Après avoir défini différentes manières de calculer les distances entre les langues (méthode lexico-statistique, distances de Levenshtein, distances basées sur les arbres linguistiques ou encore distances phonétiques) et entre groupes de population, ce chapitre propose d'explorer comment...

Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated. According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination of English. The population speaking English as a first language is, with the exception of Mandarin, the largest in the...

We examine patterns of acquiring non-native languages in a model with two languages and two populations with heterogeneous learning skills, where every individual faces a binary choice of learning the foreign language or refraining from doing so. We show that both interior and corner linguistic...

The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning, two of which affect the broad decision to learn, while two concern as well the choice...

We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential...