Language And Language Policy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Language policy involves taking an official or authoritative stand about languages and the use of languages in a given territory or state. Language policy that legitimizes language X may be perceived by the users of language Y to disfavor their language. Therefore, there are usually political, social, economic, and cultural consequences when one language is made official while others are not, making language policy not only a linguistic issue, but a political issue as well.

Language policy specialists are interested in the outcome of language acquisition, language use, and language change as a product of state-citizen relations. Language public policy studies are gravitating toward the following five special issue areas: linguistic history and etymology; official language policies and nation-building; language and culture; monolingualism, bilingualism, and multilingualism; and language policy management and development.

The Development Of Language Policy

While ancient languages abound, the written records of the kinds of language policies employed by ancient states have yet to be uncovered. From our contemporary perspective, the systematic treatment and study of language only appeared much later in the work of post-Enlightenment phenomenologists. Edmund Husserl and Ludwig von Wittgenstein were two nineteenth century European phenomenologists who exemplify research interest in the structure of language. The existentialist tradition in the work of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the ontological value of language and technology in German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s work represent some of the more interesting turning points in contemporary political theory. Most modern political philosophers and political theorists themselves often focus on language and meaning. In Language Policy and Modernity in Southeast Asia, Antonio L. Rappa and Lionel Wee raise the complexities involved in understanding the social construction of language and the political consequences of the nonneutral construction of language in terms of linguistic instrumentalism, displacement, complementarity, equivalence, and language management systems.

The resources for language policy analysts include Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic structuralism and theory of the signifier and the signified (document de langue).

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss viewed culture as a system of symbolic communication but through diachronic analyses rather than Saussure’s synchronic analysis. Anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boaz examined variations in genealogical linguistic histories. American linguist Noam Chomsky’s ideas about surface structure and deep structure as a priori semantic constituents continue to dominate the study of language and its subfields. George Lakoff, an American student of Chomsky’s interpretive semantics, built on Chomsky’s structured/nonstructured rules involving reality-dependent grammar (native experts) rather than a grammar-dependent reality (scientific experts). In the “linguistic wars” that followed in the 1960s and 1970s, Lakoff and his collaborators tried to show how reality was an important variable in generative semantics—that is, influencing grammatical rules that governed phrase structure. But it was only in his coauthored book with Mark Johnson published in 1980, Metaphors We Live By, that Lakoff presented the seminal nature of his thesis: metaphor is central to political reality. Nonmetaphorical work is reserved mainly for descriptors of a physical science of the world. Metaphors tend to generate embedded nuances within vocabularies and the larger paradigms within which cultures exist. Hence, a single metaphorical unit can represent a potentially infinite set of meanings within a given culture. In the case of the Inuit, metaphors used in Inuit share the larger linguistic material of Eskimo languages; this is similar in standard Thai, Bahasa Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia. An officially recognized language with an abundant set of metaphors is likely to be a more useful policy instrument.

Shifting Language And Language Policy

Some scholars of language policy believe that languages tend to “shift” or evolve over time. Therefore, it would be useful for scholars to study an official language’s evolution. This is especially important if the language in question might impact the existing government policies on language. For example, Joshua A. Fishman’s graded intergenerational disruption scale in language policy analysis might be used to understand how languages shift. Rappa and Wee adapted the Fishman scale to examine how “an indigenous language, while widely used in highly prestigious domains, can, over time, become restricted to ‘mere’ community and family-based interactions” (2006, 131). An example of this is the Papia Kristang (the language of the Christians), a Eurasian Portuguese creole that arrived in Southeast Asia in 1511, that suffers from the fact that:

as younger generations of speakers lose touch with the language so that most speakers tend to come from the older generations, there is, in the final stage, a very real possibility that indigenous language may be completely displaced . . . correlating with this decline in the fortunes of the indigenous language, of course, is the rise of its potential replacement, English. (131)

A significant contribution to the understanding of language policy and meaning comes from the postmodern and poststructural schools associated with Jean Baudrillard, Jacques

Derrida, Michel Foucault, Henry S. Kariel, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. Their complex analytical methods deconstruct language formations and language games as discursive power arrangements that impact society, culture, gender, class, and citizenship and the state to examine the marginal, the other, voice and noiselessness, contingency, weak ontology, simulacra, and “origins” in language policy.

The Importance Of Language Policy

Language policies are important because governments have long known that languages are valuable political tools of communication and control. Indeed, language policy is so important that very often official policies exist about how languages ought to be studied and taught within a given education system. Within democracies, there are often large lobbies for language recognition. While the United States, for example, does not have an official language policy, the wide use of Spanish within the American polity had led to Spanish being used in many government departments, offices, and bureaus. Because language itself is a very sensitive issue that can raise emotional feelings among people, language policies and their policy makers have to tread carefully as some language policies can do more harm than good.

In conclusion, research on language policy remains a very important area in policy studies and political science, as language policy is about legitimizing or “authorizing” a predominant human language in a given territory. The debates within language policy are significant for a large variety of political and linguistic reasons, including the life of the language itself, the value of the language to the people within a given language community, and the financial support that follows government policies on language.

Bibliography:

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Pennycook, Alistair. “Postmodernism in Language Policy.” In Introduction to Language Policy:Theory and Method, edited by Thomas Ricento, 60–76. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism: A Conspiracy, or a Conspiracy of Silence? Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Netherlands, 2007.
Rappa, Antonio L., and Lionel Wee. Language Policy and Modernity in Southeast Asia. New York: Springer, 2006.
Tollefson, James W. “Critical Theory in Language Policy.” In Introduction to Language Policy:Theory and Method, edited by Thomas Ricento, 42–59. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006.
Wee, Lionel, and Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng. “Language Policy and Nationalist Ideology: Statal Narratives in Singapore.” Multilingua 24, no. 3 (2005): 159–183.

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