The 1994 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to John Harsanyi, John Nash, and Reinhard Selten for their ground-breaking work in game theory. This field, a branch of decision theory, has been productive in many areas of research, especially economics, other behavioral sciences, and biology. Selten's many applications of game theory include some related to decision making about language. He and ESF Board member Jonathan Pool have written two articles on games in which the players decide which language or languages to learn.
Players pay costs for learning languages.
The costs depend on the intrinsic difficulties of the languages and on the players' language-learning aptitudes. Knowledge of languages in addition to their native languages gives players benefits. Players choose to learn whatever set of additional languages maximizes their own net benefits, i.e. their communicative benefits reduced by their learning costs. Among the authors' conjectures based on their analysis are two about the politics of language. One is that individuals are unlikely to benefit from deliberately depressing their own language-learning aptitudes.