We investigate the causal effect of parents’ linguistic skills on the intergenerational language transmission in a bilingual society. We consider the case of Catalonia, where the two main speech communities, Spanish and Catalan, are of similar sizes, and both languages are official, and exploit the natural experiment generated by a language-in-education reform. We discuss theoretically the main alternative channels through which such policies may affect the language parents speak to their children. Empirically, we find that the reform improved oral skills in Catalan among native Spanish speakers. These greater skills increased the propensity to speak Catalan with the offspring, which highlights the intergenerational spillovers overs of the reform. We also show that the effect is not confounded by spurious trends, potential changes in language identity, and linguistically mixed partnership formation.

我们调查在双语社会中父母的语言技能对代际语言传递的因果关系。我们以加泰罗尼亚为例，其中两个主要的语音社区（西班牙语和加泰罗尼亚语）的大小相似，并且两种语言均为官方语言，并利用了由语言教学改革产生的自然实验。我们从理论上讨论了此类政策可能影响父母与孩子说话的语言的主要替代渠道。从经验上看，我们发现这项改革提高了西班牙语为母语的加泰罗尼亚语的口语技能。这些更高的技能增加了与后代说加泰罗尼亚语的倾向，这突显了改革的代际溢出效应。我们还表明，这种影响不会被虚假趋势所混淆，