# How many languages do we need? (Book review)



## Earion (Oct 17, 2012)

Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber
*HOW MANY LANGUAGES DO WE NEED?
The economics of linguistic diversity*
232pp. Princeton University Press. $37.50;
distributed in the UK by Wiley. £26.95.
ISBN 978-0-691-13689-9​
There are twenty-three official languages in the European Union, not counting those spoken at a regional level such as Catalan or Welsh. While they are powerful symbols of cultural identity, the cost of providing interpreting facilities for each of them in the conduct of EU affairs is economically unfeasible. In their intriguing book _How Many Languages do We Need?_, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber illuminate how language diversity affects growth, trade and economic development. But theirs is not a narrowly financial assessment; in making their economic arguments the authors take a broad-ranging view of the historical significance that people attach to their native language and culture.

A fundamental concept is that of the distance between one language or culture and another. Linguistic distance can be measured by the similarities or differences between technical characteristics of language such as vocabulary, syntax, grammar or phonology. Cultural distance reflects differences in the organization of societies, their power structures, their respective gender roles and so on. Such data can indicate the degree to which two communities in a region or country can or cannot communicate with each other. The two types of distance, linguistic and cultural, are often correlated, but not always --for example, Germany and Austria share the same language but are culturally distinct.

Sorting out this concept of “distance” is a prelude to measuring diversity itself. Various indices can be constructed to estimate the degree of homogeneity or heterogeneity in any given population. Among American cities, for example, such an index shows San Francisco to be very diverse, with one-third of its inhabitants being non-English speakers, whereas Pittsburgh has an index value the same as that of Sweden.

English is the most widely spoken language across the European continent. Yet Ginsburgh and Weber calculate that making it the single operational language in the European system would disenfranchise almost two-thirds of the EU population. Adding German, French, Italian and Spanish to the core group would reduce disenfranchisement to just over 20 per cent, but this would still comprise a sizeable group of discontented voters. With all the problems that linguistic diversity presents us with, would we be better off without it?

It is noteworthy that attempts to construct a universal language intelligible to all merit only the briefest of mentions in the book. It is true that Esperanto, invented in the mid-nineteenth century, still survives, but most such efforts have failed. It seems there are some cultural prices that human beings are simply not prepared to pay.

DAVID THROSBY

TLS September 7, 2012


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