Language policy is an unavoidable aspect of social policy, even if this is seldom acknowledged in situations where the language question is not rendered prominent by one or other aspect of societal contradiction. This is the meaning of Halliday and Martin's statement in Writing science (1993) to the effect that ‘the history of humanity is not only a history of socio-economic activity; it is also a history of semiotic activity’.

Class struggles about the distribution of resources in a social system and about the character of a given society constitute the matrix within which all social policy is shaped and articulated. These struggles, however, seldom manifest themselves as struggles about economic goods as such. They are usually coloured by and couched in terms of historically evolved inter-group or inter-community relations, so that a certain measure of fetishism is always present. For this reason, too, it is impossible to formulate a neat set of (even) necessary conditions under which language policy and practice will affect social stability one way or another.

My use of the term ‘social stability’ should be read as referring to situations where there is no overt, large-scale conflict in the medium to long term and where the hegemony of a given set of social relations is generalised and experienced by most individuals as common sense. There is, however, a frame of reference within which my question can be meaningfully analysed. In this connection, work by Brian Weinstein in particular provides us with a set of guidelines that I find very helpful. In his introductory chapter to Language policy and political development, published as early as 1990, he makes the assertion that, based on historical evidence, language policy has been, and can be, used in order (1) to maintain a social order; (2) to reform a social order; or (c) to transform a social order. The book itself consists of a series of case studies that are calculated to demonstrate this thesis.

Formulated in this way, we may be tempted to equate the expression ‘language policy’ with the current professional practice of ‘language planning’ understood as an aspect of the discipline of the sociology of language that was pioneered by scholars such as Haugen, Fishman and Ferguson.