 Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me: Levels of Majority Language Language Acquisition by Minority Language SpeakersShlomo Weber, William Brock, Bo Chen and Steven Durlauf No 17623, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research Abstract: Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial equilibrium language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various minority groups choose whether to acquire a majority language fully, partially, or not at all. Different acquisition decisions confer different communicative benefits and incur different costs. We offer an equilibrium characterization of language acquisition strategies and find that partial acquisition can arise as an equilibrium behavior. We also show that a language equilibrium may exhibit insufficient learning relative to the social optimum. In addition, we provide a local stability analysis of steady state language equilibria. Finally, we discuss econometric implementation of the language acquisition model and establish econometric identification conditions. Keywords: Communicative benefits; Identification (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17623 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK. |
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