Markets and linguistic diversity

Ramon Caminal

No 396, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: The choice of language is a crucial decision for rms competing in cultural goods and media markets with a bilingual or multilingual consumer base. To the extent that multilingual consumers have preferences over the intrinsic characteristics (content) as well as over the language of the product, we can examine the efficiency of market outcomes regarding linguistic diversity. In this paper, I extend the spokes model and introduce language as an additional dimension of product differentiation. I show that: (i) if rms supply their product in a single language (the adoption model) then the degree of linguistic diversity is inefficiently low, and (ii) if some rms supply more than one linguistic version (the translation model) then in principle the market outcome may exhibit insufficient or excessive linguistic diversity. However, excessive diversity is associated to markets where the fraction of products in the minority language is disproportionately high with respect to the relative size of the linguistic minority.

Keywords: product variety; language; translation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L13 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
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Related works:
Journal Article: Markets and linguistic diversity (2010)
Working Paper: Markets and Linguistic Diversity (2010)
Working Paper: Markets and linguistic diversity (2009)
Working Paper: Markets and linguistic diversity (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:396

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