Language Policies are crucial in determining how language will be taught in schools and used as an official national tongue. How and why do such policies evolve?
By looking closely at the multilingual democracies of India, France and the USA, Harold F. Schiffman examines how language policy is primarily a social construct based on belief systems, attitudes and myths. It is these conceptual elements that the author presents as the linguistic culture of a society. Rather than viewing language policy as the explicit embodiment of rules, this book examines how these policies are formed within a broader framework and influenced by the covert, implicit grass-roots of each linguistic culture. Moreover, Schiffman focuses on one linguistic minority region of each of the nations studied to show how minorities have dealt with challenges to the 'official' language.
Linguistic Culture and Language Policy exposes language policy as culture-specific, helping us to understand why language policies evolve the way they do; why they work, or not; and how people's lives are affected by them. These issues will be of specific interest to linguists specialising in multilingual/multicultural societies, bilingual educationalists, curriculum planners and teachers.