Dialect Diversity And City Size

Since the reform and opening up,China’s urbanization has developed rapidly.But the imbalance and inadequacy of urban spatial layout are still existing.Why do different cities in the same economy have considerable differences in urban size? The traditional research on the influencing factors of city scale mainly from the perspectives of economy,politics,natural conditions,transportation,and so on.However,few scholars consider the role of cultural diversity in the process of urban scale development.As a direct embodiment of cultural diversity,dialect diversity influences the general level of social trust through group identity and screening mechanism,and social trust,as an important part of social capital,plays an important role in the process of urban development.From the perspective of cultural diversity,the paper explores the impact of the diversity of dialects on city size.Diversity of dialects not only exacerbates market segmentation but also hinders resource flow across regions,which brings negative affects to the agglomeration effect of resources,and as a result,the development of urban scale will be adversely affected.Using the diversity indicators of regional dialects and the NPP-VIIRS city night light index,the paper empirically studies the impact of dialect diversity on city size.The empirical results show that dialect diversity does have a significant negative impact on the size of the city and on average a one-dialect increase in the synthetic metropolitan area will result in a 4.55% decrease in the size of the city as measured by the night light index.A series of robustness tests show the robustness of the estimates in this paper.Finally,the article uses the diversity of local opera as an instrumental variable of dialect diversity in the synthetic metropolitan area.The two-stage least squares estimation results and LTZ approach further support the causal relationship of dialect diversity to the size of the city.Through empirical research,this paper shows that dialect diversity is not conducive to the urban scale mainly through the channels that hinder the flow and agglomeration of labor,capital and technological elements.The policy implications of this study are: the policy design needs to recognize that the trust barrier brought by dialect diversity is a deep-seated factor that affects the agglomeration of factors and the size of cities.To build a more diversified and inclusive modern city,we need to break the cultural gap,eliminate cultural biases,improve the level of social trust,and then give full play to the complementary effects brought by multi-cultural.