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A Language Theory of Discrimination
Abstract
Any advanced industrial society is composed of a number of speech communities with different verbal and nonverbal languages. In particular, in the United States blacks and whites and men and women have sharply differing methods of speaking and listening. This paper develops a model in which people can only work together if they “speak” the same language and in which it is costly to learn a second language. The competitive market will tend to minimize communication through segregation, but if interaction is required, the cost will be borne by the minority. A number of nontrivial predictions are derived from the model.
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Citations
Cited by
Chapter 48 Race and gender in the labor market
Altonji, J. G., & Blank, R. M. (1999) · Handbook of Labor Economics · doi:10.1016/s1573-4463(99)30039-0 · Cited by 981
Employer Learning and Statistical Discrimination
Altonji, J. G., & Pierret, C. R. (2001) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355301556329 · Cited by 894
Racial Discrimination in the Labor Market: Theory and Empirics
Lang, K., & Lehmann, J.-Y. K. (2012) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.50.4.959 · Cited by 371
Self-citationSELECTIVE ATTENTION AND LEARNING
Schwartzstein, J. (2014) · Journal of the European Economic Association · doi:10.1111/jeea.12104 · Cited by 269
Metadata
- Authors
- Lang, K.
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1986-05
- Volume
- 101
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 363
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1992415142
- Cited by
- 426
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 11.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Language Theory of Discrimination. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1891120
- The paper
- Lang, K. (1986). A Language Theory of Discrimination. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/1891120
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
