François Grin

English as Economic Value: Facts and Fallacies.

Provides an overview of the economic approach to the question of the value of English. Discusses reasons why this question is attracting increasing attention, and examines the labor market in Switzerland, presenting methodological aspects and providing fundamental statistical reports. Results indicate that for Switzerland as a whole, English skills can be associated with high and statistically robust wage premia.

The economics of the multilingual workplace

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: The Economic Perspective on Multilingualism 1: Language at Work: Identifying the Issue 2: On the Linguistics of the Economy v. the Economics of Language 3: A Gallery of Empirical Findings 4: Foreign Language Skills and Earnings Part II: Foreign Language Skills, Foreign Language Use, and Production 5: Language Use and the Production Process 6: From Theory to Measurement 7: The Contribution of Multilingualism to Value Creation 8: Foreign Language Skills and Hiring Strategies Part III: Policy Implications and Future Prospects 9: Policy Implications 10: Multilingualism at Work: A Prospective Glance Appendix I: Language-Augmented Production Model Appendix II: Estimation Procedure and Results Appendix III: A Simple Recruitment Model Notes Bibliography Index

The Economics of Language: Match or Mismatch?

The economics of language is an interdisciplinary field of inves tigation which explores the mutual effect of language-related and economic variables. This paper reviews the main orientations and results of research, and then critically assesses the nature of standard assump tions made in the economics of language. It is shown that many of these assumptions can be expanded or adapted in order to increase the scope of relevant causal links that can be encompassed in modelling. This, in turn, requires a stronger emphasis on interdisciplinarity, in which economics has an essential role to play, in particular for selecting and designing language policy.

The Economics of Multilingualism: Overview and Analytical Framework

The purpose of this paper is to introduce noneconomists to the economics of multilingualism. This area of research is relatively little known among economists, and until recent years, few of its methods and results had been published in the journals usually read by language specialists, although sociolinguists and applied linguists had for many years been pointing out the importance of economic dimensions in their research field. It is therefore useful to begin with a brief review of the literature which, owing to limitations of space, does not report specific results, but lists the major issues that have been examined to date. More extensive surveys are available in Vaillancourt (1985a) and Grin (1994c; 1996e).

The economic approach to minority languages

Abstract This paper begins with a brief survey of existing contributions about language by economists. The relevance of these contributions to the specific case of minority languages in Europe is then critically assessed. After defining what is meant here by ‘minority language’, the paper explains the fundamental economic reasoning on the basis of which minority language use can be modelled. A simple model of minority language use is developed, providing some results that can be of help in evaluating the efficiency of proposed language policies. The impact of subsidising minority language goods, of increasing wage rates in minority language areas, and of offering better exposure to the minority language are shown to yield ambiguous results unless some conditions are met; these conditions regard the sensitivity of minority language activities to certain prices and to the wage rate offered on the labour market. The model also suggests that pouring money into minority language areas will yield disappointing ...

Chapter 17. Assessing efficiency and fairness in multilingual communication: Theory and application through indicators

As shown in several chapters of this book, actors confronted with the need to communicate in a multilingual context use a variety of strategies. These strategies may be more or less directly influenced by the language policies adopted by the public or private sector institutions in which they operate. Such policies may also be extremely diverse. Whether we are referring to actual language practices or explicit language policies, they can prove more or less multilingual. Assessing the relative merits of “more” or “less” multilingual practices and policies presupposes that we have a set of criteria which we can use as a basis for comparing them with each other. This chapter is devoted to the development of such criteria on the basis of the core principles of policy analysis, as it is applied to a host of other questions ranging from education planning to the provision of health services and environmental protection. We first show how the standard criteria of efficiency and fairness can be constructed and used with reference to language. We then infer from this analytical framework a matrix for the generation of a system of indicators of efficiency and fairness in multilingual communication. Examples of indicators, which can be “populated” with data, are provided in the appendix.

RISK, RISK AVERSION AND THE DEMAND FOR PERFORMING ARTS

Most people like to go to a show, and the live arts have always been one of the most popular forms of recreational activities. However, although almost everybody regularly attends artistic performances of various kinds, not everybody favors the same type of entertainment.

Language‐based earnings differentials on the Swiss labour market: is Italian a liability?

This paper examines wage rate differentials that set off speakers of Italian (Switzerland’s third national language community) from the rest of the population. Although second language skills are used here as control variables, the focus is on agents’ first language, which can be interpreted as a proxy for ethnicity. This paper uses a unique data set, and to our knowledge, is the first paper, to address the issue of language‐based inequality in Switzerland. Our chief aim is to provide an overview and to identify priorities for further research. The methodology is accordingly kept simple. After presenting general information on Switzerland′s Italian‐speaking community, we discuss the conceptual and methodological issues involved in the identification and operationalization of the data necessary to assess its relative socio‐economic status. Results show that outside the predominantly Italian‐language region of Tessin, male speakers of Italian are at a significant disadvantage on the labour market, even after controlling for the effect of other determinants of earnings, including competence in Switzerland’s other national languages. Therefore, the Swiss way of dealing with linguistic diversity, which relies on the territoriality principle (i.e., a one‐to‐one correspondence between language and territory, making for fairly homogeneous language regions), is not just an institutional arrangement; it also appears to be backed up by labour market outcomes, because interregional mobility may carry a significant cost.

The relevance of thresholds in language maintenance and shift: A theoretical examination

Abstract The decline of many minority languages, and the associated shift towards majority languages, raises the question of whether there is a point of no return, or ‘threshold’ in the process. This paper develops a formal model of language vitality as a function of preferences for conducting activities in one or the other language, percentage of minority‐language speakers, and expectations‐based adjustment to the observed change in language vitality. It shows that long‐term survival with low demolinguistic figures is possible if they are compensated for by a clear preference for minority‐language activities, and that insufficient preferences still allow for sustainable vitality if the public can be persuaded that language authorities are strongly committed to the protection of the language. Critical (threshold) values distinguish combinations of the independent variables leading to decline from those leading to survival. Formal expressions are provided for these critical values, suggesting that the conc...

THE DYLAN Project: “Language Dynamics and Management of Diversity”

This paper presents the European research project Language Dynamics and Management of Diversity (DYLAN) and its main findings.1 This project, from the European Union’s Sixth Framework Program, completed in 2011 after five years’ work by nineteen partners from thirteen countries across Europe, offers a fresh look on multilingualism in European institutions, businesses and institutions of higher education. In this project, our focus was on the interrelationships between actual language practices, people’s representations about multilingualism, their language choices, and the contexts in which they are confronted with linguistic diversity. In order to deepen our understanding of these relationships, we have examined at close range (i) how the very diverse linguistic repertoires of speakers operating in increasingly multilingual environments develop, and (ii) how actors make the best use of their repertoires and adapt them skilfully to different objectives and conditions. Throughout the project, a special emphasis was placed on how organisations actually cope with this diversity. Careful observation of actors’ multilingual practices has revealed finely tuned communicational strategies drawing on a wide range of different languages, including national languages, minority languages and lingue franche. Understanding these practices, both at the level of their meaning and at the level of their implications, helps to show in what way and under what conditions they are not merely a response to a problem – multilingualism often being primarily construed as such – but an asset in business, political, educational, scientific and economic contexts. In addition, the project explored issues that could not be assigned to any of these terrains, because they straddle the boundaries between them. Three such transversal issues have emerged as particularly relevant in the management and practice of communication in multilingual settings. They have provided much of the integrative substance of the project.The approach designed and implemented in the DYLAN project amounts to a reversal of the commonly held view that linguistic diversity is per se problematic. This research therefore allowed us to address the fundamental issue of whether (and, if so how), a European knowledge-based society designed to ensure economic competitiveness and social cohesion could develop and blossom despite the fact that, following enlargement, the European Union found itself more linguistically diverse than ever before. The DYLAN project has adopted a “mixed-methods” approach, collecting and analysing different types of data such as official documents, interviews with agents working at different hierarchical levels, job ads, websites, various features of the linguistic landscape, and tape recordings of multilingual and monolingual interaction in the workplace, in various institutional settings and in teaching in educational institutions. Our analysis showed that the use of multilingual repertoires can constitute a resource for the construction, transmission and use of knowledge, providing various modes of access to information processing, and helping actors retain and classify new information. A multilingual mode, encouraged by a policy of multilingualism and linked to an appropriate participatory framework, seems to be one of the conditions for taking full advantage of the multilingual asset.