equivalent to an earlier equation that permitted OECD and non-OECD countries to have different patterns of border effects. As with the smaller sample, the language variable is strongly significant. Equation 3(ii) also shows that the single language variable covers a considerable variety of results by language groups. As was the case for the OECD countries, the English language commonalities are linked to much higher trade densities, with a smaller effect from German and none from French. The latter two results are not surprising here, as none of the additional countries provide additional German or French language trading pathways. What is in the new sample is a number of trading pathways with Spanish as a common language. There is no evidence of any trade creation from this language commonality, however, as the coefficient is small and insignificant. The final equation adds the commonwealth variable, drops the Spanish variable, and still finds the English pathway to be the only one with strong significance. Tests show that the probability of all language effects being equal is even less than in Table 2, being .0002 for equality of the four language effects in Equation 3(ii). More research with larger samples of countries will be required before any firm conclusions can be drawn.(14) For the meantime, and in any event among the OECD countries, the general common language effect seems to be driven by the role of English. If this pattern were to be confirmed, the analysis would then need to focus on whether the language effect is collinear with other factors, or if there are other reasons why English language pathways might be more conducive to trade than are other common language channels. LANGUAGE AND INTERPROVINCIAL TRADE Another fruitful area for studying the effect of language on trade and other economic linkages is provided by Canadian interprovincial and province-state data. There are several previous studies whose results speak to the effects of language. First there was the pioneering study of long distance telephone traffic by Ross Mackay (1958), who used a gravity model to compare the calling patterns among Quebec cities, between Quebec and Ontario cities, and from Quebec to U.S. cities. He found a sharp drop in density across the provincial border, and a far larger one across the U.S. border. International call densities were only about one-fiftieth as large as those among Quebec cities, after using the gravity model to adjust for the effects of population size and distance. These results provided an early clue to John McCallum's (1995) startling finding that in 1988 merchandise trade densities were twenty times greater among Canadian provinces than between Canadian provinces and U.S. states. Given the drop in telephone traffic across the Quebec/Ontario border found by Mackay, it might be expected that merchandise trade linkages would be less tight between Quebec and the other provinces than among the other provinces. An attempt to examine this possibility (Helliwell 1996) found that there was not significantly less merchandise trade between Quebec and the other provinces than among the other provinces. From the perspective of this paper, the next question to consider is why the language effects on trade that are so apparent across national borders do not appear to characterize trade flows across provincial boundaries in Canada. One hypothesis is that some combination of official and unofficial bilingualism has meant that national commercial ventures have been able to operate fairly seamlessly in all parts of Canada, while regional firms have been equally able to establish the necessary trading contacts and linkages in all other regions of Canada. To further test the plausibility of this supposition, it might be helpful to look at the interprovincial trade patterns in greater commodity detail. The problem with disaggregation by commodity, however, is that trade by commodity depends very much on the geographic distribution of resources of various types. One aspect of the hypothesis has been investigated somewhat further. There is some international theory and evidence (Rauch 1996, Gould 1994, Head and Ries 1998) that immigration tends to induce trade flows, either because immigrants bring established tastes with them, and tastes are to some extent specific to the country of production (as supposed by Armington (1969) and supported by the empirical findings of Trefler (1995)) or because immigrants have the knowledge and contacts necessary to establish and maintain bilateral trade linkages. No doubt language skills are part of the trade-producing potential that migrants bring with them, 10
although the task of dividing the credit between language skills, contacts, and knowledge of institutions is daunting. How might the apparent ability of migration to create trade help to explain why trade between Quebec and other Canadian provinces is not materially reduced by linguistic differences, while international trade is strongly affected? The reason is that interprovincial migration has been found to be much greater than international migration, so that sufficient interprovincial migration could lead to enough intermingling of language groups, and development of trading networks, to substantially explain the result. A first look at the evidence is promising, as census data show that there is almost 100 times more chance of a Canadian resident having been born in another Canadian province than having been born in a U.S. state of similar size and distance (Helliwell 1997b). However, there are two subsequent problems with this line of reasoning. First, the amount of additional trade induced by migration is not great enough to account for the absence of interprovincial border effects. Second, it turns out that for migration there is a large linguistic effect, as migration between Quebec and other provinces, based on the same census data, is several times less likely than is migration among other provinces of similar size and distance (Helliwell 1997b). Research is still underway to see to what extent the patterns of interprovincial migration are themselves predictors of interprovincial trade patterns, but in any event migration between Quebec and other provinces is not likely to be the primary reason why interprovincial trade is so symmetric, and so little characterized by language patterns. Given the nature of the current evidence on interprovincial communications, migration and trade, the best working hypothesis is probably that there is a sufficiently rich set of common national institutions and knowledge networks, some linguistic and others not, so as to permit a fairly seamless trading system within the country, with a density that far exceeds that of trading linkages between Canadian provinces and U.S. states. Some of this common institutional structure is probably in the financial sector, as studies of provincial savings and investment rates show that the correlations of savings and investment rates across countries, which are argued by Feldstein and Horioka (1980) and others to reveal strong border effects in the markets for capital(15) and goods(16), are absent among Canadian provinces (Helliwell and McKitrick 1998). This suggests that Canadian interprovincial capital markets, like those for merchandise trade, are not marked by either linguistic or other significant border effects. The role of bilingualism, whether official or unofficial, in achieving this degree of internal homogeneity needs to be further assessed. As already noted, the very stability of linguistic patterns, trading patterns, and institutional structures makes it very difficult to assess the precise nature of their linkages, so that precise empirical conclusions will be hard to find. TABLE 1 LANGUAGE AND OECD MERCHANDISE TRADE, 1992(17) Equation (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) Constant 2.06 2.33 2.50 2.72 3.71 Coefficients (2.5) (2.8) (3.0) (3.2) (4.5) specific to Canada ln(GDPx) 1.28 1.28 1.28 1.28 1.22 (16.4) (16.6) (16.6) (16.6) (17.1) ln(GDPm) 0.800 0.807 0.802 0.802 0.841 (10.4) (10.7) (10.6) (10.7) (12.0) ln(POPx) -0.600 0.600 -0.593 -0.596 -0.514 (7.3) (7.4) (7.3) (7.4) (6.8) ln(POPm) -0.086 -0.088 -0.080 -0.084 -0.097 (1.1) (1.1) (1.0) (1.1) (1.3) ln(DIST) -0.890 -0.915 -0.910 -0.869 -0.848 (20.1) (20.8) (20.8) (17.9) (17.1) ln(REMx) 0.438 0.426 0.405 0.371 0.260 (4.6) (4.5) (4.3) (3.9) (2.8) ln(REMm) 0.464 0.463 0.441 0.404 0.283 (4.9) (5.0) (4.7) (4.2) (3.1) Canada 2.29 2.20 2.22 2.38 2.41 2.47 HOME (9.6) (9.3) (9.5) (9.6) (9.5) (3.6) HOME*ln -1.31 -1.34 -1.35 -1.35 -1.31 (Y/Ybar) (3.9) (4.0) (4.0) (4.0) (4.1) EU 0.420 0.390 0.392 0.400 0.400 Members (4.1) (3.8) (3.3) (3.9) (3.9) 11
Equation Common Language
(i) 0.565 English (5.5) German
(ii) 0.842 (6.2) 0.610 (2.1) French -0.110 (0.6) Commonwealth
(iii) 0.736 (4.6) 0.621 (2.2)
(iv) 0.712 (4.5) 0.414 (1.4)
0.310 (1.3)
Adjacent Foreign Trade R2 S.E.E. 0.901 0.688 0.904 0.679 0.904 0.679
0.334 (1.4) 0.283 (2.0)
0.904 0.676
(v) 0.725 (3.9) 0.419 (1.4) -0.364 (1.3) 0.810 (2.4) 0.321 (2.1) -0.598 (4.3) 0.907 0.670
(vi) 0.472 (1.1)
0.400 (1.4) 0.390 (0.9) 0.790 (1.2)
same same
TABLE 2 EFFECTS OF COMMON LANGUAGES ON OECD MERCHANDISE TRADE 1988-1992 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 Equation 3.83 4.01 3.38 3.20 2.74 Constant (4.5) (5.1) (4.2) (3.8) (3.2) 1.08 1.10 1.13 1.21 1.28 ln(GDPx) (17.0) (16.8) (16.3) (16.4) (16.7) 0.827 0.830 0.796 0.825 0.806 ln(GDPm) (13.3) (12.8) (11.7) (11.4) (10.7) -0.352 -0.392 -0.409 -0.506 -0.600 ln(POPx) (5.3) (5.7) (5.7) (6.6) (7.4) -0.080 -0.080 -0.048 -0.090 -0.088 ln(POPm) (1.2) (1.2) (0.7) (1.2) (1.1) Equation ln(DIST) ln(REMx) ln(REMm) HOME HOME*ln (Y/Ybar) EU Members English in common German in common French in common Commonwealth Adjacent 1988 -0.895 (16.9) 0.215 (2.3) 0.269 (2.9) 2.41 (9.0) -1.23 (4.2) 0.390 (3.5) 0.652 (3.8) 0.508 (1.5) -0.136 (0.6) 0.537 (2.0) 0.237 1989 -0.889 (17.3) 0.174 (2.0) 0.301 (3.5) 2.37 (9.1) -1.28 (4.2) 0.436 (4.0) 0.623 (3.7) 0.538 (1.7) -0.160 (0.8) 0.523 (2.0) 0.237 1990 -0.869 (17.2) 0.192 (2.1) 0.328 (3.6) 2.41 (9.3) -1.28 (4.1) 0.394 (3.7) 0.623 (3.7) 0.502 (1.6) -0.203 (1.0) 0.583 (2.3) 0.264 12 1991 -0.877 (17.6) 0.307 (3.2) 0.340 (3.6) 2.35 (9.3) -1.28 (9.3) 0.430 (4.1) 0.659 (4.0) 0.427 (1.5) -0.230 (1.1) 0.328 (1.3) 0.300 1992 -0.870 (18.0) 0.372 (3.9) 0.407 (4.3) 2.37 (9.6) -1.36 (4.0) 0.394 (3.8) 0.704 (4.4) 0.385 (1.3) -0.187 (1.0) 0.362 (1.5) 0.302
R S.E.E. P-Value of equality of language effects
(1.5) 0.891 0.724 0.008
(1.5) 0.896 0.706 0.006
(1.7) 0.898 0.698 0.003
(2.0) 0.902 0.689 0.001
(2.1) 0.904 0.676 0.001
Notes: Estimated by OLS with 465 observations, dependent variable ln(Sxm). Absolute values of t-statistics are shown in parentheses below the coefficients. TABLE 3 EFFECTS OF COMMON LANGUAGES ON GLOBAL MERCHANDISE TRADE, 1992 Equation (i) (ii) (iii) Constant 0.34 -0.306 0.366 (0.2) (0.1) (0.0) ln(GDPx) 0.772 0.761 0.763 (28.3) (27.6) (28.1) ln(GDPm) 0.709 0.700 0.701 (26.0) (25.7) (26.1) ln(POPx) -0.063 -0.051 -0.052 (5.4) (1.4) (1.4) ln(POPm) -0.087 0.025 0.024 (1.3) (0.7) (0.7) ln(DIST) -0.826 -0.865 -0.861 (16.0) (16.6) (17.1) ln(REMx) 0.286 0.328 0.314 (1.6) (1.9) (1.8) ln(REMm) 0.279 0.341 0.327 (1.6) (1.9) (1.9) HOME 3.15 3.00 3.02 (10.4) (9.9) (10.2) HOME*ln -0.598 -0.512 -0.517 (Y/Ybar) (1.7) (3.0) (3.0) EU Members 0.449 0.409 0.411 (3.4) (3.1) (3.2) Equation Common Language (i) 0.531 English (4.7) German French Spanish Adjacent Country R2 S.E.E. 0.285 (1.6) 0.834 0.998 (ii) 0.940 (6.3) 0.658 (1.5) 0.078 (0.3) -0.039 Common(0.2) wealth 0.363 (2.0) 0.837 0.988 (iii) 0.889 (4.6) 0.657 (1.5) 0.069 (0.2) 0.121 (0.4) 0.366 (2.0) 0.837 0.988
Notes: Estimated by OLS with 918 observations, dependent variable ln(Sxm). Absolute values of t-statistics are shown in parentheses below the coefficients.
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McCallum, John C. P. (1995), "National Borders Matter: Canada-U.S. Regional Trade Patterns" American Economic Review 85 (June 1995): 615-623. Nelson, Philip (1959), "Migration, Real Income and Information." Journal of Regional Science 1(2): 43-73 Obstfeld, Maurice, and Alan M. Taylor (1997), "The Great Depression as a Watershed: International Capital Mobility Over the Long Run." NBER Working Paper 5960. (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research). Pagden, Anthony (1988), "Trust in Eighteenth Century Naples." In Diego Gambetta, ed., Trust. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 127-141. Platteau, Jean-Philippe (1994), "Behind the Market Stage Where Real Societies Exist." Journal of Development Studies 30: 533-77, 753-817. Putnam, Robert D. (1993), Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Rauch, J. E. (1996), "Networks Versus Markets in International Trade." NBER Working Paper 5617 (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research). Rice, Tom W. and Jan L. Feldman (1995), "Civic Culture and Democracy From Europe to America" (mimeo, University of Vermont). Richardson, George B. (1960), Information and Investment. (London: Oxford University Press). Sachs, Jeffrey D. and Andrew Warner (1995), "Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration." Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1: 1-118. Summers, R. and A. Heston (1991), "The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An Expanded Set of International Comparisons, 1950-1988." Quarterly Journal of Economics 106: 327-68. Taylor, Alan M. and Jeffrey G. Williamson (1994), "Convergence in the Age of Mass Migration." NBER Working Paper 4711. (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research). Trefler, Daniel (1995), "The Case of the Missing Trade and Other Mysteries." American Economic Review 85: 1029-46. Wei, Shang-Jin (1996), "Intra-national Versus International Trade: How Stubborn Are Nations in Global Integration?" NBER Working Paper 5531. (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research). Williamson, Oliver E. (1989), "Transaction Cost Economics." In R. Schmalensee and R. D. Willig, eds., Handbook of Industrial Organization. (Amsterdam: Elsevier) Volume 2: 135-82
2. This paper was first presented at the session on the Economics of Language, Canadian Economics Association Annual Meetings, University of Ottawa, May 30, 1998, and I am grateful for comments received there. 3. In Bergstrand (1989), the assumption of tastes for imported goods (presumed to be luxuries) rising with per capita incomes was used to support the presumption and finding of a positive effect of per capita incomes in the importing country. To explain the positive finding for exporter per capita income, he assumed that per capita income was a proxy for capital intensity, with a positive coefficient suggesting that the class of goods was relatively capital intensive. 4. Studies have shown this to be the most important trading bloc. Results for EFTA linkages are smaller and less stable.(See e.g. Aitken 1973.) The possible effects of special trading rules between Canada and the United States, including the 1964 Auto Pact and the 1988 FTA, are rolled into the effects of the adjacency variable for these two countries. 5. The treatment of differences in perceptions and values in terms of distance equivalents is a natural analogy already employed by sociologists and geographers (Gatrell 1983). 6. For further discussion of the role of information costs in the determination of trade densities, see Alchian and Demsetz (1972), Ben-Porath (1980) and Johansson and Westin (1994). 7. See Greif (1992), Keefer and Knack (1997), and Mauro (1995). 8. See Coleman (1990), Dasgupta (1988), Putnam (1993), Helliwell and Putnam (1995), Helliwell (1997a) and Knack and Keefer (1997). 16
9. See Nelson (1959) Gould (1994), Rice and Feldman (1995) and Taylor and Williamson (1994). 10. The argument is analogous to that used by others to rationalize the role of the firm, e.g. Alchian and Demsetz (1972), Hart (1995), Ben-Porath (1980) and Williamson (1989). 11. For each country the variable thus has a single observation, appearing in the row showing domestic sales, equal to the log of income per capita minus the mean of the logarithms of per capita income in 22 OECD countries. This permits the coefficient on the HOME variable to show the border effect for a country with average income equal to the OECD average, with border effects for specific countries measured as exp(hb*coypc), where h is the coefficient on HOME, b is the coefficient on the relative income variable coypc, and coypc is the log difference between a country=s per capita income and the OECD average for the year in question. 12. These are Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland. 13. The countries, added to the original 22 OECD countries include Colombia, Ecuador, Hungary, Korea, Myanmar, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Sri Lanka, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. There are no officially bilingual countries in this group. Those with common language ties to other countries include Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela (Spanish) and Nigeria and Zimbabwe (English). 14. Frankel, Stein and Wei used a sample of 63 countries, and report that when they tested whether some major languages were more important than others they "found little in the way of significant differences." (1998, 96) did not find systematically significant differences. 15. For other studies of the degree of international integration of financial markets, see Baxter and Jermann (1997), Marston (1995), Obstfeld and Taylor (1997), and Fujiki and Kitamura (1995). 16. Evidence on the much greater national than international linkages of consumer prices is presented by Engel and Rogers (1997a, 1997b). The same implications follow from the trade pattern studies of Harrigan (1996), Davis (1997) and Davis, Weinstein, Bradford and Shimpo (1997). The somewhat limited role of real exchange rate variability as a cause of this is documented by De Grauwe (1988) and Wei (1996). 17. Notes: Estimated by OLS with 465 observations, dependent variable ln(Sxm). Absolute values of t-statistics are shown in parentheses below the coefficients.
17
SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin Department of Economics Universities of Geneva and Fribourg, Switzerland ABSTRACT 1. ECONOMIC TERMINOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE 2. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF ECONOMIC APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE MATTERS 3. LANGUAGE POLICY IN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE 4. DISTINGUISHING SUPPLY AND DEMAND 5. SUPPLY AND DEMAND FOR LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC COMMODITIES 6. SUPPLY AND DEMAND FOR LANGUAGE 7. ABOUT ESTIMATION 8. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE POLICY REFERENCES
ABSTRACT It is not uncommon for terms like "supply" and "demand" to be used in the study of language issues, whether by economists or by non-economists. However, the actual meaning of "supply" and "demand" in the context of language is not always clear. In particular, the implicit interpretation of quantity and price, which is necessary for the economic constructs to be meaningful, needs to be identified more precisely. This chapter opens with a general discussion of the problems raised by the transposition of economic terminology to language issues. It examines the supply of and demand for language-specific goods and services, and then moves on to an examination of supply and demand in the case of language itself, showing that these concepts can be useful if language is interpreted in terms of a linguistic environment. The notions of "quantity", "price" and "equilibrium" in both settings are discussed, and then applied to language policy problems. Some language policies can be interpreted as supply-side, others as demand-side, and bring about different consequences for the equilibrium price of a given linguistic environment. This chapter discusses the relevance and interpretation of well-established economic concepts, namely "supply" and "demand", in the study of language problems, and particularly language policy. In what follows, I begin by pointing out the problems raised by applying economic terminology to the study of language issues (Section 1), and then propose a brief overview of economists' approach to language issues (Section 2). In Section 3, I clarify what is meant here by language policy, or planning, and in Section 4, I turn to the meaning of supply and demand. Section 5 examines the supply of and demand for language-specific commodities (LSCs) and in Section 6, I explore the implications and current limitations of the notions of supply and demand of language per se. Section 7 considers some avenues for estimating supply, demand, and equilibrium values. Finally, Section 8 outlines some implications of our findings for language policy. 1. ECONOMIC TERMINOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE The use of economic terminology in the study of language-related issues is not uncommon. Economic vocabulary may be used by non-economists, and its meaning can be quite different depending on author and context. It can then be used, quite legitimately, in a sense which is not related to its standard economic meaning. For example, Ferdinand de Saussure, the founding father of modern linguistics, approaches the "value" of a word as follows: "when one thinks about the value of a word, one generally thinks primarily about its capacity to represent an idea [...]" (quoted by Gadet, 1987, my translation). In this case, de Saussure was arguably giving the word "value" a specific meaning suited to his own analytical purposes, without any intention to use it in its standard economic sense. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the modern economic theory of value would have been available, had de Saussure intended to refer it. De Saussure defended his memoir at the University of Leipzig in 1878, and his doctoral dissertation at the same university in 1881, before moving to Paris and later taking up a professorship at the University of Geneva in 1891. Hence, his academic career is clearly posterior to the publication of Walras's Elments d'conomie politique pure in 1874, where marginalist theory and the modern theory of value are presented.(18) However, other cases are not as clear-cut. For example, Rossi-Landi (1968/1983: 49) appears to makes quite a deliberate parallel between linguistic and economic processes by likening a linguistic community to a "sort of huge linguistic market in which words, expressions and messages circulate as commodities". Bourdieu (1982, drawing heavily on Rossi-Landi), in his well-known essay L'conomie des changes linguistiques, uses not just 19
SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin
"value", but also words like "market", "products", "goods", "capital" and "profit", to the point where it becomes difficult to believe that no analytical correspondence with the economic notions bearing precisely those names was intended. Closer inspection indicates that in these two latter instances, the connection between what their authors on the one hand, and economists on the other hand, call, say, "a market" is rather tenuous; hence, their use of economic terminology is, at best, metaphorical, and has limited analytical relevance. In particular, the analogy between "linguistic exchange" and the exchange of goods and services (through the intermediary of money), seductive as it is, can also be utterly misleading (Grin, 1994a, 1996b). Similes and metaphors are legitimate rhetorical devices which can pleasantly enliven theoretical discourse; the problem, however, is that the way in which they are used can be ambiguous, and imply a parallel that does not exist--or exists only to a much lesser degree than is implicit in an author's discourse. For example, in the countless cases where researchers (hailing from just about any discipline) talk of bilingualism as a "resource", a form of "wealth" or a "treasure", it is far from clear if these terms, which have a fairly precise meaning in the material or financial sphere, are supposed to refer to actual economic concepts or are simply used for illustrative purposes.(19) However, the use of economic terminology in the study of language issues also turns up, unsurprisingly, in economists' writing about language, which began to appear the mid-sixties. In these contributions, language can be seen as cause or consequence of economic processes. In some cases, economists study how language variables affect economic ones (for example, when second language skills result in higher earnings--a concern that makes up the bulk of Canadian and U.S. research); in other cases, they investigate the effect of economic variables on linguistic ones (for example, when patterns of international trade result in the spread or decline of some languages--a subject that has caught the attention of European more than North American researchers). In this literature, economic terminology is (normally) used in accordance with its meaning in orthodox (usually, neo-classical) theory(20), giving rise to an increasingly structured body of research on the economics of language and language planning, of which a brief overview is provided in the following section. However, the application of the concepts and analytical tools of economics to something as complex as language is a tricky business, and the economics of language and language planning is a field of specialization that is still in the making (Grin, 1996a). In large part, the problem has to do with the fact that economics as a discipline, though remarkably powerful in the study of causal relationships between variables that have an unambiguous quantitative interpretation, is often somewhat inadequate when the phenomena under consideration have important qualitative aspects; these qualitative aspects do not readily lend themselves to an interpretation in terms of "more" or "less" (Grin, 1998a). Economists may be tempted to force subtle linguistic variables into the strictures of highly formalized modelling, if only because mathematics is currently held up by many in the profession as the only thing worth doing--as if it were proof of an author's intellectual acumen (Mayer, 1993). But a mathematical apparatus, when used on its own, often turns out to be ill-suited to the investigation of something as multidimensional as language. It can result in the production of papers that are so far removed from any consideration of what language is that they sometimes teeter on the edge of complete irrelevance. Hence, in the study of language issues, the use of economic terminology as well as the application of economic constructs, whether by economists or not, requires us to proceed with caution, in order to avoid misleading parallels or meaningless reductionism. In this chapter, we will examine the application of the notions of supply and demand to language policy. As we shall see, such application is not unproblematic. However, it would be unwise to forfeit the use of notions as useful as supply and demand in study of language policy; it is much more fruitful to clarify what they mean in a language context and then to use these notions appropriately. This position gives rise to the following claims, which I will attempt to establish in this chapter: supply and demand can be useful tools for developing typologies of language-planning measures; the use of concepts like supply and demand can help in locating powerful levers on language use, and therefore significantly enhance the efficiency of language policy; this potential must be used with caution, because the application of the concepts of supply and demand to language planning problems is a recent development, whose relevance is limited to analytical contexts where supply and demand (including their mutual influence) have been systematically defined; in other contexts, it is likely to have little analytical relevance; much research remains to be done, particularly on the notions of linguistic environment, language value and language-related costs before we can confidently talk of the supply of or demand for a language proper.
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2. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF ECONOMIC APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE MATTERS Surveys of the economics of language (Vaillancourt, 1985; Grin, 1996b, 1996c; Grin and Vaillancourt, 1997) show that it can be convenient to make a distinction between "North American" and "European" research. In recent years, a few papers on Australian issues have also been published; the bulk of research in language economics, however, is still of European or North American origin. The first (that is, "North American") group of contributions have used analogies that usually fall in three categories. The earliest studies viewed language as an ethnic attribute, which allowed a statistical treatment similar to that of sex- or race-based earnings differentials. Following an entirely different line of reasoning, some authors have attempted to develop the language-as-currency analogy. It yields some interesting results on the rationale of second-language learning. It must be pointed out, however, that the analogy does not bear on language and currency themselves, but on differences between (national) languages and (national) currencies, which can both be seen as cost factors in international trade. Other parallels between language and money are often misleading, such as Rossi-Landi's assertion, quoted earlier, that words circulate "like commodities" or Coulmas's view that there is a "likeness" between them because (linguistic) "meaning" and (economic) "purchasing power" both "lack value in use but have value in exchange" (1992: 5).(21) They are not used by economists, or at least not as directly, as we shall see below. Finally, language can be seen as an element of individuals' human capital. Language skills, just like any other skills, have to be acquired (which entails a certain level of expenditure), but will at a later stage yield monetary returns in the form of higher labour income (that is, for most people, higher wages) accruing to those who have mastered a second or third language to an adequate level. This economic perspective on language, which grew out of empirical analyses of the economic performance of Spanish-speaking migrants on the U.S. labour market, was later combined with the first, and the dual nature of language as ethnic attribute and element of human capital (which clearly reflects the mainstream sociolinguistic view that language serves identity and communication functions) is now used in most of language economics. These three ways of representing language dominate in the contributions of Canadian and U.S. economists. European research, which is often of more recent vintage, has typically put more emphasis on the economic determinants of observed language status in contact settings. This has often extended into discussions of the economic aspects of language policies. A sizeable proportion of this work deals with minority language issues, calling for the development of a different set of assumptions. For example, language can be interpreted as a dimension of consumption, because the activities of everyday life can be performed in one or another language, and "activities" can be seen as the ultimate arguments of utility (or "objective") function, as suggested by Becker (1965). The cost of carrying out an activity in a given language, set against the satisfaction derived from it, makes language use (as well as patterns of language reproduction, once the relationship between "use" and "reproduction" is defined) amenable to standard microeconomic analysis. That an activity can be conducted in one or another language is the general rule for speakers of minority languages, who are overwhelmingly bilingual because they speak the majority language as well. However, the argument can be generalized, since unilinguals represent limiting cases where the cost of performing an activity in another language tends to infinity. Current developments in the economics of language planning, particularly when it is seen as a form of public policy, stress the analogy between language itself and public goods and services. Finally, there has always been an interest in the effect of language on production processes, sometimes using the assumption that language itself can be a production factor; under very different guises, it comes up in research work on both sides of the Atlantic. Because economics is, at heart, concerned with how social actors make choices, economists interested in language issues have inevitably been making forays in language policy, ever since the earliest papers in the field, such as Breton (1964). Such developments are based on a view of "policy" that sometimes remains implicit, and which is discussed in the following section. 3. LANGUAGE POLICY IN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE In this paper, no distinction is made between "language policy" and "language planning". However, the reader should be aware that language specialists do not necessarily see them as synonyms, and that a sizeable amount of literature (mostly in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics) is devoted to a discussion of what these terms actually cover (see e.g. Daoust and Maurais, 1987; Cooper, 1989; Labrie, 1992). For the purposes of this chapter, however, such detail is not necessary, and we shall be content with the following definition (Grin, 1996b), adapted from Cooper : Language planning is a systematic, rational, theory-based effort at the societal level to solve language problems with a view to increasing welfare. It is typically conducted by official bodies or their surrogates and aimed at part or all of the population living under their jurisdiction.
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Defining language policy in this way implies that we take a problem-oriented rather than an interaction-oriented view of it. As Scharpf (1987: 11) explains, problem-oriented perspectives are concerned with the causes of policy problems, potential policy solutions, and the latter's likely effect on the initial problems and the wider policy environment. Their focus is on understanding the technical implications of the issues and solutions at hand. By contrast, interaction-oriented perspectives, an equally important aspect of the study of "policies" (which include, of course, language policies), deal with the conditions under which policy plans can be implemented, and how the conflicting interests of real social actors interact to produce, eventually, actual policy outcomes. In order to keep things simple, we could say that problem-oriented policy analysis must be located somewhere upstream in a policy process, while interaction-oriented analysis becomes relevant later. The traditional economic perspective on policy analysis is problem-oriented (e.g., Stokey and Zeckhauser, 1978), although major developments on interactive issues have become possible through game theory (Hamburger, 1979; Hargreaves and Varoufakis, 1995). Game theory itself is but one way to analyse a broader question, namely, the relationship between policies and politics (on this, see Heinelt, 1993). A problem-oriented perspective supposes that there is a problem to be solved, and that there is more than one conceivable response to this problem.(22) Hence, problem-solving requires the identification of the advantages and drawbacks associated with each response. Advantages and drawbacks are usually conceptualized as benefits and costs, which are then expressed in terms of one common unit of measurement, such as current dollars. Once analysis has made it possible to compare options, basic common sense requires the "best" option to be selected. This, of course, requires some criterion for deciding which option is best, or "optimal". In the policy analysis tradition discussed here, this criterion is welfare, which usually means "aggregate welfare of members of society". This apparently straightforward notion covers an intricate set of issues. Obviously, the best option for some is not the best for others, with the result that an option can be defined as socially optimal only under a set of rather heroic assumptions. These assumptions may amount to little more than a simple omission of important distributional implications. An examination of these points (whose relevance in language-related policy issues has been pointed out many years ago; see e.g. Breton and Mieszkowski, 1977) would exceed the scope of this chapter, where we will keep referring to the fairly restrictive notion of "policy" proposed above. This, however, does not make the exercise pointless. As a way-station towards the identification of policies which, from the standpoint of a democratically elected, benevolent decision maker, appear to further the common good, problem-oriented policy analysis makes sense. Hence, the above definition of language policy, simple as it is, does not imply an oversight of the complexities of real-world policy implementation, and will prove sufficient for our purposes. Finally, it should be pointed out that in most instances of policy analysis applied to language, whether in an economic perspective or not, the emphasis is clearly placed on status rather than corpus matters. According to this distinction, usually credited to Kloss (1969), corpus refers to the internal features of a language, such as alphabet, spelling, terminological development, etc., while status refers to the position of a language vis--vis other languages in a "language contact" situation. In what follows, I will focus exclusively on status, if only because corpus-related policies can arguably be seen as an element in broader status-related policies. 4. DISTINGUISHING SUPPLY AND DEMAND Supply and demand embody the very essence of economic reasoning. They hark back to the core concepts of utility and opportunity cost, and are the key ingredients of that quintessentially economic construct, the market. They feel very natural to economists and it is not surprising that the latter would want to use them without further ado, as if their application to such a complex element of human experience as language were unproblematic. Many of the assumptions and results found in the models inspired by the various analogies discussed in Section 2 imply a direct or indirect reference to the notions of supply and demand. For example, the interplay of the supply and demand for skills in a particular language result in an equilibrium wage markup accruing to workers who possess such skills. However, these implications should not be interpreted as expressions of supply of, or demand for, the languages themselves. Therefore, expressions such as, "the demand for French" remain metaphorical unless the parameters that characterize such a "demand" are identified, at least in the form of a set of hypotheses. Assuming this identification work has been made, we may then be confronted with two situations: either (as generally turns out to be the case) "supply" and "demand" actually apply not to languages themselves, but to consumption goods and services, non-material commodities, or production factors that embody some language-related characteristics (e.g television programs in English, books in German, computer software in French); we shall call them language-specific commodities (LSCs). By way of consequence, language policy considerations concern supply and demand for LSCs, not languages. In a language planning context, the standard model of the market for goods and services is of limited relevance; however, extensions of this model (inspired 22
by the pioneering work of authors like Linder (1970) and Becker (1965, 1976)) provide the framework for its necessary adaptation to language issues.(23) The underlying assumptions of Becker's approach to human behaviour are not unproblematic, which means that it must be handled with caution; I shall return to this momentarily. Suffice it to say for now that its founding idea is that the actual objects of actors' decisions are not goods and services, but complex commodities (or activities) in the production of which these goods and services are used, as well as the time necessary to produce them; or languages themselves are more directly the object of supply and demand; however, since "language" is too complex a phenomenon to be supplied and demanded in the usual sense, the operational concept must be some manifestation of language, such as the continued existence of a linguistic environment characterized by the presence of Welsh, Spanish or Inuktitut. This necessary qualification of language as "linguistic environment", however, requires several caveats and definitions before we can confidently talk about the supply of and demand for a language. The apparatus of supply and demand can be used in both cases, but the logical, conceptual and empirical questions raised in each are quite different, as will the resulting policy implications. The rest of this paper is devoted to clarifying the distinction between the two cases, often using the issue of minority language preservation as an example.(24) If we wish to use the standard supply and demand framework (and then apply to language issues the considerable range of analytical insights based on these concepts), it is important to recall their precise meaning. They refer to rational actors' willingness to buy (demand) or sell (supply) a certain amount of a particular commodity, the values of some key variables being given. In the case of demand, these key variables are the price of the commodity itself, the price of other commodities (which can serve as substitutes or complements), disposable income and, of course, the agents' preferences. In the case of supply, these variables are the price of the commodity, production costs (which depend on technology and on the price of production factors), and the producers' goals (usually, profit maximization). Hence, supply and demand are not fixed values, but collections of values determined by the level of a set of variables. Rationality, in this context, implies that actors attempt to maximize their satisfaction under a set of constraints, which essentially means that people try to make the most of what they have. The actual amount of a commodity that will be produced, exchanged and consumed in a given time period (assuming no build-up of stocks by producers or consumers) cannot be inferred from demand or supply alone, and is (under a few additional technical restrictions) uniquely determined by the intersection of supply and demand. It is customary to represent this "equilibrium point" E in a price-quantity diagram as in Figure 1, and unless otherwise specified, "supply" and "demand" will always refer to the quantity of a commodity that agents are willing to provide or buy at a given price level, all other things being equali.e., the value of the other key variables remaining unchanged. FIGURE 1: STANDARD MARKET DIAGRAM
Obviously, making use of the notions of supply and demand requires a clear definition of both axes, and of the units used to distinguish "more" from "less" on each. However, references to supply and demand in connection 23
with language do not always come along with adequate attention to this necessary definition and identification work, so that their analytical and operational relevance may be limited. Whether we are interested in the supply and demand of language-related goods themselves, or attempting to apply supply and demand to languages directly, more than one of the analogies discussed in the preceding section could provide a starting point. However, the most direct approach is probably to resort to the languageas-consumption analogy--particularly if we want to identify a demand schedule, which constitutes, most of the time, the forgotten side of language planning. Traditionally, the lion's share of language policies (particularly in the case of minority language revitalization) is given over to supply-enhancing measures, something which may explain the poor performance of some of these policies. 5. SUPPLY AND DEMAND FOR LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC COMMODITIES We have seen earlier that demand is measured along a quantitative scale, is normally decreasing in price, and must be seen not as a fixed quantity, but as a collection of quantities that consumers would be willing to buy, given the values of variables such as prices, incomes and preferences. Obviously, transposing such notions to a language context is no easy task. One way of handling the problem is to look at the activities that people wish to engage in, using one or another language. Some activities are relatively language-neutral (such as going from point A to point B using public transport), but many have an identifiable language component. Performing these activities (for example, reading children's stories) requires the use of some goods and services, including language-specific ones (the LSCs introduced earlier), and some of the agents' own time. As in the basic microeconomic model of consumer behaviour, the extent of language-specific activities demanded is a function of people's preferences and resources. However, the resources in question now also include time and a whole range of non-material resources (for example, the "quality" of one's social network). Demand behaviour also responds to changes in the price of goods and services that are substitutes or complements to a particular LSC, but primarily those that could be used to perform a similar activity, possibly in another language. Finally, the efficiency with which people combine time and goods will also influence demand for LSCs (the complete derivation of the model is available in Grin (1990)).(25) The amount of resources available differs from one individual to the next; in an economic perspective, however, the crucial point is that resources are scarce in relation to needs and desires, and that individual resource availability at a certain point in time can be treated as a constraint. Other constraints are identical for all individuals (even though individuals may respond to them in different ways), and reflect macro-level supply conditions. For example, members of the minority-language community are less likely to want to have their children educated in the minority language if the latter have to "pay" for it in terms of segregation and reduced employment opportunities later in life (among many examples, see for example Lloyd Humphreys, 1991, for the Breton language). We are also more likely to observe strong demand for language-specific entertainment (whether in books, television, etc.) if there is no "prestige cost" attaching to it, that is, if the language is not branded as backward or countrified. Finally, access restrictions (for example, when the outlets of languagespecific goods and services are few and far between) will generally discourage demand for them. Alternatively, many of these collective constraints affecting demand could be viewed as supply factors. The supply of language-specific goods and services (such as books, media, opportunities for entertainment in a given language, etc.) is not exhaustively described by their going market price. In the basic microeconomic market model, it is always assumed that commodities are defined by a vector of characteristics, which includes not only price, but also indicators of accessibility, such as geographical location at a certain time. Access restrictions or social stigma can therefore readily be interpreted as cost elements, which must be added to the market price in the computation of the true cost of language-specific commodities. What policy implications can be derived at this stage? Let us assume that the declared policy objective is to have "more" of a language (such as a minority language) and that language planners want to lay out the problem in terms of "supply" and "demand". One brief look at Figure 1 is enough to show that the desired increase will obtain if the demand schedule, or the supply schedule, or both, shift to the right. If the analytical level is that of language-specific commodities, rather than language itself, the policy goal can be approached through a variety of means. On the supply side, subsidies to producers of language-specific commodities (assuming competitive goods markets) will shift the supply schedule downwards and to the right, inducing an increase from C1 to C2 of the equilibrium level of language-specific commodities consumed. This change, which simply reflects the fact that a subsidy will enable producers to supply a given amount of the good or service at a lower price than before, is shown in Figure 2. These supply-side measures will generally improve the availability conditions of minority languages. If, as we may expect, availability conditions influence demand behaviour as well, policy measures relaxing the collective constraints on availability or fighting back prejudice and stigmatization will induce a shift 24
of the demand schedule upwards and to the right, and the equilibrium consumption level of these goods and services will move up to C3. FIGURE 2 : SHIFTS IN SUPPLY AND DEMAND
On the demand side, increases in disposable income, price changes (possibly through taxation) of substitutable goods and services (such as majority-language-specific entertainment), and promotional campaigns aimed at improving attitudes (or increasing preferences) towards the target language will shift the demand schedule upwards and to the right, causing the equilibrium consumption level of the language-specific commodities to move to C4 in Figure 2. The rightward shift in the demand schedule obtains because ,at a given price of some LSC or index of LSC prices, consumers are willing to buy more of them than before. The relative effectiveness of policy options depends not just on the magnitude of the interventions, but also on the precise nature of the link between the value of these determinants of supply and demand on the one hand, and the shape and location of these two curves in the price-quantity space on the other hand. One analytically powerful tool summarizing some of these links is the sensitivity of quantity (on the horizontal axis) to changes in market price (on the vertical axis). When both magnitudes are expressed in percentages, their ratio is known as (own-)price elasticity and plays a crucial role, both on the supply and on the demand side. Suppose for example that the demand for language-specific commodities is not very sensitive to price changes; a large increase in the price of children's books in Basque, would not lead parents to buy fewer of them and replace them by children's books in Castilan or French. Conversely, a sharp drop in market price would have an equally small (positive) effect. Graphically, this means that the demand curve is almost vertical in the price-quantity space. The reader is invited to check for himself that in such a case, even a vigorous shift of the supply curve to the right (possibly as a result of massive subsidization of Basque-language publishers) will have practically no effect on the amount of bedtime stories read in Basque. In this case, where demand exhibits a low price-elasticity, language planners should devote public resources to demand-enhancing measures. It should be clear, however, that if supply is not responsive to market price (that is, if supply is inelastic, meaning that producers do not publish more Basque-language books when their market price increases), we end up with a symmetrical situation, indicating that demand-enhancing measures will then be ineffective. 6. SUPPLY AND DEMAND FOR LANGUAGE Although the primary focus of economic analysis is on standard, easily identifiable goods and services, it can be of help when investigating more complex commodities. There is a strong tradition in economics of tackling this type of problem, and it has resulted in the emergence of economic approaches to health, education, culture and the environment. These forays into seemingly "non-economic" issues are, however, underpinned by an intrinsically economic philosophy, because issues are addressed through the prism of "scarcity". Hence, they fully accord with economics as defined in 1932 by Lionel Robbins as "a science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means that have alternative uses". As noted earlier in this chapter, all this need not amount to disciplinary imperialism. Proper identification of supply, demand, quantity and price (or of some suitable indicators) is a condition for the market model to yield insights and policy implications. At this time, no model available in the literature is sufficiently developed to allow reference to the "demand for a language" or "supply of a language", except in the most general (and sometimes vague) terms. The priority, therefore, is on developing the theoretical foundations of such a class of models. In what follows, I submit that an analytically and operationally useful concept (which, I believe, also is the crux of all status planning) is that of linguistic environment. 25
We can define a linguistic environment as a theoretical construct used for analytical purposes. It subsumes in an extensive (but obviously not exhaustive) fashion all the relevant information about the status, in the broadest sense of the word, of the various languages present in a given polity at a certain time. This includes the number of speakers, individual proficiency levels in the various languages, the domains of use of each language by different types of actors (individuals, corporations, state, civil society organizations), their attitudes towards the languages considered, the public visibility of these languages, etc. Corpus data, insofar as they impact on language status, are also relevant to the characterization of linguistic environments. There are strong parallels between a linguistic environment and "the environment" in its usual sense of a natural setting modified by human intervention. By way of consequence, many of the tools used in environmental economics to assist in the selection and design of environmental policies carry over into the realm of language planning, once it is recognized that language planning, in essence, comes down to the governance, or management of a linguistic environment (Grin, 1996d, 1998b). In the context of minority-language promotion, "more" and "less" would then be defined in terms of the greater or lesser presence of the minority language in a variety of domains, or more or less favourable conditions for the social reproduction of the language. In the case of some minority language X, we can therefore define a quantitative axis in terms of increasing X-ness of the linguistic environment; for example, the "Catalan-ness" of the linguistic environment in Catalonia has increased markedly since the end of fascism. Defining some indicator of price is considerably more difficult. Contrary to goods and services, a linguistic environment cannot, per se, be bought and sold on the marketplace. Nevertheless, it is conceptually straightforward to imagine some valuation and cost index for minority languages, in terms of the financial, temporal and symbolic resources needed to depart from a laisser-faire policy. Assume that at a given point in time, no promotional policy exists in favour of the minority language. Hence, the linguistic environment is characterized by a low presence of the language in the media, in schools, in business life, etc. This is represented by level M1 in Figure 3. Assuming that the presence of the language is seen as positive, people are likely to value very highly what little of it there is. In other words, their marginal valuation of the presence of the minority language will be high. Suppose now that policies are introduced to increase the presence of the minority language, create more favourable conditions for its social reproduction, etc. The more generalized presence of the language will (assuming that social actors view it as positive) increase their absolute level of satisfaction, or "utility", or "welfare". However, the more generalized the presence of the language, the less urgent its predicament, and the less the amount of resources that people are willing to devote to additional promotion. In other words, their marginal valuation decreases as the presence of the language increases, which defines a standard, downward-sloping demand schedule in Figure 3. This point is easier to understand if one remembers that, owing to the scarcity of resources, those resources that are devoted to language policy would have to be taken away from other programs. At the same time, the cost of transforming the linguistic environment towards a heightened presence of the minority language, while modest at first when the easiest measures are taken, will subsequently tend to increase. This increase need not be stable or continuous: for example, the (re)introduction of, say, Scottish Gaelic in everyday life throughout the Highlands and Islands region may induce some scale and structural effects that will temporarily reduce the unit cost of an increased presence of the language. However, if we step back to consider the process in its entirety, it is likely that a standard upward-sloping supply schedule will appear. FIGURE 3: THE MARKET MODEL--APPLIED TO LINGUISTIC ENVIRONMENTS
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The notion of a linguistic environment of varying levels of X-ness, each level being associated with a production cost reflected in the supply curve, and with a marginal valuation reflected in the demand curve, can therefore lend itself to a representation in terms of the familiar market diagram. At first sight, we have an analytical model in which it is legitimate to speak of the supply of and demand for some language X at least in a language planning context, and after having redefined "language X" as "X-ness of the linguistic environment". However, the variables measured on both axes, as well as the meaning of the supply and demand schedules, are quite different from those in the LSCs market described in the preceding section. This imposes some limits on the interpretability of shifts in supply and demand. Suppose that it has been defined as socially optimal (normally, through a democratic process) to create a linguistic environment in which the minority language enjoys favourable conditions for its social reproduction.(26) In other words, M2 is considered socially preferable to M1 in Figure 3, and the problem can be represented as that of finding the best way to move from M1 to M2. Following the same reasoning as in the preceding section, we could try to formulate policy measures in terms of shifts in supply and demand. This, however, raises a host of difficulties, of which only a few have been explored in the literature; I shall therefore confine myself to two examples. One way of increasing the X-ness of the linguistic environment is to improve the image of language X; the target of such political language marketing can be the speakers themselves, as well as two groups of non-speakers (those whose identity is related to a culture of which language X is one of the main manifestations, and those who have no ancestral connection with X-ness, such as immigrants into a historically X-speaking area). Successful campaigning will shift the demand schedule upwards and to the right in Figure 3, because on the whole, people's marginal valuation of any given level of X-ness in their linguistic environment will increase. Short of a detailed analysis, however, it is hardly possible to locate a new equilibrium point on the diagram, even if we could be reasonably confident about the position and slope of the supply and demand curves. The (main) reason for this is that if demand shifts to the right, thereby defining a higher equilibrium level of X-ness (something we expect to happen, unless the supply curve is vertical), this higher X-ness level is only transitory: the actors (particularly speakers of X) supply X-ness to each other. At any given cost level, the level of X-ness in the linguistic environment will have increased, which is tantamount to a shift of the supply curve. Hence, point B in Figure 3 cannot be an equilibrium point. Locating the latter would require us to have worked out the complex dynamics, including many feedback effects, linking together the supply and demand of X-ness. Consider now another X-ness-increasing policy measure, such the generalized replacement of unilingual (Y only) by bilingual (X and Y) road signs. Depending on how the cost indicator measured of the vertical axis of Figure 3 has been defined, this can be interpreted as a shift of the supply curve, or a mere move along the supply curve (which, within the rationality of a market model, will not occur of its own accord, because some exogenous change must explain the departure from the initial equilibrium at point B). If we view of the supply curve as a long-term one, and if road signs are seen as elements of fixed capital in the production process of Xness, then the bilingualisation of road signs implies a move along the supply curve. If we are reasoning with a short-term supply curve, the bilingualisation of signs will be interpreted as a shift of the latter to the right. Hence, pending careful clarification of the meaning of cost and its relationship with the supply curve, it is not possible to claim that the new equilibrium point should be at point C. Furthermore, in connection with this very problem, we could very well be led to suppose that the demand-side policy of the preceding paragraph induces a downward shift of the supply curve in addition to the one already mentioned. This would be the case if the promotional campaign is interpreted as a means to affect not the "direct" production of X-ness, but the framework conditions of its production. This invites an interpretation based on the distinction between the fixed and variable costs of increasing X-ness, but such an interpretation is also problematic. In short, practically every policy measure imaginable, even those that have a relatively clear interpretation in the context of the LSCs market model of the preceding section, raises very tricky conceptual and logical problems once we attempt to posit them in the type of framework necessary to speak of the supply of or demand for a language itself. While complex, these problems are not insurmountable; careful definitions, without necessarily embarking on an investigation of the causal links connecting supply and demand (and which are dependent, among other things, on the definition of the variables on the horizontal and vertical axes of Figure 3), may prove sufficient to justify (at least within some bounds) the use of terms like "the demand for English", "the supply of Welsh", etc. Such definitional work, however, generally remains incomplete, often resulting in ambiguities in the supply and demand interpretation of policy measures. One example is Grenier and Vaillancourt's model of the supply and demand for French (1983). In this model, the unit of measurement of "French" is unclear, because it sometimes refers to the fact that the language is used (rather than another language such as English), and sometimes to workers' level of proficiency in French. It follows that the meaning of price or cost also remains ambiguous. This probably explains why economists rarely 27
apply the concepts of supply and demand formally to languages themselves. Progress in this direction should start out from the study of time-budgets, because the amount of time spent on X-language activities are a good proxy variable for X-ness; the corresponding empirical work, of course, requires precise (and costly) data on individuals' time use. 7. ABOUT ESTIMATION As the discussion of the preceding sections shows, we are still a long way from an adequate understanding of the supply and demand for a language proper. Conceptually, the problem is far from being fully identified, and empirically, the necessary data are simply not available. As regards the statistical estimation of the supply and demand for language-specific commodities (a presumably easier problem), in so far as the latter are commonly marketed goods and services, estimation is feasible (data permitting) using the standard microeconomic techniques available to this end. One intriguing question is whether the estimation of supply or the estimation of demand is more relevant in a language policy context. In most cases, demand turns out to have key strategic importance. In particular, this is usually the case in bilingual environments with one majority or dominant language and one minority or threatened language. Whether the threatened language is used or not ultimately depends on whether there is a "demand" for it (Grin, 1994b). Such demand, in turn, is mainly a function of social actors' commitment to it. Obviously, the analytical role of "commitment" cannot be understood without also taking account of the constraints that minority community members face, including symbolic constraints. Sociolinguists rightly insist that the demise of minority languages cannot be blamed on insufficient motivation by speakers, if only because of pervasive linguistic oppression in most cases of language attrition. Hence, putting the entire responsibility for language survival and decline on the shoulders of members of the minority community would come down to little else than blaming the victim (on this, see Nelde, Strubell and Williams, 1996, particularly pp. 1-4). This qualification being made, an examination of cases of minority language survival or revitalization usually yields the conclusion that in the final analysis, demand is what matters, with supply usually following--in the absence of a repressive policy. Hence, I will focus in this section on some problems raised by the estimation of demand for language-specific commodities in a bilingual environment. In a policy context, the core question is the extent to which people wish to engage in activities in language X as opposed to language Y, given prevailing conditions that can be altered through policy intervention. In this perspective, a basic (linear) household demand function for some language-specific commodity q could be written as: q = b0 + b1 y + b2 p + b3 f + b4 g + u where the successive bI (I=0,1,2,...) terms are the parameters to be estimated, y is current income, p is the current price of the commodity, f is an indicator of household size and g sums up other relevant variables such as the age structure of the household, an indicator of the educational level of household members, etc. The letter u denotes a random error term. This formulation offers the advantage of being simple and requiring only fairly standard information retrievable from household consumption surveys.(27) Its form is that of a standard demand function similar to what would be used in the case of non-language specific commodities. In a bilingual environment, we would estimate this function for the X-language version and for the Y-language version of the same good--for example, cinema entrances to see "Godzilla" in English or French in Montreal. However, this basic formulation may be seen as somewhat inadequate for two reasons. First, it does not build upon any explicit theory of language use. As I have argued before, consumption of LSCs is embedded in the practice of activities that take place in one or another language, and in both cases, consumption of LSCs is associated with a certain consumption of time. In other words, there is reason to suppose that demand functions for LSCs are different from demand functions for "any" good or service. Second, it is not clear if the independent variable g can adequately capture the role of policy interventions bearing upon language use, and hence upon the consumption of LSCs used when carrying out activities in a given language. If LSCs are viewed as complements to the actors' own time in the practice of certain language-specific activities (for example, reading a book in French, going to see a film in English), more complex demand equations can be derived from a Beckerian model of time allocation. These demand equations (whose formal derivation can be found in Grin, 1990) will not be discussed here.(28) Suffice it to say that testing the type of expression so obtained would require not just standard observations on quantities, wages and prices, but also suitable data on the relative use of time and goods and services in the practice of each activity, both in language X and in language Y. To my knowledge, such estimates are not 28
available.(29) This confirms that extensive work and data gathering is necessary before satisfactory estimations of the demand for LSCs can be made. The one case, however, where empirical work is plentiful is in the estimation of the earnings differentials between actors depending on their language skills. However, these are not estimations of supply and demand as such, but of wage rate differentials that can be interpreted as the (equilibrium) result of the interaction of supply and demand. Since this type of work is represented extensively in this volume, it will not be further discussed here; suffice it to say that the estimation of language-based earnings differentials does not directly hark back to an analysis of supply and demand, but rather to the study of human capital (if the determinants of earnings differentials are actors' second language skills) or discrimination (if the language considered is their first language). In short, supply and demand in relation to language, even in the presumably simpler case of LSCs, are not just complex theoretically; they are also difficult to estimate empirically. Nevertheless, they remain useful interpretive concepts in the context of language policy, as we shall see in the following (and last) section of this chapter. 8. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE POLICY As shown in the preceding sections of this paper, it is important to exercise caution when applying the concepts of supply and demand to language matters. They can, however, constitute helpful interpretive tools. We have seen that a microeconomic model of participation in language-specific activities can yield a demand curve for language-specific commodities (LSCs), and that we can therefore analyse the supply and demand for LSCs in a meaningful way from a language policy standpoint. Although no currently available model provides an adequate basis to speak of the supply of or demand for a language per se, it has been suggested that some useful steps can be taken in this direction, namely if emphasis is placed on the concept of linguistic environment as the actual core of all language (status) policy. In addition, the concepts of supply and demand can help establish a typology of language policy measures. Most of the policies adopted now or in the past, particularly among those bearing on the status of minority languages, can be defined as either supply-side or demand-side. Policies in favour of minority languages have traditionally rested on a supply-side approach. The idea of the supply-side approach in language planning is to make it possible for people to use the minority language. One necessary condition, of course, is that people must have adequate spoken and written command of the language. As a result, much effort goes into teaching the minority language not just to members of the minority community but also, political conditions permitting, to majority language speakers. Another traditional supply-side measure is to encourage (often through various forms of subsidies) the production of minority-language literature, so that those who read the minority language can find material to consume. Various aspects of "normalizing" (in the Catalan sense of normalitzaci, "making [socially] normal") the use of the minority language in public signs or in the administration is also a supply-side measure which contributes to the (re)creation of a minority-language environment. All these probably are necessary conditions for survival (although this point alone would warrant a longer discussion). In any case, it is quite clear that they are not sufficient. Let us take the Irish language policy, which has traditionally been of the supply-side persuasion (Tovey, Hannan and Abramson, 1989), as an example. Irish is an important, often compulsory school subject; public signs make a considerable use of Irish; officially, it must always be possible to address civil servants in Irish; Irish-language literary production is encouraged by the state. However, more than seventy years after the independence, the position of Irish is far from secure. Even if the total number of speakers is, according to official statistics, well over one million, it is common knowledge that only a fraction of this figure has notable competence in the language. The Irish case suggests that an emphasis on supply-side does not guarantee success. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the demise of many languages has been accelerated by cutting off supply, namely, banning the language from schools, public signs, civil service, etc. Hence, it is probably safe to conclude that adequate supply may be a necessary condition for survival, even if it is not a sufficient one. Identifying a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for minority language survival, however, calls for some consideration of the demand side. Demand-side policy measures are less common in language planning. This may be due to the fact that they are difficult to design and to implement. Overlooking demand-side measures, however, is tantamount to taking demand for granted, that is, assuming that the (re)creation of given linguistic surroundings will suffice to ensure that a language will bloom, be used by native speakers and possibly even learned by non-native speakers. This requires a considerable faith in speakers' desire to use the minority language. The policy implications are simple, but far-reaching. If a language policy appears to fail, the diagnosis of the causes of failure can be made more crisp by examining if the policy is overwhelmingly (or even exclusively) of 29
the supply-side or demand-side type. Inefficiency may result from an oversight of either, or from an excessive reliance on the least effective of the two in a particular context. Experience shows that supply-side approaches dominate language policies, and suggests that language planning theory should devote more attention to demandside instruments. The type of approach presented here can therefore prove useful to language specialists, which goes to show that the design of successful language policies provides stimulating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
REFERENCES Beaud, Michel, and Dostaler, Gilles, 1993: La pense conomique depuis Keynes. Paris: Seuil. Becker, Gary, 1965: "A Theory of the Allocation of Time", The Economic Journal, 75, 493-517. Becker, Gary, 1976: The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, Chicago (Chicago University Press). Bourdieu, Pierre, 1982: Ce que parler veut dire: l'conomie des changes linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. Breton, Albert, 1964: "The Economics of Nationalism", Journal of Political Economy, 62, 376-386. Breton, Albert, and Mieszkowski, Peter, 1977: "The Economics of Bilingualism". In W. Oates (ed.), The political economy of fiscal federalism. Lexington [MA]: lexington Books, 261-273. Cooper, Robert, 1989: Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulmas, Florian, 1992: Language and Economy. Oxford: Routledge. Daoust, Denise, and Maurais, Jacques, 1987: "L'amnagement linguistique", in Maurais, J. (ed.), Politique et amnagement linguistiques. Paris: Le Robert and Qubec: Conseil de la langue franaise, 5-46. Fishman, Joshua, 1991: Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gadet, Franoise, 1987: Saussure. Une science de la langue. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Grenier, Gilles and Vaillancourt, Franois, 1983: "An Economic Perspective on Learning a Second Language", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 4, 471-483. Grin, Franois, 1990: "A Beckerian Approach to Language Use: Guidelines for Minority Language Policy", Cahiers du CRDE, No. 0890 / Cahiers du Dpartement d'conomique, No. 9007, Universit de Montral. -- , 1994a: "The Economics of Language: Match or Mismatch?", International Political Science Review, 15, 2542. -- , 1994b: "Minority Languages and Regional Economic Development: Resources and Priorities", in L. Dafis (ed.), Economic Development and Lesser Used Languages: Partnerships for Action. Llanbedr Pont Steffan (Cymru/Wales): Cwmni Iaith Cyfyngedig, 34-40. -- , 1996a: "Economic Approaches to Language and Language Planning: An Introduction", International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 121, 1-16. -- , 1996b: "The Economics of Language: Survey, Assessment, and Prospects", International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 121, 17-44. -- , 1996c: "European research on the Economics of Language: Recent Results and Relevance to Canada", in New Canadian Perspectives: Offficial Languages and the Economy. Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage, 37-49. -- , 1996d: "Conflit ethnique et politique linguistique", Relations internationales, 88, 381-396. -- , 1998a: "The Economic Approach to Language and Ethnic Identity", in J. Fishman (ed.), Language and Ethnic Identity: Before and After the Ethnic Revival, forthcoming. -- , 1998b: "Language Planning as Diversity Management: Some Analytical Principles", Plurilingua, 21 [Contact and Conflict: Language Planning and Minorities; Bonn: Dmmler], 141-156. -- , and Vaillancourt, Franois, 1997: "The Economics of Multilingualism: Overview of the Literature and Analytical Framework", in W. Grabe (ed.), Multilingualism and Multilingual Communities (ARAL XVII). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 43-65. Hamburger, Henry, 1979: Games as Models of Social Phenomena. New York: Freeman.
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Hargreaves, Shaun, and Varoufakis, Yanis, 1995: Game Theory. A Critical Introduction. London & New York: Routledge. Heinelt, Hubert, 1993: "Policy und Politics. berlegungen zum Verhltnis von Politikinhalten und Politikprozessen", Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 24, 307-327. Kloss, Heinz, 1969: Research Possibilities on Group Bilingualism: A Report. Qubec: Centre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme. Labrie, Normand, 1992: "L'analyse de l'amnagement linguistique", in Giordan, H. (ed.), Les minorits en Europe. Droits linguistiques et droits de l'homme. Paris: Kim, 63-77. Linder, Staffan, 1970: The Harried Leisure Class. New York: Columbia University Press. Lloyd-Humphreys, Humphrey, 1991: "The Geolinguistics of Breton", in: C.H. Williams, (ed.), Linguistic Minorities, Society and Territory. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 96-120. Mayer, Thomas, 1993: Truth versus Precision in Economics. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Nelde, Peter, Strubell, Miquel and Williams, Glyn, 1996: Euromosaic. The Production and Reproduction of the Minority Language Groups in the European Union. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio, 1968: Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato. Milan: Bompiani (English translation, 1983: Language as Work and Trade. South Hadley [MA]: Bergin and Garvey). Scharpf, Fritz, 1997: Games real actors play. Actor-centered institutionalism in policy research. Boulder [CO]: Westview. Stokey, Edith and Zeckhauser, Richard, 1978: A primer for policy analysis. New York: Norton. Swedberg, Richard, 1994: Une histoire de la sociologie conomique, with foreword by Alain Caill. Bruxelles: Descle de Brouwer. Te Puni Kokiri, 1997: Maori language policy framework: the Crown's Treaty of Waitangi and other legal obligations. Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri / Ministry of Maori Affairs. Tovey, Hillary, Hannan, Damian and Abramson, Hal, 1988: Why Irish? Irish Identity and the Irish Language. Baile tha Cliath [Dublin]: Bord na Gaeilge. Vaillancourt, Franois, 1985: "Les crits en conomie de la langue: brve revue et introduction au recueil", in F. Vaillancourt (ed.), Economie et langue [Documentation du Conseil de la langue franaise, No. 20]. Qubec: Editeur officiel du Qubec, 11-25.
18. As Coulmas (1992: 9) points out, de Saussure did make a comparison, in his Cours de linguistique gnrale published in 1916, between the "value" of a word and the "value" of a five-franc coin. However, it seems clear from the text that this parallel was only intended to underscore the conventional character of "value" in both cases. 19. This is not to say that referring to a language as a "treasure" must either be a rhetorical simile or be grounded on a full demonstration of its value in an economic sense. For example, the Waitangi Tribunal, which was set up in New Zealand to review disputes between Maori and the British Crown, has officially recognized the Maori language as a Taonga, which translates not just as a treasure, but as an heirloom passed down from one generation to the next. In this case, the term "treasure" is used for lack of a more appropriate English word to translate the concept of Taonga (on the legal consequences of the Waitangi Treaty, see e.g. Te Puni Kokiri, 1997). 20. In this essay, "economics" refers to mainstream economic theory, perhaps more appropriately defined as "orthodox" theory. On this notion, see Beaud and Dostaler (1993). 21. There may well be some confusion here, since a positive exchange value can only appear if there is positive use value. In this case, the problem may have to do with Coulmas's apparent confusion between "utility", "usefulness" and "value" (1992: 57). 22. If there were only one solution, there would be no choice, and hence not much of an economic or policy analysis problem.
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23. The reader should note that the word "commodities", in this paper, mean "goods and services", and that either expression will be used interchangeably. By contrast, in Beckerian parlance, "commodities" are produced by the actor who combines his time with goods and services bought on the market. In this paper, "activities" is what corresponds to Beckerian "activities". 24. The terminology is still, at the time of writing, not fully stabilized in the literature. Hence, the expressions "minority language preservation", "revitalization" or "promotion" are used interchangeably in this paper. Since the need for revitalization usually follows a period of attrition, it is mostly appropriate to think of it as "reverse language shift" as analysed by Fishman (1991). 25. Before moving on to the implications of the model, some remarks about its underlying assumptions are in order. Some readers will have noticed that having actors maximize their utility through the practice of activities taking place in one or another language is an extension of the "new theory of consumer behaviour". Credit for the emergence of this theory (particularly as regards the interpretation of the allocation of time) should be shared between Staffan Linder and Gary Becker, but most of the fame has accrued to the latter. Becker's work, however, has attracted criticism as well as praise, and has often been characterized as crude "economic imperialism" (among many others, see e.g. Caill in his foreword to Swedberg, 1994). This claim may be justified, but this question need not detain us, because what is at issue here is quite another matter. As I have insisted elsewhere, it is possible to use the Beckerian "technique" without harboring any imperialistic dreams. Quite simply, it provides a unique way to analyse some aspects of behaviour, and it is perfectly compatible with the type of interdisciplinary partnership that I regularly advocate (Grin, 1996a). In particular, the social and cultural embeddedness of human action can be recognized even when using a Beckerian model--hostile to any sociological treatment of embeddedness as Becker himself may have been. 26. For a presentation of the notion of "social reproduction" of a language community, see Nelde, Strubell and Williams (1996). 27. The linear function can easily be replaced by other functional forms which, though lending themselves to estimations through ordinary least squares, may provide a better "fit" for the data. Usual candidates are the double log, semilog and inverse semilog form. 28. For the interested reader, the main steps go as follows. Let us assume simple functional forms--for example, fixed coefficients in the combination of goods and time and Cobb-Douglas utility functions. We then end up with a more targeted demand function of the form: q= (St )/ where S stands for an actor's full income, that is, the amount he would earn, given an hourly wage rate w, if all his time T were devoted to gainful employment. The following terms are more complex: is an indicator of the actor's preference structure (assumed to be constant over time), represents the amount of the good q required to carry out the activity considered (also assumed to be constant), and represents the shadow price of the activity, combining the unit price of the good, p and the unit price of time, that is, the wage rate w. It is important to note first that this is an individual, not a household demand function, because the underlying model is one of individual language choice, and second that this expression is language-specific, in that it holds for the consumption of good or service q as part of carrying out an activity in a given language. This expression can be rewritten in a testable form. Letting Z stand for the amount of activity performed and assuming fixed coefficients in the practice of activities, we can define: Z = x/ = t/ where is the amount of time needed (per unit of activity) to carry out the activity considered, and t is actual time input. Taking logarithms on both sides of the demand function, we get: ln q = b0 + ln w - ln (w+p) where b0 = lnT + ln + ln. 29. In order to avoid circularity in the estimation procedure, estimates of and should be obtained independently (for example, from a survey), and not derived from the observations on prices, time budgets and quantities themselves. Even in the case of demand functions derived from simple specifications of the underlying utility function and production function for activities, it is also doubtful whether average values of the relative time and goods inputs per unit of activity are appropriate, because they are likely to depend on language proficiency, which varies across individuals.
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ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH(30) Silvana Dalmazzone Department of Environmental Economics University of York, United Kingdom INTRODUCTION THE VALUE OF A LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITY PERSPECTIVE LANGUAGES AS PUBLIC GOODS WHEN TO INVEST IN LANGUAGE POLICIES: CRITICAL MASS, THRESHOL ECONOMIC INSTRUMENTS FOR LANGUAGE POLICY: LOOKING FOR A DECENTRALISED SOLUTION THEORY AND THE REAL WORLD: VALUES OF LANGUAGES, INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCES, AND AGGREGATE BEHAVIOUR CONCLUSIONS / REFERENCES INTRODUCTION Unlike many other kinds of competence, the knowledge of a language yields more benefits to an individual the larger the number of people who share it. Knowing a widely spoken language enables the individual to communicate with a larger number of persons and widens the set of possible interactions (employment, investment and trade opportunities, exchange of information, cultural activities, etc.) available to them. Learning a language, in this sense, means becoming part of a network--a community made up of complementary components in which every new entrant, besides gaining access to the benefits of a set of services, also adds to the potential benefits of all other members (i.e., generates an external effect).(31) This is an important attribute of languages--though not of languages alone. Indeed, something very similar distinguishes most of the services related to communication, information, and transportation. Examples include telephony (where the benefit any customer obtains from the service depends on the number of people with whom the connection enables them to communicate), video formats (the larger the number of users of the same system, the larger the availability of compatible cassettes for sale, rent and exchange), computer operating systems, softwares, and so on. Considering the significance of network industries in modern economies, the vast attention they have received in recent years does not surprise. The purpose of this study is twofold. The first objective is to use the lessons from the economics of networks to gain insights into the rationale for individual choices concerning issues of language and into the economic and social implications of these choices. The second objective is to broaden the analysis and to examine real-world language issues to whose understanding a network externality approach can contribute, and to consider those which, conversely, do not fruitfully lend themselves to this line of inquiry. THE VALUE OF A LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITY PERSPECTIVE In the presence of network externalities, the "user-value" of belonging to a given linguistic group increases with the size of the group itself. Languages, in this respect, differ from most "ordinary" market goods, whose market demand slopes downward (to reflect the fact that incremental value usually decreases with the number of units bought). Why do languages differ from ordinary goods? What happens when the size of a linguistic group expands? Two distinct effects can be identified. The first is a direct effect and is related to the complementarity inherent in most forms of communication: in order to benefit from my knowledge of a language, I need to interact with at least one other person who knows that language. In a community of n individuals speaking the same language, there are n(n-1) potential binary interactions. Consider, for example, a community made up of eight individuals who can communicate with each other through a common language L. If we consider an interaction between, say, A and B initiated by A (that is, A-L-B) as different from an interaction between A and B initiated by B (that is, B-L-A), it is easy to verify, with the help of Figure 1, that, through the interface of a common language L, 87=56 potential interactions can take place: each of the eight individuals can use the common language L to communicate with each of the other seven members of the speech community.
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ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH Silvana Dalmazzone
It is also easy to see that an additional (n+1)th individual speaking the same language would yield direct benefits to all others by adding 2n potential new interactions. In our example, if a ninth L-speaker joins the community, in addition to gaining herself the opportunity of 98=72 potential interactions he or she also gives the other network members the benefits associated with 72-56=16 new potential exchanges. The above mechanism is particularly powerful as a rationale behind second language choices.(32) For these choices, the main value associated with a language is its communication value--its capacity to serve as an interface in the largest possible number of potential interactions.(33) The mechanism also helps explain why a language, once it has acquired an advantage over other potential alternatives, tends to "take off", its comparative advantage getting greater and greater. To repeat, this is true especially for a "tool-language", one that is chosen for its communication value, with all the other values associated with language use (related, for example, to an individual's culture, national identity, ethnicity and so on) not allowed to intervene in the analysis to make the decision-making process more complex. The international dominance acquired by the English speech community is the most obvious illustration of this point. English, with its 397 million secondary speakers,(34) is not only the most commonly studied foreign language, but by and large the most used language for commerce, communication and information storage (70 percent of the world's mail and about 80 percent of all information stored in data banks are estimated to be in English). The number of potentially economically beneficial interactions allowed by a knowledge of English so largely outnumbers what any other language can offer, that a choice based on the economic value of a second language can hardly be a different one. There is, however, a second kind of effect deriving from the expansion of the network. An additional member of a linguistic group will also provide an indirect benefit to other members by increasing the demand for languagesensitive goods and services (schools, libraries, bookstores, broadcasting, theatre productions, etc.) and thereby, if economies of scale are present, improving the supply and possibly the variety of such services within the community. Both the direct and indirect effects so far examined are subject to a number of caveats. I note a few of these immediately. There are no doubt others, possibly as important as those I discuss, that I do not mention because they have escaped my attention. It is generally assumed, throughout the literature and in the preceding discussion, that the externalities associated with networks are positive externalities. One can however think of negative externalities. Belonging to a speech community will also generally imply exposure to that community's culture and ideologies. That exposure may be very corrosive and even destructive. A small country, whose indigenous culture and set of beliefs are different from those of the larger linguistic community with whom it shares a language, could, under such circumstances, lose cultural and ideological elements on which it places a high value. Not belonging to the linguistic network would provide that country with a natural protection or with a shelter against cultural colonisation and a rain of unwanted "foreign" mass cultural products. The size of the speech community is obviously not the only relevant factor in determining the economic value of a language. Chinese, with an estimated 800 million primary speakers (a number roughly equivalent to the sum of primary and secondary English speakers) allows, in comparison to English, for quantitatively similar, but far less varied opportunities to communicate because interactions within the Chinese community are more homogeneous than those between the multiplicity of backgrounds and cultures which engage in all sorts of exchanges with each other by making use of English.(35) Furthermore, in so far as linguistic communication serves the purpose of establishing economically beneficial relationships, relevant factors besides the number of people who speak a language are the geopolitical location of a country, its level of industrialization, and its economic relations with other countries. For the Netherlands, a relatively small country whose economy has relied heavily for centuries on foreign trade, but whose language is not widely spoken outside its borders, the economic value of acquiring the languages of its most important trading partners (English, German, and French) is very high. Not surprisingly, public investment in foreign language training in the Netherlands is one of the highest in the world. 34
A related question concerns the content of communication. In other words, we are not only preoccupied with the number of persons with whom the knowledge of a language makes it possible to communicate, but also with the question of what the communication is about. The literary and artistic productions as well as the touristic attractiveness of a country, for example, do contribute to the utility value of proficiency in its language. The importance of the communication potential in terms of content becomes then particularly evident if we consider that languages can yield utility not only directly, as a kind of commodity, but also as means of production. Opportunities in the labour market are heavily affected by language skills, as well as the availability of linguistically trained labour force affects location decisions by multinational enterprises. The diffusion of innovations in information and communications technology is leading to a higher worldwide economic integration based on non-spatial complementarities--among which a crucial one is certainly a common language (Harris, 1998). Firms whose activities are spread across many locations have needs of internal communications, and global business require trained multilinguals for the purpose of distribution in local markets. This is what has lead Bourdieu (1982), Bloom and Grenier (1992), Breton (1998) and Pendakur and Pendakur (1998), among others, to recognise language as an asset--indeed, a form of human capital. We expect, therefore, the investment individuals make in foreign language learning to be directed towards the most economically valuable languages. In this domain too we can find exceptions to the size of a speech community as the determinant of the value of a language. Once again Chinese is a good example. Despite the number of speakers, its cultural tradition, its political importance, and the potential of its internal market, Chinese as a foreign language is far less in demand than, for instance, Japanese. The latter, by contrast, has undergone during the 1980s a 400 percent increase worldwide of the number of people who study it as a foreign language. This is a reflection of the potential for its economic exploitation, which in this case depends on the fact that Japan, much more than China, has become a major trading partner in the world global economy. Furthermore, when a language serves as a means of production, specific features of the field in which is to be employed may be as, or even more important in language choices than the size of the speech community. Many domains of highly sophisticated modern communication--domains such as science, technology, medicine--have developed and become specialised within a relatively few standardised common languages.(36) These languages are now fully adapted to serve these communicative functions, to the point that in practice translation in other languages may in many instances actually be difficult. A further exception to the rule which wants the value of a (second) language to be a function of the size of its speech community is illustrated by the numerous cases in which languages become an integral part of a struggle for cultural and political recognition. Irish in Northern Ireland is a classic example of how a language that had long been displaced by another can undergo a spontaneous strong revival. After conquering Ireland during the middle of the 16th century, England virtually eliminated the Irish-speaking ruling classes and their cultural institutions. While English became the lingua franca of government and public life, the Irish language became associated with economic and cultural backwardness. In addition, the network externalities in favour of English became stronger and stronger over time as telecommunications, tourism and trade increasingly endorsed it as the internationally dominant language. It is only with the resurgence of a struggle for ethnic and national identity in the late Sixties that people started to learn Irish again. Many members of the republican movement, including Jerry Adams (the current president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of IRA), learnt Irish in prison. A gesture of defiance and a boost to self-esteem, knowledge of Irish also had an important practical advantage: prisoners could converse in a language that their guards did not understand. The largest group of fluent Irish speakers is now to be found among those who are less than 25 years old. It is evident that the value on the basis of which these individuals choose a second language is not related to the overall size of the speech community which their investment enables them to communicate with. Nor, for that matter, is the choice governed by the value of that language as a means of production, in the sense of its return on the labour market. The value of a language, in these cases, is perceived mainly in terms of its contribution to national identity. A further example where this sort of motivation plays a role is given by the increasing number of Canadian Anglophones who, outside Quebec, learn French or send their children to French immersion schools (namely, schools in which students from the linguistic majority are taught most subjects in the French language). Although the quality of education offered by such schools is generally highly valued, the reason motivating the decision to become bilingual is also, to a considerable measure, a gesture of goodwill to Francophones in all Canada--a choice, in other words, where national unity plays a role. The above arguments are intended to point out that the number of speakers alone is not necessarily, and certainly not always, the only and the most appropriate factor in determining the communication value of a language. In some situations other variables--the variety of the potential interactions, the particular purpose or job for which the language is to be used, the geopolitical and economic position of a country and so on--will affect language choices. Subject to appropriate qualifications, however, the network externality argument retains its power and 35
general appeal: more often than not the size of a language network is the fundamental factor that determines the expected value of a language. Moreover, the decision of an individual who joins a speech community by learning the language of that community generates not only the advantage of new communication possibilities from which he or she benefits, but also the additional advantage, gained by all other members of the community, which is associated with an expansion of the network--and hence with the communicative potential of that language. In other words, the marginal social benefit from the expansion of a speech community is larger than the benefit obtained by a particular person deciding to learn that language and join the community. Individuals will not therefore take into account the whole dimension of the benefits associated with their language choices. Hence, there is reason to believe that the aggregate outcome of individual decisions will be inefficient: decentralised choices will provide a smaller network than is socially optimal, and the linguistic "compatibility" offered by multilingualism will not be generated in cases where it would be socially optimal to do so. By applying conclusions reached within the literature on network externalities to problems of language, Church and King (1993) derive a formal proof that the private optimum of foreign language learning (resulting from the uncoordinated investments of individuals maximising their own utility) and the collective optimum (which maximises total social welfare) may not coincide. There may therefore be room for an improvement in collective welfare if institutions arise or forms of regulatory intervention are designed, capable of internalising those effects that tend to be left out of an individual's decision process. For the market mechanism to be able to achieve an efficient outcome, in fact, a necessary condition is that each agent faces the true social benefits and costs of their actions--not only the individual ones--and hence makes choices that reflect those benefits and costs. The bearing of this argument for our analysis is that the maximisation of collective welfare, in the presence of network externalities in the "market for languages", requires collective institutions capable of internalising the externality, that is, of correcting the inefficiencies in the aggregate result of individual choices. We will discuss in a later section what forms public intervention may take in pursuing such objective. LANGUAGES AS PUBLIC GOODS The strength of the network externality effect is also related to the economic nature of the goods to which it is associated. Within a speech community the use of a language and of the services that are dependent on it can be considered a public good. Public goods are in fact defined as goods that exhibit consumption indivisibilities (that is, one person's consumption of a good does not diminish the amount available for others) and, additionally, are fully accessible to all.(37) The public good nature of the services deriving, for example, from the diffusion of bilingualism within a linguistically heterogeneous community, reinforces the externality in the sense that it adds more reasons why a decentralised decision process will not take into account all the benefits and costs involved.(38) Consider, for example, a linguistically heterogeneous community, such as Switzerland, where different groups speak different languages. The diffusion of bilingualism or multilingualism would lower the cost of information processing, communication, mobility of the labour force across the borders of linguistic areas, and the cost of sharing services between different linguistic groups within that community. This would free resources and bring about opportunities that would not have been economically feasible in a linguistically clustered environment. Since the potential gains from multilingualism, once in place, would be enjoyed by everybody within the community, multilingualism is a public good.(39) Notice that the benefits associated with the diffusion of a common language stem from three different sources. The first is the reward obtained by each individual who joins a language community, and is due to the new potential for communication thus acquired. The second source is the reward each member of a language community obtains whenever their community expands, and is due to network externalities. Because the communication opportunities offered by the larger speech community are enjoyed by all those who have joined the network by learning that language--and the gains from the network obtained by one individual do not conflict with those obtained by others--the common language within that community is a public good. It is, indeed, the public good nature of a common language that gives rise to the externality. The third source of benefits spills over the boundaries of the speech community. The spread of a common language enhances trade, the sharing of knowledge and hence the creation and the diffusion of innovations, and it facilitates organisation, coordination and management in most economically and socially relevant activities. In a linguistically fragmented society the prevailing form of communication tends to be horizontal--that is, taking place within homogeneous communities and social strata. A society that overcomes fragmentation and develops a common language breaks the impediments to vertical communication between the different levels at which individuals and groups interact within that socio-economic system. A widespread proficiency in one language that meets all the communicative needs of that system is a powerful engine of social and economic integration. A common language, therefore, makes for lower production as well as transaction costs within an economy, and hence for lower prices in exchange: it enhances competition. 36
Empirical observation seems to confirm that linguistic fragmentation, in the absence of a lingua franca, is not compatible with a high socio-economic development--at least in terms of the standard parameters of conventional economic evaluation and accounting.(40) Though Table I contains no information about the diffusion of a lingua franca, it makes clear that linguistic fragmentation, measured by the number of languages in use in a particular territory, tends to be associated with a lower level of per capita income.(41) The network, in other words, does not benefit only its members, that is its native speakers and those who have learnt the common language, but the economic system as a whole--including therefore the individuals belonging to linguistic minorities who have chosen not to join the network. The common language network therefore-thanks to this third source of benefits--is a real public good. TABLE I: PER CAPITA INCOME AND LINGUISTIC FRAGMENTATION IN SOME INDUSTRIAL AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Number of Country Population Per capita income (USD) languages (millions) Benin 4.5 390 (1987) 52 Bolivia 6 570 (1988) 38 Chad 5 160 (1987) 117 Denmark 5 18,450 (1988) 4 Ethiopia 50 120 (1987) 120 France 56 16,090 (1987) 10 Germany(FRG) 60 18,480 (1988) 7 Iceland 0.25 21,660 (1987) 1 Indonesia 174 440 (1988) 659 Japan 122 21,020 (1988) 5 Netherlands 14.5 14,520 (1987) 5 Papua New Guinea 3.7 810 (1988) 849 Philippines 59 630 (1988) 164 Rwanda 6 320 (1988) 2 Sudan 23 480 (1988) 135 Sweden 8 19,300 (1988) 5 UK 57 12,810 (1988) 7 Uruguay 3 2,470 (1988) 1 Vietnam 64 180 (1985) 77 Source: adapted from Coulmas, 1992: 24. At least two considerations stem from this line of argument. First, though the benefits are distributed over the entire collectivity, the native speakers of the language that becomes dominant do not share in the costs of expanding the network and developing it into a lingua franca. By the simple fact that the common language happens to be their mother tongue, people from dominant linguistic groups earn a benefit that required no specific investment on their part--what Breton and Mieszkowski (1977) called the "seigniorage of language". Countries (or linguistic groups) that enjoy such seigniorage can obtain a real economic gain thanks to the positive effect on their terms of trade.(42) And countries (or linguistic groups) that instead have to make an investment in order to join the network cannot exact a payment in return for their "private" contribution to the provision of a public good.(43) The second consideration is that, as it always happens with public goods, voluntary private provision underestimates the true demand for the good within the community. Take a typical example of a public good such as street lighting. Even though most people would attach a positive value to the comfort and safety of a city which is not left in the darkness at night, there is no incentive for individuals or private companies to invest and supply such a service. There would be no way to ascertain the benefit that accrues to each member of the community, nor to compel a payment for that benefit. In addition, it would not be possible to exclude from the benefit those who are unwilling to share in its costs. A few individuals, presumably those who get the highest net utility from the investment, may still install street lights. The equilibrium outcome will however not be that which would be collectively the best. The investment in a common language is in many ways analogous to an investment in street lighting. The fact that for many individuals the cost of personally investing in a second language may exceed the expected benefits (and consequently they would not undertake such an investment) does not mean that their own perceived benefit, and hence their willingness to pay, is zero: it simply means that the benefit is less than the market price they would have to pay to privately engage in learning a second language. 37
Public provision of services meant to enhance language learning could, in these situations, increase collective benefit. The optimal level of public investment would result from summing the willingness to contribute of all members of the community corresponding to a given level of provision of such services--rather than, as it happens in a private market, by looking at the total amount of language-learning services demanded within that collectivity at the market price. WHEN TO INVEST IN LANGUAGE POLICIES: CRITICAL MASS, THRESHOLDS, AND SELF-REINFORCING MECHANISMS IN THE DIFFUSION OF LANGUAGES While English has accelerated its expansion and is becoming the worldwide lingua franca, about 50 percent of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken on earth are endangered, that is spoken only by adults who no longer teach them to their children. An additional 40 percent may soon be threatened because the number of their speakers in the latest generation is declining measurably (Brenzinger, 1992; Crawford, 1992; Krauss, 1992). In other words, we are facing a decline in the diversity of languages on a global, unprecedented scale, that is likely to lead to the disappearance of 90 percent of existing languages within the next century.(44) Only about 600 languages, the 10 percent of the world's total, would remain-- for now--relatively secure. What are the welfare implications of such a trend towards a simplification of the world linguistic landscape? In other words, are there reasons to be concerned about the loss of linguistic diversity--and if there are, in what circumstances may intervention be appropriate? While linguists have long been studying the sociological causes and the dynamics of language decline and extinction, the question I would like to address here is whether there is any insight to be obtained from an economic approach to the problem--in particular, from an extension of the network externality argument developed in the previous sections. By looking at speech communities as communication networks, it becomes apparent how the advantage that languages acquire with increasing diffusion is akin to the competitive advantage that large suppliers accumulate in industries displaying increasing returns to scale. The market for languages, in other words, could display some of the basic features of a natural monopoly.(45) A particularly interesting point is that the presence of positive effects related to network size can give rise to a "critical mass", that is to a minimum size for a linguistic group, relative to the whole community, such that the group can be sustained in equilibrium. Minority languages of small populations, unless effectively protected, are easily assimilated and tend to disappear, because the return on a human capital investment in these languages is perceived as low, ceteris paribus, relative to the yield on other languages. Conversely, once diffusion has reached a given level, further expansion may be self-sustaining. In these situations, the outcome is affected by a coordination problem which, in turn, depends heavily upon expectations. This is because there is no independently "best" choice that one individual can make: it depends on what the others do. Decisions are influenced by what people know about the intentions of others in their environment. Whenever such evaluations involve some degree of uncertainty, the coordination of the diffusion process among individuals requires augmented signalling devices in order to spread information and reinforce positive, and eventually self-fulfilling, expectations. Language policies such as that of the Acadmie Franaise, one of the French official language planning institutions, that advocates and supports the use of French in international scientific interactions (see Coulmas, 1992: 106-108), can be seen as an attempt to counteract the establishment of English as the unique lingua franca of the academic world by protecting and making visible the community that still uses French, and alleviating the coordination problem among its members. Indeed most of the examples of protectionist language policies, such as those of the Basque Country, Catalonia, Quebec, the Republic of Serbia, the "English only" laws of several US States--and countless other examples--are often motivated by a concern about some critical threshold in a language diffusion process. Moreover, in such processes, history matters. Despite very similar initial conditions, for example, different languages coexisting over a given territory may follow a completely different development over time. For this to happen, important historical events and large scale factors are not needed; an even minimum divergence, caused perhaps by a small random event, may evolve into an accumulated advantage thanks to the self-reinforcing effect of the network externalities. The existence of local positive feedbacks in the adoption of languages generates path-dependence: the linguistic composition of a given society may evolve more as a consequence of some crucial past event than of the current objective situation. This also implies that the evolutionary successful outcome--the language that turns out to be dominant, for example--is not necessarily the one of maximum possible benefit: the survivor may well be the first, instead of the fittest.
38
Given the way the United States was formed, the emergence of English as the dominant language in the face of genuine alternatives, such as German, is an example of a linguistic outcome that is the product of a "historical accident". The fact that an English-speaking United States was the successor to Britain's hegemonic position in the XIX century largely explains why English is now the world lingua franca. That too is a historical accident. Similar patterns have four generic sources: large set-up or fixed costs, learning effects, coordination effects, and adaptive expectations (Brian Arthur, 1988: 11). These are conditions that are shared by many evolving complex systems, of which culture, traditions--and language, as we have seen from the above discussion--are important examples. Large set-up and fixed costs such as those associated with the investment necessary to the maintenance and development of a modern language give the advantage of falling unit costs as the size of the speech community expands.(46) Learning effects improve the efficiency of investments in language capital, of the provision of language-related services, and more generally of the activities meant to promote a language diffusion and export. Coordination effects refer to the advantages associated with undertaking actions and making choices synergetic to those of the other individuals in the same environment. Adaptive expectations, finally, account for the fact that the increased prevalence of a language enhances beliefs of further prevalence. ECONOMIC INSTRUMENTS FOR LANGUAGE POLICY: LOOKING FOR A DECENTRALISED SOLUTION We have seen, in what precedes, that the presence of network externalities in the diffusion of languages often means that there is scope for language policies aimed at increasing collective welfare. We have then tried to qualify this conclusion by discussing a set of specific "environmental" conditions that can contribute to make some form of public intervention desirable. The following step is, then, to look at the policy options: how, when dealing with language issues, to intervene to facilitate an outcome that is as close as possible to a social optimum. An interesting question to address concerns possible ways, in the presence of network externalities, of decentralising the welfare maximising solution: in other words, what kind of policies--aimed, for example, at reducing the costs of language acquisition--could help change an incentive structure that leads people to choose a suboptimal level of investment in languages, so that a better collective outcome could spontaneously result from a self-selection and decision process by individuals. Let us consider a collectivity facing the problem of choosing the optimal investment in multilingualism--for example, the level of resources to be devoted to supplying language training, to stimulating the demand for it, and to reducing its price by means of subsidies, in order to diffuse knowledge of languages other than each individual's mother tongue. An economic approach to the problem suggests that, for a language policy to be efficient, two basic criteria should be satisfied: (i) The level of multilingualism to be sought should be the economically efficient one--that is the one at which the marginal cost of language diffusion equals the marginal benefit from having a linguistically skilled collectivity. (ii) The level of multilingualism selected should be achieved at minimum cost. To see what this second condition implies, let us consider an hypothetical example. Suppose the government wishes to invest in foreign language training, with the objective of generating an increase (up to the level deemed to be the socially optimal one) in the share of the population with multilingual skills. There are many ways in which this policy objective may be pursued: for example, by introducing foreign languages as a compulsory subject in schools from a given level upwards, by setting up immersion schools, by subsidising access to private language courses for interested individuals, or by means of measures that motivate new citizens to conserve their original tongues while acquiring the majority language of the country. Are all such policies equally powerful and, in particular, equally economically efficient as instruments for achieving the selected objective? A basic result of microeconomic theory suggests that they will not, in general, be equivalent from the point of view of the cost they imply for reaching a pre-determined level of multilingual competence within the population. Because the costs associated with learning given languages will, in general, differ across individuals, age groups, mother tongues, and a number of other variables, there is potential for reaching the predetermined objective at a lower cost by trying to selectively invest where the cost in terms of required language training is lowest. In principle, in fact, cost-effectiveness--the property of minimising such cost--requires that the investment be targeted so that the marginal yield of language training (in terms of acquired competence per monetary unit invested) be identical for each learner. This would imply, for example, that policies that aim at raising linguistic skills by uniformly investing in the population as a whole are bound not to be cost-effective. It would therefore also imply that if learning is shown 39
to depend, for example, on personal motivation, then an investment targeted at the most motivated part of the population would enhance cost-effectiveness. If all languages are recognised to have an economic value, this at times may suggest a very effective policy would be one that gives an incentive to minority groups not to abandon their original languages when they learn the country's dominant one. This, of course, presupposes a broad recognition of the importance of competence in languages other than the majority one, for purposes of international commerce, development, investment, diplomacy, as well as for the value associated with cultural diversity.(47) Such a direction had been taken, for example, by the Australian language policy through the inclusion of a number of foreign languages (including modern Greek, Turkish, Italian, Arabic and others), which are mother tongues of important immigrant groups, among the Higher School Certificate subjects, and by establishing a parallel network to broadcast in languages other than English. Another way of taking advantage of the diversity in learning costs is to aim at decentralising the decision at the level of the individual. The same principles that have led to recognise certain economic instruments as more cost-effective ways than direct regulation for implementing environmental policies (say) apply here. Direct regulation imposes a uniform requirement, whereas, for example, incentive schemes would leave it up to the individual--who has the best information on his or her motivation, skills, and hence personal learning costs--to decide their own optimal level of investment. A subsidy (for instance under the form of vouchers for training in language schools) would simply play the role to fill the gap between the individually and the socially optimal level of investment in language--the gap generated by the network externality. Most of the foregoing discussion was concerned with policies aimed at the diffusion of a lingua franca or of multilingual skills among the population. The principles, however, apply in the case of policies directed at the protection of minority languages. In this instance, interventions that impose uniform regulatory standards on all people, activities, and so on, will not minimize social costs. The reason for this is that uniformity does not take into account that complying with the regulations is not equally costly (at the margin) for all individuals. An example of a uniform regulatory measure is the requirement that all advertising or all commercial signs in a given territory be in the protected language. If the aim of the policy is that there should be advertising or signs in no other language than in the protected language, uniformity is indeed appropriate. Such a policy, however, may entail high costs in terms of suppression of the freedom of all to express themselves in the language of their choice. A more flexible way to protect the minority language would be to resort to a system of quotas. In regards to commercial signs, for example, a regulator could issue a certain number of permits that would guarantee that on a given territory a certain proportion, 70 percent for example, of all signs should be in the protected language-the remainder to be divided among the other languages in the territory. If these permits are then allowed to be transferable, individuals who would feel constrained by a mandatory use of the protected language will have an opportunity to purchase a permit to, say, put up commercial signs in their preferred language. Relative supply and demand will lead to a market price for the permits. The advantage of such a mechanism is to offer an alternative (at a cost equal to the equilibrium price of the permits) to those who are more adversely affected by the regulation. In turn, this translates itself into a reward for those who are more willing to participate in the protection of the target language. If the market in permits is allowed to operate in equilibrium, permits will be allocated in such a way as to minimize social costs--which in this case means minimizing the perceived costs of compliance with the language regulation. In such a scheme the main responsibility of the regulator is to issue permits in such proportions as to insure the preservation of the target language while being respectful of the differences in preferences within the population. The previous argument assumes, for simplicity, that we wish to establish targets and design policies on economic grounds alone. Our objective was primarily to suggest that economic principles have some input into the process, and to analyse it--by no means to suggest they are the only input. As most domains of social policy, including health care, educational choices, and environmental protection to cite just a few, language policies are shaped and influenced by ethical principles relating to perceptions of fairness and justice. It is quite possible that policy targets derived from economic principles may conflict with those derived from some ethical standpoints, and the community may choose the latter. Nevertheless, even when a target is chosen on noneconomic grounds, economic principles may still be useful in identifying the best way in which the target could be achieved. THEORY AND THE REAL WORLD: VALUES OF LANGUAGES, INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCES, AND AGGREGATE BEHAVIOUR When making choices about language--choosing to (or not to) learn a second or third language, adopting a given behaviour towards other linguistic groups in their community, endorsing language policies, and so on--do people refer to arguments akin to those we are considering? Do they make economic calculations of the kind a customer of a telecommunication service makes in order to choose which network to subscribe to? Clearly, when applying 40
an economic approach to the understanding of social issues such as those related to language, the analysis cannot rule out the importance of cultural, ethnic, and ideological factors. In investigating the welfare implications of alternative linguistic distributions or policies it will be necessary to take into account, for example, the effect of varying individual preferences over different languages, and over the size of their linguistic community. Network externalities play an important role in explaining language choices in the market for second languages. They also play a role, though in a less "pure" form, in explaining the spontaneous emerging of a lingua franca used in literary and cultural expressions--in contexts where the right conditions exists, that is where for some reason there is a language that is not the mother tongue of the population, but the one that can act as communication means for its most diverse components and is part of the culture. Network externalities are ill suited, instead, to explain language choices when we deal with a country's first language, which often means the new generation's mother tongue. Giving up one's mother tongue is much more than switching to another computer system. You cannot hope to fill the gap with a few months training, and to enjoy the benefits of the network, afterwards, without suffering any significant loss. It's evident that people do feel that much more is at stake--that language is not just a medium to communicate, but an expression of cultural, ethnic, national identity. In the literature (in linguistics and sociology for example) and as a matter of common sense, a nation's language is largely perceived as a system of thought and an expression peculiar to that nation. Whether such perception be disputable or not, what matters is that it does, in reality, inform individual choices, and cannot therefore be ignored. It is not by chance, in fact, that processes of assimilation of linguistic minorities into an official language have not relied, historically, on the effect of network externalities as their main determinant: we can rather observe extensive public intervention, regulation, and pressure to conform through discrimination. The attachment of minority communities to their language, and often the association of language with political and nationalistic causes, certainly are among the factors that limit the network externality mechanism in its functioning. The importance of these factors should therefore invite caution when extending conclusions from the theory of network externalities to language policy issues. A standard result stemming from such theory is, for example, that it is never optimal to subsidise the learning of a minority language (Church and King, 1993). A careful consideration of the additional meanings and values that people tend to attach to languages suggests, however, that such a conclusion may not hold if, for instance, the inclusion of the minority language in the subsidisation programme enhances the fairness of the language policy as perceived by members of the linguistic minority, and thereby lowers their perceived costs of learning the dominant language. In particular, extending subsidisation to a minority language would indeed be a cost-effective way of reducing a country's linguistic fragmentation if it lowered the aggregate perceived cost of acquiring the majority language by more than the additional cost of the policy, net of the benefit obtained by some of the majority language native speakers from learning a second language. Another limit to the network externalities mechanism can be identified by making a distinction between the utility value of a language to society at large and its individual or group-specific utility value. In countries where, for historical, political, and social reasons, linguistic minorities live in compact communities, the functional potential of a minority language for a member of such communities is not determined only with reference to the share of the country's total population by which such language is spoken. The yield from minority language skills which allow a greater horizontal communication potential at the community level may significantly counteract the network externality argument, especially if the linguistic minority occupies an economic niche within which the language can have a value as a production factor--as is the case with Asian minorities in the clothing, food and restaurant industries in several areas of the United Kingdom (Linguistic Minorities Project, 1985).
CONCLUSIONS The set of features that languages share with other communication networks motivate an interest in looking at the theoretical achievements of the economics of networks also from a language policy perspective. This paper first reviews the basic elements of the network externalities approach, and applies them to language issues. The argument is then extended to consider in more depth the relevance of the public good nature of a common language within a collectivity, as well as dynamic effects such as critical mass and self-reinforcing mechanisms in the diffusion of languages. In discussing the policy implications of such analysis, I have maintained that economic principles have some useful input into the decision making process, but also that they are not--and should not be--the only input. Indeed, confronting the theory of network externalities with real world language issues sheds some light on both the role and the limits of the former in understanding the latter. 41
The analysis in this paper suggests that the economics of networks is an appealing conceptual tool that can yield useful insights when applied to the comprehension of language choices. It should also make clear that factors other than the economic value attached to the size of a speech community may counteract the power of explanation of network externalities to a significant degree.
REFERENCES Arthur, W. Brian (1988), "Self-reinforcing mechanisms in economics", in Anderson P. W. et al. (eds.), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, Addison Wesley. Bloom, David E. and Grenier, Gilles (1992), "Economic perspectives on language: The relative value of bilingualism in Canada and the United States", in J. Crawford (ed.) (1992), 445-452. Bourdieu, Pierre (1982), Ce que Parler Veut Dire: L'Economie des Changes Linguistique, Fayard, Paris. Breton, Albert (1978), "Nationalism and language policies", Canadian Journal of Economics, 11(4), 656-68. Breton, Albert (1998), "An economic analysis of language", in Breton, A. (ed.), Economic Approaches to Language and Bilingualism, Canadian Heritage, Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada, Ottawa, 1-33. Breton, Albert and Mieszkowski, Peter (1977), "The economics of bilingualism", in Wallace E. Oates (ed.), The Political Economy of Fiscal Federalism, D.C. Heat, Lexington, MA. Brenzinger, M. (ed.)(1992), Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Cabral, Luis (1990), "On the adoption of innovations with 'network' externalities", Mathematical Social Sciences, 19, 229-308. Carr, Jack (1985), "Le bilingualism au Canada: l'usage consacre-t-il l'anglais monopole naturel?", in Vaillancourt, Franois (ed.), conomie et Langue, Universit de Montral, Centre de Recherche en Dveloppement conomique, Montral, 27-37. Choi, Jay Pil (1996), "Do converters facilitate the transition to a new incompatible technology? A dynamic analysis of converters", International Journal of Industrial Organization, 14, 826-835. Church, Jeffrey and King, Ian (1993), "Bilingualism and network externalities", Canadian Journal of Economics, 24(2), May, 337-45. Coulmas, Florian (1992), Language and Economy, Blackwell, Oxford UK. Crawford, James (ed.)(1992), Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Economides, Nicholas (1996), "The economics of networks", International Journal of Industrial Organization, 14, 673-99. Grenier, Gilles and Vaillancourt, Franois (1983), "An economic perspective on learning a second language", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 4(6), 471-83. Grimes, Barbara F. (ed.) (1988), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 11th edition, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas TX. Grin, Franois (1996), "The economics of language: Survey, assessment, and prospects", International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 121, 17-44. Grin, Franois (1990), "The economic approach to minority languages", Journal Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 11(1-2), 154-73. Harris, Richard G. (1998), "The economics of language in a virtually integrated global economy", in Breton, A. (ed.), Economic Approaches to Language and Bilingualism, Canadian Heritage, Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada, Ottawa, 35-88. Katz, Michael L. and Shapiro, Carl (1994), "System competition and network effects", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 8(2), 93-115. Krauss, M. (1995), "Endangered languages: Current issues and future prospects", Keynote address, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 3 February. 42
Linguistic Minorities Project (1985), The Other Languages of England, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, UK. Marschak, Jacob (1965), "Economics of language", Behavioral Science, 10(2), 135-40. Pendakur, Krishna and Pendakur, Ravi (1997), "Speak and ye shall receive: Language knowledge as human capital", in Breton, A. (ed.), Economic Approaches to Language and Bilingualism, Canadian Heritage, Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada, Ottawa, 89-121. Schelling, Thomas C. (1978), Micromotives and Macrobehavior, W.W. Norton, New York.
30. I am grateful to Albert Breton for helpful comments and discussions. Remaining errors are, of course, my sole responsibility. 31. External effects, or externalities, are an important dimension of interactions between economic agents. They arise when a person, attending to their own activities, unintentionally renders services or disservices to other persons of a sort that payment from the benefited parties is not exacted, either because the exaction would be too expensive to execute or is technically not possible to implement, nor can compensation to injured parties be compelled. The influence of these effects (external to the market) on the choices individuals make, and their consequences for collective welfare, have been the object of wide interest in economic theory. 32. The same applies to the choice of a third, fourth, etc. language. In what follows I will refer to a "second language" to mean any language, additional to one's mother tongue, that an individual chooses to learn. 33. The fact that, above a given threshold size of the speech community, any one individual will not be able in their lifetime to exploit all the potential interactions, does not weaken the point: we want a good general library to contain as many volumes as possible, even though the limits in terms of what can be read in a lifetime are relatively narrow. What matters is in fact to increase the chances of finding whatever one is looking for. 34. Source: Grimes (1988). 35. The above statement disregards the fact that Chinese is a language of many variants and that, as a consequence, not all members of the estimated "basic" speech community can actually communicate with each other. 36. It is quite telling in this connection that Nobel Laureates in physics have had, as of 1992, no more than nine different mother tongues (Coulmas, 1992: 65). 37. The public good nature of a good does not therefore refer to the source of its provision--in particular, a public good is not necessarily one provided by governments. 38. In some cases it might also be possible to think of languages as a kind of club goods, if the linguistic community can exert to some degree a power of exclusion--for example by raising barriers against the acquisition of their language by non-members. 39. It should be clear, at this point, that it is the common language that is a public good--individual bilingualism, or multilingualism, in a linguistically heterogeneous world--and not the mere existence of a multitude of languages. 40. Per capita income is a very imperfect measure of real purchasing power for two principal reasons. The first is a consequence of currency conversion difficulties. The second is the fact that in many countries a considerable volume of economic activity, being the outcome of communal production, does not flow through markets and consequently is not registered in national accounts. In addition, even if the above problems could be satisfactorily resolved, the question remains as to whether purchasing power adequately measures well-being. 41. To establish a negative correlation between fragmentation and per capita income, evidence on the absence of a lingua franca in communities that are highly fragmented linguistically would be needed. Table I can only be used on the basis of a presumption that high fragmentation is generally associated with the absence of a lingua franca. 42. The relevance of the economic argument finds support in the fact that the countries whose languages compete in the market for lingua franca devote a large volume of resources to subsidise the export of their languages. The division for the promotion of the German language, for example, appropriates up to 50 percent of the cultural budget of the Foreign Ministry--about 500 DM per annum in the late 1980s. These are spent in language export subsidies through intermediary agencies such as the Goethe Institut, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the central office for German schools abroad. Government expenditures for the international promotion of French, probably the most generously funded policies of this kind, were estimated in 43
the late 1970s as amounting to between 25 and 30 billion francs, spent for operating 1,200 offices of the Alliance Franaise and other ad hoc institutions in more than 100 countries (Coulmas, 1992: 111). 43. Notice that the nature of the seigniorage premium does not coincide with that of the rent which typically accrues from the position of power inherent in belonging to a majority. To clarify this point, consider that the primary speakers of English worldwide are now outnumbered by a factor of two by its secondary speakers--but are nonetheless the latter who bear the investment cost of generating the network. 44. Krauss (1995) projects that 155 out of the 175 native languages still spoken in North America will lose their last speakers with the present generation. 45. Carr (1985) is the first to liken the market for languages to a natural monopoly. 46. "Languages are capital investment projects, in a literal rather than metaphorical sense. The most important investments contributing to an improved utility of a language are the following: (1) the compilation of dictionaries for common use as well as terminologies for specific purposes; (2) word processing equipment; (3) automatic translation; (4) artificial intelligence, specifically the creation of knowledge systems and data banks; (5) the improvement of man-machine communication, that is, the adjustment of computer languages to human languages". (Coulmas, 1992: 69). These are to be added to the traditional components of a stock of linguistic capital--namely literature and other artistic productions, textbooks, educational institutions and so on. 47. If it is recognised that language has been a source of social conflict whenever a dominant group has tried to impose its language and force assimilation, for example by using language to obstruct access to jobs, education, and power, and if it is recognised that social conflict is economically costly, we identify an additional source of economic value in the preservation and valorisation of a collectivity's multilingual skills.
44
THE CULTURAL YIELD ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION Albert Breton Department of Economics University of Toronto 1. LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION 2. ON A PROPOSITION OF SALMAN RUSHDIE AND A CONJECTURE REGARDING JOSEPH CONRAD'S WRITINGS 3. STATIC AND DYNAMIC CULTURES 4. SURVIVAL OR ASSIMILATION CONCLUSION / APPENDIX REFERENCES
The recognition that, in general(48), there are both monetary and non-monetary costs to learning a second language--or to improving a mother tongue or first language--and that there are benefits, spread over time, to incurring these costs, has meant that languages are a form of human capital. One implication of the economic approach to language is that if the net yield to a language is positive and sufficiently large relative to that on other forms of capital, individuals will invest in that asset by learning another language or by improving on their first language. A considerable amount of work has been done analysing some of the factors that help shape the size of the net yield on languages and therefore the decision of individuals to remain monolingual or to become bilingual. That work has also helped us understand why some languages thrive and flourish in the sense that the number of people who make use of them expands, becomes more varied and more productive, and why, in some cases, some languages become dominant. At the same time, it is an easily observed but also well documented fact that some languages languish or even die. When a language disappears, individuals who spoke that language do not cease to communicate with each other, but instead make use of another language or, to put it in the terminology that I will use in the remainder of this paper, they become assimilated into another language.(49) Is linguistic assimilation and, if that assimilation becomes widespread, linguistic extinction simply consequent on a reversal of the factors that lead people to invest in languages? Put differently, is linguistic disinvestment strictly symmetric to linguistic investment? Or are there other forces at work? In the hypothesis suggested in this paper there are other factors at work--factors which, once understood, also help us understand why certain languages thrive and flourish as well as why other languages languish and even vanish. In other words, the question I seek to answer is the following: what are some of the significant factors and forces that contribute to an acceleration of linguistic assimilation and what are those that result in a retardation or even in a blockage of assimilation? This is not the first time that this question has been asked. In the relatively young literature focused on the economics of language, the question has been cogently addressed by Franois Grin (1990, 1992, 1993). The reader will become aware as he or she reads on that there is much in Grin's treatment of the matter that I accept. I was led to reconsider the question following a reading of Annie Proulx's (1996) powerful novel in which she looks at eight immigrant communities in the United States and analyses, by crafting a variety of "novelistic models", the association of linguistic assimilation with cultural extinction. The question that Proulx's novel raised in my mind was that of the role of what I will call the cultural yield on languages in retarding and possibly stopping linguistic assimilation. It seems to me that on the whole the literature on linguistic assimilation puts too much emphasis on explanatory factors that are individual in the sense that they pertain to individual human beings and not to the institutions in which they live. The underlying stylized fact that is assumed to be in need of explanation is something like the following: individuals (and eventually societies) become assimilated into another language because these individuals, one by one as it were, change languages as a result of the fact that, let us say, their parents do not teach them the "original" language. Something in the chain of transmission goes wrong. What Proulx's novelistic models made clear to me is that linguistic assimilation has an institutional or cultural dimension to it. It is that dimension that I will explore in what follows. The argument is developed in four steps. In Section 1, I examine some powerful forces that can lead to linguistic assimilation. Then, in Section 2, I report on and analyse a proposition of Salman Rushdie (1997) stating that English is, in effect, an Indian language. I also examine a conjecture made by one of Joseph Conrad's biographers--Zdzislaw Najder (1983)--as to why Conrad chose to write in English. That discussion will serve as a preamble to Section 3 wherein I attempt to develop a model of literary creativity in which that phenomenon has 45
THE CULTURAL YIELD ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION Albert Breton a positive rate of return.(50) Section 4 is devoted to the relation between the economic and the cultural yields on languages, while Section 5 concludes the paper. I offer a slightly more formal presentation of the argument in an Appendix. 1. LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION This section begins with a stylized description of the two steps that individuals can take which, if they are both taken, will lead them from an original language to becoming assimilated into another language. The first step consists in learning a second language; the second in dropping the original language. Dropping a language means that the language is unused, unlearnt, and eventually forgotten. In general, this is not likely to be experienced by individuals in the course of their lifetime as only a few are likely to forget a language in which they were once fluent. It is therefore best to think of the process of linguistic assimilation as taking place over two generations or more. In subsections (ii) and (iii), I examine the forces that motivate individuals to take one step and then the other. It is important to keep in mind that there is nothing preordained or automatic about taking the first or the second step. Individuals, in other words, can choose not to take the first step, can decide to take it and stay there, that is, never take the second step, and they can elect to take both the first and the second steps. The factors that deter individuals from taking the first and/or the second step are examined in sections 3 and 4. It is therefore only after the analysis of these sections is completed that we will be in a position to understand why assimilation into a language other than the original language sometimes occurs and sometimes not. To understand the forces that induce individuals to sometimes take the first and the second steps that lead to linguistic assimilation, it is useful to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary assimilation. Voluntary assimilation refers to the consequences of decisions made by individuals to invest in the learning of a second language because the stream of gross economic benefits (investment costs held constant) from investing in that language is expected to be large. The assimilation, if it materializes, is not voluntary in the sense that the individual decides to become assimilated, but in the sense that in adjusting to the gross rates of return that are determined by technological, social, and other exogenous forces, the individual places herself on a path than can (need not) lead to linguistic assimilation. The discussion of subsection (ii) will be concerned with the analysis of the forces that affect the gross economic yield on languages. Involuntary assimilation is the consequence of the operation of forces that increase the costs of using the original language and consequently reduce the incentive to use that language. Subsection (iii) will look at four such forces: governmental policies regarding languages, linguistic intolerance, linguistic discrimination, and what I will call linguistic drift. A) THE PATH TO LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION For any given individual, the path to linguistic assimilation can be represented in the following way. In some initial position, an individual is monoglot in an original language which we may call A. If the individual takes the first step, he or she learns a second language, say B, and becomes bilingual. If the second step is taken, the individual becomes monoglot in B--he or she is assimilated into B.(51) When the number of individuals in a given community who take both the first and the second steps is large--at the limit when that number approaches the totality of individuals in the community--linguistic assimilation becomes a social phenomenon. The question examined in this paper can be reformulated in terms of the simple scheme just described. What are the forces that prompt individuals to take the first and the second steps that lead to linguistic assimilation and what are the forces that dissuade them from doing so. The factors that motivate taking both the first and second steps will be examined under the headings of voluntary and involuntary assimilation. That examination makes up the remainder of this section. The factors that can impede assimilation are examined in sections 3 and 4. B) VOLUNTARY ASSIMILATION Imagine a space in which a large number of individuals, many of whom are initially of different languages, stand to gain from working together, from investing in each others' enterprises and activities, from trading (buying and selling goods and services) among themselves, and from reaching collective agreements regarding communal undertakings. To carry out these activities, these individuals will have to communicate with each other. It is now well-known (Carr, 1976/1985; Breton and Mieszkowski, 1977; Breton, 1998; and Dalmazzone, 1999) that there will be a tendency for a common medium of communication, or lingua franca, to emerge.(52) Which of the languages initially employed in the assumed space will become the lingua franca cannot be determined by reference to first principles. The selection will, to a considerable extent, be a matter of historical accident.(53) However, the strength of network externalities and the advantages that derive from the public good character of a shared medium of communication will guarantee that the economic yield that accrues to the "accidentally" selected common language will be such that individuals who are working, investing, trading, and making collective decisions will invest in the lingua franca.(54) A self-reinforcing mechanism will have been created. Add to this the gains that can be garnered from scientific discoveries, very often the product of collective or 46
group activity, and their rapid diffusion, as well as the spread of technical innovations which, in the space postulated, will tend to be effected in the selected lingua franca and which will, as a consequence, make the economic yield to the common language even larger than if only the set of factors considered in the previous paragraph were at work. Finally, consider the effects of what Kenneth Boulding (1966, 1969) has called the "superculture", namely the mechanisms and processes that, among other things, lead to a homogenization of cultural and artistic artifacts and expressions in an effort to make them available to mass audiences and publics. It is therefore not an accident that many components of the superculture are designed and crafted in today's lingua franca, namely English. The artifacts of the superculture are, to a considerable extent, in English and are made available to mass audiences worldwide in that language in such a way that the lingua franca and the superculture form another selfreinforcing loop which serves to enhance a bit more the economic yield on investments in the lingua franca. C) INVOLUNTARY ASSIMILATION It would be difficult to exaggerate the role played by governmental policies and interventions in linguistic assimilation. The governments of many countries--France, Britain, and the United States immediately come to mind as prime examples--have implemented and, in some cases, continue to implement policies of linguistic assimilation: from Breton and Savoyard, for example, to French; from Irish to English; and from the various languages of the new immigrants arriving to the United States to English. These policies have taken many forms, but in all cases they have raised the cost of using the language which in (i) above was labelled A and, in this way, have encouraged a passage from the first to the second step.(55) Some environments are extremely intolerant of minority languages. When that is the case, those who use these languages are often the victims of name-calling and of insults, are the butt of jokes, and generally are made to feel like second-class citizens. For example it was not uncommon, just a few decades ago in the west of Canada, for French-speaking Canadians to be told to "speak white", that is to speak the language of the "white man"--a nice cocktail of linguistic intolerance and racism. It is common to think of intolerance as motivated solely by bigotry and fanaticism. Whether that is in fact the case, it is important to remember that whenever an individual does not learn and therefore does not use a language, say language B, that individual implicitly refuses to enter the B-linguistic network. That decision deprives the users of B of the benefits of a positive network externality. This necessarily robs those who only make use of B of some economic benefits and may induce them to become more intolerant. However that may be, intolerance, when expressed in behaviours and actions, raises the cost of using the language of those who are being abused--say language A. In that way, intolerance will motivate those who are its victims to learn the language of the victimizers--language B--or, to put it differently, intolerance acts as a pressure on individuals to conform to the wishes of the intolerant. Intolerance, in a word, motivates the victims to take the first step on the path to assimilation. In many instances, the difference between intolerance and discrimination is small. Still, it is useful to distinguish between the two, reserving the latter expression to characterize situations in which the person who is the target of discrimination either is paid a wage or salary lower than someone with the same qualifications but who is of the dominant language group, or pays prices that are higher than the prices paid by another person who purchases goods and services in the same quantity and of the same quality but is of the dominant language group. And so on. It goes without saying that what intolerance does to motivate individuals to travel the path that leads to assimilation, discrimination does also and for the same reasons: it raises the cost of using the original language and thus reduces the yield on that particular human capital asset. To the extent that discrimination is successful in compelling individuals to reduce the use of their original language and to become bilingual, it succeeds in expanding the language network of discriminators. Because of the externalities associated with the expansion of language networks, discriminators benefit--enjoy a larger net rate of return on their language--from the decision of discriminates to become bilingual. Discrimination, in other words, induces an individual (say x) to join a language network and thus confer a benefit on the discriminator (say y). Until x has become a full partner in all the ramifications of the network, y will continue to gain from further discrimination. In addition, as long as the marginal benefit to y from the feedback generated by x's behaviour is not only positive, but increasing, discrimination (like intolerance) is self-reinforcing. That is, the increasing marginal benefit from discrimination will induce y to discriminate ever more against x. The last group of factors that can motivate individuals to travel along a path that can lead to language assimilation I call drift. Drift is a consequence of such things as migration into a community that speaks a different language--the mobility of an A-speaking person into a B-speaking employment or environment-intermarriage across language frontiers, differential mortality and fertility rates among language communities, and similar "demographic" factors that affect the intergenerational transmission of languages.(56) Drift factors have played an historically important role in the linguistic assimilation of immigrants into those regions of the 47
THE CULTURAL YIELD ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION Albert Breton world that are of more recent settlement--America, Australia, Canada, and others. At the same time, one must recognize that from a policy perspective these factors are, at least in liberal democracies, beyond the reach of governments. The most that can be done is to implement policies that would retard or impede the effect of drift. That is one of the concerns of the present paper. 2. ON A PROPOSITION OF SALMAN RUSHDIE AND A CONJECTURE REGARDING JOSEPH CONRAD'S WRITINGS In June 1997, to commemorate and celebrate the imminent fiftieth anniversary of India's Independence, the New Yorker magazine devoted a double issue to Indian literature. Following an editorial comment, the first article is an essay by Salman Rushdie (1997) on the Indian literature of the post-Independence era . In his essay, in which he begins by skilfully defending a broad personal assessment of that literature and then puts forward an explanation or rationalization of that assessment--which I will refer to as Rushdie's Proposition. Rushdie begins by pointing to the fact that a significant number of post-Independence Indian novelists write in English.(57) Then, comparing the output of that group of novelists to that of those who write in one or the other of the sub-continent's eighteen indigenous languages, he suggests that the quality of the first group's output is, on the whole, greater than that of the second group. The assessment is not that the literature of those writing in the country's indigenous languages is of poor quality--only that the work of those writing in English is of better quality. I am incapable, obviously, of evaluating Rushdie's assessment. Moreover, given that assessment is not a feature of his argument which is central to the development of this paper, I accept it without further ado. The Rushdie Proposition essential to the logic of my own construction is based on two presuppositions regarding the real world. The first is that "English has become an Indian language." In other words, a significant number of Indians have chosen to write in English because their upbringing, education, and social milieu were to a significant extent English. That was, in turn, a consequence of the special place the English language had come to occupy in the linguistic landscape of India as a result of British imperial rule in the country and of the fact that no other language could serve as a substitute lingua franca over the whole of the sub-continent. The second presupposition is that "part of the achievement of English language Indian writers is to have found literary voices that are as distinctively Indian, and also as suitable for any and all the purposes of art, as those of other Englishlanguage writers in Ireland, Africa, the West Indies, and the United States" (Rushdie, 1997, p. 54). Later (p. 57), Rushdie adds: "whatever language we Indians write in, we drink from the same well. India, that inexhaustible horn of plenty, nourishes us all." As I understand it, the Rushdie Proposition simply says that language, as a medium of communication between writer and reader, plays a secondary role in literary creativity--in the mysterious process through which a writer ingests a particular reality, transforms it, and makes it possible for their readers to perceive hitherto hidden, but essential, aspects of that same reality. Two things, however, really matter for literary creativity. First, writers and prospective writers must partake of a "local" culture that is sufficiently fertile to make it possible for them to go to--to fathom, to grasp--the "heart ... of the human condition" through the human condition embodied in their "local" cultures (Rushdie, 1997, p. 58). Second, writers and prospective writers must find "literary voices" that are congruent with those cultures. In reviewing Arundhati Roy's (1997) first novel (winner of the 1997 Booker Prize), John Updike (1997, p. 159) wrote that "a novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does." Given that Roy did not invent the English language, what she must have invented is a distinct literary voice that allows her to depict a mixture of beauty and terror that is truly Indian, but that goes to the heart of the human condition--that has meaning on a planetary scale. I agree with Updike that she has invented a language. Even if in literary creativity the role of language as a medium of communication is secondary, it is nonetheless essential. Writers must have a command of the language they choose such that language does not become an impediment to creativity. Still, an Indian writer who observes an aspect of Indian culture can reveal to us, through their knowledge of that culture, a dimension of the human condition, whether they write in English, Hindi, Urdu, or Malayalam. That would seem to be the message to retain from Rushdie's Proposition. Is it, however, a complete message? To see that it is not, consider the case of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), one of the English-speaking world's more important writers, whose novels were all written in English, his third language after Polish and French. It is indeed only after joining the British Merchant Navy at the age of 21 that Jzef Korzeniowski learnt English. Nine years later, as Joseph Conrad, he published his first novel written in that language. Why Conrad chose to write in English, instead of Polish, has puzzled many persons. Conrad himself attempted an answer to the conundrum in which he stated that "English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption". He went on to say that if he "had not written in English [he] would not have written at all", though Najder (1983) in his biography points to the fact that Conrad was at one time tempted to use French as his literary medium. He seems never to have considered writing in Polish. That led Najder (p. 117) to the following conclusion which I quote at length because it strikes me as particularly apposite. 48
But even if Conrad had wanted to write in Polish and if his proficiency in his mother tongue had been maintained to a sufficient degree to make creative writing feasible, he would have had to overcome, in addition to all other obstacles, yet another one, practically insurmountable: the Polish novel was at that time in its infancy; its artistic development did not begin until the years when Korzeniowski was sailing the oceans. In his Polish literary heritage the novel was practically nonexistent. Najder's point would seem to be central to an understanding of Conrad's decision to write in English. It is also a point capable of being generalized. In other words, one must accept that language has an important role to play in the literary creative process. Another way of making this point is to say that some languages--though they may help some individuals define a sense of personal identity--are not rich enough to allow artists to capture important aspects of reality in a literary (or scientific, or technical, or musical--see footnote 1, page 91) manner because they do not possess enough "models" to permit a transcription or transformation of that reality into basic truths about the local culture, and cannot therefore go to the heart of the human condition. As I see it, two ingredients then define the relationship between language and creativity. First, there must be a culture with dimensions that are capable of being captured by a language and which is fertile enough to yield insights into fundamental aspects of the human condition. Second, there must be a language rich enough in "models" of various sorts that it will be possible for the fertile culture to be appropriated and made to disclose the hidden truths that artists, using these "models", can reveal to the world. 3. STATIC AND DYNAMIC CULTURES Some cultures are dynamic while others are static. The most important element distinguishing the two is the change or evolution that results from the creativity of a subset of the population in the first, change or evolution that is absent from the second. I concentrate on literary creativity but as noted earlier, the argument holds for creativity in all domains. Indeed, to fully understand linguistic survival the logic that follows should be extended to all domains. The formal modelling of creativity is still in its infancy and consequently what is known of the phenomenon is still quite rudimentary. We are not, however, without worthwhile insights. I briefly mention two approaches and offer an idiosyncratic blend of the two to which I add a few extraneous factors. The first approach could be called the "recombinant" (Weitzman, 1998) or "recombination" (Witt, 1993) approach, while the second could be labelled the "probe" or "exploration" approach (see Allen, 1993). Both certainly capture elements of the creative process, but introspection, observation, and the recollected experience of creative persons make clear that something still escapes the analysis. The recombinant model is based on the notion that new ideas are the product of a reconfiguration or recombination of old ideas. In one version of that approach (Weitzman, 1998), the creative process is likened to one of systematic hybridization of all old ideas that have not hitherto been combined--much as would happen in the breeding of new plant varieties. Weitzman (p. 336) gives three steps to the procedure. First, a systematic cross-pollination of all parent material; second, efforts to bring the product of the first step to the status of grown plants; and third, an insertion of the new plant in the population as fresh breeding stock. The recombination is therefore systematic in the sense that all cross-fertilizations are tried--none are jettison on a priori grounds as not likely to be productive of new ideas. Not all combinations need be successful. Those that are will yield new ideas which are then recombined with the older ideas. Given that the recombinations are from a given "gene pool", one can expect the yield of cross-fertilization to fall over time. There is a cost to recombination, but it is implicitly assumed to be constant and therefore plays no important role in the analysis. In the probe approach to creativity (Allen, 1993), the process of creation results from a decision to, at once, reduce or even halt the scrutiny of known ideas for maximum short-term maturation, and to begin probing for new ideas. In Allen, the metaphor is that of fishers who have "perfect" information (known ideas) about a fish pool which they can exploit for maximum short-term profits. Deciding to stop fishing the pool to probe for new fish pools (new ideas) is costly in terns of foregone profits, but with some degree of uncertainty, can yield larger profits in the longer run. There is therefore a risk and a cost attached to creative probing. What seems to be missing most from the recombinant approach is a role or a part (as in a play) for the creator's distinctive, even eccentric, mental transformation of some aspects of the real world which is not ab initio part of the population of ideas that are seen as those that will be recombined. There is also the fact that the costs of recombination are not given a sufficiently important role. The probe approach tells us something about costs, but not much beyond "searching" regarding creativity itself. Without belittling the two approaches I have just very briefly outlined, I would like to suggest that creativity is primarily an activity of the imagination. Some individuals have a predisposition to creativity, others not. Those who are creative, possess an endowment--an imagination, a faculty which is in the nature of a natural resource-which if exploited will allow these individuals to be creative. The creative person uses their imagination to select among "old" ideas and among aspects of reality which they then imaginatively combine and recombine in their 49
THE CULTURAL YIELD ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION Albert Breton mind. Some combinations and recombinations are fruitful, most are not. The major cost of the creative process is a blurring or fading of many of the ideas and of much of the information that the creator had accumulated in the past. It would seem reasonable to assume that the more productive the imagination's act of creation, the more pronounced the beclouding of old ideas. It has often been remarked that after an act of creation, the creator is incapable of sustained new work. He or she is incapable, as it were, to be anything else but intellectually idle and therefore not creative.(58) That, it is suggested here, is simply a consequence of the dimming of older ideas which is part of the process of creation. The creator has to "re-learn" things they knew well in the past. If creativity is costly, it is also beneficial. The new "endogenous" growth models (see, for example, Romer, 1996) are based on the assumption that new ideas--creativity--are the major sources of economic growth. The capacity of a society to understand itself is in large part the result of the creative work of its artists and poets. It therefore follows that creativity is a form of human capital. Literary artists benefit from their creativity. Sometimes the benefits exceed by a small amount only or not at all the satisfaction of having crafted a product, and sometimes the benefits are large enough to be sufficient for a decent life or even, in some cases, for a life of great ease. In what follows, the non-monetary dimensions of the cultural yield on creativity will be assumed to be convertible into a monetary equivalent. I will therefore take it as given that the cultural yield on creativity can be measured in dollars. That, I recognize, is a somewhat heroic assumption, but I need it or something like it to proceed. The private cultural yield on creativity then depends on the productivity of the natural endowment--the imagination--and on the volume and efficiency of the resources invested in the exploitation of that endowment, as well as on the skills through which the endowment and the resources are combined. But the private cultural yield on creativity depends also on the fertility of the culture that nourishes artists and prospective artists and on the richness of the language that is a part of that culture. In other words, prospective artists, abundantly endowed in imagination, who would decided to invest in the cultivation of that imagination, would garner a small cultural return on this investment if the culture which nourished them was anaemic and/or if the language or languages of that culture did not contain "models" that made it possible to articulate the values embodied in that culture.(59) We could identify such cultures as "static"; their counterpart would be "dynamic" cultures. The contribution of the environment to the private yield on creativity is at the base of a self-reinforcing mechanism which generates an externality. Whenever an artist produces a meaningful literary product, he or she makes a contribution to their culture--makes that culture more fertile--and as such raises the private yield to creativity for all other literary artists in that community.(60) That, in turn, acts as an incentive to more investment in creativity by all artists and prospective artists in the community in a continuously self-reinforcing loop. The externality exists because creative artists, acting as wealth maximizers, are not likely to take into account the effect of their creativity on the yield that accrues to other artists. Their decisions are governed by the private cultural yield on creativity and not by the social cultural yield. As a consequence, the presumption must be that in any culture--whether dynamic or static--the volume of creativity is less than the optimal.(61) An a priori case exists for some form of intervention by public or private bodies. Intervention is not possible at the level of the endowment. Moreover, governments and corporate bodies are not likely to be able to meaningfully affect the fertility of a culture nor are they likely to be able to participate in the development of language "models". They can, however, reduce the costs of investing in creativity by such means as cash and/or in kind grants to artists, they can reduce the risk attached to investing in creativity by subsidizing publishers and others that bring artistic products to the marketplace, and they can increase the gross returns on investment in creativity by promoting the diffusion of artistic output. In addition to private and social cultural yields to creativity, there exists another yield which we may call a "communal" cultural yield to creativity. That yield is made up of two distinct, but related, components, The first has many dimensions. Among these I mention an increased capacity to know one's self, to understand one's society, its history, its strengths, its weaknesses, and its temptations. It also manifests itself in a greater ability to appreciate beauty, tragedy, and the human condition. That component has many of the characteristics of a Samuelsonian public good in that any person who nourishes themselves from the "horn of plenty" which may be present in their culture in no way reduces the nourishment available to others in that environment. The second component is a reflection of the role that language may come to play as a means of influencing the evolution of the social system--what, for short, I will call an instrument of social control. To understand this point it is important to recognize that a person's "identity" (or "self") is, to a degree, a product of interaction with other persons.(62) That interaction, in turn, is most of the time effected in a given language. Whether a genuine meaningful relationship between language and identity exists or not, the fact that a person's identity is acquired, to a degree at least, through a particular language easily leads to the conviction that language and identity are inseparable--that one's identity would be hurt by a change of language. That conviction can then serve as a ground into which those who inhabit the power structure (politics, religion, big business, the media, the 50
educational establishment, the judicial system, the scientific community, and so on) can lodge or root a language as an instrument to influence the evolution of the social system, an instrument of social control. When this happens, those who inhabit the power structure in a given society acquire a vested interest in language. That, in turn, implies that the communal cultural yield on language--and indirectly on creativity--will be higher and that the language is more likely to survive. Put differently, if the power structure does not use language as a means of social control--either because better instruments are available or because the elites are too weak to exercise social control--assimilation into another language will more easily occur. The basic hypothesis of this paper is that if the communal cultural yield on literary creativity (referred to previously), expressed in a particular language, is sufficiently large,(63) linguistic assimilation in another language will not take place, but if this yield is too low, assimilation is inevitable. In other words, even if individuals take the first step described in Section 1--go from being monoglot to becoming bilingual--they (the next generation) will not take the second step--go from being bilingual to becoming monoglot in the second language--if the communal yield on creativity is sufficiently large. But if that yield is too low, they will take that second step. While this paper was in preparation, James Brooke (1998) reported in the New York Times that "of the 175 Indian [Native] languages still spoken in the United States, only 20 are still spoken by mothers to babies" adding "70 languages are spoken only by grandparents, and 55 more are spoken by 10 tribal members or fewer" (p. A1). Brooke also reported on some of the efforts being made to stave off linguistic assimilation into English. For example, in a town in the south-central region of California, a nonprofit group sponsors "intensive language immersion, sometimes up to 500 hours [presumably over a year or a lifetime], with 'masters', tribal elders who speak the language". Another example: a Tribal Council declares "Crow the official language of the reservation, honouring fluent speakers as 'tribal treasures' and encouraging all tribal members to speak the language". Finally, we are told of a "summer language camp" and of "language classes" that are offered (p. 20). If the hypothesis suggested in these pages possesses any validity, it tells us that these efforts are bound to fail unless something is done that will raise the communal yield to creativity in these native language communities. Failing that, linguistic assimilation into English will be complete in a very short time. It might seem reasonable at this juncture to ask whether creativity embodied in an oral tradition (in story-telling, for example), as opposed to a written literary tradition, could have a communal cultural yield high enough to prevent linguistic assimilation. This is a difficult question to answer. When creative output was mostly oral and stored, as it were, in a collective popular memory, the communal yield could be, and very often was, high enough to prevent assimilation. Nowadays, however, what is oral has to compete with so much which is written that it is unlikely that an oral tradition will be sufficiently resilient to insure that the communal yield on creativity will be large enough to stave off assimilation. It is indeed possible to argue that many of the languages that are predicted to vanish over the next hundred years will be those whose culture is embodied in oral traditions. Oral traditions, and especially story-telling, do not only have to compete with written materials, they have to compete as well with radio and television which are also, in a way, engaged in story-telling (soap operas, sitcoms, talk shows, etc.). Once language communities have learnt the language to listen to the stories on radio and television (have taken the first step described in Section 1), the communities' own story telling fades away and linguistic assimilation follows with only a short delay. A basic problem with Native languages and, to a degree, with (current) oral traditions is that they do not appear to be able to serve as instruments of social control in the relevant linguistic communities. As a consequence, the local power structures do not have, as power structures, a vested interest in the languages. That was certainly a major contributing factor in the extinction of local cultures among the immigrant groups that came to the United States which Proulx (1996) so vividly renders in her "novelistic models". One could indeed argue that in the absence of politically organized jurisdictions, the local powers of language communities are not likely to develop a vested interest in languages as instruments of social control. This last statement does not mean that a political jurisdiction by itself will guarantee the survival of a language. There have been repeated efforts devoted to the problem of why artificial languages such as Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Occidental, or Volapk, have not had much success. A standard explanation relates to coordination problems, critical mass, and network externalities. These variables would seem capable of explaining why artificial languages have not spread. They are not particularly useful in helping us understand why a few artificial languages continue to be used by certain groups. In a recent paper, Jonathan Pool (1991) has proposed a model to explain why artificial languages have succeeded in relatively small specialized groups. He is able to show that knowledge of these languages can increase the welfare (defined as the gross utility attached to language use minus the cost of learning the artificial language both measured in the same units) of those who learn them by allowing them to communicate across specialized language barriers. 51
THE CULTURAL YIELD ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION Albert Breton No one has apparently realized that artificial languages, though they are used by some individuals, might not have spread because they are not rich enough, that is because they do not possess language models that would make it possible for literary artists or prospective literary artists to reveal important but hidden aspects of their local cultures. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake did construct an "artificial" language--one not subjected, like natural languages, to the limitations of time and space. It is noteworthy that even if Joyce did succeed in achieving the objective he was pursuing, the language he crafted in that book does not appear to have been used by other creative literary artists.(64) 4. SURVIVAL OR ASSIMILATION In the last two sections I have introduced four different yields on language and creativity: (i) a private economic yield on language associated with network externalities and the public good character of certain languages; (ii) a private cultural yield to creativity which accrues to individual literary (and other) creative persons; (iii) a social cultural yield resulting from the creativity of individual literary artists (and other creators) which benefits other artists by raising the fertility (productivity) of the local culture; and (iv) a communal cultural yield whose height is determined by the force of creativity and the language in which that creativity is expressed to become an instrument for self-understanding as well as an instrument of social control. I assumed that these various yields can be expressed in comparable units. To explore the interrelationship between these four yields and to shed some light on the question of the survival of languages or of the assimilation of individuals and groups into another language, I begin by assuming that the private economic yield to language (ye) is positive and constant. I also assume that the creativity of artists during that same period produces no externalities which benefit other artists. The assumption means that the social cultural yield to creativity (ys) is zero. I relax both assumptions later on. Given these two working assumptions, I now conceive of a relationship between the private cultural yield (yp) and the communal cultural yield (yc) such that an increase in the former leads to an increase in the later. This functional relationship simply says that when literary artists (and other creative persons) benefit more from their work, the community as a whole is also better-off in terms of what it derives from its language, because artists being better-off produce more. To make things simple I assume that as yp increases, successive increments in yc are smaller. It would be possible to make different assumptions about the behaviour of yp and yc, but the main results of the paper would remain the same under a wide range of assumptions. It also seems natural to suppose that when yp is zero, yc is also zero, but it is possible to conceive of a situation in which yp > 0 and yc = 0. What should not be assumed is a state in which yc > 0 and yp = 0 because then the communal yield to language and creativity would be independent of the activities of creative artists (and other creators). Given this set-up, let us imagine that the private economic yield on language is fixed at ye0. There is then a threshold at which ye0 = yc0, that is where the attraction of a second language--presumably a lingua franca--is equal in terms of yields on languages and creativity to the attraction of the original language. On one side of that threshold, when let us say yc0 ye0, the original language will survive although all members of the linguistic community may be bilingual. Inhabitants of that community, to put it differently, may have taken the first step toward linguistic assimilation, but will not take the second. On the other side of the threshold where yc0 ye0, individuals take the second step and become assimilated. We can now drop the assumption that the social cultural yield to language and creativity is zero and instead suppose that it is positive--either because of the presence of genuine externalities, or because of public policies in support of creativity, or both. Doing so will have the effect of increasing all values of yc--except that at the origin--associated with given values of yp. As a consequence of this, what we can call the "zone of assimilation", where yc0 < ye0, will shrink. The tendency toward assimilation into the second language will diminish. The zone of linguistic survival will have increased. The presence of externalities alone may insure survival. Because externalities imply under-investment in creativity. If governments adopt policies aimed at internalizing these externalities through the promotion of creativity, they will make a contribution to linguistic survival. Finally, we can drop the assumption that the private economic yield to the second language is constant and instead suppose a ceteris paribus across increase in that yield. As a consequence, we have ye1 > ye0. If the ceteris paribus is taken to mean that the communal cultural yield is unchanged, we have yc0 < ye1 resulting in an increased zone of assimilation. More people will become assimilated in the second language.
CONCLUSION The argument of this paper is a simple one. If linguistic assimilation is a consequence of cultural extinction as Proulx (1996) implicitly argues and casual observation does not deny, it is essential for linguistic survival to make sure that local cultures are solid and vibrant. The paper makes the point that this is only possible if 52
resources are invested in creativity--a form of human capital that has both a private and a social yield. Beyond the policy implication that follows from the need to internalize the externality that generates the social yield, the paper also contains an explanation for the now accepted prediction that over the next century at least half of the languages now in use will have disappeared. Finally, the paper contains an implicit criticism of many of the policies currently being implemented to achieve the survival of certain languages.
APPENDIX The argument of Section 4 can be extended and clarified with the help of a diagram which makes more explicit the relationship between the four different yields on language and creativity that are at the base of the argument of the paper. These four yields are: (i) ye, the private economic yield which is determined, in part, by the size of network externalities and the degree of publicness of a language if it is a lingua franca; (ii) yp, the private cultural yield which accrues to individual productive artists; (iii) ys, the social cultural yield which results from the contribution which literary artists make to the fertility of their local culture and which accrues to all productive literary artists and possibly to all creative people; (iv) yc, the communal cultural yield which derives from the contribution of literary artists to the life (artistic, cultural, spiritual, social, etc.) of the community and from the contribution of the local power structure when it uses a language as an instrument of social control--a yield which accrues to the community as such. To make things simple. I assume to begin that ye is positive but constant and that ys is zero. I relax both assumptions later. I assume that yc is a function of yp and that the marginal contribution of yp to yc is positive but that it diminishes as yp increases. In other words, I assume that the community benefits from creativity expressed in its own original language when literary artists benefit from their own activity, but at a decreasing rate as artistic activity increases. In the diagram, the abscissa measures the private cultural yield to language and creativity (yp) and the ordinate measures the communal cultural yield (yc). That axis also measures the private economic yield to language (ye). The OA curve embodies the assumptions made above related to the contribution of yp to yc. That curve is drawn for a given social yield--in this case zero. Let us now assume that the private economic yield is equal to ye0. Then if yp happens to be yp0, the communal yield read from the OA curve will be yc0 and what could be called the zone of linguistic survival will be equal to (yc0 ye0). If the private cultural yield to language and creativity is, instead of yp0, equal to yp1, the communal yield will be equal to yc1 and the difference between that yield and the private economic yield (ye0 yc1) is a zone of linguistic assimilation. The importance of creativity expressed in a given language in determining zones of linguistic survival and assimilation is made quite transparent in the diagram.
Let us now assume that the externality associated with the effect of creativity on the fertility of local cultures is positive. That assumption will shift the OA curve to OB. If a body, whether public or private, accepts the responsibility for internalizing that externality, the zone of linguistic survival will be enlarged. In the diagram, not only is the zone of survival larger--it goes from (yc0 ye0) to (y'c0 ye0)--but the zone of assimilation has been altogether extinguished. We see clearly that support for creativity expressed in a given language is favourable to linguistic survival. 53
THE CULTURAL YIELD ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION Albert Breton Finally, if there is an exogenous increase in the private economic yield to language--in the diagram it goes from ye0 to ye1, the zone of linguistic assimilation is enlarged and that of linguistic survival reduced whether we are focussing on the OA or the OB curve. It is therefore clear from the diagram that the most effective policy instrument to deal with the powerful forces associated with network externalities and with the public good character of some languages, namely any lingua franca, is support for creativity and creative persons. To put it differently, if the argument of this paper is accepted, the way to prevent individuals who have taken the first step described in Section 1 from taking the second step--the one that leads to linguistic assimilation--is support for creativity in the language that one wants to preserve.
REFERENCES Allen, Peter M. (1993), "Evolution: Persistent Ignorance from Continued Learning", in Richard H. Day and Ping Chen, eds., Nonlinear Dynamics and Evolutionary Economics, New York: Oxford University Press: 101-112. Arthur, W. Brian (1989), "Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In by Historical Events", Economic Journal, 99, March: 116-131. Boulding, Kenneth E. (1966/1974), "Expecting the Unexpected: The Uncertain Future of Knowledge and Technology", In E. Morphet C. O. and Ryan, eds., Prospective Changes in Society by 1980, Including Some Implication for Education, Denver: Designing Education for the Future: 199-215. Reprinted in Larry D. Singell, ed., Collected Papers of Kenneth E. Boulding, 4 Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press: 329-343. Boulding, Kenneth E. (1969/1974), "The Interplay of Technology and Values: The Emerging Superculture", in Kurt Baier and N. Rescher, eds., Values and the Future. The Impact of Technological Change on American Values, New York: The Free Press, 336-350. Reprinted in Singell, ed., 4: 453-467. Breton, Albert, (1978), "Nationalism and Language Policies", Canadian Journal of Economics, 11(4): 656-668. Breton, Albert, (1998), "An Economic Analysis of Language", in Breton, Albert, ed., Economic Approaches to Language and to Bilingualism, Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage. Breton, Albert, and Peter Mieszkowski (1977), "The Economics of Bilingualism", in Wallace E. Oates, ed., The Political Economy of Fiscal Federalism, Lexington, MA: Heath. Brooke, James (1998), "Indians Striving to Save Their Languages", The New York Times, Thursday, April 9. Carr, Jack (1976/1985), "Le bilinguisme au Canada: l'usage consacre-t-il l'anglais monopole naturel?", in Franois Vaillancourt, ed., conomie et langues, Montral: Centre de recherche en dveloppement conomique, Universit de Montral. Crawford, James (1996), "Seven Hypotheses on Language Loss: Causes and Cures", in G. Cantoni, ed., Stabilizing Indigenous Languages, Flagstaff: Center for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona University. Dalmazzone, Silvana (1998), "Economics of Language: A Network Externalities Approach", in New Canadian Perspectives: Offficial Languages and the Economy. Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage. Grin, Franois (1990), "The Economic Approach to Minority Languages", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 11(1&2): 153-173. Grin, Franois (1992), "Towards a Threshold Theory of Minority Language Survival", Kyklos, 45(1): 69-97. Grin, Franois (1993), "The Relevance of Thresholds in Language Maintenance and Shift: A Theoretical Examination", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 14(5): 375-392. Grin, Franois (1996), "The Economics of Language: Survey, Assessment, and Prospects", International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 121: 17-44. Pool, Jonathan (1991), "The World Language Problem", Rationality and Society, 3(1): 78-105. Proulx, E. Annie (1996), Accordion Crimes, New York: Scribner. Romer, David (1996), Advanced Macroeconomics, New York: McGraw-Hill. Roy, Arundhati (1997), The God of Small Things, London: Flamingo. Rushdie, Salman (1997), "Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You", The New Yorker, (June 23 & 30): 50-61. Samuelson, Paul A. (1954), "The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure", Review of Economics and Statistics, 36(4): 387-389. 54
Updike, John (1997), "Mother Tongues. Subduing the Language of the Colonizer", The New Yorker, (June 23 & 30): 156-161. Weitzman, Martin L. (1998), "Recombinant Growth", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113(2), May: 331-360.
48. Sometimes, in bilingual societies, children learn a second language on the street while playing with other children whose language is different. In circumstances such as these, the cost of learning a second language is trivially small. The words "in general" in the text are meant to exclude instances such as these. 49. What I call linguistic assimilation is often called language shift (see, for example, Grin, 1993 and Crawford, 1996). 50. The origin of the paper in Proulx's novel as well as the need to avoid what would in effect be a repetition of the same argument have led me to formulate the model in terms of literary creativity. The reader will, however, become aware that the model applies to all manifestations of creativity: scientific, musical, technological, architectural, political, religious, commercial, and so on. 51. In fact, as already pointed out, the second step is not likely to be taken by the person who takes the first step, but by someone in the next generation. It will often happen, however, that the person of the "first" generation-the person who knows A--will have an essential role to play in linguistic assimilation, simply by not acting as a conduit for the transmission of the original language to members of the second generation. 52. A lingua franca is any language which is employed as a common vehicle of communication by people of different languages. 53. Grin (1996, p. 21) takes Breton and Mieszkowski (1977) to task for associating, in his words, "the main determinants of language spread" with "nonmarket behaviours such as 'displaying substantial military power', 'military intervention' and 'diplomatic interference'". On the same page, Grin also states that Breton and Mieszkowski treat "language policies as a form of nationalism whose nature is to invest in ethnicity ...". I note, first, that Breton and Mieszkowski's (1977) paper contains not a word on nationalism and though Breton (1978) did try to relate nationalism and language, Mieszkowski is quite innocent of this. Second, Breton and Mieszkowski were concerned with the emergence of a lingua franca, a problem related but different from that of "language spread". As a result of recent theoretical work on network externalities (see, for example, Arthur, 1989), we now know that the increasing returns that derive from these externalities often give rise to multiple equilibria, with the possibility that any one of a set of languages could become the historical equilibrium lingua franca. Small "historical events"--generally nonmarket in character--select one language from the set and that one then becomes "locked-in". That was not known to Breton and Mieszkowski in 1977 but, by hindsight, it appears that they were right in stressing the role of nonmarket events in the spread of a lingua franca. On the role of nonmarket forces in selecting a lingua franca, see Breton (1998). 54. To understand why a lingua franca possesses strong characteristics of public goods, see Dalmazzone (1999). The argument is easy to summarize. A pure Samuelsonian (1954) public good is one that is available equally to all. According to Dalmazzone, a lingua franca is a public good which benefits even those who, not knowing the language cannot use it, because a lingua franca makes it possible for science, technology, commerce, and so on to grow faster than they would otherwise, and, as a consequence, the total volume of wealth in the world is larger. Every one in the world, in other words, gains or could be made to gain from the spread of a lingua franca. 55. Education policies have no doubt been among the most important policies implemented to force linguistic assimilation 56. For a good discussion of the factors I associate with drift, see Grin (1992). 57. A partial list includes Vikram Chandra, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Kiram Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Andashir Vakil. 58. If what I am suggesting is at all near to the truth, it follows that the "publish or perish" rule that has sway in so many institutions of higher learning is, in effect, a rule to extinguish creativity by denying a period of intellectual idleness to creators. There is evidence, admittedly only casual, that the rule often produces that result. 59. Some individuals--geniuses like Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, James Joyce, and William Shakespeare-are so abundantly endowed that they create the language "models" they need to express what they want to say. Geniuses are, however, in short enough supply that I feel no embarrassment in disregarding them in what follows. 55
THE CULTURAL YIELD ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION Albert Breton 60. To the extent that the life and potency of the scientific or musical imagination (say) are positively affected by a contact with a literary product, the contribution of a literary artist to their culture raises the private yield to creativity to all who are engaged in inventing new ideas--scientific, musical, architectural, and mathematical. 61. The reason for this is the neo-classically dictated assumption that both the private and the social rate of return on creativity declines as the volume of creativity increases. If the social yield is larger than the private yield, as will be the case in the presence of a positive (beneficial) externality, the self-interested decision of the artist to stop creating when, at the margin, costs are equal to his or her private yield implies that optimality will not be achieved. Indeed, for optimality to be reached would require that at the margin costs be equal to the social yield. That requires more creativity. 62. I use the word "identity" to refer to a person's set of basic beliefs. For example, the belief that persons should be given more weight than institutions (markets and organizations, for example) in matters of policy is part of the identity of some persons and not of others. Similarly, the belief that changing one's mind in the face of contrary evidence instead of pursuing a search for supporting evidence is also part of the identity of certain persons and not of others. 63. What that means and how the communal yield is related to the other yields on creativity and to the economic yield on language as a medium of communication are matters that I explore in the next section. 64. I am grateful to Robert Breton for telling me about Joyce's efforts and for relating them to artificial languages in general
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EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE

Official Languages Support Programs Branch

Programmes d'appui aux langues officielles

2000 The Department of Canadian Heritage

Modification : 02/04/2004 18:32:47

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell

Equation Common Language

(i) 0.565 English (5.5) German

(ii) 0.842 (6.2) 0.610 (2.1) French -0.110 (0.6) Commonwealth

(iii) 0.736 (4.6) 0.621 (2.2)

(iv) 0.712 (4.5) 0.414 (1.4)

0.334 (1.4) 0.283 (2.0)

(vi) 0.472 (1.1)

0.400 (1.4) 0.390 (0.9) 0.790 (1.2)

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

R S.E.E. P-Value of equality of language effects

(1.5) 0.891 0.724 0.008

(1.5) 0.896 0.706 0.006

(1.7) 0.898 0.698 0.003

(2.0) 0.902 0.689 0.001

(2.1) 0.904 0.676 0.001

LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

LANGUAGE AND TRADE John F. Helliwell

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

SUPPLY AND DEMAND AS ANALYTICAL TOOLS IN LANGUAGE POLICY Franois Grin

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH Silvana Dalmazzone

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH Silvana Dalmazzone

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH Silvana Dalmazzone

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH Silvana Dalmazzone

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH Silvana Dalmazzone

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE: A NETWORK EXTERNALITIES APPROACH Silvana Dalmazzone

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton

EXPLORING THE ECONOMICS OF LANGUAGE Edited by Albert Breton