Language and Carbon Emissions: A Cross-Country Analysis

Drawing on the social representation theory, this study investigates how language structure heterogeneity affects national carbon emissions and further examines the moderating role of renewable energy consumption structure in the relationship. Weak future-time-reference (FTR) languages refer to those lacking obligatory grammatical distinctions between present and future tenses. Analyzing data from 1990 to 2018, we reveal that countries with weak-FTR official languages exhibit significantly lower carbon emissions, suggesting that linguistic temporal framing affects future-oriented cognition and consequent environmental decision-making. This linguistic effect diminishes as renewable energy consumption increases. Extensive robustness checks confirm these findings, which remain significant after addressing endogeneity concerns. Notably, international environmental agreements attenuate the carbon-reducing effect of weak-FTR languages.