Abstract
In organising this survey of the language situation in the Pacific Basin, we have tried to justify the choices we have had to make. In the end, these choices may be seen as somewhat arbitrary, based on a restricted definition of the Pacific Basin and at least in part on our collective experience. Essentially, we want to differentiate between countries of the Pacific Rim, which generally have a continental orientation (including great nations of vast size and substantial wealth—the United States, Canada, the west coast of Central and South America on the eastern rim, and the Russian Federation, China and mainland south-east Asia on the western rim) and the Pacific Basin—which includes the thousands of islands suspended between the two vast continental enclaves of North and South America and Asia.
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Notes
While it is true that China subsumes a large number of regionalects or varieties of Han ‘Chinese, ‘ in fact Mandarin is the national and official variety. Similarly, the United States subsumes speakers of a very large number of languages, but English is the de facto national language. So, too, Russia, though vastly multilingual, employs the fiction of Russian as the national, official language. Japan and South Korea are notoriously monolingual, and Canada has an official bilingual policy in English and French (but ignoring the languages of large numbers of First Nation People). Though the polities of Central and South America are sometimes excluded from the definition of the Pacific Rim, they are largely officially monolingual in Spanish (again with the languages of the indigenous populations largely ignored).
The term polities will be used throughout this study. Rather than using nation or country, we prefer polity because some of the entities discussed are independent states (e.g., Malaysia), some are special territories of various kinds (e.g., possessions, parts of nations, etc. like Taiwan, Niue, the Cook Islands), and some are mega-states (e.g., Indonesia, The Peoples’ Republic of China).
Indeed, the range runs from the wealthiest polities (The United States, Japan) to the poorest (Tuvalu).
i.e., instruction in ‘knowledge telling’ obviates the need for instruction in ‘knowledge transforming.’
“...To be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds..., “ says Phoenix to Achilles at a moment of crisis, will lead to wisdom in old age (see, e.g., Jaeger 1945, 1: 8).
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kaplan, R.B., Baldauf, R.B. (2003). Introduction. In: Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin. Language Policy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6193-5
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