[LI] Languages & UBI; lang tech in Africa; MT; missing words

Four items posted to LinkedIn relating to languages, one with economics and three with technology. Question about how UBI might affect language usage (posted September 2019) How might universal basic income (#UBI) affect use of various #languages? Question arises from hearing again the notions "can't get a #job speaking X" & "speaking Y improves job …

Economics of language and the “long tail” effect – part 2

On the Wikinomics blog, Dan Herman responded to my discussion of use of the long tail model for languages. He raised some interesting points that I'll come to in a moment. Part of the reason I posted on the long-tail concept is that I believe it will be useful in various ways to analyzing the …

Economics of language and the “long tail” effect

"The economics of language has been neglected and deserves much greater attention," wrote economist Donald Lamberton in a book he edited in 2002. That may not have been too much of a revelation at the time - only a few years earlier (1994) another economist, François Grin, wrote that this field was tolerated "as an …