How an Official Language Shapes Mindsets: A Mechanism

This chapter examines the cognitive links through which the official language field shapes political mindsets, with a focus on how listening proficiency modifies process-based political trust. This type of trust, which emerges from direct interactions with government representatives, is shown to be crucial in shaping broader institutional trust and state legitimacy. Building on the OLF framework, the chapter explores how exposure to the official language establishes cognitive connections between the language and the authority. The chapter contrasts OLF’s predictions with those of ethnolinguistic theory, which views language as marking cultural or ethnic identities, i.e., as "cultural markers." While the ethnolinguistic approach emphasizes language’s role in defining group boundaries, OLF highlights its influence on political cognition. The chapter argues that the exposure mechanism creates an "authority marker," fostering a sense of authority legitimacy and greater alignment with political power. Using a lab experiment on language attitudes, the chapter presents empirical evidence for this process, showing that the authority marker amplifies the influence of the political power during government-citizen interactions. Placebo experiments reveal that this effect is conditioned by the speaker’s political identity; when speakers are not perceived as representing the government, the authority marker loses its effect, and listeners revert to using cultural markers to assess the speaker.