The more recent of the Selten-Pool articles, "The distribution of foreign language skills as a game equilibrium", defines a game whose players have various native languages and can learn other native and/or non-native (e.g., synthetic) languages. Players pay costs for learning languages. The costs depend on the intrinsic difficulties of the languages and on the players' language-learning aptitudes. Knowledge of languages in addition to their native languages gives players benefits. The "communicative" benefit to a player of knowing any particular additional language depends on the number of additional players with whom that player would thereby share at least one language, and also on the "importances" of those other players. Players choose to learn whatever set of additional languages maximizes their own net benefits, i.e. their communicative benefits reduced by their learning costs. On the basis of these general assumptions, Selten and Pool prove (among other things) that the more language aptitude a player has the more difficult the languages that the player learns and (despite this additional difficulty) the more net benefit the player gets.
Among the authors' conjectures based on their analysis are two about the politics of language. One is that individuals are unlikely to benefit from deliberately depressing their own language-learning aptitudes. It's true that (in the Selten-Pool game) they would thereby cause themselves to learn "easier" languages, but their communicative benefits would decline more than their learning costs, thus reducing their total welfare. However, if a whole language community, acting in concert, were to depress its members' language-learning aptitudes artificially, then its members might profit from this conspiracy.
Thus, it might be a rational decision for a citizen to vote against measures that would make foreign-language teaching more effective. The resulting barriers to foreign-language learning would stop some in that community from choosing to learn particular foreign languages, and this might in turn induce native speakers of those languages to learn the language of the conspiring community, giving its members communica tive benefits without the corresponding learning costs.
The other conjecture is that non-native languages being promoted as world languages may not have the take-off point that their promoters often believe in, after which their progress toward universal currency would purportedly be irreversible. In the Selten-Pool game a non-native language can be unstable even if everybody in the world knows it, and even if (as advocates of synthetic languages claim) it is easier to learn as an additional language than any native language is. Unless language-learning aptitudes are distributed in particu lar ways, some individuals would find it irrational to know a synthetic language despite the fact that everybody else knows it. When these individuals failed to learn it, their choice would make it lose value for everybody else, and some others would therefore reverse their decisions. The whole consensus could thereby unravel. Consequently, as Pool argued in a recent conference paper, the Esperanto movement is deluding itself if it assumes, a priori, that it needs only a strategy for getting Esperanto adopted by some threshold number of persons as a common world language; it may also need a strategy for maintaining the universality of the language against the perpetual possibility of attrition.
Contact: Dr. Pool.
[A thoughtful article under the above title was published by Harvard International Review (1993, vol. XV, no. 4). In it author Sara Su Jones discusses current problems relating to linguistic imperialism and linguistic nationalism, and considers the possible role of Esperanto given current international realities. The article is too long to reproduce here, but we reprint the provocative opening paragraph.]
The radical re-ordering of the international system in recent years has effected dramatic changes in the global linguistic landscape. A decline in the use of the Russian language, the consequence of the Soviet Union's collapse, has cleared the way for new linguistic influences in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Use of English and German is growing rapidly in the former Eastern Bloc, but both languages contain the biases and connotations that burden all national languages. More over, nationalist movements world-wide are re-affirming ethnic identities and reviving long-suppressed languages. In newly independent Latvia, for example, current language policy effectively discriminates against those who do not already speak the Latvian language - a majority of the population. While ethnic, tribal and racial divisions are more pronounced than ever before, the need to eliminate language barriers has never been greater than in this period of unprecedented economic and political interdependence.
The Center sponsors a scholarly periodical, Language Problems and Language Planning, published three times a year by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam. CRD also publishes books and reports from time to time and organizes and sponsors conferences and seminars.
The Center operates in two locations. Its European headquarters is in Rotterdam. It also operates as a unit of the University of Hartford, in Hartford CT. The Center cooperates with the United Nations Office of Conference Services to organize an annual conference in New York, usually in December. The series began in 1982 and for most of the early years CRD published annual conference reports, with all papers given at the conference in question. The Center now publishes, in cooperation with University Press of America, a series of Occasional Papers, containing major papers from the conferences.
Each year the Center sponsors a summer conference on Esperanto studies in cooperation with the Universal Esperanto Association. The 1994 Conference took place in Seoul, Korea. In 1995, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, CRD will sponsor or co-sponsor three conferences, the first at the University of Hartford on May 5, the second in Ottawa, Canada, in cooperation with the Canadian Centre for Linguistic Rights, and the third in Tampere, Finland, in July.
Some free copies of the following three volumes of CRD Occasional Papers published by University Press of America are available to libraries from CRD. Address queries about these or about the upcoming CRD conferences to Dr. Tonkin. (Prices are here shown for reference.)
Language in Religion. Humphrey Tonkin & Allison Armstrong Keef, eds. 1989. vii+121 pp. $36. ISBN 0-8191-7511-0.
Language as Barrier and Bridge. Kurt E. Müller, ed. 1992. xvi+125 pp. $42.50. ISBN: 0-8191-8670-8.
Aspects of Internationalism: Language and Culture. Ian M. Richmond, ed. 1993 x+151 pp. $36. ISBN: 0-8191-8859-X
CRD's earlier series of volumes of conference papers are available at $7 each postpaid from Dr. Tonkin. Titles are:
Language Behavior in International Organizations. (1984, 155 pages)
Language Planning at the International Level. (1985, 152 pages)
Overcoming Language Barriers: the Human-Machine Relationship. (1986, 115 pages)
The Idea of a Universal Language. (1986, 131 pages)
The Economics of Language Use. (1987, 163 pages)
Language and Culture in International Organizations. (1988, 95 pages)
CRD also publishes a series of Esperanto Documents in Esperanto, English, and French on Esperanto and the language problem. The latest pamphlet in the English language series (ISSN 0165-2575) is University of Geneva psychologist Claude Piron's Psychological Reactions to Esperanto, distilling Piron's findings and thinking on this topic over a period of years. In it he seeks to understand strong opposition to the idea of an international language by people who have little background on the subject. Forthcoming is Esperanto Studies: An Overview by Humphrey Tonkin & Mark Fettes, a concise but wide-ranging and up-to-date survey for scholars with only a passing acquaintance with the field. North American distribution of the English language series are handled by the Esperanto League for North America, Box 1129, El Cerrito CA 94530; fax: 510-653-1468, Internet: elna@netcom.com.
Claude Piron is the author of a book-length study, Le defi des langues: du gachis au bons sens (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994). In it Piron details the many costs, both direct and hidden, of multilingualism in international organizations, the current linguistic predicament in general, and the claims of Esperanto in relation to these problems. Piron has worked extensively in translation and is the author of a wide range of articles on Esperanto and international language problems. Of related interest is a work by Yvonne Lassagne-Sicard on Esperanto and the preservation of the French language, Que vive la langue francaise et que vive l'esperanto (Paris: Arcam, 1993).
ESF Publication Available
The ESF-sponsored study on Esperanto and education has been welcomed by many interested readers. (See ES4.) Some copies are still available from Dr. Pool. The price is $14 postpaid. The item is: Esperanto and Education: Toward a Research Agenda. Alvino E. Fantini & Timothy G. Reagan. 1992.
Esperanto Studies and Interlinguistics.
Esperantic Studies Foundation.