A Meeting of Concepts and Praxis: Multilingualism, Language Policy and the Dominant Language Constellation

Abstract

This chapter combines discussion of multilingualism and language policy, with the productive power of the Dominant Language Constellation concept. Multilingualism research has flourished and deepened in recent years, producing many analytically revealing and empirically robust accounts of the super-diverse communicative environment of our world. This body of multilingualism studies makes available to educators, public officials and ordinary citizens, as well as scholars, the lived realities of multiple languages and their presence in the everyday lives of citizens. In public policy settings however, multilingualism studies have had far less traction.

This chapter pursues a line of questioning about language policy and planning and the DLC in an exploration of how multilingualism can be linked to public policy formation of states (a prime example is Vietnam), and the personal language planning of individuals and institutions. Key to the discussion is a conception of knowledge linked to the vita activa and praxis of enlightened individuals and scholars seeking linguistic justice, but also the vita contemplativa of conceptual clarification. The DLC is a promising conceptual innovation because it fosters productive dialogue between academic accounts of language diversity and the complex realm of policy and decision making. The chapter concludes by discussing how these domains can be aligned through a shared body of concepts to become mutually comprehensible, and the likely outcomes if academics furnish accounts of demo-linguistics that are persuasive and politically tractable. The chapter also offers some new additions to the stock of ideas within the DLC concept, such as the idea of a coherent script cluster within a language grouping, and thereby expands the concept itself.