Multilingual societies, benevolent governments and dying languages Maksym Ivanyna Regensburg University, Bavarian Graduate Program in Economics, Germany European Center for Minority Issues, Flensburg, Germany April 20, 2007 Abstract In this paper we consider possible directions and outcomes of govern- mental policy towards majority and minority languages, which are spoken in the country. Namely, we build the model of the bilingual society, in which individuals receive their utility from communication with institu- tions, controlled by the government. Setting the official language of com- munication government weights several factors: cost of misunderstanding if parties speak different languages and cost of operating in two languages from the one side, cost of acquiring second language and disenfranchise- ment of minority from the other side. Depending on government’s social cost function the outcome of the policy may change from balanced usage of both languages to complete dominance of the official one. At the same time, the cheapest policy as well as no government intervention at all most likely bring the country to a monolingual state, and to avoid this society should give up some cost sparing. 1 Introduction In this paper we analyze scope and outcomes of the government’s lingual pol- icy in a society, where two or more languages are spoken. It is hard to argue against the fact that the authorities in such societies possess major capability to influence it’s language usage patterns. 1 At the same time, two opposing forces have substantial influence on a decision making in this issue. From the one side, government would wish to homogenize the society in order to avoid the misunderstanding between heterogeneous groups, and lower the costs of running multilingual institutions. From the other side, going too far with homogeneity may cause disenfranchisement of a minority group, resulting in either disap- pearance of minority language or ethnic conflicts and even civil war. 2 In our 1 Refer to, for example, [14], [9], [16], [11] for some facts 2 Refer, for example, to [15] 1