The Distribution of Foreign Language Skills as a Game Equilibrium

The birth, death, growth, and shrinkage of languages over millennia has given us a world containing about three thousand living languages, whose speakers number from 1 up to several hundred million. Our current knowledge of what causes a language to gain more speakers than it loses or lose more speakers than it gains is limited to a few generalizations about bivariate, more-less effects (see Dressler, 1982; Laponce, 1984; Lieberson, 1982). One important generalization is that the children of two native speakers of the same language tend to acquire that native language unless outside the home the language is rarely used or is despised. In addition, persons who spend a few years or more in a milieu (e.g., neighborhood, school, or workplace) where a language other than their native language is the main language tend to add the other language to their repertoire. Persons tend to learn a language through deliberate study (in contrast with immersion in its milieu) when the language is spoken by many persons, has widely distributed speakers, has wealthy and powerful speakers, and has a prestigious literature, art, and history. Languages tend to lose speakers through death, of course, but also through forgetting by their native and nonnative speakers. Forgetting tends to take place among persons who are not in contact with other speakers of the language or whose rewards for using the language are small or negative. There is little evidence as to whether the difficulty of a language or its effectiveness as an instrument of thought and communication influences its acquisition of new speakers or its loss of former speakers.