National Development And Language Diversity

Abstract

The joint distribution of domestic language diversity and GDP per capita is highly nonlinear, with almost no highdiversity prosperous countries. Does this support the hypothesis that language diversity impedes economic development? Data on the size, as a fraction of the population, of the largest native-language group, and the gross domestic product per person per year, were collected for 133 countries. The static relationship between these variables was represented graphically with a scatterplot. The distribution of bivariate values was found to be highly nonlinear, and describable as a dispersion of countries throughout three quadrants of the bivariate space. The quadrant in which almost no countries were located was that with the upper half of GDP and the lower half of largest-language share. In other words, there were almost no highly linguistically diverse, prosperous countries. Although this result is sensitive to the definitions of the variables, some plausible redefinitions would apparently strengthen rather than weaken it. The result appears to support assertions that linguistic diversity is a barrier to economic development, but such a conclusion would be premature, because the distribution of values does not demonstrate an effect, nor, if there is an effect, its directionality.

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