François Grin

François Grin (born September 14, 1959 ) is a Swiss economist . One of his research areas is the economics of linguistic communication.

Life

Grin studied economics at the University of Geneva , where he received his doctorate summa cum laude in 1989 . He then taught at the University of Montreal and the University of Washington in Seattle , became an assistant professor ( maître-assistant ) at the University of Geneva and deputy director of the European Minority Center in Flensburg . Since 2001 he has been visiting professor at the University of Italian-speaking Switzerland and since 2003 professor at the University of Geneva.

In his research work, he dealt with the linguistic situation in officially quadrilingual Switzerland and in the European Union and examined its economic consequences. In a detailed report ( L'enseignement des langues comme politique publique , Language training as a public policy - briefly called rapport Grin in French-speaking countries ), he proposes a theory that the introduction of the artificial language Esperanto could save 25 billion euros annually . One of his proposals is the introduction of a language tax to compensate for the economic disadvantages of countries with underprivileged languages.

Grin has also dealt in detail with the situation of the Kalmuck language in the Soviet Union and in Russia .

Web links

• Literature by and about François Grin in the catalog of the German National Library
• CV (Università della Svizzera Italiana; PDF file; 87 kB)