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How Many Languages Do We Need?: The Economics of Linguistic Diversity
In the global economy, linguistic diversity influences economic and political development as well as public policies in positive and negative ways. It leads to financial costs, communication barriers, divisions in national unity, and, in some extreme cases, conflicts and war--but it also produces benefits related to group and individual identity. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages of linguistic diversity and how does it influence social and economic progress? This book examines linguistic diversity as a global social phenomenon and considers what degree of linguistic variety might result in the greatest economic good.Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber look at linguistic proximity between groups and between languages. They describe and use simple economic, linguistic, and statistical tools to measure diversity's impact on growth, development, trade, the quality of institutions, translation issues, voting patterns in multinational competitions, and the likelihood and intensity of civil conflicts. They address the choosing of core languages in a multilingual community, such as the European Union, and argue that although too many official languages might harm cohesiveness, efficiency, and communication, reducing their number brings about alienation and disenfranchisement of groups.Demonstrating that the value and drawbacks of linguistic diversity are universal, How Many Languages Do We Need? suggests ways for designing appropriate linguistic policies for today's multilingual world.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
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January 28, 2016
Spoiler Alert: The answer to the question is 6.
I realize this book may be a hard sell to a lot of people because of the subject matter, but as a former Econ major who has an unhealthy obsession with languages, I really enjoyed it. If you're like me and you build language indexes in your free time, then this is a book I can recommend.
So first off, here's a criticism. They joke at the beginning that their friend Marjorie Pannell translated their "Globish" into English, but unfortunately the language used was still pretty dry, even for economists, and while there weren't a ton of grammar mistakes (maybe a dozen or so), there were enough to catch my attention. And then there were just a couple of places where the authors contradicted themselves (ex. p. 192, "Finally, let E, G, and F represent the total number of speakers of English, German, and French" followed just a few lines later by "E, the total number of Europeans who do NOT speak [English]." (Emphasis added.) It's clear from context and the chart that follows, that the letters represent those who do not speak the language, and the first reference was a mistake, but these mistakes can really throw someone off who is having a hard time following the logic. The book really just needed a second read through with a copy editor.
Second complaint. The whole book builds up to the European case study at the end, which was excellently done, but when they move on to the section on compensation for languages that don't make the cut, the authors don't do nearly as good a job in laying the theoretical foundation for why compensation should be given in the way they suggest. I generally agree with the conclusion, but they need to connect the dots.
The best part of the book was the analysis of what they call the B index, which measures linguistic diversity taking distance into account. I agree that this is a very important variable in language analysis that economists ignore too often. Their distance data relied primarily on Ethnologue, which I can't complain about as I use Ethnologue for lots of my language related research as well. but when they got down to the differences between dialects I was a little surprised that they didn't bring up Glottolog, which tends to be a little more conservative in recognizing linguistic relationships (resulting in far more unique language families), but has significantly more detail with regard to dialect relationships. I only recently discovered this index myself, so it's possible that the authors didn't have it on their radar at the time they wrote the book. I would recommend it to the authors in the future as an additional helpful resource.
On the point of distances, I wish they gave a little more attention to the issue of closeness sometimes being a greater source of contention than distance. The best example from a non-linguistic source is the view of Jesus as a Pharisee. His greatest enemies were also the closest to him in terms of teachings and philosophy. The same is frequently true in a linguistic context. They mention the Hutu and Tutsi example, and spent some time on India, but I would really like to have seen more attention given to examples such as the Philippines or Kenya, where English is preferred over local languages to avoid preferencing one over the others, even though it would be far easier for a Filipino child to learn Tagalog in school than English, because of the similarity in that language to other Philippine languages.
Even though this isn't as highly rated as some other books I've read, I still recommend the book to the right reader. It's a good overview of a field that doesn't get the attention it deserves. Clearly I have opinions about the economics of language, but my criticism can be taken with a grain of salt as I've never actually published anything. But who knows, maybe someday I'll get to share my Relative Unique Linguistic Contribution Index with the authors!
I realize this book may be a hard sell to a lot of people because of the subject matter, but as a former Econ major who has an unhealthy obsession with languages, I really enjoyed it. If you're like me and you build language indexes in your free time, then this is a book I can recommend.
So first off, here's a criticism. They joke at the beginning that their friend Marjorie Pannell translated their "Globish" into English, but unfortunately the language used was still pretty dry, even for economists, and while there weren't a ton of grammar mistakes (maybe a dozen or so), there were enough to catch my attention. And then there were just a couple of places where the authors contradicted themselves (ex. p. 192, "Finally, let E, G, and F represent the total number of speakers of English, German, and French" followed just a few lines later by "E, the total number of Europeans who do NOT speak [English]." (Emphasis added.) It's clear from context and the chart that follows, that the letters represent those who do not speak the language, and the first reference was a mistake, but these mistakes can really throw someone off who is having a hard time following the logic. The book really just needed a second read through with a copy editor.
Second complaint. The whole book builds up to the European case study at the end, which was excellently done, but when they move on to the section on compensation for languages that don't make the cut, the authors don't do nearly as good a job in laying the theoretical foundation for why compensation should be given in the way they suggest. I generally agree with the conclusion, but they need to connect the dots.
The best part of the book was the analysis of what they call the B index, which measures linguistic diversity taking distance into account. I agree that this is a very important variable in language analysis that economists ignore too often. Their distance data relied primarily on Ethnologue, which I can't complain about as I use Ethnologue for lots of my language related research as well. but when they got down to the differences between dialects I was a little surprised that they didn't bring up Glottolog, which tends to be a little more conservative in recognizing linguistic relationships (resulting in far more unique language families), but has significantly more detail with regard to dialect relationships. I only recently discovered this index myself, so it's possible that the authors didn't have it on their radar at the time they wrote the book. I would recommend it to the authors in the future as an additional helpful resource.
On the point of distances, I wish they gave a little more attention to the issue of closeness sometimes being a greater source of contention than distance. The best example from a non-linguistic source is the view of Jesus as a Pharisee. His greatest enemies were also the closest to him in terms of teachings and philosophy. The same is frequently true in a linguistic context. They mention the Hutu and Tutsi example, and spent some time on India, but I would really like to have seen more attention given to examples such as the Philippines or Kenya, where English is preferred over local languages to avoid preferencing one over the others, even though it would be far easier for a Filipino child to learn Tagalog in school than English, because of the similarity in that language to other Philippine languages.
Even though this isn't as highly rated as some other books I've read, I still recommend the book to the right reader. It's a good overview of a field that doesn't get the attention it deserves. Clearly I have opinions about the economics of language, but my criticism can be taken with a grain of salt as I've never actually published anything. But who knows, maybe someday I'll get to share my Relative Unique Linguistic Contribution Index with the authors!
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