Linguistic Diversity and Its Impact on Economic Policies and Political Decisions

The paper addresses the issue of linguistic diversity and its impact on economic policy and political decisions. Importance of the topic is illustrated by examination of optimal sets of official languages in the European Union. It is shown that alternative estimation methods of language disenfranchisement alter the order in which the languages enter the list of the official ones. Also, we present an overview of gametheoretic models of language acquisition, where individuals weigh costs and benefits of studying new languages. These models are used to predict actual distribution of language skills in a society and to compare it with the first-best outcome. The paper ends with estimation of our predictions on the basis of empirical analysis of European data.Game theory, linguistic models, communication benefits, costs of studying, official languages of the European Union, Nash equilibrium, public efficiency

"Come Together!": Interactions of Language Networks and Multilingual Communities on Twitter

Emerging tools and methodologies are providing insight into the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following significant activities, such as high-profile international social or societal events. This paper presents an extensible approach for analysing how different language communities engage and interact on the social networking platform Twitter via an analysis of the Eurovision Song Contest held in Stockholm, Sweden, in May 2016. By utilising language information from user profiles (N=1,226,959) and status updates (N=7,926,746) to identify and categorise communities, our approach is able to categorise these interactions, as well as construct network graphs to provide further insight on these multilingual communities. The results show that multilingualism is positively correlated with activity whilst negatively correlated with posting in the user’s own language