Managing speech and linguistic communities

Students of language management commonly deal with the activities of the state or nation, perhaps considering it the sole “centering institution” (Silverstein 1998: 404) or, more cautiously, one of the most central of such institutions (Blommaert 2005: 396). Silverstein himself recognizes “local linguistic communities” to be groups of people “by degree evidencing allegiance to norms of denotational (aka ‘referential,’ ‘propositional,’ ‘semantic’) language usage” (1998: 402). He contrasts local communities with global processes such as formation of empires and nation-states, the growth of global economies and communication, and the emergence of diasporization of people with multiple cultural allegiances. Blommaert, in his study of language management in Tanzania, notes the inadequacies of state language planning when it came up against the forces at the local level, on the one hand of “transnational centering institutions” such as capitalism, democracy, and transnational ideas of prestige, and international educational models on the other. These supranational institutions assign values to the elements and clusters of elements that define language varieties, and so help account for the nature of language practice, language attitudes, and the motivation and effect of language management at the national level. Understanding the nation, then, requires recognizing forces that impinge on it from above and below. This is the goal of this book.

The many levels at which language policy occurs is a partial explanation of “unplanned language planning,” a concept proposed by Baldauf (1994) and developed further by Kaplan (1997: 298) and by Eggington (2002) to account for what goes wrong in language policy.