Everybody’s talkin’ at me: levels of majority language acquisition by minority language speakers
研究了移民在多数语言经济体中语言习得的异质性，将部分习得建模为均衡现象，并分析了均衡与社会最优的差距及长期动态过程。
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.