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languages. Besides, it is quite common that when people study abroad, they tend to get together with their compatriots so that they could communicate in the same language, which symbolizes a sense of belonging, security, and familiarity.
Furthermore, there is no strong correlation between the vitality of a language and its symbolic value. On particular occasions, high symbolic value could be attributed to the dead or endangered languages which still enjoy a special position among powerful languages.
The sign value of an object refers to the evaluations that are made according to its social prestige. Social prestige refers to the attitudes held towards the target object and the socioeconomic powers that it implies. For instance, a luxurious car not only contains use value (a car runs) and exchange value (a car might be worth a five-year salary), but also has high sign value since the society usually holds a set of special stereotypes towards particular car brands. When applying the notion of sign value to the analysis of language phenomena, numerous examples could offer an explanation.
The proliferation of English, Spanish or Portuguese in the once colonized countries represents the success of physical powerfulness, economic control and political manipulation. Pure linguistic factors only play a very minor role. The developments of those powerful colonizer languages might entail a variety of benefits, and thus high value, for their speakers.
2.3 Language and Economy
Economics is the social science that studies how scarcity and incentive influence or reconcile our choices. Scarcity refers to the condition when available resources are insufficient to satisfy wants; incentive refers to a reward or a penalty that encourages
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or discourages an action.13
In a multilingual society, scarcity might happen frequently since an individual’s mother tongue is not sufficient to satisfy the communicative needs. Especially under an authoritarian government, only the designated official language is able to satisfy the communicative, political, and economic needs in public spheres. Thus, incentives that encourage people to learn the designated official language arise. The transformation of Taiwan language structure under martial law was an example that explains this situation.
The world can not function as usual without language. Language is an important cultural asset that facilitates the exchanges of both physical and non-physical interactions. It is the medium of business; nevertheless, it sometimes could act as a barrier to trade. There is such a powerful and tight relation that it will not make perfect sense to explain the changeable linguistic map of the world without referring to economic development.
The above statement draws attention to the study of language economics, which tries to figure out how linguistic and economic variables influence one another. For instance, it has been argued that in most African countries, one has to gain knowledge of a former colonial language in order to achieve upward social mobility and better economic opportunities. From the perspective of language economics, linguistic products such as language varieties and accents are regarded as goods or commodities that contain a value based on the functions of markets. Some linguistic products may be in possession of higher market values when compared with others; thus, people tend to invest in the acquisition of a certain linguistic product to enjoy the underlying advantages. Furthermore, language planning efforts are most likely to succeed when
13 Bade, Robin and Michael Parkin. 2004. Essential Foundations of Economics. Boston: Pearson Addison Wesley, pp. 2-3.
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supported by economic or associated social incentives for the minority groups (Kamwangamalu, 2008).
Alsagoff (2008) applied the concept of commodification, which requires the theory of political economics, to the analysis of languages. This concept regards languages as goods that can be objectified, evaluated, and exchanged for on the market. In other words, the value of a language depends on its correlation with some form of benefit or goods of worth to the society. For instance, economic value can be given to a particular language as long as it, directly or indirectly, generates advantages to its speakers or smoothes the economic functioning of a society.
The notion of global language system, proposed by de Swaan, is a sociological classification of languages based on the non-haphazard connections between various language communities. Languages are classified into four categories, namely central languages, supercentral languages, hypercentral languages, and peripheral languages.
The speakers of peripheral languages, for the purpose of communication, tend to acquire the same second language, which becomes central language to their region.
This inclination of language shift towards central language can be explained through concepts of economics. According to de Swaan, languages are hypercollective goods that require an investment to learn. Languages are like social networks that provide connections into that specific language community. Thus, the acquisition of a (central) language is like an investment that brings potential economic opportunities.14
Language ability has been proven to be a detrimental form of human capital, and it is especially true in developing countries. If we assume that the acquisition of language can be achieved through individual choice and parents can decide which of the existing languages to pass on to their children, it would be quite possible that the selection of which language to acquire or to pass on might be determined by the
14 Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 88-89.
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potential economic incentives that the target language could bring. The economists that study immigrant labors have argued that ability in the receiving countries’
language earns returns in the labor market (Bleakley and Chin, 2004; Chiswick and Miller, 1995).15 Lankshear (1997) suggests that language has been economized in the sense that they are promoted, from individual to national level, for reasons of economic advantage. As a consequence, language is likely to be an integrated characteristic of economic development.
Members of non-prestige social groups or linguistic minorities seem acutely aware of the fact that certain languages (non-prestige or minority languages) do not have a function in gaining upward social mobility. Spanish in America, French in Canada, Moroccan-Arabic in Morocco, or Quechua in Peru therefore are not highly associated with academic schooling, economic success, etc. (Rene Appel and Pieter Muysken, 1987: 20)
Pool (1972: 222) once made a short statement that linguistically highly fragmented countries are economically poor. As in many developing countries, linguistic fragmentation coincides with low economic growth. However, this does not mean that linguistically highly homogenous countries are economically rich, for which it is not difficult to find examples.16 Practically speaking, Li Wei (2000) suggested that difficulties in communication within a country can act as an impediment to commerce and industry. It is assumed that multilingual countries are often faced with certain problems that monolingual states do not encounter although pure monolingual states can be hardly found. When the highly industrialized countries colonized the underdeveloped countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth
15 Although the conclusion is based on the analysis of immigrant society, the struggle of the people in the lower class in any societies is somewhat similar; thus, the generalization of the conclusion is credible.
16 Pool, Jonathan. 1972. National Development and Language Diversity. In Fishman, J.A. (ed.).
Advances in the Sociology of Language, 2. Den Haag: Mouton, pp. 213-230.
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centuries, one of the measures taken to tear down the obstacles in reaping economic surplus was to diminish communicative difficulties by way of various language policies that promoted the colonizers’ languages.17
Coulmas (1992: 25) suggested that a high level of socioeconomic development is not compatible with linguistic fragmentation. This perspective is in accordance with that of the language planners in the developed and industrialized countries, which shows a certain degree of monolingualism. Though in some advanced countries, several languages co-exist and enjoy official status, the governments tend to promote one certain language (or a few already widespread languages) and make it dominant, while downplaying the others to symbolic and cultural accessories rather than functional significance.18
Pattanayak (1996) brought up the idea that the co-existence of multiple languages is perceived to be a threat to national cohesion, administrative integration and barriers to economic growth. Furthermore, the significant influence of urbanization on languages was also emphasized by him. Simply speaking, in highly industrialized and urbanized societies, the language of the rich becomes richer and the language of the poor becomes poorer.19
The notion of linguistic instrumentalism was emphasized by Lionel wee (2008), who defined it as what justifies the existence of a language in a community based on its usefulness in achieving specific utilitarian objectives such as access to economic development or social mobility.20 Although it has been widely agreed that language possesses certain sentimental attachments that bring people together, the survival of an endangered language, according to linguistic instrumentalism, might rely more on
17 Wei, Li (ed.). 2000. The Bilingualism Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 3-25.
18 Coulmas, Florian. 1992. Language and Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, p. 25
19 Coleman, Hywel and Lynne Cameron (ed.). 1996. Change and Language. British Association for Applied Linguistics: Multilingual Matters Ltd, pp. 143-152.
20 Tan, Peter. K. W. and Rani Rubdy (ed.). 2008. Language as Commodity. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, p 32.
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its correlation with social mobility or potential economic advantage that comes with it.
To sum up, there is no scientific evidence to show that multilingual countries are particularly disadvantaged compared to monolingual ones; nevertheless, it might be true that linguistic uniformity and economy reinforce each other. In other words, economic advancement leads to the reduction of linguistic diversity.21