Language Policy and Language Choice

Author(s):  
Norie Yazu ◽  
Yuji Kawaguchi
Author(s):  
Camelia Suleiman

Arabic became a minority language in Israel in 1948, as a result of the Palestinian exodus from their land that year. Although it remains an official language, along with Hebrew, Israel has made continued attempts to marginalise Arabic on the one hand, and secutise it on the other. The book delves into these tensions and contradictions, exploring how language policy and language choice both reflect and challenge political identities of Arabs and Israelis. It combines qualitative methods not commonly used together in the study of Arabic in Israel, including ethnography, interviews with journalists and students, media discussions, and analysis of the production of knowledge on Arabic in Israeli academia.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Wagner ◽  
Winifred V. Davies

This paper explores the link between explicit Luxembourgish language policy and the actual practices as well as expressed attitudes of a group of speakers of Luxembourgish, with the aim of studying the role of World War II in the advancement of Luxembourgish as Luxembourg’s national language. The first two sections introduce the theoretical approach of the paper and provide an overview of the history and present situation of Luxembourg and Luxembourgish. The following two sections present the findings of a sociolinguistic study of language choice, language values and identities, and linguistic (in)security among a group of Luxembourgish letter-writers, as well as recent interview data provided by the sole surviving correspondent. The final section brings together these results and the claims made regarding the role of World War II in the changing status of Luxembourgish and points out the complexity of this discussion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (64) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Vedernikova

Language choice is a core value of language policy that consists of three elements: management, or direct efforts to manipulate a language situation: practice, a sum of sound, word and grammatical choices that an individual speaker makes; and ideology, a set of beliefs about appropriate language practice (Spolsky 2004). Motives are related to the last component. As stated by researchers, language usage within a family can be determined by even one of these factors. This article presents the results of an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collected during my fieldwork in Mari El (Russia). Comparative analysis of the survey data confirmed the process of weakening of intergenerational language transmission among rural Maris and the fact that the linguistic behavior of family members varies by generation. Usage of Russian or Mari within a family is mainly the result of different values attached to each language and their social roles among certain sectors of society.


Multilingua ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Soler-Carbonell

AbstractThe role of English as a global language and its consequences for the internationalization of higher education are matters that have increasingly drawn the attention of researchers from different fields of language and communication. In this paper, an overview of the situation in Estonia is presented. The Estonian context has not previously been analyzed along these lines. The author suggests looking at Ph.D. dissertations as a site of tension between the need to effectively incorporate English as an academic language and the need to maintain Estonian as the national language. The article views this question in the context of some relevant language policy documents and other macro indicators. It then focuses on the number of Ph.D. dissertations defended at four main public universities in the last few years and the languages they have been written in. It appears that, although the language policy documents seem to correctly capture this tension between English and Estonian, the language most commonly used when writing dissertations is overwhelmingly English, with only the humanities providing some counterbalance to that trend. The current situation is different from that of past decades, when English was absent from Estonia’s scientific production and Estonian was significantly employed in that context, alongside Russian. In the discussion section, some lines for further inquiry are presented, together with a proposal for integrating complexity theory in such analyses.


Multilingua ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tünde Puskás ◽  
Polly Björk-Willén

AbstractThis article explores dilemmatic aspects of language policies in a preschool group in which three languages (Swedish, Romani and Arabic) are spoken on an everyday basis. The article highlights the interplay between policy decisions on the societal level, the teachers’ interpretations of these policies, as well as language practices on the micro level. The preschool group is seen as a complex context for negotiating language policies and expectations regarding language use. The theoretical framework builds on Billig’s work on ideological and everyday dilemmas that we argue are detectable at both levels of the analysis. The analysis of the ethnographic material shows that the explicit language policy formulated in the Swedish preschool curriculum leads, in practice, to ideological, pedagogical and everyday dilemmas. Moreover, an unwillingness to set rules for children’s language choice combined with the central position of free play in Swedish preschool practice has led to a situation in which children fall short of their potential to develop bilingual competence.


1990 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Woolard ◽  
Tae-Joong Gahng

ABSTRACTThe effects of language policies on the symbolic value of the linguistic repertoire merit consideration in needed studies of the consequences of language status planning. Since achieving political autonomy within Spain in 1979, Catalonia has instituted a number of policies, particularly in education, to enhance the status and use of Catalan. A matched guise test was conducted among students in Barcelona in 1980 and again in 1987 to gauge changes in attitudes toward Catalan and Castilian. Conflict between positive status and negative solidarity values of Catalan for nonnative speakers found in 1980 appears to be resolved in 1987. Three aspects of public language policy have attenuated ethnic constraints against nonnative use of Catalan, but further changes in social relations may be necessary to alter patterns of language choice. (Language attitudes, language policy, Catalonia)


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