Aims and scope

Language Policy is relevant to scholars, students, specialists, educators, and policymakers working in the fields of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, language teaching and learning, and related fields. The journal aims to publish empirical studies that cover a range of language policy related cases, situations, and regions worldwide while having a substantial theoretical underpinning that contributes to new understandings in the field. 

The editors remain interested in papers that explore language policy practices and processes at all levels, including by governments but also in schools, workplaces, families, health services, media and other institutional sites. Rather than just description and/or evaluation of policies, Language Policy seeks high-quality research that is empirically driven, allows us to understand ongoing processes of social change, and contributes to theory-building. We welcome research that is grounded in nuanced understandings of power that move away from its conceptualisation as something located in one place (e.g. a governmental body) and exercised via policymaking, towards recognition of power as a more diffuse, anonymous network that is not limited to state politics alone. We are also interested in contributions that describe and critique technologies of governmentality and forms of language policing which enable the daily regulation of communicative practices and speakers across a wide range of social domains, with a focus on the consequences for social groups’ unequal access to spaces and various material and symbolic resources. 

The journal seeks researchers’ vigilance in unsettling the epistemic traces of long-standing projects of capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy in their own work. We look forward to receiving contributions to the journal that press the boundaries of the field and reconsider what it is that we are actually fighting for in language policy research and activism. We also encourage papers informed through interdisciplinary work within related fields such as linguistics, education (inclusive of bilingual education), anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, law, history, ecology, and geography. Language Policy is interested in accounts focused on:

• Language policies, practices, and processes involving governments and governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, business enterprises, public and private institutions, community organizations, families, and other entities, with a critical perspective (not only descriptive);
• The enactment, promotion and management of language (education) policy (who, what, why, and how) in local, institutional, national, and global contexts, with attention to public spaces, cyberspace and the broader language ecology (e.g., linguistic landscapes, sociocultural and ethnographic perspectives on language policy);
• The development, implementation, and effects of language policies and regimes of knowledge about language and speakerhood, including implications for speakers of minoritized languages, endangered languages, and lingua francas; and
• Attempts made by minoritized groups to develop, establish, contest, disrupt, appropriate or modify language policies and the forms of knowledge and categories about languages and speakers that these bring about.

The journal editors occasionally commission guest-edited special issues on the journal’s central themes.