The Literal Cost of Language Assimilation

• In Event: 75.012 - Rethinking Bilingual Education: New Research on the Economic Benefits of Bilingualism

Abstract

Objective: This study poses the question of whether there could actually be a cost associated with the loss of bilingualism among samples of individuals who have begun their educations with knowledge of a non-English language. Specifically he asks whether students’ bilingual proficiencies are related to their future employment status and earnings.
Theoretical Framework: The author adopts a Bourdieusian theoretical perspective, framing his analysis citing Bourdieu (1977) thusly, “A language is worth what those who speak it are worth, i.e. the powers and authority in the economic and cultural power relations ... the dominant language is the language of the dominant class.” The author then asks why additional language skills are not viewed as added human capital.
Data Sources: The author utilizes two data sets, comparing and contrasting their findings: the National Education Longitudinal Study (which begins in 1988 with a national sample of 24,000 8th graders and conducts the final data collection in 2000 when the average age of the sample is 26) and the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which began in 1992 with 5,000 first and second generation students in the 8th and 9th grades in Miami and San Diego. The final data collection was conducted in 2002 when the students were on average about 24 years of age. Thus, the two samples are similarly positioned in time. (For more information about the CILS, see Portes & Rumbaut, 2005).
Methods: The author first conducts multinomial logistic regression analyses to predict full-time employment status versus either part-time employment or unemployed status, comparing balanced bilinguals to English dominant groups. He utilizes Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to create three distinct language groups: those who are similarly proficient (or understand, speak, read, and write) in both English and the language of the home, who are referred to as “balanced bilinguals”; those who are English dominant, and those who have lower proficiency in both languages. The data are then limited to those who are full-time employed to investigate the effects of bilingualism on earnings, and OLS regression analyses are used for this purpose.
Results: After controlling for cognitive ability, educational attainment and parental socioeconomic status (SES), the author estimates the additional cost of complete linguistic assimilation is estimated to be between $2000 and $3000 annually. This paper concludes that “linguistic assimilation policies do not merely steal from people, they steal from those who already have less. These findings suggest that English learners may be placed at an even greater disadvantage, given the negative association between monolingualism and earnings.”
Scholarly significance: The author turns the prior literature on its head. Rather than asking if there is a premium in the labor market for bilingualism, he asks if there isn’t a cost for monolingualism. And, of course, he finds a substantial cost. The importance of his findings cannot be overstated – this study completely reframes the question of the value of bilingualism and thus opens up new avenues for future research.

Author

• Orhan Agirdag, University of Amsterdam