The Language Game: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Language Contact
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We study a society inside which two official languages, the majority language A and the minority language B, are in contact and compete for the same social functions. We propose a non-cooperative game to capture some features of this competitive situation. In the game, there are two types of players: the bilingual one who speaks both A and B and the monolingual one who speaks only A. The information about which type is each player is private. A real life situation captured by the game is that in many interactions bilingual players must decide under incomplete information about which language to use. One implication of this information structure is that while A satisfies the main properties of a public good, B does not. Another implication is that it may have dangerous consequences on the language diversity of the society. We show that in many equilibria bilingual players fail to coordinate in their preferred language and end up using the majority language A.
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The goal of this article is to introduce the notion of industrial linguistic heritage into the study of industrial heritage. By combining viewpoints of cultural heritage research and language studies, the article opens new insights into the identities and cultural resources of industrial communities. The linguistic heritage of industry is investigated in the light of two case studies from selected linguistic landscapes of Varkaus, a small industrial community in eastern Finland. The case studies illuminate both multilingualism of the industrial community as industrial linguistic heritage and language as a means to verbalize and commemorate the industrial past of the community. The examination of the linguistic landscape data shows that language is an important strategic means to verbalize the past, to restore shared histories and participatory experiences, and to carry out commemorative identity work in the industrial heritage community.
This paper develops a model of strategic communication, in which a better-informed Sender (S) sends a possibly noisy signal to a Receiver (R), who then takes an action that determines the welfare of both. We characterize the set of Bayesian Nash equilibria under standard assumptions, and show that equilibrium signaling always takes a strikingly simple form, in which S partitions the support of the (scalar) variable that represents his private information and introduces noise into his signal by reporting, in effect, only which element of the partition his observation actually lies in. We show under further assumptions that before S observes his private information, the equilibrium whose partition has the greatest number of elements is Pareto-superior to all other equilibria, and that if agents coordinate on this equilibrium, R's equilibrium expected utility rises when agents' preferences become more similar. Since R bases his choice of action on rational expectations, this establishes a sense in which equilibrium signaling is more informative when agents' preferences are more similar.
This paper develops an approach to equilibrium selection in game theory based on studying the learning process through which equilibrium is achieved. The differential equations derived from models of interactive learning typically have stationary states that are not isolated. Instead, Nash equilibria that specify different out-of- equilibrium behavior appear in connected components of stationary states. The stability properties of these components can depend critically on the perturbations to which the system is subjected. We argue that it is then important to incorporate such drift into the model. A sufficient condition is provided for drift to create stationary states, with strong stability properties, near a component of equilibria. Applications to questions of forward and backward induction are developed.
The birth, death, growth, and shrinkage of languages over millennia has given us a world containing about three thousand living languages, whose speakers number from 1 up to several hundred million. Our current knowledge of what causes a language to gain more speakers than it loses or lose more speakers than it gains is limited to a few generalizations about bivariate, more-less effects (see Dressler, 1982; Laponce, 1984; Lieberson, 1982). One important generalization is that the children of two native speakers of the same language tend to acquire that native language unless outside the home the language is rarely used or is despised. In addition, persons who spend a few years or more in a milieu (e.g., neighborhood, school, or workplace) where a language other than their native language is the main language tend to add the other language to their repertoire. Persons tend to learn a language through deliberate study (in contrast with immersion in its milieu) when the language is spoken by many persons, has widely distributed speakers, has wealthy and powerful speakers, and has a prestigious literature, art, and history. Languages tend to lose speakers through death, of course, but also through forgetting by their native and nonnative speakers. Forgetting tends to take place among persons who are not in contact with other speakers of the language or whose rewards for using the language are small or negative. There is little evidence as to whether the difficulty of a language or its effectiveness as an instrument of thought and communication influences its acquisition of new speakers or its loss of former speakers.
This paper presents the various measurement tools used by economists to ascertain the socioeconomic status of French and Francophones in Quebec since 1960 and the findings thus obtained It then examines the nature and role of the determinants of this status and its evolution over time. This choice of emphasis and issues was made since it allows us to present tools that can be used by sociolinguists studying various languages situations. They can refer to a society, Quebec, where there has been major changes in the economic and legal status of the two main languages, English and French, since 1960. The paper is divided in four sections. In the first we examine the status of Quebec's language groups, and in the second the status of the languages themselves. In the third, explanations are offered for recent changes in their relative status. In the fourth the costs of Quebec's language policies are examined.
This paper offers a general presentation of the economics of language as it has evolved since the publication of the earliest articles in this field in the mid-1960s. To this end, it begins by extensively reviewing the main trends and results found in the literature, which is arranged, for the purposes of this paper, in nine categories. Although much of the existing research is empirical and documents the relationship between linguistic attributes and socioeconomic status (usually in Canada or in the United States), an increasingly wide range of topics is being studied. These include language maintenance and shift, the relationship between linguistic patterns and economic activity, and the selection and design of language policies. The paper then moves on to an assessment of the particular challenges facing researchers in the economics of language. On the one hand, it is important to guard against tempting but misleading analogies, of which some examples are discussed; on the other hand, the economics of language is well equipped to shed light on some causal links between linguistic and economic variables and to select, design, implement, and evaluate language policies. I try to show that language planning raises questions that are analytically similar to many of those encountered in other types of public policy and must therefore be amenable to policy analysis; this requires the development of appropriate concepts and tools, many of which can be supplied by an economic approach. The priorities for further research are examined and shown to fall into two main categories. The first consists of the development of a wide range of sectoral models addressing specific issues, such as, for example, the cost structure of the production of language-specific goods and services. The second points to a larger goal, that is, the development of an integrated perspective on language planning and linguistic plurality. The end of the paper is devoted to an outline of the essential features of this enterprise.
This paper proposes a comprehensive overview of the 'economics of language'. This field of research, which is grounded in the discipline of economics, displays a strong interdisciplinary orientation, which places it on the fringes of mainstream economics. It studies the ways in which linguistic and economic processes influence one another. It is also well placed to contribute to the evaluation of public policies regarding language, because it offers analytical tools for the systematic identification and measurement of the advantages and drawbacks of policy alternatives. I begin by discussing the reasons why an economic perspective on language is scientifically and politically relevant; I then review some of the attendant epistemological and methodological issues, before moving on to an overview of the main lines of research in language economics. A full section of this paper is devoted to the economic approach to language policy, and another focuses on an application to education policy, detailing the economics of second or foreign language education. The paper aims at making the key economic tools accessible to readers from varied academic backgrounds; it also emphasises the need to combine disciplines to develop an inclusive methodology for the selection, design, and implementation of language policies.
This paper investigates the implications of common knowledge of lan- guage on cheap talk games. A general framework is proposed where lan- guage is modeled as a direct restriction on players'strategies, and the pre- dictions under iterative admissibility (IA) are characterized. We apply this framework to sender-receiver games a la Crawford and Sobel (1982) (CS), where the Receiver takes a one-dimensional action. We incorporate two observations about natural language into the language assumption: 1) there always exists a natural expression to induce a certain action, if that action is indeed inducible by some message, 2) messages that are more dif- ferent from each other induce actions that are weakly more dierent. It is assumed to be common knowledge that the Receiver plays only strategies that belong to language. Typically, there is a severe multiplicity issue in CS games. This procedure, on the other hand, eliminates outcomes where only a small amount of information is transmitted. Under certain regu- larity conditions, all equilibrium outcomes are eliminated except the most informative one. However, with an example, we point out that the normal form procedure does not take care of sequential rationality. To address this issue, we propose an extensive form procedure and characterize the solution.
The theory and practice of assistance to speech communities whose native languages are threatened are examined. The discussion focuses on why most efforts to reverse language shift are unsuccessful or even harmful, diagnosing difficulties and prescribing alternatives based on a combination of ethnolinguistic, sociocultural, and econotechnical considerations. The first section looks at reasons for trying to reverse language shift, whether it is possible, where and why shift occurs, and how it can be reversed. A typology of disadvantaged languages and ameliorative priorities is presented. The second section contains a number of case studies from different continents, including those of: Irish; Basque; Frisian; Navajo, Spanish, and Yiddish (secular and ultra-orthodox) in America; Maori in New Zealand; Australian aboriginal and immigrant languages, Modern Hebrew and French in Quebec; Catalan in Spain; and the unique situation of non-transmission of "additional" (parents' second) languages. The third section addresses the related issues of language planning for reversal of language shift, dialect standards and corpus planning, intergenerational transmission of "additional" languages, and limitations on school effectiveness in connection with native language transmission. Chapters include bibliographies. (MSE)
I define neologism-proofness, a refinement of perfect Bayesian equilibrium in cheap-talk games. It applies when players have a preexisting common language, so that an unexpected message′s literal meaning is clear, and only credibility restricts communication. I show that certain implausible equilibria are not neologism-proof; in some games, no equilibrium is. Journal of Economic Literature classification numbers: D83 D82 C73.