The Official Language Problem

Polities and organizations use and require particular languages for official business. The choice of official languages is a vexing issue. Theorists, convinced that a fair language policy cannot be efficient, have despaired of an elegant solution. To investigate this apparent dilemma, I mathematical...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American political science review 1991-06, Vol.85 (2), p.495-514
Main Author: Pool, Jonathan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cost efficiency
Fairness
Language
Language policy
Language rights
Language translation
LANGUAGE, LANGUAGES, LINGUISTICS
Languages
MODELING, MODELS
Native languages
Official languages
Political science
Politics
Polities
Public Policy
Social research
Sociology
Sociology of communication and mass media. Sociolinguistics
Sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture
Tax policy
Theory
Total costs
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Polities and organizations use and require particular languages for official business. The choice of official languages is a vexing issue. Theorists, convinced that a fair language policy cannot be efficient, have despaired of an elegant solution. To investigate this apparent dilemma, I mathematically model the problem of choosing an efficient and fair language policy for a plurilingual polity. The policy designates official languages and taxes the language groups to pay for translation among the official languages. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, this model implies that a fair language policy can be efficient. But what if language groups rationally misrepresent the costs of using a nonnative official language? Even then, the policy maker can discover a fair language policy and, under some conditions, can use a cost-revelation procedure that discovers a fair and efficient language policy. The results challenge the claim that efficiency and practicality excuse the inferior treatment of language minorities.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.2307/1963171