Parochialism

First of all, the study of language policy in the area tends to be country-oriented and therefore parochial and fragmented; there is little comparative work or work on any region as a whole. Work often focuses only on those polities that have had to oust a colonial language and change their overt policies (e.g. India, Tunesia, Tanzania); where a polity exhibits straight-forward long-term policy, there is little work being done, except where this impinges on minority languages (e.g. Thailand). Research to date on the area often tends to be descriptive and case-oriented, and focuses on one analytical framework or one explanatory element (e.g. Marxist economic theories.) In many of these approaches, language is treated like a `black box', with no internal factors or language-determined social motivation that could have any effect on human behavior, much less language policy. In addition, many of the studies are ahistorical and acultural; `thick' explanations and descriptions are eschewed in favor of `thin' ones. Formalism (e.g. game theory) is valorized over descriptive adequacy.

Many of the extant studies take overt policies at their face value; decision-making is assumed to occur at the highest levels, i.e. in the language academy or the language planning board (such as the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in Malaysia), rather than throughout all layers of society. Studies of the ways planning and policy decisions are implemented and accepted (or not accepted) by language users ignore grass-roots attitudes (linguistic culture) and look only for economic explanations for failures of policy. And occasionally we find examples of ethnocentrism: western notions of the `efficiency' and `logic' of monolingual policies are often preferred (at least by official planners) over linguistic diversity and multilingualism. Thus, notions about official language in Vietnam assume the need for a highly standardized language based on the Hanoi dialect, with no regional or cultural variation. In Sri Lanka, e.g., the idea that Sinhala fills the bill as a national language is accepted by the Sinhalese because it appears to be `anti-imperialist' (i.e. anti-British and English) even though non-Sinhala groups such as the Tamils have steadfastly refused to accept this notion. India's policy is a clone of the Soviet model of language policy, filling the lingua-franca slot devoted to Russian with Hindi, with unfortunate consequences.