Linguistic Perspectives on Language Policy Research Paper

1. Language Status Policy

Language status policies are either prohibitory, permissive, or facilitative. If policies are prohibitory they oppose and penalize the public use of particular languages for particular societal functions. Thus, the ‘English Only’ movement in the United States opposes any requirement that American governments (federal, state, or local) use any language other than English in the discharge of their governmental functions (including direct services to the public, whether or not its members have a command of English). During the years of the fascist Franco regime in Spain, the regional Iberian languages (primarily Catalan, Basque, and Gallego) were prohibited in public, whether spoken or written. The Communist regime of the Soviet Union prohibited publication in, or the teaching of, Hebrew (thereby effectively rendering inoperative religious Jewish services or traditional schooling) due to that language’s perceived theological and bourgeois (i.e., antirevolutionary) associations. One of the earliest examples of modern prohibitive language policy is the ‘abolition’ of the regional languages (pejoratively referred to as ‘patois’ or ‘dialects’ ) by the French Revolution toward the very end of the eighteenth century (Schiffman 1996, Tabouret-Keller 1999).

Permissive language policies are presumably ‘neutral.’ While they permit nongovernmental efforts on behalf of, or in opposition to, particular languages (or in conjunction with all languages other than the national or official languages which are, naturally, supportively treated), they neither obligate the government positively nor negatively with respect to such languages. During most of its history, the USA has had a permissive language policy, making it possible for citizens of various non-English mother tongues to advocate on behalf of these languages publicly, seeking for them recognized functions above and beyond any religious functions which some of them may have and which are separately protected by the Constitution. The search for additional functions may aim at and utilize both print and nonprint media, and may aspire to functions such as becoming the medium of instruction in the public education of their young, or advocacy of governmental use of these languages in discharging various official services to speakers of these languages (e.g., in the courts, in the fire, police, and health services, as well as in social services more generally).

However, the absence of supportive policies has meant that when the mother-tongue speakers of non- English languages finally learn English (as all of them have done within a generation, or at most two), the Government has permitted these languages to fade away in public as well as in private life, and has in no way been committed to their functional continuation as a potential resource for American diplomatic, commercial, or intellectual cultural growth. Because of such passively permissive policies, even major world languages such as German, French, and Spanish have thus far failed to be intergenerationally continuous in the US, even though all of them predate the establishment of the United States on American shores. The unwritten nature of permissive policies has also meant that little if any prior supportive legislation has had to be annulled on the few occasions when prohibitive policies have been implemented (e.g., the post-World War I, anti-German or anti-foreign language legislation in Nebraska and in several other mid-Western states—later overturned as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court decision Meyer s. Nebraska, 262 US 390, 1923).

Since to post-World War II sensibilities prohibitive policies smack of anti-minority discrimination, such policies have often been replaced by purportedly permissive ones. The effective differences are often minor or totally absent, since the lack of outright supportive policies usually leaves demographically, functionally, and attitudinally threatened languages bereft of tangible opportunity to reverse their deteriorating fortunes.

Supportive policies are either across the board (multifunctional), or functionally specific in their focus. The Swiss government’s support of Romansh has been multifunctional, spanning support for nursery schools, elementary and secondary schools, courses for adults, the preparation of visual and auditory media, periodical publications, and book publications. The Canadian government’s Ministry of Multicultural Affairs supports cultural programs, publications, creative artists and curricular materials preparation for the immigrant languages (termed ‘heritage languages’ to differentiate them from the founding languages—English and French—or the indigenous languages of Canada), although the latter alone are still responsible for providing most of the basic funding for the schools, theaters, and media that utilize their languages. During most of the 1980s and 1990s, Australia’s language policy with respect to immigrant languages has gone beyond that of Canada by also providing funds for teacher training and certification, as well as for student competence certification, in connection with ethnic community supplementary schools—for LOTEs (languages other than English).

In addition, many of these very same community languages have been added to the foreign language programs of elementary and secondary schools servicing ethnic neighborhoods in large urban centers. Australia has also had an unusually effective program of supporting radio and television in many of the LOTEs. However, toward the end of the 1990s many of the above supportive policies have been curtailed or phased out entirely, as the Liberal Party has assumed the leadership previously in Labor Party hands. In the US, Title VII Bilingual Education remains the most obvious example of supportive policy toward other languages, even though this policy has had transitional purposes (subtractive bilingualism leading to English alone) as part of its avowed purpose. Since all three policies (those of the US, Canada, and Australia) obtain in English-mainstream and immigrant-based societies, the differences between their policies is indicative that the omnipresence of English (or any other language of wider communication) need not necessarily lead only to prohibitory or permissive policies vis-a-vis sidestream or less powerful languages.

2. Reversing Language Shift

One of the most demanding (and, often, most disappointing) areas of language status policy-efforts deals with the attitudinal, demographic, and functional recovery of languages that have become seriously weakened by virtue of competition with their neighbors. Prolonged and debilitating reverses often lead to language death, on the one hand; and to reethnification, on the other hand. Indeed, both these outcomes may themselves be the conscious or unconscious consequences of prior, or even still ongoing, language policies, at the very same time that permissive or even supportive efforts are underway for one or more threatened or weakened languages within the very same polity. When the lost or weakened functions are narrowly specific (e.g., press, media, curricular recognition as subjects of instruction), similarly specific and delimited efforts can be undertaken to reverse or, at least, more nearly balance the social forces that are at play. This is not the case when intergenerational mother-tongue continuity (rather than mere language reproduction) is in question. Mother tongues (taken as the most frequent language of early home, family, neighborhood and community life) are, by definition, acquired early, quickly and intimately (i.e., affectively). As a result, it is difficult, for formal and authoritative policies to rationally determine either their acquisition, or their retention through the period from one generation’s mother-tongue acquisition and the time some 20 years off when the next intergenerational transition occurs (Fishman 1991).

The difficulties encountered in the long-term planning of intimate and informal interactions (or even in the reinforcement of such interactions via formal institutions such as schools, governments, economies, and media) has resulted in very few successes along the lines of reversing language shift in twentieth-century historical perspective. The more recent partial successes along such lines by efforts on behalf of French in Quebec, Catalan in Spain, and the clearly unusual case of Hebrew in Palestine Israel (where prestigeful, formal [written read], and theological functions predated the language’s revernacularization) have encouraged renewed and better informed efforts on behalf of Basque, Frisian, Maori, and even Irish. (The last named suffering from approximately 80 years of unsuccessful efforts to foster widespread intergenerational mother-tongue transmission, notwithstanding an array of supportive policies.) In order to achieve the desired results, the realm of intimacy-and-infancy must be successfully ideologized as to its consequences for language transmission, but even the institutions that are not normally effective within, nor focused upon, the infancy intimacy realm (school, media, worksphere, and government) must be focused upon language interaction with home, family, and neighborhood processes; and the threatened language must be explicitly related to the rewards to which these institutions can lead. This difficult and long-term intergenerational feedback process—(a) within, and (b) upon the informal nexus of language transmission—has been conceptualized in terms of a Graded Intergenerational Dislocation Scale (Fishman 1991). This scale highlights the priority of reestablishing informal and intergenerational interactions, the interruption or attenuation of which is viewed as particularly mother-tongue dislocative ( just as the higher numbers on the Richter earthquake scale indicate greater damage and threat to life), in contrast to dislocations of formal functions normally distant and compartmentalized from the mother-tongue transmission nexus, and not normally directly related thereto.

All in all, whether in connection with reversing language shift, or in connection with other policies pertaining to the authoritative recognition of particular languages in particular societal functions, the policy culture in connection to language issues closely corresponds to the policy culture that local authorities are accustomed to, or are obliged to, utilize more generally. Democratic authorities generally begin with open policy debate (including the exchange of promises and commitments, ‘bargaining,’ related to forthcoming other-than-language decisions and resource allocations). This is followed by policy adoption (‘decision making’), codification (the formal wording of the law), and elaboration (the law as interpreted in practical terms of ‘regulations’) of the decisions reached; implementation of the foregoing; ultimate evaluation by other authorities or specialists than those entrusted with formulation and implementation of the adopted language policies (wherever such separation of formulation, implementation, and evaluation are built into the political culture); and, finally, iteration of language policy debate in subsequent areas highlighted for attention.

The culture of policy formulation and implementation in the language field is clearly an instance of the more general policy culture that is locally and contemporaneously in place. Where political stability is lacking, newly elected or empowered language policy authorities may counteract those that have been previously enforced and may undertake policy replanning along different and even quite contrary lines. Such replanning commonly has both status consequences and corpus consequences for the languages to which they pertain (Clyne 1997).

3. Language Corpus Policy

Languages that are not customarily used to discharge certain societal functions commonly lack the corpus features that are required for such functions, all the more so if they have never (or not for prolonged periods) been associated with the implementation of these functions. Accordingly, language policies may be called upon to devise writing systems, establish spelling norms, promulgate standardized grammatical conventions (particularly for nonfiction prose), foster different styles for different kinds of writing (e.g., popular newspaper style vs. serious adult reading style for languages that have exercised neither function before), create or recover terminologies (e.g., for the natural sciences), or repair lexical gaps (e.g., in revising the pronoun system in order to reflect and foster democratic and egalitarian interpersonal address and interaction). Such corpus policies may be enacted by the very same governmental or quasi-governmental authorities that are involved in status policy formulation and implementation; but, because of their more technical nature, more commonly, they are entrusted or delegated by the latter to special boards, committees, or ‘academies’ of linguistic specialists. On occasion, various illustrious leaders and exemplary writers and intellectuals have been instrumental in propelling corpus planning in particular directions closely allied to their own preferred usage (e.g., Luther for High German, Pushkin for Russian, Bialik for Modern Hebrew, Perets for Yiddish, Cervantes for Castilian). This frequent prominence of individual ‘influentials,’ particularly in early corpus planning stages, is the reason why such planning efforts often precede those undertaken by governments, or even precede the establishment of governments and governmental corpus planning authorities (Rubin et al. 1977).

Although linguistically technical, the corpus planning of academies is commonly exposed to two different and possibly contradictory sources of influence. The first is the acceptability of corpus recommendations insofar as the intended target group is involved. In this connection, considerations of euphony, transparency, simplicity, absence or presence of cognates, or other esthetic and ‘least effort’ notions may prevail (Fishman 1997). Another powerful (and even a more powerful) direction of influence upon the efforts of corpus planning and corpus policy is the ideological interpretation given to such efforts by the political authorities who are engaged simultaneously in culture planning (i.e., in national identity planning) more broadly. Accordingly, corpus policy is regulated in accord with bipolar considerations such as unique-ness, authenticity, purity, and classicization, on the one hand, and modernization, regionalization, vernacularization, and internationalization, on the other hand. These emphases all differ to some degree, but they may all be subsumed under the general bipolar rubric of independence vs. interdependence. Since the facilitation of economic and political interaction within the modern world is generally a prime under- lying motive in all modern corpus planning, the need to maximize linguistically both the interactive advantages and the independent challenges of modern life provide language policy, particularly with respect to its corpus concerns, with a built-in tension which can often be very anguished in those language-policy settings where the rejection of internal or external colonialism and the liberation from other foreign influences come to be of primary concern.

The ‘authenticity’ pressure upon late-modernizing languages that are faced either by confrontation with ‘genetically related’ Big Brothers (i.e., with long-established and well-modernized languages of similar lexical and structural characteristics to those of the late-modernizing language), or even faced by other, genetically similar, recent arrivals at the gates of modernity have long been studied. Languages in interaction and ethnicities in interaction are both dependent on considerable constructivist effort— namely policy interventions per se—in order to render them recognizably and consensually ‘separate,’ at least within their own authoritative frameworks. The policy and planning effort on behalf of authenticity-motivated distancing has been termed ‘Ausbau’ i.e., the building away of one language from another, by emphasizing the real, imagined or preferred differences between them. Endlessly exploitable sources of such differences may be found in older (archaic) periods of the language, in the varieties of the rural countryside that have suffered from fewer foreign urban influences, or in a favored classical language of particularly acceptable historical, religious, or cultural significance. Ausbau efforts have been engaged in as part of the corpus policy of Hindi and Urdu relative to each other, of Macedonian vis-a-vis Bulgarian, of Yiddish vis-a-vis German, of Ukrainian vis-a-vis Russian, of Belorussian vis-a-vis both Russian and Ukrainian, of Moldavian (under Soviet influence) vis-a-vis Romanian, of Slovak vis-a-vis Czech, of Rusyn vis-a-vis Ukrainian, etc. More general ‘purification’ movements exist, e.g., for French (vis-a-vis English), for North Korean (vis-a-vis Mandarin borrowings), for Catalan vis-a-vis Castilian, for Czech vis-a-vis German, for the newly independent Baltic languages vis-a-vis Russian, for Navaho vis-a-vis English, for Hebrew vis-a-vis Yiddish and English, for Yiddish vis-a-vis Russian, etc.

Of course, all languages whose communities are engaged in interactive modernization with the Western World are exposed to linguistic influences as a result thereof. Since the material and intellectual gains attributed to the general interactive stance often seem incontrovertible, the corpus policies that attempt to limit or counteract the lexical and structural borrowings that are rooted in, and that derive from, interaction with and exposure to the West are faced by a dilemma from which there is no simple or easy escape. Indeed, one school of linguistics (the so-called ‘Prague School’) explicitly recognizes this tension but regards the ‘national language’ to be the supradialectal and generally written variety of the local linguistic repertoire which is most consistently monitored by nationally oriented linguists with the goal of keeping it as authentically pure as possible. In North India this process takes the approach of Sanscritization, in South India: of Classical Tamilization, i.e., of genuinely local classicals which can both intellectualize and deAmericanize or de-Westernize the corpuses of their modernizing local national languages. Language corpus authenticity (usually experienced as primordial) and language status Westernization (usually as a result of constructivist experiences) are often pursued simultaneously (or seriatim), eliciting tensions in either case.

4. Linguistic Culture

Obviously, status planning and corpus planning policies are also pragmatically (rather than only ideologically) closely interdependent. What would be the good of achieving the status goals of any given language policy if the corpus remained as inadequate to discharge or implement those statuses as it had, perforce, been before the status goals had been pursued? Conversely, what would be the good of endless corpus refinement if there were no societally recognized and protected functions in which the new lexicons, grammars, spellers, and writing systems could be put to use? Indeed, when one policy emphasis (whether status or corpus) is too far in advance of the other, then this lack of synchronization is itself a major policy problem. Accordingly, all language policy efforts, even in advance of any governmental recognition, require both linguistic expertise and political expertise in order to move ahead productively in connection with their language goals.

The diversity of talents required to bring language policies into operational rather than merely theoretical existence is well illustrated by the ‘first congresses’ that have been organized all over the world on behalf of different late-modernizing languages (Fishman 1993). Those organized primarily under academic auspices have least commonly attained their stated status goals (e.g., re the Mayan languages or Yiddish). Those convened by jubiliant nationalist movements have often found themselves without technical linguistic expertise or consensus, even when they were triumphantly swept into power (e.g., re Macedonian). Those organized by pre-existing cultural or political organizations have most frequently combined both the political constituencies and the technical scholarly expertise needed to attain their goals (e.g., re Catalan, Hindi, or Hebrew).

In any case, the goals and means employed in conjunction with linguistic policy reflect the historically deeply ingrained linguistic culture of its sponsoring power base. Language policies are expressions of a long-lasting ‘linguistic culture—i.e., of the cultural myths and cultural values pertaining to the types of linguistic accommodations, programs, and efforts that are in accord with the brunt of local historical experience and aspiration (Schiffman 1996). Rather than being expressions of conscious or unconscious linguistic determinism, language policies are generally expressions of widespread convictions that the furtherance of crucial national policies more generally also require language status policies and language corpus policies that can contribute to national policies as a whole.

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