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• International interactions in the light of linguistic affinity

  Edina Varnagy

  Adam Markus

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  Although international trade economists often highlight the improtance of common currency, FDI flows or other factors in bilateral trade relations, quite few papers focus on the role of languages or linguistic similarities in this respect. The uniqeness and difficulty of this topic lie in its complexity. Analyses generally lean solely on official languages losing useful peaces of information hidden in the fact that a great number of people use other languages in their everyday life. In the absence of common mother tongue bilateral economic interactions can be intensified by foreign languages acquired by a great share of people in both countries. We emphasize that english seems to be the only universal mediator among trading countries in the world. A further aim of this paper using the results of Eurobarometer surveys is to point to the role of linguistic affinity in international economic interactions based on the case of Estonia, Finland and Hungary.

   

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes: F10; Z10