Compensation Schemes for Learning a Lingua Franca in the European Union

Abstract

We discuss compensation schemes that should give incentives to EU countries and citizens to acquire a lingua franca. We consider three possible candidates: English, French and German, which are already the most widely spoken languages. In our model, countries can claim compensations linked to the number of citizens who do not speak a given candidate language, and the distance between the official language in the country and the suggested lingua franca. We study two sharing schemes that are rooted in ancient sources: the Aristotelian proportional rule and the Talmud rule. The former prevents coalitional manipulations among countries, whereas the latter guarantees meaningful lower bounds for all countries.