Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 121
the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but is this still the case?
All that said, de Swaan’s is a useful conceptualisation of the hierarchical ordering
that characterises relationships between the world’s languages. It highlights the
evident inequalities between languages that track the material and political
inequalities between regions and between countries, and it draws attention to the
oligopolistic tendencies of the global language system that mirror oligopoly in the
non-linguistic world.
However, to fully understand the architecture and dynamics of the global
language system, we need, de Swaan argues (2001a), to take account of the special
properties of language as an economic commodity
5.1.3.2 Languages as ‘hypercollective’ goods
Languages are special because, in economic parlance, they are not just collective but
‘hypercollective goods’, definable in terms of the following set of properties:
1. Like other collective goods, languages do not diminish in utility with use.
Quite the opposite: the more speakers a language gains, the greater the number
of potential interlocutors and the greater the production of texts, which, of
course, boosts the utility of the language to all who are already proficient in it.
The same is true of other kinds of networks – telecommunication networks,
for instance: new subscribers increase the utility of the network for all existing
subscribers by multiplying the number of potential connection points, a
phenomenon economists refer to as ‘external network effects’. One might add
here that the choice of network to subscribe to, or language to acquire, is
influenced by the individual’s estimate as to which is most likely to retain an
enduring utility in a competitive situation, a factor predisposing people to opt
for the larger language, whose prestige tends to transfer to the acquirer, thereby
further enhancing its attractiveness. And once acquired, people develop a
vested interest in the language, or brand, they have invested in, which reduces
the likelihood of transfer to an alternative.
2. Unlike telephone networks, which are ‘excludable’ in the sense that entry is
usually dependent on payment of a toll or fee, languages are non-excludable,
‘free’ goods in the technical economic sense that they are open, in principle, to
anyone willing to make the effort to learn them. In practice, however, there
may be barriers: illiteracy or exclusion from education, for instance, and so
‘non-excludability’ here is a moot point.
3. As with other collective goods, the maintenance of language requires the
collaboration of many persons.
4. The creation, or production, of a collective good requires the efforts of a
community, not single individuals. The same is true of languages (see de Swaan
2001a: 31).
The hypercollective character of languages helps explain why language spread tends
to acquire a self-reinforcing dynamic. To elaborate: since entry into a language is not