Karshi state university foreign languages faculty

Political economy

This perspective centres on the inclinations that people have towards learning one language over the other. The presumption is that if given a chance, people will learn the language that gives them more communication advantage. In other words, a higher Q-Value. Certain languages such as English or Chinese have high Q-values since they are spoken in many countries across the globe and would thus be more economically useful than to less spoken languages, such as Romanian or Hungarian.

From an economic perspective, languages are ‘hypercollective’ goods since they exhibit properties of collective goods and produce external network effects. Thus, the more speakers a language has, the higher its communication value for each speaker. The hypercollective nature and Q-Value of languages thus help to explain the dilemma that a speaker of a peripheral language faces when deciding whether to learn the central or hypercentral language. The hypercollective nature and Q-value also help to explain the accelerating spread and abandonment of various languages. In that sense, when people feel that a language is gaining new speakers, they would assign a greater Q-value to this language and abandon their own native language in place of a more central language. The hypercollective nature and Q-value also explain, in an economic sense, the ethnic and cultural movements for language conservation.

Specifically, a minimal Q-value of a language is guaranteed when there is a critical mass of speakers committed to protecting it, thus preventing the language from being forsaken.

Characteristics

The global language system theorises that language groups are engaged in unequal competition on different levels globally. Using the notions of a periphery, semi-periphery and a core, which are concepts of the world system theory, de Swaan relates them to the four levels present in the hierarchy of the global language system: peripheral, central, supercentral and hypercentral.¹

De Swaan also argues that the greater the range of potential uses and users of a language, the higher the tendency of an individual to move up the hierarchy in the global language system and learn a more "central" language. Thus, de Swaan views the learning of second languages as proceeding up rather than down the hierarchy, in the sense that they learn a language that is on the next level up. For instance, speakers of Catalan, a peripheral language, have to learn Spanish, a central language to function in their own society, Spain. Meanwhile, speakers of Persian, a central language, have to learn Arabic, a supercentral language, to function in their region. On the other hand, speakers of a supercentral language have to learn the hypercentral language to function globally, as is evident from the huge number of non-native English speakers.³

According to de Swaan, languages exist in "constellations" and the global language system comprises a sociological classification of languages based on their social role for their speakers. The world's languages and multilinguals are connected in a strongly ordered, hierarchical pattern. There are thousands of peripheral or minority languages in the world, each of which are connected to one of a hundred central languages. The connections and patterns between each language is what makes up the global language system. The four levels of language are the peripheral, central, supercentral and hypercentral languages.¹

This flowchart depicts the hierarchy of the languages in de Swaan's (2001) global language system theory.