Language Policy

1. One definition of Policy: `` A definite course or method selected from

among alternatives and in light of given conditions to guide and determine
present and future decisions."

Language Policy has to do with decisions (rules, regulations,

guidelines) about the status, use, domains, and territories of language(s) and
the rights of speakers of the languages in question.

2. Different Dimensions:
1. Covert vs. Overt Policies:
 Covert policies make no mention of any language in any legal
document, administrative code, etc. Guarantees of linguistic rights
must be inferred from other policies, constitutional provisions,
`the spirit of the law', etc. (Implicit, unstated, common-law, de
facto, traditional, customary, grass-roots, etc.) Covert policies may
be subversive or collusive.
 Overt policies state explicitly the rights of any or all linguistic
groups to the use of their language in whatever domains they
specify. Overt policies strongly guarantee the freest tolerance
policy. (Explicit, specific, de jure.)
 Overt and Covert policies are like an iceberg: the tip of the
iceberg is the overt part; the underwater part is the covert part. To
continue this metaphor, the whole thing is immersed in a sea that
is the linguistic culture in question.

Some researchers are uncomfortable with the idea

of culture, maintaining that culture is often seen as 'deterministic,'
or 'a prison' and that we act as if people are 'imprisoned' in their
cultures. I do not hold this, but I do believe that social scientists
have thrown out the baby with the bath water in jettisoning
'culture'. Read more about this here.

2. Promotive vs. Tolerance Policies.

 Promotive policies encourage the use of (a) particular
language(s) by constitutional, administrative and legal guarantees;
devote and/or guarantee resources (money, personnel, space) for a
language; specify and reserve domains of use (school, courts,
administration) for a language. May be covert: covert promotion
 policies de facto promote one (or more) language without
explicitly mentioning it/them; overt promotion policies name the
language(s) in legal code, constitution, etc. and what its rights and
territories (or the rights and territories of its/their speakers) shall
be, etc.
 Tolerance Policies allow the use of certain language(s) usually
without explicitly devoting resources, time, space etc. to them; no
domains reserved. Can also be covert (not mentioning anything)
or overt (openly stating and naming which language will be
tolerated).
 Mixed: Promotive policy may still tolerate language(s) of
minority, to ensure smooth functioning of polity/burocracy: e.g.
signs in Spanish or other languages in urban transportation
systems, or for safety purposes; driver license testing in various
minority languages in some states, but not in others; social
security information in many languages in US; translation
provided in court cases; different languages on the
national currency etc. (Note that in this Chinese currency, some
languages and scripts other than Chinese appear in very small
print; in India, in contrast, many languages and scripts are used.)
Schools may use minority languages for `bilingual' education at
their own expense, or paid for by parents. Few or no public
resources are used to promote these languages, only tolerate them.
3. Egalitarian vs. Restricted. Policy may treat languages even of a small
minority as totally equal, always placing both/all languages on equal
footing, addressing all citizens as if bilingual, etc.
4. Jurisdictional Limitations. Polity may tolerate/promote certain
languages only in restricted areas; e.g. in US BIA, Dept. of Agriculture,
Soc. Sec. Administration, Military, State Department,CIA, Treasury,
Census. Right to use a language may be reserved for, or restricted to a
particular function within the polity, e.g. religious, military, burocratic,
data-gathering. Or the right may be guaranteed only for a segment of the
population, e.g. adults (but not children).
 Personal Rights. State may allow (even guarantee) individuals
the right to use minority language in certain situations. The right
is portable and belongs to the person wherever he/she goes and
interacts with organs of the state.
  Territorial Rights. Right to use a particular language may be
restricted to a particular territory within the polity, or even certain
domains within a restricted territory.
5. De facto vs. De jure policies. Related to overt/covert distinction.
Policies may de jure pertain to one language , but in actuality the de
facto use of some other language is tolerated. School policy may de
jure reserve domain for Language 1, but de facto Language 2 is widely
used, or merely tolerated.
3. Interdisciplinary Nature of Language Policy Study. The following
disciplines have been interested in `language' in certain ways that have
reprecussions for language policy, for the reasons mentioned; our task in this
course is to try to integrate these approaches to see how they interact
with policy toward language and what their influence is on overt and covert
policy formation.

Anthropological Linguists Have been concerned with interaction between

language and culture, and the central role of language in the transmission of
culture. In a recent description of what she called the `heart' of linguistic
anthropology, Leila Monaghan (Contributing Editor, Society for Linguistic
Anthropology ) stated that `` ``At the heart of linguistic anthropology is the
assumption that language is inextricably connected to all facets of human life.
We see language as a privileged position from where to view the transition
from biological talents (our ability for making sounds and gestures, sense and
nonsense) to the social worlds of conversations, institutions, communities and
nations. ... Current linguistic anthropology focuses on a number of closely
related issues, including the interrelationship of language and context ..., how
ideologies of language provide a window into the intersections between
language structures and social systems ..., the construction of authority through
language ... and how information on language use throws light on the
institutions we live within." (Monaghan 1996)

Though most linguistic anthropologists do not refer to what they do

as policy study, in fact they are often concerned with social `rules' (also known
as social norms, `taboos') or patterns of behavior that are reflected in linguistic
behavior, such as politeness, ways of speaking, terms of address, respect,
gender, and many other kinds of linguistic control that societies exhibit.
Linguistic anthropology is now under fire from some quarters for its supposed
`orientalism' and participation in the establishment of colonial hegemony,
and structuralism is also suspect; but much work in this area still has validity
and can probably be `recuperated' (rehabilitated, cleansed of its `orientalism')
and used for its insights into behavior of various sorts.
Education: Some overlap with Social Psychology; concerned mainly with
educational aspects of bilingualism---measurement of school performance of
bilingual children (especially their verbal ability), disfunction, implementation
of curriculum, training of teachers for bilingual education, as well as concern
for how children learn best when more than one language is used in education,
etc. Strong focus on seeing bilngualism not as a burden or handicap, but as a
resource.
Geography: Concerned with human geographical aspects of language and
ethnicity---spread and distribution of language on a territory, diffusion,
demographic aspects of language differentiation, measurement and mapping of
ethnolinguistic features, census data, etc.
Jurisprudence: Until quite recently, legal studies were concerned only with
case law that involved language, such as Supreme Court cases like Meyer v.
Nebraska (1923) or Lau v. Nichols. Most legal scholarship in this country did
not place the study of language and legal problems involving language above
any other kind of discriminatory practice.

Recently, legal scholarship has developed to focus on the notion of social

norms and how concern with or observation of social norms operates to
condition certain kinds of behavior, irrespective of laws or of the presence of
legal authority. As Posner (2000:5) puts it,

``Most people refrain most of the time from anti-social behavior even
when the law is absent or has no force. They conform to social norms.
He also defines social norms as ``non-legal mechanisms of cooperation."
``Social Norms describe the behavioral regularities that occur in
equilibrium when people use signals to show that they belong to the
good type. Social Norms are thus endogenous; they do
not cause behaviors but are the labels that we attach to behavior that
results from other factors. Social Norms should be distinguished from
behavioral regularities that emerge in cooperative relationships simply
because they are value maximizing."
[HS: more on this later; by `good type' is meant the person who refrains from
anti-social behavior; a.k.a. the upstanding `law-abiding citizen' who does the
`right thing' (even if no laws exist or if the force of law is absent.)] For
language policy, I see a parallel between social norming and the development
of non-official, implicit, covert policy, behaviors related to language that are
not determined by overt policy or language laws, etc.
For a bibliography of language and legal issues, look here. This bibliography
also deals with issues of forensic linguistics i.e. how language and linguistics
can be involved in court disputes, helping to exonerate or inculpate people by
using linguistic evidence.

Work-place discrimination. Another more recent development is in the

area of workplace discrimination (people punished for speaking a
language other than English on the job), and there have been a number of
cases that have been decided in favor of the non-English worker(s).
Another issue is drivers' license testing; one case on this ( Alexander v.
Sandoval, actually went to the Supreme Court, but the Court refused to
hear it. I have written something about this here.

Constitution vs. constitution A recent article in the New Yorker

(September 12, 2005) has an article about Justice Anthony Kennedy,
who makes a distinction between the Constitution (with a capital C), and
the constitution, without.

"There is also the constitution with a small "c," the sumtotal of

customs and mores of the community. [...] The closer the big 'C'
and the small 'c', the better off you are as a society."
Later the writer refers to the small "c" as 'the evolving standards of the
community" which of course means the opposite of "strict
constructionism."
Political Science: Concerned traditionally with polity; law; voting behavior,
and political behavior. Interested in persistence of linguistic ethnicity as a
political phenomenon: alliances, elite formation, political economic reasons for
language maintenance or shift. Tend to focus on number crunching and
whatever can be quantified, and ignores what cannot be quantified.
Social Psychology: Concerned with study of psycho-social aberrance, identity,
bilingualism and its effect on educational performance and intelligence;
interested in attitudes about languages and people who use them, and how this
affects behavior and policy.
Sociolinguistics: Concerned with sociolinguistic variability, language behavior,
(some overlap with `anthropolitical linguistics',) non-standard languages
(creoles and pidgins), diglossia, hierarchical linguistic behavior, history of
language(s), code-switching; concern about bilingualism as interactive codes,
linguistic contact phenomena, spread of linguistic features, mapping of dialect
features. Some overlap in concerns with Soc. of Language and Social-
Psychology.
 Sociology of Language: Concerned traditionally with social roles and
quantification of data about group behavior. Concerned with language
maintenance, language loyalty, group boundaries, interaction with other social
factors, bilingualism as a group or social phenomenon. Language shift,
language death. Asks the question ``Who speaks what to whom, where, and
when?"

Multilingualism
Contrary to what is often believed, most of the world's population is bilingual or
multilingual. Monolingualism is characteristic only of a minority of the world's
peoples. According to figures cited in Stavenhagen (1990) for example, five to
eight thousand different ethnic groups reside in approximately 160 nation states.
Moreover, scholars estimate that there are over 5000 distinct languages spoken
in that same small number of nation states. What is evident from these figures is
that few nations are either monolingual or mono-ethnic. Each of the world's
nations has groups of individuals living within its borders who use other
languages in addition to the national language to function in their everyday lives.

Definitions of Bilingualism and Multilingualism

When people hear the term bilingual many imagine an individual who speaks two
languages perfectly. For them someone who is 'truly' bilingual is two native
speakers in one. They imagine that such a person can speak, understand, read,
and write in two languages at the highest levels. For others, the term bilingual
means something quite different. When newly arrived immigrant children
entering U.S. schools, for example, are described as 'bilingual children,' the term
is often used as a euphemism for 'poor' and 'uneducated'. In this case, newly
arrived immigrant children do not yet function in two languages. They are
monolingual speakers of their first language and not bilingual at all. The term
bilingual here is used to convey a very different set of meanings from what
linguists intend.

Defining Multilingualism
The question of how to define bilingualism or multilingualism has engaged
researchers for a very long time. Some researchers have favored a narrow
definition of bilingualism and argued that only those individuals who are very
close to two monolinguals in one should be considered bilingual.
More recently, however, researchers who study bilingual and multilingual
communities around the world have argued for a broad definition that views
bilingualism as a common human condition that makes it possible for an
individual to function, at some level, in more than one language. The key to this
very broad and inclusive definition of bilingualism is 'more than one'.

From the perspective of this framework, a bilingual individual is not necessarily

an ambilingual (an individual with native competency in two languages) but a
bilingual of a specific type who, along with other bilinguals of many different
types, can be classified along a continuum. Some bilinguals possess very high
levels of proficiency in both languages in the written and the oral modes. Others
display varying proficiencies in comprehension and/or speaking skills depending
on the immediate area of experience in which they are called upon to use their
two languages.

According to this perspective, one admits into the company of bilinguals

individuals who can, to whatever degree, comprehend or produce written or
spoken utterances in more than one language. Thus, persons able to read in a
second language (e.g. French) but unable to function in the spoken language are
considered to be bilinguals of a certain type and placed at one end of the
continuum. Such persons are said to have receptive competence in a second
language and to be 'more bilingual' than monolinguals who have neither
receptive nor productive abilities in a language other than their first. The
judgment here is comparative: total monolingualism versus a minor degree of
ability to comprehend a second language.

Types of Bi- and Multilinguals

Because there are very different kinds of bilinguals and multilinguals, much
effort in the study of bilingualism has gone into developing categories which
might make the measurement and description of these differences possible. The
categories used to describe different types of bilinguals reflect different
researchers' interests in focusing on specific aspects of bilingual ability or
experience. Researchers concerned about the age of acquisition of bilingualism,
for example, classify bilingual individuals as either early or late bilinguals and
further subdivide early bilinguals into simultaneous bilinguals (those who
acquired two languages simultaneously as a first language) or sequential
bilinguals (those who acquired the second language (L2) after the first language
(L1) was acquired). Researchers, on the other hand, concerned about the
differences between persons who choose to study a second language and those
who grow up in communities where several languages are spoken have used the
terms elite, academic, and elective bilinguals for the former and natural, folk,
and circumstantial bilinguals for the latter.

The usefulness of these labels and categories clearly depends on the specific
interest a researcher has in bilingualism. Meaningful comparisons of bilingual
persons cannot generally be made unless attention is given to the differences
and similarities between these individuals in terms of a number of key
dimensions such as age of acquisition of the second language, circumstances in
which the two languages are used, patterns of use of the two languages in the
surrounding community, level of formal education received in each language, and
degrees of proficiency.

How "Mother Tongue Influence"

Affects English Learning
When you teach English abroad, you'll be bound to experience people who speak
English with mother tongue influence. This is when their main language (mother
tongue) is influencing how they speak English. For example, they might use
English vocabulary with their native grammar, or they might use different
expressions that don't sound natural.

Another example is known as "Chinglish", how some Chinese speakers speak

English, using expressions such as "Try try see" instead of "Try it and see".

This can be a bigger problem for some than for others, but your job as a teacher
will be to identify when mother tongue influence is taking place, and when the
speaker simply hasn't learned the correct grammar/word/expression.

Identifying Mother Tongue Influence

Every language affects English learners differently, so we can't simply list out all
the common mistakes, this post would be too long!

If you're a complete newcomer to the country you're in, then it can be hard to
identify at first. The longer you stay, the more often you'll notice the same
mistakes occurring, which is likely a sign of the mother tongue interfering.

Pay attention to mistakes your students make, and when you come across the
same ones over and over again, ask somebody who speaks the local language if
it might be caused by that language.
It's definitely worth doing this, because letting students know when they're being
influenced by their mother tongue is a good way of stopping it happening again.

Equally, if you start learning the local language, you'll find yourself understanding
mother tongue influence a lot more, and will be able to correct it far more easily.
This is an added bonus of taking the plunge and learning the language.

You can also use other people's research. There are plenty of "How [language]
affects English learning" articles online and many books have been written on
the subject too. All you need to do is find one that applies to the language(s) of
the country you're in, and you'll be set.

Also, be aware that words have different connections in different languages, or

words that have multiple meanings in English might not have the same (or any)
alternate meanings for other languages. This means that you should take extra
care when presenting new vocabulary, as sometimes there are ambiguities that
you wouldn't have thought of.

What Kind Of Things Are Influenced By Mother Tongue?

As mentioned earlier, different languages affect English learning in a different
way. For some, sentence word order can be a problem. You might hear sentences
like "I for breakfast eat toast" or "I tomorrow will go to Japan".

This is usually easy to rectify, you just need to remind students of the correct
word order, and practice, practice, practice. In fact, most errors are fixed by just
practicing more.

In other languages, pronunciation might be a problem. The classic example is

Germans pronouncing "W" as "V" and saying sentences like "Velcome to my
home". French people not pronouncing the letter "H" is another well-known
mother tongue influence.

In many languages, speakers will have a "schwa". This is where they add a sound
onto the end of words, such as saying Bird, "Birdda" or "Dogga" instead of Dog.
This is usually caused by two things, the first being that they were taught
phonics incorrectly, or have let it slip.

The other cause of a schwa is because their own language has very distinct
sounds and pronunciations, such as Chinese. When trying to cope with the softer
sounds that English can have, it can be difficult. This is also the reason why
some people struggle with correctly pronouncing different vowel sounds.
Fixing These Mistakes
The best way to deal with mother tongue influence is to make people aware of it,
and keep practicing and correcting them. It's important that they are aware of
why they're making the mistake, in order to avoid doing it in future.

As you get more experienced at teaching people with that particular mother
tongue, you'll get much better at spotting, and even anticipating these mistakes.
Being able to stop the mistake happening before it happens is the best way of
all.