The following is not exactly the *economics* of language(s) -- rather, its statistics -- but the data concerned might inform an economics of language:

* George K. Zipf (1949) Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley.
* George K. Zipf (1935) The Psychobiology of Language. Houghton-Mifflin. (see citations at http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/64879/0)

Both references are from the Wikipedia page on Zipf's Law -- which, to slightly simplify, says that if you rank a language's words by frequency of use, their frequency will follow a power-law distribution.

Julian




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Alain Alcouffe
> Sent: 21 February 2011 10:04
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [SHOE] economics of language(s)
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> during the last decades several scholars have published surveys of an
> emerging field (economics of language). Most of them consider Marschak's
> 1965 paper as the starting point of the field. Nevertheless to take only
> two examples some developpements are to be found in Turgot,  Smith's WN
> and Menger.  Is anybody aware of studies of an history of the topic
> before 1965? (concerning Menger, I did not find many secondary
> literature except  a 1992 paper by Hodgson.
> Thanks for any tips
> 
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