Economic Value of Reciprocal Bilingualism
Economic Value of Reciprocal Bilingualism
Some bilingual societies exhibit a distribution of language skills that cannot be explained by economic theories that portray languages as pure communication devices. Such distribution of skills are typically the result of public policies that promote bilingualism among members of both speech communities (reciprocal bilingualism). In this paper I argue that these policies are likely to increase social welfare by diminishing economic and social segmentation between the two communities. However, these gains tend to be unequally distributed over the two communities. As a result, in a large range of circumstances these policies might not draw sufficient support. The model is built upon the communicative value of languages, but also emphasizes the role of linguistic preferences in the behavior of bilingual individuals.
Keywords: Language skills, Reciprocal bilingualism, Language skill distribution, Bilingualism, Economic and social segmentation
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
