Calendrier du 20 avril 2021
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 20/04/2021 de 12:30 à 13:30
BLANC Guillaume (University of Manchester)
The Origins of Common Language in Nations: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in France
écrit avec Masahiro Kubo
This paper studies the evolution of language in the process of nation-building. We identify the institutional origins and consequences of the advent of common language in the course of the emergence of nation-states in the nineteenth-century. In France, at the time of the French Revolution, less than fifteen percent of the population spoke standard French—a dialect of langue d’oil and only one of forty-six different languages spoken historically. Today, French is the only official language and a first language to most Frenchmen. In order to empirically study this for the first time, we digitize a novel, detailed town-level dataset on spoken languages in France in 1900. We explore the role of state-sponsored education in a regression discontinuity framework exploiting quasi-experimental variation in school building and show that schools played a substantial role in the widespread adoption of standard French language. We additionally find that elites and secular public education were important vectors of homogenization, while places with low returns to education were less likely to adopt standard language. Finally, we document an association of linguistic distance with trade and migration, and show that the nation-building policy influenced the salience of national identity in the twentieth century.?