Interviews

You have been doing research around the world to study linguistic conflicts, what have you discovered?

 I was doing research in Catalonia, studying the normalització movement when the Soviet Union began to fall apart. It occurred to me that in many ways, Estonia had a very similar situation to Catalonia. Estonia had some 35-40% of its population who could trace their origins to immigrants from other countries of the former Soviet Union, due to the mass migrations of Russian speakers induced by the dictatorship. When Estonia became independent, it had to deal with the issue that 40% of its population was non-Estonian speaking. There was a similar situation with what happened here in the 1980s, when Catalans faced Andalusian immigration and worried whether they would become Catalans. I got interested in the incentives of migrant or minority groups to accept nationalisation movements in the country in which they reside.

I have read that while watching a sardana, a traditional Catalan dance, you were surprised with the contrast between the rational, bourgeois Catalan spirit and a language movement that did not serve their material interests…

Yes, that’s right.

This kind of observation led to your interest in game theory and the application of Schelling’s theory, or the “tipping game”. Could you give us a broad outline?

Tom Schelling’s work was much more on coordination than conflict games. For example, imagine you are living in an all white neighbourhood in America and a few African Americans move in. The whites could coordinate to say “we are going to stay here”, and the neighbourhood would remain stable. But if they fail to coordinate and each thinks the other is going to sell to get out, you get a massive switch from an all white to an all African American neighbourhood.

This same situation, with another kind of immigration, can be seen in many neighbourhoods in Spain these days.

He [Schelling] was interested in coordination success and coordination failure. As you can see, language issues are the ultimate coordination issue. If you learn Esperanto, it is only of value to you if other people learn it. It has no other value than for coordination. If you look at immigrants from Andalusia who came to Catalonia, they could have been resolute in continuing to speak Spanish and not learning Catalan, but they failed to coordinate against the normalització movement . Each Andalusian thought: “I would like to continue speaking Spanish but my neighbour is sending his child to a Catalan school, and he will get a good job in the police force or El Corte Inglés and my child won’t”.

What are the main incentives to switch at this point?

 I’ve found that the principal theoretical incentive is the expectation of the number of other people who are going to do it. It’s where you are in terms of how many others in a similar situation as you have made this choice. I’ve theorized three other factors that could affect incentives: one is economic returns for language. For example, the son of Andalusian parents realizes that if he speaks Catalan he can get an excellent job. A second is the status issue and there are two elements. Suppose you learn Catalan and all your peers and neighbours think that you have sold out on the community, and your status goes down. You would be disincentivized. In the US, that’s sometimes called “jungle fever”, (many African Americans feel that African Americans dating whites are traitors to their own community). The third factor is status in the out-group, or majority. Suppose I work my heart out in classes and I speak excellent Catalan. Then I face a glass ceiling in corporations, because even though everyone knows I speak Catalan, they know I’m not really Catalan. That would be a disincentive.

In one of the arguments I’ve made, economic returns for Andalusians who were learning Catalan were good. Catalans (the out-group) were extremely welcoming of Andalusians who learned Catalan. President Pujol made a big deal of anyone working and wanting to live here, wanting to be one of us, being a Catalan. That’s a positive incentive. And thirdly, Andalusians did not scorn their fellow Andalusians for learning Catalan, but they started speaking this Catalan which was considered to be degraded.

A degradation?

The problem was that many young Catalans, who were born speaking Catalan and grew up speaking Catalan, would hang out in the streets or jazz clubs, would speak the same Catalan that immigrant kids were speaking. So, in a sense, young immigrants had a great influence on the language, and a great influence on the Catalans’ use of the language.

Returning to game theory. You point out in your study that payoffs for educating your children in Catalan have risen since the democratic transition –what you call the tipping point– due to the weakness of the central state at this time. Is that right?

 I would say that in the early 70s, or when Franco dies in the mid-70s, from the point of view many Catalans and almost all migrants, the idea that Catalan would become a normalized language of everyday administration and education was considered unlikely. It was a hope and desire for many Catalans, but the weight of Spanish was very heavy, the percentage of immigrants was very high. Convergència, as well as the Socialists and Esquerra, all made clear to the government in Madrid that the only way Catalonia would participate in its democratic parliament was along with normalization. It was an elite-driven bargain that even the communists in Madrid, such as Carrillo, would accept. That was the condition for Catalan full participation in the democratic transition.

Once that bargain was struck, people’s expectations here were that unless you learned Catalan, your future in this region was going to be dimmer. People saw that this tipping point was going to be reached, and if it was going to be reached it was better to learn Catalan sooner rather than later. It began a kind of a cascade towards the expectation that your children should be educated in Catalan. I took language classes where parents of Andalusian school kids wanted to learn Catalan because they wanted to speak Catalan at home which they thought would help their children succeed in university entrance exams. I feel that after the bargain and acceptance of the law on autonomy, people thought that the tipping point had been reached.

What cost have the Catalans paid for their nationalism?

I have assumed, through all my work, that the cost was reduced economic growth. I remember interviewing a minister in Pujol’s cabinet about the reason for studying Catalan rather than informatics or other subjects. He said to me, wisely: “some countries have snow, some countries have mountains, we have languages”. We have to pay for our own natural setting. About a year ago, I started doing research on whether multilingualism at the state level was associated with poverty. I found, if you ask not if the multilingualism is associated with poverty, but ask instead if in a well established state you give linguistic autonomy to a region, what’s the expected loss on GDP? And there wasn’t any. So now I’m revising my own theory. I no longer believe that multilingualism is necessarily associated with lower economic growth.

What about the learning of English in Catalonia?

When I was here in 1984-1985, I said that, from the point of view of rational economic strategy, the smartest thing for Catalonia to do was to support English more strongly than in the rest of Spain. The return on investment in English would be so much higher than the return on investment in Catalan in terms of lifetime income. What was more interesting from the point of view of the 1980s was that Catalonia was pushing for the EU faster than Madrid.

Thanks to Pujol.

Also if you look at that period, there were constant editorials about the Europe of 101 nations; not 27 states, but 101 nations. The idea was for Catalonia to become one of these nations. And I said, “If they’re interested in Europe the key is to become the fastest learners of English on the peninsula”. Catalonia gave up on that project in part because of the cost of learning Catalan.

Well, children were overwhelmed at school…

You can see it in international journals. The more there is math, the more Catalan intellectuals are in international journals. The more there is language, the less well they do. In economics, Catalans are at the very, very top of the world. In sociology, they are much lower. In a sense, the math that goes into economics gives Spain a more world-class standing, but the global average level of English at university is much lower than in Germany, Scandinavia or the Netherlands. In the fields that require subtle use of English, Catalan scholars do less well.

“Multilingualism is a function of geography”. Does geography explain multilingualism?

Yes, it’s a well-known phenomenon. I don’t know why it is, but there are more languages spoken per square kilometre the closer you are to the equator, the higher up you are in the mountains and the longer the growing season.