Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism: Some Foundational Connections

Introduction: Language Planning

Language policy is a body of ideas, laws, regulations, rules and practices 'intended to achieve a planned change (or to stop change from happening) in the language use in one or more communities' (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 3). These policies might be enacted through legislation, court decisions, executive action or other means. In most instances, language policies are the result of language planning. In the language planning process, officials determine the linguistic needs, wants and desires of a community and then seek to establish policies that will fulfill those goals. Such goals might include: cultivating the language skills needed to meet national priorities; establishing the rights of individuals or groups to learn, use and maintain languages; promoting the growth of a national lingua franca; and promoting or discouraging multilingualism.

In some cases, language policy occurs without much planning. For example, language policy in the United States has developed without a consistent language ideology and with very little planning per se. Instead, it has evolved on an ad hoc basis through a number of important court cases and some legislation. This has meant that instead of following a smooth path toward some goal, it has historically been a path laid out in fits, starts and adhocracy shaped by various political, social and economic forces. As regards language diversity, this inconsistency is seen in a history that moves through three distinct periods: a period of benign neglect in which language diversity was tolerated, to a period of severe restriction with an emphasis on assimilation, to a period of opportunism that saw a revived importance placed on language learning and maintenance (Ovando, 2003).

When exercised, language planning can seek to achieve a variety of goals, including maintaining the status quo, transforming the language characteristics of a community of speakers, or reforming the language characteristics of a community of speakers (Weinstein, 1990). Language officialization, for example, where the language of the dominant group is made official, would be a policy maintaining the status quo and the linguistic privileges entailed. But language officialization need not always be a way to maintain the status quo. Officialization of various African languages in post-Apartheid South Africa is, instead, an example of reform, as was the officialization of Catalán in Spain/Cataluña.

Historically, language planning to transform – change identities, replace one elite group by another in the state apparatus or alter patterns of access to reflect the replacement of a dominant class or ethnic group (Weinstein, 1990) – is most readily seen in policies designed to make languages disappear. Historical examples include France's policies toward Alsace, Spain's policies toward Cataluña, and the United States' policies toward Native Americans. In educational policy, this kind of 'negative language planning' (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997) has often meant severe repression of the minority language in schools, including punishment for its use.

Finally, 'reform', in contrast to negative language planning that decreases the number of linguistic options, is 'positive language planning' (Petrovic & Kuntz, 2013): policies that increase linguistic options in terms, for example, of which languages can be used in what circumstances. In the United States, examples of this kind of policy would be the Voting Rights Act of 1975 and the Bilingual Education Act of 1968. The Voting Rights Act, as amended in 1975, requires states and political subdivisions to conduct elections and provide certain election materials in languages other than English. This Act is invoked whenever more than 5% of the voting-age citizens in the state or political subdivision are members of a single language minority group. The Bilingual Education Act was signed into law in 1968 as a way to address the harm done by English-only policies through 'new and imaginative programs' which funded bilingual education, mainly transitional bilingual education (Crawford, 2004).

Depending on the goal(s) set, there are three different kinds of planning that must be considered: corpus planning, status planning and acquisition planning. The latter two are the broad foci of this book.

Corpus, Status, and Acquisition Planning

Corpus planning deals with 'those aspects of language planning which are primarily linguistic and hence internal to language' (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 38). One of the primary tasks in corpus planning is standardizing the language, especially in terms of its grammar, writing system and vocabulary. In France and Spain, the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et Aux Langues de France (formerly the Commissariat de la Langue Française) and the Real Academia Española, respectively, take on the task of standardizing the French and Spanish languages and endeavor to eliminate or minimize the infiltration of foreign words and expressions.

Another example of corpus planning would be the modernization of languages. Corpus planning also includes efforts to reform languages. Many Native American languages, for example, are being revitalized. This revitalization requires, among other things, modernization of the vocabulary. Indigenous translations for words such as 'airplane', 'computer', or 'hard drive' must all be determined. This example demonstrates how status planning and corpus planning become intertwined. The Northern Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute all speak varieties of the Ute language. Whose variety should the standardization and modernization of the language reflect?

Status planning deals with 'those aspects of language planning which reflect primarily social issues and concerns and hence are external to the language(s) being planned' (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 30). The determination of which language(s) should be used for official purposes is a focus of status planning, for example. In the United States, federal legislative efforts to make English the official language exemplify status planning with the goal of maintaining the status quo. Even though the officialization of English would be a change to its current official status, it would serve to maintain the status quo since English is already the de facto lingua franca and language of power in the United States. As just noted, an example of status planning to reform in the United States was the Voting Rights Act.

India provides other clear, but complicated, examples of status planning (see Petrovic & Majumdar, 2010). In order to provide cohesion and communication at various levels (e.g. federal, state, local) a three-language formula was constitutionally introduced in the education system of India. This...