World Language Policy

Globalization, Localization, and Language Choice

In Britain they used to call a barometer a ?glass.? One would visit the ?glass? in the

morning in order to get a sense of what the weather would be for the day. It was of

course a rather chancy business, not least because on the average day in Britain you have

a little of everything anyway. The poet Louis MacNeice caught the sentiment in a wellknown

poem about impending doom:

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,

But if you break the bloody glass you won?t hold up the weather.

Perhaps the least observed phenomenon in the global system is language. Because it is so

basic to human communication, we are apt to regard it simply as an unchangeable part of

the communication process itself ? a kind of natural phenomenon as ordinary and

ineluctable as weather.

In fact, language is a social institution of enormous importance, and one over which we

have a great deal of control (Edwards 1994, Tonkin 2003a). Human utterances are

elective: we can either make them or not make them, and we are potentially capable of

making these utterances in any language. Since language is fundamental to human social

interaction, we begin by choosing our utterances in accordance with the code that we are

born into: language is a form of human behavior, and we learn to talk through the need

and the desire to participate in the community of which we are a part. Thus the language

that we use also has symbolic value: it is a marker of our identity and it reinforces our

sense of belonging. But it is an accident of geography or economics that we learn one

language or another, that we are born into one speech community rather than another.

Within that community, we lear...

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Tonkin, Humphrey & Timothy Reagan, ed. 2003. Language in the 21st Century. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Wright, Sue. 2004. Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation.

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