In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before … entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus …, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a child's development …

measure of the proportion of each country's population whose native language is a gender language. At the cross-country level … structure of the language tree and the distribution of languages across countries, this paper demonstrates that the results are … not driven by spurious correlations within language families. Gender languages appear to reduce women's labor force …