Low-cost Language Learning: A boost to move?

Speaker: Joop Adema (ifo Institute & LMU)

Joop Adema is Junior Economist and Doctoral Student at the ifo Institut and the MGSE program (LMU) in Munich. He researches the economics of migration in relation to traditional media and new technologies and how these matter for prospective migrants as well as for natives' attitudes towards migrants.

Alongside the rise of the internet and smartphones, language learning apps have become tremendously popular. These apps encourage and facilitate language learning at low cost, which may have noteworthy consequences for international migration patterns and language acquisition by immigrants prior to immigration and in the destination country. In this paper, we use the staggered introduction of 84 available language modules between 2012 and 2021 on the widely used language learning platform Duolingo (56 million monthly active users to date) to study how a decrease in the cost of language learning impacted migration aspirations from 158 origin to 188 destination countries and the language skills of immigrants from 143 origin countries in the United States. We find that the introduction of a typical language learning module providing learning from an origin country language to a destination country language increases the stock of aspiring migrants along that corridor by about 7%. Furthermore, we find that the introduction of a Duolingo module from a widely spoken language in one's origin country to English increases the language skills of immigrants in the US through two channels: availability in the year prior to migration increases the probability to speak English well upon arrival by about 2 percentage points and every additional year of immigration increases the probability to speak English well by 0.8 percentage points.