Do the languages people speak influence their economic decisions and social behavior in multilingual societies? This Handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine the links and tensions between economics and language to find the delicate balance between monetary benefits and psychological costs of linguistic dynamics.

Arising out of the author's lifetime fascination with the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language, this short book comprises five essays investigating both the economics of language and the language of economics. Ariel Rubinstein touches on the structure imposed on binary relations in daily language, the evolutionary development of the meaning of words, game-theoretical considerations of pragmatics, the language of economic agents and the rhetoric of game theory. These short essays are full of challenging ideas for social scientists that should help to encourage a fundamental rethinking of many of the underlying assumptions in economic theory and game theory.

Written by two internationally renowned experts in the field, this book explores the determinants of dominant language proficiency among immigrants and other linguistic minorities and the consequences of this proficiency for the labour market.Using empirical material from a range of countries, including the USA, Canada, Australia and Bolivia, the a

Insights from the application of economic theories and research methods to the management of linguistic diversity in an era of globalization. In an era of globalization, issues of language diversity have economic and political implications. Transnational labor mobility, trade, social inclusion of migrants, democracy in multilingual countries, and companies' international competitiveness all have a linguistic dimension; yet economists in general do not include language as a variable in their research. This volume demonstrates that the application of rigorous economic theories and research methods to issues of language policy yields valuable insights. The contributors offer both theoretical and empirical analyses of such topics as the impact of language diversity on economic outcomes, the distributive effects of policy regarding official languages, the individual welfare consequences of bilingualism, and the link between language and national identity. Their research is based on data from countries including Canada, India, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia and from the regions of Central America, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Theoretical models are explained intuitively for the nonspecialist. The relationships among linguistic variables, inequality, and the economy are approached from different perspectives, including economics, sociolinguistics, and political science. For this reason, the book offers a substantive contribution to interdisciplinary work on languages in society and language policy, proposing a common framework for a shared research area. Contributors Alisher Aldashev, Katalin Buzási, Ramon Caminal, Alexander M. Danzer, Maxime Leblanc Desgagné, Peter H. Egger, Ainhoa Aparicio Fenoll, Michele Gazzola, Victor Ginsburgh, Gilles Grenier, François Grin, Zoe Kuehn, Andrea Lassmann, Stephen May, Serge Nadeau, Suzanne Romaine, Selma K. Sonntag, Stefan Sperlich, José-Ramón Uriarte, François Vaillancourt, Shlomo Weber, Bengt-Arne Wickström, Lauren Zentz

By bridging the gap between linguistics and economics, this book sheds light on a range of mutually valuable topics.

This book proposes a path-breaking study of the economics of multilingualism at work, proposing a systematic approach to the identification and measurement of the ways in which language skills and economic performance are related. Using the instruments of economic investigation, but also explicitly relating the analysis to the approaches to multilingualism at work developed in the language sciences, this interdisciplinary book proposes a systematic, step-by-step exploration of the issue. Starting from a general identification of the linkages between multilingualism and processes of value creation, it reviews the contributions of linguistics and economics before developing a new economic model of production in which language is taken into account. Testing of the model using data from two countries provides quantitative estimations of the influence of multilingualism on economic processes, showing that foreign language skills can make a considerable contribution to a country’s GDP. These findings have significant implications for language policy and suggest strategies helping language planners to harness market forces for increased effectiveness. A technical appendix shows how the novel technical and statistical procedures developed in this study can be generalized, and applied wherever researchers or decision makers need to identify and measure the value of multilingualism.