Economics and English: Language Growth in Economic Perspective

Considering the reality of hegemonic tendencies: English and linguistic diversity

“…It is important that we not disregard how linguistic forces and imperialistic interests influenced both the expansion and spread of the English language. Approaching other factors that contributed towards the development and growth of English was evidently not the sole objective of an economic analysis (Reksulak et al, 2014). Interestingly, the growth of English has always been proportionally related to the gross national product of the countries who spoke it and the size of the population communicating in this language.…”

Fetishism and the language commodity: a materialist critique

“…For example, within much of the discussion on this topic there are references to how language is viewed in terms of instrumental value (Lam & Wang 2008;Tupas 2008;Wee 2008), cultural value (Alsagoff 2008;Lam & Wang 2008), value of identity (Hoon 2008), market value (Coulmas 1992;Kamwangamalu 2008;Lam & Wang 2008), symbolic added value (Heller 2010;Heller & Duchêne 2012;Heller, Pujolar & Duchêne 2014), pragmatic value (Alsagoff 2008), ideological value (Gal 2012), exchange value (Heller 2010;Heller Pujolar & Duchêne 2014), authenticity as value (Heller, Pujolar & Duchêne 2014), and indexical value (Irvine 1989). Discussion of the value of commodities from classical or Marxist political economy is largely absent, as is discussion of work in applied linguistics that does employ specific notions of value, for example Grin's (2003) application of the utility theory of value, and Reksulak, Shughart & Tollison (2004) on English valued as a network good. In lieu of in-depth considerations of theoretical approaches to value, there is often instead the tacit reproduction of a set of assumptions largely derived from neo-classical economics which correspond to favoured neoliberal conceptions in which value is conceived primarily in terms of want.…”

A Personal Remembrance

“…He was interested in many fields of study, almost all of which either extended the existing literature or were, but for him, entirely novel. At the risk of overlooking some of his most important contributions and of failing to recognize his many (hundreds of) coauthors, I list a few of the topics, in no particular order, that engaged our joint interests: “bibliometrics” (analyses of the citation practices of economists, e.g., Laband, Shughart, and Tollison ); what he called “sportometrics” (applying the rational actor model to individual and team sports, both amateur and professional, e.g., Fleisher et al ; Goff, Shughart, and Tollison ; Shughart and Tollison ); rent seeking (Tollison ; Higgins, Shughart, and Tollison ); legislatures and legislative processes (Crain, Shughart, and Tollison ); bureaucrats (Goff, Shughart, and Tollison ); the judiciary (Anderson, Shughart, and Tollison ; Shughart and Tollison ); the so‐called third law of demand (Razzolini, Shughart, and Tollison ); and the growth of the English language (Reksulak, Shughart, and Tollison ). Along the way, Bob made important contributions (with Robert Hébert and Robert Ekelund) to the literatures on Mercantilism, the medieval Catholic Church, and many other topics that should be of interest to economists, but not necessarily those who think that economics is confined to solving formal optimization problems bereft of the institutional details that shape the behaviors of individuals in the so‐called real world.…”