Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Language practices, ideology and beliefs, and management and planning
- 2 Driving out the bad
- 3 Pursuing the good and dealing with the new
- 4 The nature of language policy and its domains
- 5 Two monolingual polities – Iceland and France
- 6 How English spread
- 7 Does the US have a language policy or just civil rights?
- 8 Language rights
- 9 Monolingual polities under pressure
- 10 Monolingual polities with recognized linguistic minorities
- 11 Partitioning language space – two, three, many
- 12 Resisting language shift
- 13 Conclusions
- References
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Language practices, ideology and beliefs, and management and planning
- 2 Driving out the bad
- 3 Pursuing the good and dealing with the new
- 4 The nature of language policy and its domains
- 5 Two monolingual polities – Iceland and France
- 6 How English spread
- 7 Does the US have a language policy or just civil rights?
- 8 Language rights
- 9 Monolingual polities under pressure
- 10 Monolingual polities with recognized linguistic minorities
- 11 Partitioning language space – two, three, many
- 12 Resisting language shift
- 13 Conclusions
- References
- Index
Summary
There is a special challenge in writing about a comparatively new field. Language policy has been studied for at least fifty years, with growing interest and publication over the last two decades, but no consensus has emerged about the scope and nature of the field, its theories or its terminology. I will therefore venture definitions, present first efforts at a theory, attempt to do justice to other opinions and develop, where it seems needed, my own terminology.
There are two matters that I want to mention at the outset. At least since Thomas Kuhn raised the matter, the problem of a scientist's personal point of view has been widely recognized. Especially in the social sciences, it is hard to conceive of a scholar who is strictly neutral. Can one write about economics without an opinion about the morality of the division of resources and the growing gap between rich and poor? Can one write about political structures without taking a stand on the value of democracy and the danger of totalitarianism? Can one write about language policy without a personal view about the desirability of linguistic diversity? In an introduction to the field, however, my assignment is not to advocate but to attempt to understand and explain.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language Policy , pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003