What is language? / Qué es el lenguaje?

…is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn. (p. 3) 

That is from the excellent book: The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker.

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…no es un protocolo legislado por una autoridad sino un wiki que incorpora las contribuciones de millones de escritores y hablantes, quienes sin parar moldean el lenguaje a sus necesidades y quienes inexorablemente embejecen, mueren, y son sustituidos por sus hijos, quienes también adaptan el lenguaje. (p. 3)

 Del excelente libro: The Sense of Style por Steven Pinker.

Language and economic behavior

I twitted this Keith Chen TED-talk recently. The paper is here (December 2012). The abstract:

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice.

FTR stands for Future Time Reference. 

The title of the paper is "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets." It is forthcoming in the AER.
There is a lot of fresh air in that type of research.

What determines gender political quotas?

According to this article by Gay, Santacreu-Vasut, & Shoham the main determinant is female/male distinction in language:

The abstract:

This article studies the determinants of gender political quota and enforcement sanctions, two key policy instruments for increasing female participation in politics. We find a novel empirical fact: language (the pervasiveness of gender distinctions in grammar) is the most significant related variable to quota adoption, more than traditional explanations such as economic development, political system and religion.

A draft is here.  

Returns to English-language skills in India

Another interesting paper in the most recent number of Economic Development and Cultural Change looks at the returns to English-language skills in India:

Abstract

India’s colonial legacy and linguistic diversity give English an important role in its economy, and this role has expanded due to globalization in recent decades. In this paper, we use individual-level data from the India Human Development Survey, 2005 to quantify the effects of English-language skills on wages. After controlling for age, social group, schooling, geography and proxies for ability, we find that hourly wages are on average 34% higher for men who speak fluent English and 13% higher for men who speak a little English relative to men who do not speak English. The return to fluent English is as large as the return to completing secondary school and half as large as the return to completing a Bachelor’s degree. Additionally, we find that more experienced and more educated workers receive higher returns to English. The complementarity between English skills and education appears to have strengthened over time–only the more educated among young workers receive a premium for English-speaking ability, whereas older workers across all education groups do.

Download the draft.
Did you see "The economics of language"?

Languages and the law

The role of the law in protecting or promoting language is limited. A love for culture cannot be imposed. Culture comes from the heart, from the gut. If Afrikaans is becoming irrelevant it is not because of the law only – it is because the Afrikaans-speaking population is losing heart or losing its heart. To illustrate: Some years ago a new law library was opened at a former Afrikaans university. All of the speakers, from the Principal to the Dean were Afrikaans. They spoke English. The only speaker who used Afrikaans was Mr Mbeki, then the President. He hardly qualifies as Afrikaans. 

The poet NP van Wyk Louw wrote in 1959: ‘Dit wat ons taal sal word, of oor wat van hom sal word, kan ons nie praat nie – behalwe met hartstogtelike verlange’ (Van Wyk Louw, ‘Laat ons nie roem nie,’ in Versamelde Prosa II p 181). (We cannot speak about what our language will become; and we cannot speak about what will become of our language – except with a passionate yearning. My translation.)

 Source.  

Language and rationality

 . . . [P]sychologists found that people forced to think in a foreign language made more rational decisions. 

Source.

Language and migration

We use a novel dataset on immigration flows and stocks of foreigners in 30 OECD destination countries from 223 source countries for the years 1980–2009 and a wide range of linguistic indicators to study the role of language in shaping international migration. Specifically, we investigate how both linguistic distance and linguistic diversity, as a proxy for the "potential" ease to learn a new language and to adapt to a new context, affect migration. We find that migration rates increase with linguistic proximity and the result is robust to the inclusion of genetic distance as a proxy for cultural proximity and to the use of multiple measures of linguistic distance. Interestingly, linguistic proximity matters more for migrants moving into non-English speaking destinations than to English-speaking countries. The likely higher proficiency of the average migrant in English rather than in other languages may diminish the relevance of the linguistic proximity indicators to English speaking destinations. Finally, destinations that are linguistically more diverse and polarized attract fewer migrants than those with a single language; whereas more linguistic polarization at origin seems to act as a push factor.

That is from the paper "The Role of Language in Shaping International Migration" by Alicia Adsera and Mariola Pytlikova

Languages and growth

I have mixed feelings about the implications of this:

. . . [E]conomic growth requires that groups have the ability to coordinate, interact and organize in networks of production, knowledge and trade. This ability is affected by linguistic divisions. In India, for instance, the degree of integration between regions is likely hindered by linguistic barriers — even linguistic barriers separate relatively similar linguistic groups such as Hindi and Gujarati speakers. Coordination, integration and more generally the ability to form knowledge, production and trading networks is hampered as soon as linguistic differentiation prevents interactions between groups, and this can occur between groups that are relatively similar linguistically.

The case of public goods shares characteristics of both types of outcomes: public goods are inherently redistributive in nature, and their provision depends on differences in preferences among participants. At the same time, the provision of public goods requires coordination and interactions, that even superficial cleavages might hamper. We found that, much as in the case of growth, for a wide array of measures of public goods, fine distinctions between linguistic groups matter to hinder their provision. Even when cleavages are shallow, a country may fail to have well-functioning public services, not necessarily because people are unwilling to redistribute, but because of coordination failures. 

That is from the paper "The political economy of linguistic cleavages," by Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín, and Wacziarg.

Gender in Language and Gender in Employment

Women lag behind men in many domains. Feminists have proposed that sex-based grammatical gender systems in languages reinforce traditional conceptions of gender roles, which in turn contribute to disadvantaging women. This article evaluates the empirical plausibility of this claim in the context of the labour market outcomes of women. Based on a sample of over 100 countries, the analysis shows that places where the majority language is gender-intensive have lower participation rates of women in the labour force.

This is from this new working paper, by Astghik Mavisakalyan (Australian National University). 

Does vagueness reduce conflict?

From the paper Intentional Vagueness by Andreas Blume and Oliver Board: 

This paper analyzes communication with a language that is vague in the sense that identical messages do not always result in identical interpretations. It is shown that strategic agents frequently add to this vagueness by being intentionally vague, i.e. they deliberately choose less precise messages than they have to among the ones available to them in equilibrium. Having to communicate with a vague language can be welfare enhancing because it mitigates conflict. In equilibria that satisfy a dynamic stability condition intentional vagueness increases with the degree of conflict between sender and receiver.

The paper is discussed in a recent post by Tim Harford:

Alan Greenspan, the mumbling maestro of mixed messages, played the markets with one vague declaration after another, each one a nudge – but not a shove – in the direction he preferred. 

The Blume-Board paper lurks on the boundary between philosophy and mathematics – and, ironically, it is extremely precise about what “vagueness” means. A working paper from the economists Florian Ederer, Richard Holden and Margaret Meyer has a more practical bent, examining the boss who finds it useful to be vague about performance bonuses.