A language competition model for new minorities
Torsten Templin
Rationality and Society, 2019, vol. 31, issue 1, 40-69
Abstract:
This article presents a new model describing a language competition situation between a local majority language and a migrant minority language. Migrants enter the society, form families, and produce offspring. Adults raise their children in either one of the two languages or both. Children then attend school, learn additional languages as adults, and produce a new cohort with its own linguistic repertoire. Families and adults are utility maximizing actors, who take into account instrumental aspects of languages, such as their communicative range, as well as identity-related aspects. A general macro-level model describes how the linguistic composition of a population facing migration changes over time. Furthermore, a specific functional form of the general model is proposed and steady states are analyzed. Finally, for illustrative purposes, the model is applied to the case of Spanish and English in the United States.
Keywords: Dynamic modeling; language competition; language policy; migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463118787487 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:31:y:2019:i:1:p:40-69
DOI: 10.1177/1043463118787487
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().