Linguistic Culture and Language Policy

Harold Schiffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134670000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

By looking closely at the multilingual democracies of India, France and the USA, Harold F. Schiffman examines how language policy is primarily a social construct based on belief systems, attitudes and myths.
Linguistic Culture and Language Policy exposes language policy as culture-specific, helping us to understand why language policies evolve the way they do; why they work, or not; and how people's lives are affected by them. These issues will be of specific interest to linguists specialising in multilingual/multicultural societies, bilingual educationalists, curriculum planners and teachers.

1 Introduction: language policy and
linguistic culture

1.1 TYPOLOGIZING LANGUAGE POLICY

The original plan for this book was that it be a study of different kinds of language policies, to be exemplified by a selection of typical kinds of policies exhibited by a small number of nation states (and other polities) in the modern and pre-modern world. I had originally intended to contrast the policies of the USA, France and India, since those are familiar to me from personal research, and because they are in some ways very typical. French language policy represents centrist policy par excellence, that is, a unilingual policy decreed from above, handed down and strictly controlled by a highly centralized state (multilingual, but refusing to recognize it). US language policy was to exemplify laissez-faire policy as applied to a supposedly monolingual state that is actually multilingual; Indian language policy was to represent an admittedly multilingual nation to which the Soviet policy model has been transplanted, but with unhappy results.

There are other models that fit somewhere in between these, but these three elegantly represent a continuum of policies, from the autocratic centrist policy of France to the multilingual accommodationist (even then limited) policy of India, with the USA somewhere in between. They also represent three kinds of historical development—the autocratic, monarchic European centrist type that has its roots in the nation-building period of sixteenth-century France, which the French Revolution simply carried to its logical extreme; the ‘democratic’ separation of powers development seen in the USA two centuries ago, and the post-modern, post-colonial striving of newly emerging nations (India).

But there are a number of problems with the notion that one can easily typologize language policies and arrange them along a continuum. One is that things never quite fit in a linear order in typologies, but beyond that, even in a given polity, the policy rarely fits the situation without problems of various sorts. For one thing, there is usually a difference between the policy as stated (the official, de jure or overt policy) and the policy as it actually works at the practical level (the covert, de facto or grass-roots policy). This may result from some historical change, for example, increase in numbers or political power of a formerly insignificant minority, such as by immigration, demographics (birth rate), or conquest of territory. But alas, the ‘fit’ between language policies and the polities for which they have been devised are rarely appropriate, and in actual practice a typology of policies would look very different from a typology of the multilingual states that they have been applied to. This led me to consider whether there were good reasons why policies were often poorly selected, or whether this was in some way an ‘accident’ of history (if there is such a thing), or perhaps even misguided or wrongheaded (for some reason). I began to wonder whether language policy can in fact be managed by human beings in an explicit interventionary way.

1.2 POLICIES AND POLITIES

Another problem with the typological approach to language policies is that the possession of one or another kind of language policy is not only a characteristic of nation states, but also of smaller administrative or territorial divisions within them, such as states or provinces in federalized polities (e.g. the cantons of Switzerland, the provinces of Canada, the states of India and the USA, the republics of the Soviet Union, etc.). Beyond that, we may find differing policies exhibited at the municipal level, in educational institutions of all sorts (school districts, universities), in libraries, in the judiciary, in different levels of state bureaucracy,¹ as well as in non-governmental bodies such as churches (temple, mosques, …), labour unions, fraternal lodges and so on. Furthermore, though overt policy may be guaranteed at the federal or central level, the ‘trickle-down’ effect of these policies may be minimal at the local level, or the resources to defend these rights may be inadequate. With these levels of complexity, it would seem almost futile to attempt to establish types of language policies, and even if it could be done, many generalizations would be lacking. In typologies that have been attempted, we often see a confusion between societal multilingualism and policies about multilingualism, that is, we see an assumption that what is de jure the case is also de facto the case, and vice versa.²

It is of course true that multilingualism is often to some extent the product of certain language policies, just as it seems also verifiable that certain policies have come about in order to deal with the multilingualism of the citizenry. Which comes first (the chicken or the egg) is not a priori obvious.

1.3 INPUTS AND OUTCOMES: CAUSES AND EFFECTS

Another problem with some approaches to questions of language policy, language planning, language loyalty, and other sociolinguistic issues, is that that some researchers seem to interpret reasons for various developments as outcomes of policy when it is clear that they are elements underlying the policy. That is, conclusions are drawn about supposedly causal relationships between language and policy that seem to me totally turned around.

It is also an unfortunate fact that in the literature on language policy and language planning these two topics are treated as one. In study after study containing the term ‘language policy’ in the title one finds in fact that the topic is really language planning; this is fine, of course, if language planning is the main thrust of the policy in question. For my purposes, I prefer to distinguish the two. For the time being, let us use as a working definition of language policy and language planning the following:

The term language policy here refers, briefly, to the policy of a society in the area of linguistic communication—that is, the set of positions, principles and decisions reflecting that community's relationships to its verbal repertoire and communicative potential. Language planning is understood as a set of concrete measures taken within language policy to act on linguistic communication in a community, typically by directing the development of its languages.

(Bugarski 1992:18, emphasis in original)

Another view of this dichotomy is presented in an article by Cloonan and Strine (1991:268ff.) who characterize the language planning approach to that policy development as deliberate, rational, prospective and institutional. (By prospective is meant that it is future-oriented, and planning precedes implementation; by institutional is meant that it is organized by planning bodies or institutions.) But Cloonan and Strine demonstrate that a great deal of policy formulation in the USA, for example, is none of these—it tends to be decentralized, lacks formal fact-finding, is reactive and ad hoc. Because of the lack of federally mandated language planning, in other words, policy formulation is carried on at state and local levels, and in response to client demands. The result is, of course, a hodgepodge of rules, regulations and policies that may be in conflict with other state, local, or even federal rules, regulations and policies; thus a state like California may have an official policy on English (arrived at by referendum) requiring one approach, and simultaneously have statutory laws (codes, rules) mandated or arrived at by other avenues. We will examine this in detail in Chapter 9; my point is to show that it is futile to look for overt policies where none exists, and a waste of time always to focus on explicit planning, or to consider something to be the policy simply because it is written.

I shall build on this distinction to broaden the notion of policy even further, and restrict the notion of planning to deliberate, explicit or concrete activities on behalf of language. In the process we shall see that much more happens at the covert level, especially in polities like the USA, than at the overt level.

1.3.1 Need for broader scope

As an example of the need for a broader scope to the notion of policy, consider the sociolinguistic situation we find in South Asia, where the existence of sharply differentiated spoken and written varieties of a given language (diglossia) has profound effects on language policy.³ In diglossic linguistic cultures, typically, overt policies specify the rights and domains of specific languages, but only to the literary or standard language—they ignore the existence of a broad spectrum of verbal repertoires that are employed by people in various ways. As various researchers have pointed out (Ferguson 1959a; Hudson 1991b), diglossia arises under certain social conditions, and once established, becomes a social construct that governs the uses and functions of different varieties; there is widespread agreement in the society about the cultural legitimacy and differentiation of these codes and their uses. Essentially diglossia controls both the ‘corpus’ of all varieties in use⁴ and the status of each variety. Any attempt by policy-planners to change this situation will encounter widespread resistance from many if not all segments of society.

Overt language policy in South Asia is therefore neither causative nor resultative with regard to diglossia: the policy ignores spoken repertoires, which are thought of as ‘broken’, corrupt', low', vulgar', etc., almost in the hope that this will cause them to disappear. But diglossia in such areas persists, and has persisted perhaps for millennia. The persistence of diglossia in an area like India is not so much an overt policy issue as it is a deep-seated cultural behaviour towards language. That is, diglossia has to be considered to be a given, an underlying assumption, an input to the decision-making process, even an underlying cultural policy if you will, not a result of it, and not something that can be ignored.⁵ Since it is not part of the explicit policy, it is not amenable to change in the same way that more explicit aspects of policy might be. In some parts of the world, diglossia might perhaps be eliminated by a stroke of some ruler's pen, but it is clear in India that no ruler would even contemplate it, let alone attempt it. Were such a peremptory attempt to be made, it would certainly fail.

As we shall see in other ways as well, certain issues that might seem to be policy issues (in the overt understanding of the term), and therefore subject to manipulation and planning, are not amenable to political intervention or manipulation, and diglossia in South Asia is one of these.⁶

When we consider such complexities, it becomes obvious that if we are to search for explanations of why certain polities have the kinds of language policies they have, we must look more deeply into their linguistic histories, in particular those aspects of language that I have come to refer to as ‘linguistic culture’.⁷

1.4 THE LOCUS OF LANGUAGE POLICY

It should be clear by now that the basic tenet of this book is that language policy is ultimately grounded in linguistic culture, that is, the set of behaviours, assumptions, cultural forms, prejudices, folk belief systems, attitudes, stereotypes, ways of thinking about language, and religio-historical circumstances associated with a particular language. That is, the beliefs (one might even use the term myths) that a speech community has about language (and this includes literacy) in general and its language in particular (from which it usually derives its attitudes towards other languages) are part of the social conditions that affect the maintenance and transmission of its language.⁸ Therefore, typologizing language policies without looking at the background in which they arise is probably futile, if not simply trivial. In this light, works like that of Falch (1973), a dry catalogue of types of language policy in Europe, tell us nothing about why a particular polity exhibits a particular policy. It is as if the choice of language policies was totally random, from ‘off the shelf’ as it were, without any relationship to the historical, social, cultural, educational or religious conditions extant in a particular area. There may indeed be such an appearance of randomness in certain polities—certainly there have been autocratic rulers and megal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Linguistic Culture and Language Policy
• The Politics of Language
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: language policy and linguistic culture
• 2 Typologies of multilingualism and typologies of language policy
• 3 Religion, myth and linguistic culture
• 4 Language policy and linguistic culture in France
• 5 French in the marginal areas: Alsace and the sother regions
• 6 Indian linguistic culture and the genesis of language policy in the subcontinent
• 7 Language policy and linguistic culture in Tamilnadu
• 8 Language policy in the United States
• 9 Language policy in California
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index