Gravity model explanations of trade volumes frequently include dummy variables to account for the commonality of language among trading partners. In this paper we use a data set for the number of people in a country who speak English as a first language or English as a second language (Crystal,...

We introduce a measure of language difficulty called "linguistic distance" into a modified gravity model to determine whether the fact that a language is further away from English affects the level of trade. Our sample of 36 non-English speaking countries includes Japan and South Korea, which we...