Economics of language and the “long tail” effect

“The economics of language has been neglected and deserves much greater attention,” wrote economist Donald Lamberton in a book he edited in 2002. That may not have been too much of a revelation at the time – only a few years earlier (1994) another economist, François Grin, wrote that this field was tolerated “as an intriguing fringe interest” by the discipline of economics. I’d like to briefly explore an intriguing idea on the fringe of that fringe: whether there are or could be “long-tail” dynamics that give some advantages to minority languages.

But first, what is “economics of language”? Grin, in the same article mentioned above defined it as covering the study of:

…the effects of language on income (possibly revealing the presence of language-based discrimination), language learning by immigrants, patterns of language maintenance and spread in multilingual polities or between trading partners, minority language protection and promotion, the selection and design of language policies, language use in the workplace, and market equilibrium for language-specific goods and services.

Actually some of these issues are getting increased attention (another book on the topic was just published last year by Barry R. Chiswick and Paul W. Miller, for instance), so I suspect that economics of language is becoming a little more mainstream. (A good online review of the subject under the title “The Economics of Multilingualism” was written by Grin and François Vaillancourt.)

Long tail graph from Wikimedia CommonsWhat does the “long tail” have to do with any of this? Well to begin with, the distribution of languages by number of speakers, if plotted out on a graph like the figure (from the Wikimedia Commons) to the right, is a long tail distribution. The question is whether this means anything with regard to the economics of languages – and in particular for minority or less-widely spoken languages (the ones I’ve liked to call MINELs) which are in the long tail.

By way of explanation, the “long tail” refers to a distribution where a few categories have a lot of each (they would be the green-shaded area in the figure), and many categories have progressively fewer (the yellow-shaded part). It was popularized by Chris Anderson in a 2004 article, and then a 2006 book, on new marketing strategies facilitated by the internet. As such, it is a kind of economic model.

How do languages fit this pattern? I plotted out a bar graph for the 50 languages with the most mother tongue speakers using figures from Wikipedia (originally from Ethnologue) and an online utility at Shodor.org.
First 50 languagesIt’s “quick and dirty” but gives an idea of how the actual distribution compares to the long tail model. Needless to say, there is a very long and low “tail” to the right in this distribution after the first 50 languages.

I got the idea of connecting the long tail concept with languages from Laurent Elder of IDRC. When I finally got to read up on the subject it began to make sense. At least partway…

I have been among those suggesting that information and communication technologies make a lot of things possible or less expensive for MINELs that were impossible or too costly before. Desktop publishing or using webpages reduces barriers to producing and sharing text in any language – critical for languages with few resources and examples of a long tail effect. Cheaper communications via VOIP and expanded availability of cellphones facilitate dispersed member of a minority language community being able to speak their languages with each other. Community radio (a new use of an old technology) opens new ways of using the oral language. And so on. To be sure, dominant languages can use the same technologies, but the real advantage I think is for the non-dominant languages.

On the other hand – and here the application of the long-tail concept to language runs into problems perhaps similar to other attempts to apply economic analysis to languages – people don’t move “down the tail” to niche markets with language in the way they might with music or books (two of the prominent examples in Anderson’s writing on the subject). With language, the most prominent fact is that people live in the long tail, as it were, and there are some incentives to move up the tail to dominant languages. Part of the issue is how the new technologies facilitate not abandoning the linguistic home in the long tail when dominant languages are learned and used. Most people after all learn more than one language.

In any event, the long tail seems to be a useful concept in looking at the present and future of world languages. When I did a little research on this last fall, I came across an article on the Wikinomics blog that looked at the distribution of languages on the internet and posed questions re language learning. In other words, is there a long tail market for language services (mainly language learning)? This is a different take than mine above but also interesting. There may yet be others and perhaps, as the field of economics of language develops, more ambitious applications of the concept.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

5 thoughts on “Economics of language and the “long tail” effect”

  1. ce serait bien si ton blog avait une option “imprimer la page”, ou peut-être ne l’ai-je pas trouvée. Je lis en annotant les bonnes idées.

    1. Merci pour la suggestion. Je dois faire une mise à jour du logiciel WordPress très bientôt, et je regarderai quel plug-in pour imprimer sera bien à installer.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.