Resumen de Your language or mine?

Ramon Caminal, Antonio Di Paolo

• Do languages matter beyond their communicative beneÖts? We explore the potential role of preferences over the language of use, theoretically and empirically. We focus on Catalonia, a bilingual society where everyone is fully proÖcient in Spanish, to isolate linguistic preferences from communicative beneÖts. Moreover, we exploit the language-in-education reform of 1983 to identify the causal e§ects of language skills. Results indicate that the policy change has improved the Catalan proÖciency of native Spanish speakers, which in turn increased their propensity to Önd Catalan-speaking partners. Hence, the acquisition of apparently redundant language skills has expanded cooperation across speech communities.