Bilingualism, linguistic distance and adult’s skills endowment: evidence from PIAAC

Abstract

Abstract. Do bilinguals outperform monolinguals on skills development? If so, is there heterogeneity in the effect of bilingualism across countries? I combine data of the PIAAC with the Levenshtein measure of linguistic distance and I estimate the effects of bilingualism in the scores gained in the literacy and numeracy tests of the PIAAC by Ordinary Least Squares. I perform the analysis using data on 7 European and postSoviet countries with a significant percentage of a bilingual population. I find a bilingual advantage in the countries where most of the bilinguals speak the same two languages as well as a detrimental effect of a higher linguistic distance. Moreover, I exploit the Spanish case to identify if the general intuition holds for the within-country case. Results indicate that a linguistic immersion in two well-established languages can help to develop a bilingual advantage on literacy and numeracy skills if both languages do not differ sharply between them. These findings are relevant for the design of language-in-education policies since they suggest the importance of fostering bilingualism in modern societies.