LING 540: Language Policy: Introductory Remarks

Harold F. Schiffman, Instructor

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.

Different Dimensions:
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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
While I'm at it, here's an interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher
Education on 'unwritten, tacit' rules about investigation in science:
http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/02/2005021104n.htm

Friday, February 11, 2005

Scientists Censor What They Study to Avoid Controversy and 'Lunatic-

Proof' Their Lives, Researchers Find

By LILA GUTERMAN
Unwritten social and political rules affect what scientists in many fields
study and publish, according to a paper published today in Science, and
those constraints are even more prevalent than formal constraints, such as
government or university regulations. The paper is based on interviews with
41 researchers at top academic departments in fields such as neuroscience,
drug and alcohol abuse, and molecular and cellular biology. The interviews
were conducted by Joanna Kempner, Clifford S. Perlis, and Jon F. Merz, of
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Brown University, and the
University of Pennsylvania, respectively. They asked the researchers if they
or any of their colleagues had ever refrained from doing or publishing
research.

Almost half of those interviewed said they felt constrained by formal

controls, but the respondents said they felt even more affected by informal
ones. Many of the scientists interviewed said they had found out their
research was "forbidden knowledge" only after papers reporting their results
had been published. One respondent told the interviewers that a colleague's
graduate student had a job offer rescinded when the would-be employer
found out the student had worked on a study of race and intelligence.
Another researcher stood accused of "murderous behavior" after doing an
anonymous survey in which he was incapable of intervening when
respondents said they were infected with HIV and were having sex without a
condom.

Many other researchers said they simply chose not to do studies, or not to
publish completed ones, because of concern about controversy. Several said
they did not study dogs or other higher mammals because of fears of animal-
rights activism. "I would like to lunatic-proof my life as much as possible,"
one told the interviewers. Mr. Merz, an assistant professor in Penn's
department of medical ethics, said the study was not designed to determine
the abundance of constraints on science. But, he said, just from the small
group the researchers interviewed, it is clear that people feel constrained
"fairly frequently."

"It's a source of bias, another source of nonobjectivity in science," he

continued. "It's hard to measure. We don't know really what's not being
done."

haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
last modified 9/20/05