Nationalism, Immigration and the Dynamics of Language Evolution

TL;DR

This paper models the complex interaction between language competition and ideological struggles, revealing that bilingualism is unstable in the long run when language status is explicitly considered, contrasting with previous models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-state ideological model among natives and analyzes the impact of ideology on language evolution, highlighting the instability of bilingualism.

Findings

Bilingualism can be a stable equilibrium under certain conditions.

Removing ideological conflict leads to the instability of bilingualism.

Explicitly modeling language status causes bilingualism to be unsustainable long-term.

Abstract

I study the interplay between language competition and ideology struggle in a country where there is a native high-status language and a low-status language spoken by immigrants. Language transition is governed by a three-state model similar to the Minett-Wang (2008) and the Heinsalu et al. (2014) models. I introduce the novelty that, among natives, an ideological struggle exists between a group of nationalists and a group of pro-immigrants, thus a two-state model as in Abrams-Strogatz (2003). When bilingualism emerges as an equilibrium, there might be a completely segregated society with monolingual immigrants and monolingual nationalistic natives, thus an undesired outcome contrasting with the widespread literature. Removing ideology struggle, bilingualism is never stable, thus results in Heinsalu et al. (2014) are solely due to the way conversion rate constants are defined in their model. If language status is explicitly defined in the model, bilingualism becomes doomed in the long run.