Abstract Sub-Saharan Africa stands out as a part of the world that primarily uses, as its official languages, former colonial languages that are neither spoken at home nor in the community. In this paper, we elicit preferences for colonial versus local languages and analyse the role of perceived costs and returns to different languages. In order to do so, we elicit beliefs about the effects of hypothetical changes to Zambia’s language policy on schooling outcomes, income and social cohesion. Our results show overwhelming support for the use of the colonial language to act as official. Looking at the determinants, we find that fears of being disadvantaged by the installation of another group’s language, high perceived costs of learning in another group’s language and lack of association between retaining the elite language and socioeconomic inequality as crucial factors in affecting preferences over language policies.

中文翻译：

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殖民舌帝国？赞比亚语言政策偏好的证据

摘要 撒哈拉以南非洲作为世界的一部分脱颖而出，主要使用既不在国内也不在社区使用的前殖民语言作为其官方语言。在本文中，我们引出了对殖民语言与当地语言的偏好，并分析了感知成本和回报对不同语言的作用。为了做到这一点，我们引出了关于赞比亚语言政策的假设变化对学校教育成果、收入和社会凝聚力的影响的信念。我们的研究结果显示，绝大多数人支持使用殖民语言作为官方语言。查看决定因素，我们发现害怕因安装另一组语言而处于不利地位，