Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

122 Language Planning and Education
easily controlled (‘non-excludability’), and since the addition of each new speaker
increases the utility of the language for all existing users (‘external network effects’),
there is an inbuilt propensity for further persons to acquire the language, and this
potentially can escalate into a stampede toward it.
Rooted as it is in the behaviour of aggregates, the notion of hypercollectivity
illuminates the dynamics of language spread but only partly explains why individuals
elect to acquire one second language rather than another in the first place. This,
de Swaan (2001a: 33) argues, is influenced by expectations regarding how others
will act towards a language – whether they too will acquire it as a lingua franca, for
example, and also by perceptions of the ‘communication potential’ of a language –
its ‘Q value’ (de Swaan 2001a: 31).
The Q value of a language x is the product of its prevalence and its centrality.
‘Prevalence’ refers to the proportion of speakers of language x in a constellation,
and ‘centrality’ to the proportion of plurilingual speakers of other languages in the
constellation who may also be reached through language x – an indicator, therefore,
of its connectedness. Centrality is important because a language x with a smaller
number of speakers in a constellation than language y, hence less prevalence, may
nonetheless end up with a higher Q value because it offers more connections to other
plurilingual speakers. 3
Q values, however, are, de Swaan (2001a) points out, most appropriately
determined not by comparing single languages but language repertoires. Thus, a
bilingual speaker of, say, German and Portuguese, faced with a choice between
learning English or French as a third language, needs to ask (so to speak) how much
the Q value of their entire repertoire will be enhanced by learning one of these
languages rather than another.
To summarise, a language’s Q value is an indicator of its communicative value in
a particular language constellation, which is itself affected by the position of that
language in the global language hierarchy outlined above. It represents – in formal
fashion – the rough and ready intuitive estimations that guide individual choices as
to which foreign language it is more advantageous to learn, and it is, therefore, not
all that dissimilar in composition to the factors identified by Coulmas (1992) as
making languages more or less attractive to learn: communicative range (the number
of other persons one can communicate with using the language) and functional
potential (what one can do with the language once it is acquired). The latter,
Coulmas (1992) points out, is substantially determined by long-term historical
processes, particularly investment in the language in the form of dictionaries,
translations and the like. In one sense then, languages may be seen as long-term
capital investment projects, with the quantity of investment affecting the functional
potential of the language. And, at the individual level meanwhile, second language
learning may be likened to capital formation, in this case the acquisition of symbolic
and intellectual capital.