The Impact of Multilingualism on Spanish Language Acquisition Among Immigrants in Spain

34 Pages Posted: 3 Jan 2015

See all articles by Santiago Budría

Santiago Budría

Universidade da Madeira

Pablo Swedberg

St. Louis University

Abstract

This article uses micro-data from the Spanish National Immigrant Survey to analyze the acquisition of Spanish language skills for immigrants in Spain. The motivation of the paper is threefold. Language skills are important for an individual's labour market performance, Spain offers an important non-English speaking country instance and the main novelty of our paper is to explore the impact of speaking multiple foreign languages on host language learning for immigrants. The results reveal a strong positive association between multilingualism and the probability of reporting good or very good Spanish language proficiency for immigrants in Spain.

Keywords: immigration, language proficiency, education

JEL Classification: J15, J24, J61

Suggested Citation

Budria, Santiago and Swedberg, Pablo, The Impact of Multilingualism on Spanish Language Acquisition Among Immigrants in Spain. IZA Discussion Paper No. 8748, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2544812 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2544812

Santiago Budria (Contact Author)

Universidade da Madeira ( email )

Campus Universitario da Penteada
9000-390 Funchal
Portugal

Pablo Swedberg

St. Louis University

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