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Abstract Which parties embrace multilingualism in their communication? Despite growing interest in parties’ multilingualism among normative scholars of deliberative democracy, empirical research has largely overlooked the linguistic aspect of party competition. We leverage large‐scale data on Facebook posts by more than 800 parties in 87 democracies and analyze their day‐to‐day language practices. By so doing, we develop, for the first time, the classification of monolingual and multilingual parties around the world. Moreover, using this novel dataset, we explore what factors are associated with parties’ adoption of multilingualism and how multilingual parties predict the language use of candidates they nominate. Overall, this study provides the most comprehensive picture of parties’ multilingualism in contemporary democracies and sets agendas for future research in the intersection of parties and language representation.
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This content will become publicly available on December 29, 2026
A theoretically driven and empirically grounded calculation for language dominance and degree of multilingualism
Abstract Bilingualism research has long been challenged by a lack of a unified approach to quantifying language dominance and degree of multilingualism. While numerous questionnaires (e.g., LHQ, BLP, LEAP‑Q, and LUQ) provide valuable data on language background variables, they lack a standardized formula to compute key measures from it. We introduce two formulas that synthesize critical linguistic variables to efficiently calculate language dominance and a multilingualism score that ranges from perfect monolingualism to native-like proficiency in multiple languages. Validation across two large datasets shows our dominance measure closely aligns with more complex PCA methods while being simpler and more efficient.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2446452
- PAR ID:
- 10658166
- Publisher / Repository:
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- ISSN:
- 1366-7289
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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