Language Policy & Planning
By Laura Valencia
The academic field of Language Planning & Policy (LPP) has some useful terms and theories that feed into our discussions on language justice. When LPP emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, the initial focus was on promoting languages that could aid “modernization in developing countries,” to access global markets or as postcolonial nation-building. This was often eurocentric, universalistic, and predictive.
In response, questions arose: Are languages ideologically neutral? Can they be abstracted from their social, political, and historical contexts? Mass-based language movements demonstrated that the answer to these questions is “NO” – language and identity are inseparable. A critical approach to LPP emerged, with a more complex view of how power and inequality are sustained or transformed through language policy, particularly in contexts where decolonial/postcolonial politics are struggling with the forces of globalization.
It is from the field of Language Planning and Policy that some terms come into our discussions on Language Justice such as:
Language ideology – This term comes from the field of linguistic anthropology and refers to any set of beliefs or feelings about languages as used in their social worlds. Some examples are:
the ideology of monolingualism (the idea that language minorities should give up their languages in favour of a dominant one);
the ideology of a ‘standard’ language (the idea that there is only one standard way of speaking a language);
the ideology of the ‘modern’ language (the instrumental value of the language in modernity and economic process);
the ideology of English ‘neutrality’ (to bring social and national cohesion among diverse peoples).
Linguistic imperialism (linguicism) is a bias against or discrimination of a person based on their language or language skills. This includes dialect, accent, native tongue, vocabulary size, and more.
Language rights are the human and civil rights concerning the individual and collective right to choose the language or languages for communication in a private or public atmosphere.
Language policies include official regulations by authorities about the form, function, use, or acquisition of languages. Language policies can also be unofficial conventions (covert, de facto, or implicit) regulating how languages are used and interact within communities (i.e. workplaces, schools, at home).
For more detail on language policies in South Asian social movements, take a look at the blog on our site by Ganesh Birajdar.
For further reading see:
Rubdy, Rani (2008). “Language Planning Ideologies, Communicative Practices, and their Consequences.”
