Reducing Language Barriers Online: Evidence from Cyprus

• In Event: New Directions in the Study of Intergroup Relations (Virtual Session)

Abstract

What role do language barriers play in building or undermining peace within ethnically polarized settings? Creating opportunities for direct contact across ethnic groups is a challenging endeavor, made more difficult in contexts with significant language barriers. There is a lack of micro-level causal evidence of the impact of language barriers in shaping inter-ethnic relations both because of the magnitude of the challenge and the fact that exogenously manipulating one’s fluency in a foreign language would require resource intensive language training. The digital world provides an opportunity to reduce language barriers with an ever-growing number of translation tools. We incentivize Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots to use the Facebook's native translation tool, and to view content that is in a different language than their own. After a two-week period, we survey participants using a comprehensive set of outgroup regard measures to assess whether, and to what extent, their language barrier hampers the level of intergroup interactions and facilitates prejudice formation. Our design also contributes to our ongoing research on the effects of social media on group polarization, specifically our previous Facebook deprivation studies conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Asimovic et al, 2021) and Cyprus, by deepening our understanding of how linguistic differences shape the ways users engage with one another on social media and the implications of such processes on intergroup relations in ethnically polarized settings.

Author

• Nejla Asimovic, NYU