LANGUAGE POLICY AS CONTROL

There are some 2,000 languages each with its own literature. Yet, in India alone there are 1,600 dialects. Whatever differences there may be between a language and a dialect is a matter of definitions about which there is wide controversy. One question of especial interest to sociologists and communication scholars is how these systems of communication are affected by people who use them, on the one hand, and by people who control them, on the other hand. Indeed, most researchers believe that there is an élite who, in practically all cultures and societies, has a particularly strong impact on the selection, shaping, standardization, use, and socio-economic power of the language or languages of a polity. The ruling class--whether a minority or a majority--view their chosen language as an ethnocentric possession, i.e. as an inherently superior cultural and ethnic instrument of power.

This short paper does not address the origins of this view; rather, it is concerned with one of its implications. It hypothesizes that language policy is ethnocentric and designed as an instrument of social and political control. Through the manipulative exercise of this mechanism of influence, the power structure impacts linguistic form, use, and socio-political acceptance. Language thus constitutes a filter for discriminatory inclusion in its cadre. Language is standardized for the particular benefit of a privileged social class, whi

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hat had found its identity and roots after centuries of "barbarization", a.k.a. "arabicization". Thus was a language policy a tool for uniting a people heretofore schizophrenetically torn apart between Indo-European and Semitic influences. Language standardization has been an equally powerful tool of language policy. English peoples have no standardizing body to tell them what is "good" English. The Académie Française and the Real Academia Española, for example, set the linguistic usages which are "acceptable" to well-educated French and Spanish speakers and writers. "Prescriptive language education is the means by which standard languages maintain a community of users . . . By regulating admission to its educational institutions, a culture can very directly control whether knowledge of the standard will be reserved for a select few or spread to those who did not previously have access to it: this is the fundamentally political aspect of language education." The French and the Spaniards think such control is necessary to preserve the "purity" of the language--a laudable concept. The English and Americans think that any control hinders the development of a strong vital enriching and democratic expression of thought--an e
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Approximate Word count = 1894
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)