The authors develop a model in which the benefit of language acquisition is increasing in the number of individuals who speak the language. This gives rise to a network externality and, if language acquisition is costly, the language acquisition decisions by individuals may be inefficient. If the available policy instruments affect all members of a language group homogeneously, then policies that effectively subsidize language acquisition are warranted only for the majority language.
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Church et al. (1993) studied this question.
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