Law and economics of minority-language policy

Abstract

Formal language rights, such as the status as an official, working, national, or regional language, are normally conferred on a language in a well-defined territory, be it a county, a province or an entire country. For a minority language in a federal state, the status as a rule varies from one jurisdiction to another, depending on the number of speakers in the various federal parts of the state. We provide a framework for a normative analysis of this type of language policy. The analysis is based on cost-benefit analysis. We first define and discuss the benefit side assuming benefits to be proportional to the number of beneficiaries of a given planning measure. We then argue that the costs of a planning measure can be adequately described as a function of two variables “number of beneficiaries” and “size of area of application”. It turns out that a change of variables to “number of beneficiaries” and “geographical density of the beneficiaries in the area of application technically simplifies the analysis.” The form of this cost function characterizes different types of planning measures and hence lets us analyze different planning measures in a two-dimensional model characterized by the number of beneficiaries and their geographical concentration in the jurisdiction under consideration. In praxi simple planning rules have to be used in deciding on the implementation of planning measures. The cost structure—as well as the size of the costs of given planning measures—determines how different planning rules function. In addition, also for practical purposes, only a small set of policy categories is tractable. This leads to a multi-stage optimization problem. For any possible category—collection of planning measures—the results of an optimal planning rule have to be found. Based thereon, the selection of categories can be made, also considering administrative costs.