Economists, according to Leanne Hinton, define people as "bilingual" only if their second language results in an increase in earnings greater than the cost of learning that language.

Hinton, a linguist from the University of California-Berkeley, was one of many scholars discussing the confluence of culture and economy at the Cornell Conference on Language and Poverty, held in Clark and Goldwin Smith halls and in the Biotechnology Building Oct. 14 to 16.

Economics and language are highly relevant in today's world, she noted. "Languages defined as economically irrelevant will join the ranks of those already extinct," Hinton said, introducing a refrain that would echo throughout the conference. "It is the approach to language as economic capital that induces the trend toward monolingualism."

With the acceptance of English as the dominant international language, scholars fear that our collective cultures will be edited and summarized according to criteria of relevance dictated by the wealthy, dominant cultures.

"When we speak of minority languages, the notion of minority is not a numerical concept, but a power concept," Cornell English Professor Satya Mohanty reminded the group. "In the past, economic frailty has proven effective in protecting cultures from assimilation. The entry of a culture into the global market, however, usually signals both economic empowerment and cultural deference.

Said John Whitman, Cornell professor of linguistics, "Linguists and economists confront two competing positive values -- national development and minority language preservation." Whitman and his colleagues hope to position these values in such a way that they no longer compete, but complement one another instead. Whitman, who also is director of the East Asia Program, organized the conference with Cornell linguistics Professors Wayne Harbert, Sally McConnell-Ginet and Amanda Miller.

Some speakers noted that the economic assumptions about the link between poverty and minority languages have become self-fulfilling prophecies. During Saturday's workshop, University of Oxford Professor Suzanne Romaine argued that "poverty does not exist independent of the discourses that address it."

Within the United States, poverty and language have an equally problematic relationship, said Hinton. Native American tribes recognized by the government can apply for financial support. But "tribes trying to accrue benefits from their language heritage approach language as a commodity to be hoarded," leading some tribal councils to ban non-tribal members from studying their languages.

The domestic debate over languages concerns not only the extinction of indigenous languages, but the use of Spanish and languages introduced by immigrants. John Baugh of Washington University-St. Louis showed public service announcements discovered during his research on linguistic profiling. Describing them as "the auditory equivalent of racial profiling," he noted that linguistic profiling entails discrimination based on a person's accent or speech patterns.

Baugh described how he responded to rental housing advertisements using accents typical of different ethnicities. Baugh, who is black, was uniformly turned down unless he used an accent associated with a middle-class white male.

Funded by the Cornell's Poverty, Inequality and Development Initiative (PID) and the National Science Foundation, the conference was devised by the PID as a response to concerns about endangered languages and language politics. According to Whitman, "The conference is unique in its attempt to facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas among scholars studying the extinction of minority languages and those studying the relationship between language and the economic status of the speaker."

Kerry Gilfillan is a writer intern at the Cornell News Service.