Abstract
Earlier, I proposed that language policy could usefully be analyzed as consisting of three independent but interconnected components, language practices, language beliefs or ideologies, and language management. It was also argued that failure to recognize that language policy can exist in other domains and at other levels than the nation-state, ranging from the family to international organizations was one of the reasons for the ineffectiveness of state planning efforts. From looking at a number of cases, some modifications are now suggested. First, within management, is to note the distinction between advocates (without power) and managers. Second, is to add the level of the individual, noting the importance of self-management, attempts to expand personal repertoires to enhance communication and employability. Finally, it is pointed out that even when this leads to a workable language policy, it may be blocked or hampered by non-linguistic forces such as genocide, conquest, colonization, introduced diseases, slavery, corruption and natural disasters.
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Notes
An earlier version of this paper was read at a symposium on "Interests and Power in Language Management" held at the University of Regensburg in September 2017. I am grateful to audiences at the School of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the Victoria University of Wellington, the School of Languages and Linguistics at Melbourne University, and the Language Policy and Practice Research Seminar at Hong Kong University, and to the anonymous reviewers of this paper, for comments and suggestions that helped me rethink it.
Classical language planning saw its task as the solution of language problems. The journal Language Problems and Language Planning, which in 1977 succeeded the Esperanto-language journal La monda lingvo-problemo [The world language problem] founded in 1969 preserves this orientation in its title at least.
In Burundi, Kirindi is official as are English and French. Kenya and Uganda have Kiswahili and English as official languages. Tanzania has no de jure official language, but considers Swahili the national language and uses English for many government activities.
The term comes from Fishman (1991).
It seems there are more speakers of Polish and Mandarin in Dublin than of Irish.
Williams (2017) discusses continuing difficulties in Welsh language policy and implementation.
After over 50 years of marriage, I now have adopted my New York-born wife’s “flapped d” as the central consonant of “butter” rather than the “t” I grew up with.
This is called audience design in studies of radio announcers by Bell (1984).
Totten and Hitchcock (2011) open their collection with the definition of indigenous peoples, aboriginal or “First people”, a category recognized by the United Nations in a covenant, and applying to some 360,000,000 to 600,000,000 people today—the wide range is because few nations recognize or count them.
The term was first used by Lemkin (1944), a Polish Jew who escaped to the US and became a professor of law, to refer to both the Armenian genocide and the Nazi killing of members of his family.
Belich (1986) describes the wars the followed and then provided excuses for seizure of Maori land in nineteenth century New Zealand.
For example, Marsh (2013) describes the effects of mining on an Australian aboriginal people.
Klein and Luna (2009) describe slavery in Brazil.
Cook (1998) argues that there were too few invading Spaniards to account for the death of millions, and so suggests introduced diseases like smallpox. There is dispute as to whether the “extinction” of the Arawak people was genocide or an internally generated loss of identity (Grenke 2005; Provost et al. 2010).
About 5,000,000 people are estimated to have died in the wars at the end of the twentieth century in Congo, but by the mid-2000 s, thing had become calmer; however, In February and March of 2018, violence resumed and the UN says 400,000 have been displaced.
Basso (2016) describes the Cherokee, the Herero and the Greek Pontic genocides.
There are many reports of Navajo children frozen to death as they tried to escape the boarding school and find their way home.
Similarly, in schools in Wales, children were beaten for using a Welsh word or sentence.
In Asia, local languages took over, and in North Africa, Arabization is being attempted.
Successful implementation of constitutional recognition of nine indigenous languages in South Africa has been handicapped by the limited resources allocated to each for modernization (Heugh 2003).
Myers-Scotton (1990) called this “elite closure” and presents a number of cases from Africa.
Written as a doctoral thesis, Guimarães (2016) is a full account of the Angolan wars.
Central Intelligence Agency (2017).
Twenty languages are spoken in Timor: Portuguese with a few native speakers and Tetun-Dili with about 400,000 speakers are statutory national languages. Tetun with 65,000 native speakers is important, and another 12 are classified as vigorous. Many older people still use the Indonesian in which they were educated.
Hutu and Tutsi are not ethnically or linguistically different, but under Belgian rule, Tutsi leadership was encouraged; later, the majority Hutu seized power and targeted the former ruling class.
Turner (2007) gives a full account of these complex and involved events.
Spolsky (2018a).
Model-based geostatistics are reported to have shown accurate estimates of nutrition in Burkino-Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, and Somalia; in a new study (Osgood-Zimmerman et al. 2018), data from fifty-one African states show measures of Child Growth Failure between 2000 and 2015.
The Millennium Development Goals aimed to improve nutrition by 2025 and end malnutrition by 2030.
Northern Senegal, southern Mauritania, central Mali, northern Burkina Faso, the extreme south of Algeria, Niger, the extreme north of Nigeria, central Chad, central and southern Sudan, the extreme north of South Sudan, Eritrea, Cameroon, Central African Republic and extreme north of Ethiopia.
Graetz et al. (2018) mapped variation on the basis of 173 unique census and survey sources.
UNESCO on Sustainable Goals.
Formerly called the Failed States Index, the classifications are made by the US Fund for Peace, a non-government non-profit research organization which now includes 178 countries. South Sudan, Somalia and the Central African Republic are the top three, followed by Yemen, Sudan, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Issued by Transparency International, a German-based based international organization.
There are many well-publicized cases of the corruption of individual political leaders and their close associates: Trump in the US, Putin in Russia, Zuma in South Africa, Lula, Rousseff and Lerner in Brazil, dos Santos in Angola, Gaddafi in Libya.
Haugen (1966a, b) suggested four dimensions of language planning (selection of norm, codification of norm, implementation, and elaboration). Cooper (1989: 88–98) proposes a more elaborate scheme: “What actors …attempt to influence what behaviours … of which people … for what ends … under what conditions … by what means … through what decision-making process … with what effect.”
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Spolsky, B. A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and management). Lang Policy 18, 323–338 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9489-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9489-z