Common Language and Integration of Interethnic Networks

There is a global policy shift toward home language instruction. Studying in the language students best understand can have positive effects on learning and human capital attainment. However, this might have unintended effects: students from different ethno-lingustic groups may be segregated, leading not only to fewer opportunities to interact but also to an erosion of communication skills.

This is what our fieldwork in North Macedonia suggests. Albanians, Macedonians, and Turks go to integrated schools but learn in their respective native languages in separate classrooms. Our pilot surveys show that non-Macedonians are more likely to say they have mastered English than Macedonian, the current lingua franca that is the native tongue of the nationally dominant group. Unsurprisingly, we see that student social networks are highly segregated by ethnicity – fewer than 5 percent of pairwise friendships are cross-ethnic.

In our RCT we will evaluate a programme where students from different ethnicities learn together in English, a neutral common language. This intervention addresses the two problems we have recognised: missing opportunities for interaction and an erosion of mutual communication skills. We build on recent successful contact interventions by asking how communication technology (a neutral common language) interacts with cooperative inter-ethnic episodes. By varying the intensity of spoken English, we aim to isolate the role of verbal communication in a neutral language in the process of integration. We will quantify the effects of the programme on inter-ethnic friendships and out-group bias.

Given that friendships likely exhibit complementarities and spillovers, our project also aims to measure spillovers of the treatment on a network of friendships. Does a newly formed friendship have ripple effects downstream in the social network? A main goal of our study is to ask how policy makers can target individuals in networks to optimally integrate segregated groups.