Some gains, some losses

Despite gains in the areas mentioned above, studies of language policy tend not to have achieved the comprehensive integratedness of account that they require. Consequently, in our view, many opportunities to contribute significantly to much larger societal debates, at the national and international level, have been partly or wholly neglected. And it is in view of those larger societal debates (such as the Oakland Ebonics discussion) that we feel that a Center of this kind is a pressing need. In a multitude of respects, languages continue to be the ground and vehicle for conflicts and contests of varied kinds, ranging from petty stigmas to thoroughgoing wars and oppression. Understanding and dissemination of the complex but rational grounds on which groups seek to assert and maintain language difference is far from adequate, however, with the result that, from the outside, language-based conflicts are too often seen as irrational, arbitrary, and inexplicable. In our view, those conclusions are an abdication of a society's responsibility to analyse and understand its own differences, preferences, tensions, inequalities, inclusions and exclusions, and the deployment of `language power' within the society and relative to other societies. On the contrary, we see the differential statuses and uses of languages within any polity as to a large degree rational, calculated, and explicable. And to the extent that current accounts of differential language status fail to be adequately explanatory, one of the means by which societal conflicts can be addressed (rather than vaguely repressed) is neglected.