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Language policy (and/or planning) is
usually thought of in a somewhat narrow way, i.e., as the pragmatic
formulation of plans for dealing with language issues in a given polity,
and is therefore not often seen as a true interdisciplinary area of
study. Indeed, as different humanistic and social science disciplines
have approached it, it has tended to veer away from a central
interdisciplinary approach, and take on the characteristics of the
individual disciplines. We think of language policy issues as a much
broader phenomenon, involving not only overt decision-making regarding
language, but also more subtle kinds of societal forces that we will
subsume under the notion of `covert' or `implicit'
policy.
We see language policy study therefore as not only future-oriented,
but as deeply rooted in the past, especially in what we are calling the
linguistic culture of the language speakers in question. We do
not see linguistic culture as deterministic, but as a powerful
force that may underlie and guide the formulation of both overt and covert
action on behalf of language, and we see it at work in many areas of
linguistic activity that are not usually thought of as policy-related per
se.
(Justification for this is given below.) Furthermore when overt language
policy comes into conflict with linguistic culture, as it seems to have
in, e.g. India, the overt policy will eventually fail, not for economic
reasons, but for cultural reasons.
Next: The locus of language
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Harold Schiffman
8/17/2000