The economics of language is a specialty in mainstream economics that has steadily developed in the course of a 50-year history beginning in the 1960s. Its establishment as a field of specialization has been marked by several milestones (e.g. Vaillancourt, 1985; Grin, 1996; Chiswick and Miller, 2007). In recent years, it has known accelerated progress, marked in particular by the publication of several edited volumes (Ginsburgh and Weber, 2016; Gazzola and Wickström, 2016). Many of the most interesting developments have to do with the emergence of an increasingly autonomous, interdisciplinary research field, with numerous applications to language policy selection and design. This raises the question of the interaction between language economics and other fields of specialization in the broader context of what we shall call “multilingualism studies” – that is, the study of multilingualism as a micro-, meso- and macro-level phenomenon. The economic contribution to multilingualism studies starts out from one general, transversal concern: apart from understanding multilingualism per se, we also need to recognize that different ways of dealing with multilingualism, through formal and informal institutions, and through overt and covert policies, have different impacts on individuals and groups: different ways of dealing with multilingualism have different socio-economic outcomes. These outcomes can be approached in terms of the more or less efficient use, but also in terms of the more or less fair distribution of material and symbolic resources, and these outcomes can also be assessed simultaneously from the standpoint of different disciplines. In this panel, we propose to reflect on multilingualism studies in a dual perspective, namely (1) how language economics develops its core constructs (such as efficiency, costs, benefits, etc.) (2) whether these constructs converge with, or depart from those developed in other disciplines and specializations in multilingualism studies (such as linguistics, political science, law, the education sciences, etc.).
The colloquium benefits from funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (Project MIME – grant agreement 613344). This support is gratefully acknowledged.
