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Language policy at a crossroads?
Bahasa Kadazandusun or BKD is the sole indigenous language offered in schools in Sabah, initially under the Pupils’ Own Language (POL) program based on the Education Act 1966. Different reactions towards BKD come from various concerned stakeholders i.e., ethnic societies, cultural bodies, and political organizations within the Kadazan and Dusun Orang Asal communities that make up almost 30% of the population of Sabah. Views on BKD range from critical and hardline positions to support and tolerance. Differing opinions can be read in the media due to the press statements by organizations or individuals reported in the news. However, one group whose opinions are rarely heard within the debates is the Orang Asal parents whose children are BKD learners at schools. This paper extracts findings from a larger study conducted to investigate the views and perspectives of stakeholders on the teaching and learning of the Kadazandusun language. In particular, this paper discusses relevant extracts from focus group discussions specifically with parents (n = 294) from five districts (Tambunan, Keningau, Kudat, Kota Marudu, and Tuaran). The study found that Orang Asal parents who are non-Kadazan or non-Dusun speakers are supportive of the BKD’s position and role as the sole indigenous language option taught in the national education system while recognizing that they want their indigenous languages to be transmitted to their younger generation, the parents also strongly encourage for inclusion of other ethnic languages in the system, formally or informally. This study found that the acceptance and tolerance shown by the parents, though themselves not speakers of Kadazandusun, are consistent with the sense of community present within indigenous communities in Sabah. The support given by non-Kadazandusun speakers to the standard language points to existing social harmony in a multicultural and multilingual society in Sabah. This paper also discusses at length the history behind the establishment of BKD and language standardization ideology within indigenous communities’ context.
English as a foreign language is taught almost exclusively as a school subject in most parts of the world. However, reported in this autoethnography is our practice in family language planning in English as a foreign language (non-native to either parent). The personal narratives of our bilingual parenting experience focus on our decision making process, the concerns we encountered, our bilingual parenting practices, and our reflections on this journey. Our lived experiences shared in this study serve to shed light on such issues in family language planning as the formation of parental language ideology, the process of family language policy making, and the emotionality of bilingual parenting practice. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature
Ever since the wars of the Yugoslav secession in the nineties, linguistic nationalism has proven to have been among the more relevant instances in the discursive construction of national identity and new languages, dubbed by Ranko Bugarski as ‘administrative successors’ of Serbo-Croatian. Even though contemporary linguistics still classifies Serbo-Croatian as one language with regional varieties (commonly dubbed ‘polycentric standardized languages’ in linguistics), nationalist linguists have been working tirelessly to discursively construct their own, local languages, based on national identity, script and religion. Since most scholarly production has been dealing with nationalist linguistics related to the breakup of Serbo-Croatian during and in the immediate aftermath of the wars of the Yugoslav secession, not much has been written on the current state of nationalist linguistics in Serbia in the 21st century. This article deals with the contemporary nationalist linguist discourse on the topic of the Serbian version of the polycentric standardized Serbo-Croatian language, its discursive connections to religion, nationality and the Otherizing of Croatia as the discursive Other against which a Serbian language needs to be constructed. As the article will show, this is achieved by assertive, declarative discourse.
Local languages/varieties play a key role in the construction of an authentic and local tourism experience. This is also the case in the bilingual town of Murten, which uses its situation at the language border between the French- and the German-speaking part of Switzerland and the local bilingualism to attract and entertain tourists in different ways. Taking the example of a theatrical bilingual guided tour, this paper focuses on the linguistic management adopted by the involved touristic institutions in order to package and adjust the local linguistic diversity to turn it into a touristic experience that can be commodified on the tourism market.
Policies concerning language use are increasingly tested in an age of frequent migration and cultural synthesis. With conflicting factors and changing political climates influencing the policy-makers, Elana Shohamy considers the effects that these policies have on the real people involved. Using examples from the US and UK, she shows how language policies are promoted and imposed, overtly and covertly, across different countries and in different contexts. Concluding with arguments for a more democratic and open approach to language policy and planning, the final note is one of optimism, suggesting strategies for resistance to language attrition and ways to protect the linguistic rights of groups and individuals.
Contributes to contemporary debates about justice, multiculturalism, citizenship, and democratic theory. The book argues that the conventional liberal understanding of justice as neutrality needs to be supplemented by a conception of justice as evenhandedness. It also argues that theorists ought to pay attention to the moral wisdom that is sometimes embedded in practice. Claims about the moral relevance of culture and identity appear in many different forms in politics. There is no master principle that enables us to determine when we should respect such claims and when we should challenge them, but the idea of evenhanded justice often points us in the right direction. The book demonstrates this through a comparative and contextual analysis that pays close attention to the actual claims about culture and identity advanced by immigrants, national minorities, aboriginals, and other groups in a number of different societies. While the main focus is on a range of familiar and unfamiliar cases, the book includes an extended critical analysis of the work of Michael Walzer and Will Kymlicka. Finally, the book also contends that the conventional conception of citizenship is an intellectual and moral prison from which we can be liberated by adopting an understanding of citizenship that is more open to multiplicity and that grows out of practices that we judge, upon reflection, to be just and beneficial.
Earlier studies showed the value of seeing language policy as consisting of three independent but interconnected components, language practices, language beliefs, and language management. Failure to recognize that language policy can also exist at other levels than the nation-state, ranging from the family to international organizations, was one of the reasons for inadequacy of state planning efforts. After studying a number of cases, especially language policy in colonial and post-colonial states, it became clear that two additional components should be added. The first is self-management, the effort of individuals to expand their language repertoire to improve possibilities of communication and employment. The second are non-linguistic forces, such as conquest, colonization, genocide, introduced diseases, slavery, corruption, and natural disasters, which work to block or interfere with the development and implementation of management. An enriched model should help clarify the difficulties of state language policy. Abstract Earlier studies showed the value of seeing language policy as consisting of three
This chapter explores the history, development, and role of ethnographic research in understanding de facto and de jure language policies. With its roots in anthropology, ethnography is characterized by the contextualization of cultural and linguistic phenomena and close attention to participants’ point of view. This chapter begins by framing ethnographic research in terms of its distinct ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. The chapter then locates ethnographic approaches to language policy in the complementary fields of educational and linguistic anthropology and socio-educational linguistics. This is followed by an examination of key issues and findings emanating from these disciplinary fields and an exploration of core areas of new research, including critical ethnographic, sociocultural approaches to language education planning and policy, and ethnographic studies of educators as de facto language policymakers. Final sections address the implications of this work for pedagogy, policy, and praxis. Returning to Hymes’s (1980) call for an ethnographic science that is reflexive, critical, and democratizing, the authors argue for ethnographic research that engages and works to dismantle persistent linguistic inequalities in education.
This chapter explores the history, development, and role of ethnographic research in understanding de facto and de jure language policies. With its roots in anthropology, ethnography is characterized by the contextualization of cultural and linguistic phenomena and close attention to participants’ point of view. This chapter begins by framing ethnographic research in terms of its distinct ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. The chapter then locates ethnographic approaches to language policy in the complementary fields of educational and linguistic anthropology and socio-educational linguistics. This is followed by an examination of key issues and findings emanating from these disciplinary fields and an exploration of core areas of new research, including critical ethnographic, sociocultural approaches to language education planning and policy, and ethnographic studies of educators as de facto language policymakers. Final sections address the implications of this work for pedagogy, policy, and praxis. Returning to Hymes’s (1980) call for an ethnographic science that is reflexive, critical, and democratizing, the authors argue for ethnographic research that engages and works to dismantle persistent linguistic inequalities in education.
Language policy is an issue of critical importance in the world today. In this introduction, Bernard Spolsky explores many debates at the forefront of language policy: ideas of correctness and bad language; bilingualism and multilingualism; language death and efforts to preserve endangered languages; language choice as a human and civil right; and language education policy. Through looking at the language practices, beliefs and management of social groups from families to supra-national organizations, he develops a theory of modern national language policy and the major forces controlling it, such as the demands for efficient communication, the pressure for national identity, the attractions of (and resistance to) English as a global language, and the growing concern for human and civil rights as they impinge on language. Two central questions asked in this wide-ranging survey are of how to recognize language policies, and whether or not language can be managed at all.
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I analyse what exactly is being addressed when the notion of ‘literacy inequalities’ is cited in the context of international policy with regard to education in general and literacy in particular. Whilst literacy statistics are used as indicators of social inequality and as a basis for policy in improving rights, educational attainment, etc., I question to what extent literacy levels (or various accounts of ‘lack of literacy’) can be taken as offering a valid account of ‘inequality’ in the larger international context. Recent work on literacy from an ethnographic perspective has questioned the international categorisation of a single uniform thing called ‘literacy’, from which consequences can be drawn and has instead focused on local meanings and cultural variations in what counts. In particular I take issue with arguments rooted in economic generalisation on the one hand, by such authors as Amartya Sen, and on the other in moral universalism, in the work of such authors as Nussbaum.I argue that an ethnographic perspective offers two major contributions to this debate: (1) that ethnographic perspectives and an understanding of literacy practices as multiple and culturally varied, can help avoid simplistic and often ethnocentric claims regarding the consequences of literacy based on one-dimensional and culturally narrow categories and definitions and (2) that an ethnographic perspective can sensitise us to the ways in which the power to name and define is a crucial component of inequality. I will elaborate on these two ‘contributions’ with reference both to theoretical debates in the field in recent years and to examples of practice in literacy programmes in different international contexts.
L'article passe en revue les differents aspects de la standardisation d'une langue : les proprietes structurelles qui definissent une langue standard, les avantages qu'une langue standard apporte a une communaute linguistique, et les conditions dans lesquelles se developpe une langue standard.
The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation in spoken language. The book discusses key approaches to stylistic variation, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology.
Influenced by the work of Bakhtin, a sociolinguistics has begun to take shape in recent years that takes multiplicity, hybridity, and simultaneity as key concepts. Such a sociolinguistics should place bi- and multilingual speakers and communities at its center, rather than in their traditional place at the margins. Within the frame of a Bakhtinian concept of simultaneity in language, this article reconsiders translingual phenomena of codeswitching and so-called interference, and brings into focus a relatively understudied third form, here called bivalency. It further considers the ambivalent and simultaneous messages that are communicated in linguistic contact zones, and speakers' simultaneous claims to more than one social identity. There can be analytical advantage in comparing the frequencies, functions, and relationships of these different forms of simultaneity in different political economies of language contact
While theoretical conceptualizations of language policy have grown increasingly rich, empirical data that test these models
are less common. Further, there is little methodological guidance for those who wish to do research on language policy interpretation
and appropriation. The ethnography of language policy is proposed as a method which makes macro–micro connections by comparing
critical discourse analyses of language policy with ethnographic data collection in some local context. A methodological heuristic
is offered to guide data collection and sample data are presented from the School District of Philadelphia. It is argued that
critical conceptualizations of educational language policy should be combined with empirical data collection of policy appropriation
in educational settings.
The impossibility of stating precisely how many “languages” or “dialects” are spoken in the world is due to the ambiguities of meaning present in these terms, which is shown to stem from the original use of “dialect” to refer to the literary dialects of ancient Greece. In most usages the term “language” is superordinate to “dialed,” but the nature of this relationship may be either linguistic or social, the latter problem falling in the province of sociolinguistics. It is shown how the development of a vernacular, popularly called a dialect, into a language is intimately related to the development of writing and the growth of nationalism. This process is shown to involve the selection, codification, acceptance, and elaboration of a linguistic norm.
- Carens
- Schiffman
- Spolsky
Linguistic Culture and Language Policy
- Harold Schiffman
Schiffman, Harold. 1996. Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. New York: Routledge.
Culture, Citizenship and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness
- Joseph H Carens
Lengua, Nación E. Identidad: La Regulación del Plurilingüismo en España y América Latina
- Kathryn. A. Woolard
- Kirsten Süselbeck
- Ulrike Mühlschleger
- Peter Masson