Everybody’s talkin’ at me: levels of majority language acquisition by minority language speakers

Abstract

Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various minority groups choose whether to acquire a majority language fully, partially, or not at all, with varying communicative benefits and costs. We provide an equilibrium characterization of language acquisition and demonstrate that partial acquisition can arise as an equilibrium behavior. We also show that a language equilibrium may exhibit insufficient learning relative to the social optimum. Finally, we formulate a deterministic language learning dynamic process and find that our language equilibrium arises in the long run under suitable conditions.