Language Policy
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Language Policy BERNARD SPOLSKY published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011--4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org c Bernard Spolsky 2004 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2004 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface Swift 9.5/12 pt. and Futura System LATEX2ε [tb] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Spolsky, Bernard. Language policy / Bernard Spolsky. p. cm. -- (Key topics in sociolinguistics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 80461 2 (hardback) -- ISBN 0 521 01175 2 (paperback) 1. Language policy. 2. Language planning. I. Title. II. Series. P119.3.S666 2004 306.449 -- dc21 2003053295 ISBN 0 521 80461 2 hardback ISBN 0 521 01175 2 paperback The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Contents List of tables viii Preface ix 1 Language practices, ideology and beliefs, and management and planning 1 2 Driving out the bad 16 3 Pursuing the good and dealing with the new 26 4 The nature of language policy and its domains 39 5 Two monolingual polities -- Iceland and France 57 6 How English spread 76 7 Does the US have a language policy or just civil rights? 92 8 Language rights 113 9 Monolingual polities under pressure 133 10 Monolingual polities with recognized linguistic minorities 143 11 Partitioning language space -- two, three, many 161 12 Resisting language shift 186 13 Conclusions 217 List of references 224 Index 243 vii Tables 1 Types of countries and language policies 60 2 Monolingual countries with protection for minorities 144 3 Dyadic and triadic nation states 163 4 Countries with twelve or more languages according to Ethnologue 174 viii 1 Language practices, ideology and beliefs, and management and planning LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE NEWS A fifty-six-year-old Turkish woman was refused a heart transplant by clinics in Hanover on the grounds that her lack of German (common among Gastarbeiter) made the recovery process dangerous. The clinic defended the decision: the patient might not understand the doctors’ orders, might take the wrong medicine and might not be able to get help if there were complications. The state minister for health said (Sunday Telegraph, August 27, 2000) that in future in similar cases they must find a more practical solution. Doctors and hospitals make lan- guage policy when they decide how to deal with language diversity. Many stories deal with similar cases. Some involve public signs, outward evidence of language policy. In the Old City of Jerusalem, there are trilingual street signs, with the changing order of languages (English, Arabic or Hebrew at the top) tracing the recent history of the city (British Mandate, Jordanian or Israeli rule). But other Israeli cities have signs only in Hebrew and English. After years of litigation, the courts recently ruled that street signs in cities with a mixed Jewish-- Arab population should include Arabic. Half a world away, Transit New Zealand agreed to add Maori¯ to English road and place signs (The Do- minion, March 2, 2000; for more on Maori¯ and New Zealand, see the section beginning on p. 200). Quebec law requires that all public signs be in French, permitting the addition, in smaller letters, of a transla- tion into another language. In Wales, Carmarthenshire County Council decided that place and road signs should be in Welsh only. Swansea City Council disagreed: ‘‘As a council we have a policy of bilingual signs...ifwearegoingtomakeSwanseaatourismcentrewehave to attract people of all nationalities” (South Wales Evening Post, March 3, 2000; for more on Welsh, see the section beginning on p. 81). The language of public signs may seem a trivial local matter, but language issues can lead to major conflicts. At the end of June 2001, with the fighting in Macedonia continuing, the Council of Europe 1 2 language policy urged the Macedonian government to grant ethnic Albanians ‘‘the use of the Albanian language in Macedonian courts, schools and admin- istration” (Agence France Presse, June 28, 2001). A real language war was possible. Perhaps languages do not often cause wars, but language has cer- tainly been a major factor in what Horowitz (2001: 1) calls deadly ethnic riots, which he defines as attacks by civilians belonging to one ethnic group on civilians from another group. The riots may be com- munal, racial, religious, linguistic or tribal. Horowitz lists a number of recent examples of linguistic riots: Assam in 1960 and 1972, Sri Lanka in 1956 and 1958, Ranchi in 1967, Mauritania in 1966, Karachi- Hyderabad in 1972 and Bangalore in 1994. Assam, a state in the north- east of India, tried to make Assamese its official state language, in the hope that this would favor natives in obtaining positions (Horowitz 2001: 208f.). The 1960 riots came in the midst of the campaign. The Assam Language Act made Assamese compulsory. The learning of Assamese by Bengali immigrant Muslims partly vitiated the effect of the law, so that ethnic tensions and violence continue (Misra 2000). National language policy is a regular topic. China recently passed a new language law that bans the use of foreign words and the mis- use of Chinese. According to the law, Putonghua is to be the offi- cially legal language of China, its standard spelling and pronuncia- tion to be required of all radio announcers, teachers and civil servants (The Straits Times, Singapore, November 17, 2000). In August 2002, the Turkish Parliament, applying for admission to the European Commu- nity, had passed laws abolishing the death penalty and permitting the use of the Kurdish language in broadcasting and education. The same month, the US Supreme Court agreed to rule on a law requiring libraries receiving federal funding to use software to filter out pornog- raphy and obscenity. On November 15, 2002, the Russian Duma (lower house of parliament) easily passed a law, saying that the ‘‘alphabets of the Russian Federation’s state language and the state languages of the republics of the Russian Federation are based on the Cyrillic alphabet” (Reuters). On November 14, 2002, the lower house of the Yugoslav Par- liament passed a resolution urging all state and local self-government institutions, public companies and educational, cultural and media institutions to use Cyrillic (Tanjug News Agency). On November 21, 2002, Associated Press reported that Turkey’s broadcasting authority had authorized up to forty-five minutes a day of radio broadcasting in Kurdish or other regional languages. Because of the centrality of language to education, many of the sto- ries concern the choice of language as the medium of instruction in Practices, ideology and beliefs 3 schools. In November 2000, the voters of Arizona approved Proposition 203, based on an earlier initiative in California, which replaced bilin- gual education with immersion English education. In Malaysia, there was debate over a threat to existing Chinese-medium schools (Agence France Presse, June 23, 2001), a new plan announced by the Ministry of Education to improve the teaching of English (The Malaysian National News Agency, May 17, 2001), a new Islamic radio station which planned to broadcast twenty-four hours a day in English, Bahasa Melayu and Arabic (New Straits Times, July 7, 2001) and a bitter public controversy over a government decision to start teaching mathematics and sci- ence in English after twenty years in which they had been taught in Malay, with a compromise decision to teach the subjects in English as well as Mandarin in Chinese schools (Malaysia General News, October 29, 2002). In Ghana, the minister of education decided that the use of the vernacular in the first three school years should be abandoned and English used instead (Africa News, August 16, 2002). After three decades of debate, the Tanzanian Parliament decided to switch the language of secondary schools from English to Kiswahili (Xinhua Na- tional News Service, January 16, 2001). In South Africa, a provincial education department said schools could not refuse to admit English- speaking students because they would upset the language balance against Afrikaans (News24, South Africa, January 15, 2003). Businesses, too, are involved in language policy. The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa supported Zimbabwe’s policy that dairy imports from Zambia must have instructions on the packages written in Shona and Ndebele, the official languages of Zimbabwe (Times of Zambia, July 10, 2001). With increasing globalization, more and more translation engines are being announced giving multilin- gual access to the web; these include a platform called Prolyphic to make web translation faster (Business Wire, July 10, 2001) and a website platform originally in French and already available in English that is now planning to add capacity in German, Spanish and other languages (The Gazette, Montreal, July 9, 2001). Churches are not exempt. A Roman Catholic priest in Wezembeek- Oppem, a town near Brussels in the Dutch-speaking Flanders region of Belgium where the large French-speaking community has special rights to use its language (see pp.