A Game-Theoreteic Analysis of Minority Language Use in Multilingual Societies

This chapter studies multilingual democratic societies with highly developed economies. These societies are assumed to have two languages with official status: language A, spoken by every individual, and language B, spoken by the bilingual minority. We emphasize that language rights are important, but the survival of the minority language B depends mainly on the actual use bilinguals make of B. The purpose of the present chapter is to study some of the factors affecting the bilingual speakers language choice behaviour. Our view is that languages with their speech communities compete for speakers just as fi rms compete for market share. Thus, the con ict among the minority languages in these societies does not take the rough expressions such as those studied in Desmet et al. (2012). Here the con flict is more subtle. We model highly plausible language choice situations by means of choice procedures and non-cooperative games, each with different types of information. We then study the determinants of the bilinguals ' strategic behaviour with regard to language. We observe that the bilinguals' use of B is shaped, essentially, by linguistic conventions and social norms that are developed in situations of language contact.

Ikasleen hizkuntza erroreak eta hutsegiteak : zuzentzeko proposamena

[Es]El presente trabajo se basa en las consultas que los profesores y profesoras de distintas asignaturas nos hacen al profesorado de lengua. Muchas veces los profesores debemos corregir no sólo el contenido de los trabajos de nuestros alumnos, sino también la lengua. La discusión no es nueva: ¿somos todos los profesores también profesores de lengua? Es un desafío del que difícilmente podemos escapar, ya que la lengua además de ser una materia de estudio también es el vehículo en el que se imparten los contenidos de todas las asignaturas. Con el presente trabajo pretendemos ayudar a los profesores que no imparten lengua como asignatura a corregir los trabajos de sus alumnos. Esta propuesta consta de tres ejes de actuación marcados por un orden de prioridad: prevenir, autocorregir y ayudar.

Estrategias de lectura on-line en inglés como lengua extranjera

XXIV, 508 p.

Solutions for New Terrestrial Broadcasting Systems Offering Simultaneously Stationary and Mobile Services

221 p.

EUSMT: incorporating linguistic information to SMT for a morphologically rich language. Its use in SMT-RBMT-EBMT hybridation

148 p.: graf.

The Economics of "Why is it so hard to save a threatened Language?"

We study the language choice behavior of bilingual speakers in modern societies, such as the Basque Country, Ireland andWales. These countries have two o cial languages:A, spoken by all, and B, spoken by a minority. We think of the bilinguals in those societies as a population playing repeatedly a Bayesian game in which, they must choose strategically the language, A or B, that might be used in the interaction. The choice has to be made under imperfect information about the linguistic type of the interlocutors. We take the Nash equilibrium of the language use game as a model for real life language choice behavior. It is shown that the predictions made with this model t very well the data about the actual use, contained in the censuses, of Basque, Irish and Welsh languages. Then the question posed by Fishman (2001),which appears in the title, is answered as follows: it is hard, mainly, because bilingual speakers have reached an equilibrium which is evolutionary stable. This means that to solve fast and in a re ex manner their frequent language coordination problem, bilinguals have developed linguistic conventions based chie y on the strategy 'Use the same language as your interlocutor', which weakens the actual use of B.1