Linguistic Distance Diminishes Economic Growth

Consequences of Linguistic Distance for Economic Growth. Erkan Gören. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, doi:10.1111/obes.12205

Abstract: This paper advances a new country-level measure of ethno-linguistic diversity, making use of Greenberg's definition of diversity by synthesizing information on the share of different ethno-linguistic groups in a country's population and, more importantly, information on intergroup linguistic distances derived from a recently developed lexicostatistical approach. I show that this measure captures ethno-linguistic diversity at lower levels of linguistic aggregation. However, unlike the commonly used phylogenetic language tree approach, I found that these distance-weighted diversity measures continue to have a strong negative statistical association with economic growth that is not sensitive to the underlying resemblance function between ethno-linguistic groups.

Check also Ethnic Diversity and Poverty. By Sefa Awawory Churchill, Russell Smyth
http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/06/ethnic-and-linguistic-fractionalization.html
World Development, Volume 95, July 2017, Pages 285–302