APost-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education 9781783092857

Table of contents :
Contents
1. Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism: Some Foundational Connections
2. Formalist Liberalism and Language Policy
3. Saving Liberalism: Communities, Language, and Schooling
4. The Promise and Problem in Linguistic Human Rights
5. Post Linguistic Human Rights?
6. Post-Liberal Language-in- Education Policy
7. A Post-Liberal Approach: Broadening Language and Narrowing Policy
References
Index

Citation preview

A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Series Editor: Professor Viv Edwards, University of Reading, Reading, Great Britain Two decades of research and development in language and literacy education have yielded a broad, multidisciplinary focus. Yet education systems face constant economic and technological change, with attendant issues of identity and power, community and culture. This series will feature critical and interpretive, disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning, language and literacy in new times. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION: 41

A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education John E. Petrovic

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Petrovic, John E. A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education/John E. Petrovic. New Perspectives on Language and Education: 41 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  Language policy – Political aspects. 2.  Language and education – Political aspects. 3.  Language and languages – Political aspects. 4.  Intercultural communication. 5.  Language and culture.  I. Title. P119.3.P475 2014 306.44’9–dc23 2014025255 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-284-0 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2015 John E. Petrovic. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Group (UK Ltd), Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

1 Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism: Some Foundational Connections1 Introduction: Language Planning 1 Corpus, Status, and Acquisition Planning 2 Language, Identity, and Liberalism 4 The Language–Identity Link: Thin and Thick 5 Why Language Should Figure in a Liberal Theory of Language Policy14 Progression of the Argument 15 2 Formalist Liberalism and Language Policy 24 Introduction24 Formalist Liberalism 30 Why Formalist Liberalism is Problematic 33 Formalist Liberalism and Language Policy 36 Conclusion: A Thicker Conception of Liberalism is Required 40 3 Saving Liberalism: Communities, Language, and Schooling 42 Introduction42 The Communitarian Challenge to Liberalism 43 The Problem with the Communitarian Critique 45 A Communitarianized Liberalism 46 Recasting Liberalism to Incorporate Community 47 (Limited) Community Rights and Language Policy 50 Which Language Protections for Whom? 53 Conclusion: Liberal Democracy Cannot Be Politics as Usual 56

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vi Contents

4 The Promise and Problem in Linguistic Human Rights 61 Introduction61 Why Linguistic Human Rights? 62 What Does LHR Require? 65 The Problem with Inalienable Rights 67 Neutrality and the Unavoidability of Language 69 Rights, Goals, and Prorated Official Multilingualism 71 Conclusion: Language Requires Protections But Does Not Command Rights 76 5 Post Linguistic Human Rights? 79 Introduction79 Liberalism, Linguistic Anti-Foundationalism, and the Problem with LHR 80 Liberalism and the Construction of ‘Language’ 84 Speech Communities: Language Varieties and Transborder Languaging87 Conclusion: Liberalism and the Need for Both the Post and the Structural 91 6 Post-Liberal Language-in-Education Policy 97 Introduction97 Issues and Approaches 98 The Prescriptivist Lament 100 Language Varieties in the Classroom 102 Academic Language 104 Conclusion: A Post-Liberal Education Requires Challenging Linguistic Privilege 108 7 A Post-Liberal Approach: Broadening Language and Narrowing Policy112 Introduction112 Policy and Language/Language and Policy 113 A Linguistics of Contact or Community for Policy? 115 Conclusion: Anarchism as Policy? 116 References119 Index128

1 Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism: Some Foundational Connections

Introduction: Language Planning1 Language policy is a body of ideas, laws, regulations, rules and practices ‘intended to achieve a planned change (or to stop change from happening) in the language use in one or more communities’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 3). These policies might be enacted through legislation, court decisions, executive action or other means. In most instances, language policies are the result of language planning. In the language planning process, officials determine the linguistic needs, wants and desires of a community and then seek to establish policies that will fulfill those goals. Such goals might include: cultivating the language skills needed to meet national priorities; establishing the rights of individuals or groups to learn, use and maintain languages; promoting the growth of a national lingua franca; and promoting or discouraging multilingualism. In some cases, language policy occurs without much planning. For example, language policy in the United States has developed without a consistent language ideology and with very little planning per se. Instead, it has evolved on an ad hoc basis through a number of important court cases and some legislation. This has meant that instead of following a smooth path toward some goal, it has historically been a path laid out in fits, starts and adhocracy shaped by various political, social and economic forces. As regards language diversity, this inconsistency is seen in a history that moves through three distinct periods: a period of benign neglect in which language diversity was tolerated, to a period of severe restriction with an emphasis on assimilation, to a period of opportunism that saw a revived importance placed on language learning and maintenance (Ovando, 2003). When exercised, language planning can seek to achieve a variety of goals, including maintaining the status quo, transforming the language 1

2  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

characteristics of a community of speakers, or reforming the language characteristics of a community of speakers (Weinstein, 1990). Language officializ­ation, for example, where the language of the dominant group is made official, would be a policy maintaining the status quo and the lin­ guistic privileges entailed. But language officialization need not always be a way to maintain the status quo. Officialization of various African languages in post-Apartheid South Africa is, instead, an example of reform, as was the officialization of Catalán in Spain/Cataluña.2 Historically, language planning to transform – change identities, replace one elite group by another in the state apparatus or alter patterns of access to reflect the replacement of a dominant class or ethnic group (Weinstein, 1990) – is most readily seen in policies designed to make languages disappear. Historical examples include France’s policies toward Alsace, Spain’s policies toward Cataluña, and the United States’ policies toward Native Americans. In educational policy, this kind of ‘negative language planning’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997) has often meant severe re­pression of the minority language in schools, including punishment for its use. Finally, ‘reform’, in contrast to negative language planning that decreases the number of linguistic options, is ‘positive language planning’ (Petrovic & Kuntz, 2013): policies that increase linguistic options in terms, for example, of which languages can be used in what circumstances. In the United States, examples of this kind of policy would be the Voting Rights Act of 1975 and the Bilingual Education Act of 1968. The Voting Rights Act, as amended in 1975, requires states and political subdivisions to conduct elections and provide certain election materials in languages other than English. This Act is invoked whenever more than 5% of the voting-age citizens in the state or political subdivision are members of a single language minority group. The Bilingual Education Act was signed into law in 1968 as a way to address the harm done by English-only policies through ‘new and imaginative programs’ which funded bilingual education, mainly transitional bilingual education (Crawford, 2004). Depending on the goal(s) set, there are three different kinds of planning that must be considered: corpus planning, status planning and acquisition planning. The latter two are the broad foci of this book.

Corpus, Status, and Acquisition Planning3 Corpus planning deals with ‘those aspects of language planning which are primarily linguistic and hence internal to language’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 38). One of the primary tasks in corpus planning is standardizing the

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  3

language, especially in terms of its grammar, writing system and vocabulary. In France and Spain, the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et Aux Langues de France (formerly the Commissariat de la Langue Française) and the Real Academia Española, respectively, take on the task of standardizing the French and Spanish languages and endeavor to eliminate or minimize the infiltration of foreign words and expressions. Another example of corpus planning would be the modernization of languages. Corpus planning also includes efforts to reform languages. Many Native American languages, for example, are being revitalized. This re­ vitaliz­ation requires, among other things, modernization of the vocabulary. Indigenous translations for words such as ‘airplane’, ‘computer’, or ‘hard drive’ must all be determined. This example demonstrates how status planning and corpus planning become intertwined. The Northern Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute all speak varieties of the Ute language. Whose variety should the standardization and modernization of the language reflect? Status planning deals with ‘those aspects of language planning which reflect primarily social issues and concerns and hence are external to the language(s) being planned’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 30). The determination of which language(s) should be used for official purposes is a focus of status planning, for example. In the United States, federal legislative efforts to make English the official language exemplify status planning with the goal of maintaining the status quo. Even though the officialization of English would be a change to its current official status, it would serve to maintain the status quo since English is already the de facto lingua franca and language of power in the United States. As just noted, an example of status planning to reform in the United States was the Voting Rights Act. India provides other clear, but complicated, examples of status planning (see Petrovic & Majumdar, 2010). In order to provide cohesion and com­ munication at various levels (e.g. federal, state, local) a three-language formula was constitutionally introduced in the education system of India. This formula requires children: (1) to study and to receive content area instruction for 12 years in their mother tongue or the regional (state) language (which for some children will be one and the same), (2) to study Hindi or English for 10–12 years, and (3) to study a modern Indian language (i.e. any one of the scheduled languages) or a foreign language for 3–5 years. While implementation of this formula varies widely across states, it demonstrates the deliberative nature, at the federal level, of language planning to allocate status to particular languages, to encourage acquisition of a lingua franca and to promote multilingualism. It is also illustrative of the close and necessary relationship between status planning and acquisition planning.

4  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

Acquisition planning refers to the means by which members of the polity will be encouraged, induced or provided the opportunities by which to learn the language(s) that are the objects of language planning. Cooper (1989) presents three overt goals of acquisition planning: acquisition of a language as a second or foreign language, reacquisition of a language by populations for whom it was once a vernacular or language of specialized function, and language maintenance. While acquisition planning certainly does not boil down simply to planning language instruction, with respect to the means of reaching acquisition goals, schools and language instruction are naturally seen as crucial to the process. Thus, education policy vis-à-vis language planning becomes a highly volatile issue, especially around determinations of the media of instruction. In other words, language policy (or lack thereof, as in the United States) has direct ramifications for acquisition planning and, therefore, education. If we are to be a monolingual society, what is the best way to educate children? If we respect families’ rights to their own language and culture, need we supply the resources to promote them? If we want to respect private bilingualism but promote societal monolingualism, how should we educate language minority children? These questions foreshadow some of the topics that must be discussed when determining key language policy issues in education. Prior to a brief overview of those issues, I believe a somewhat longer discussion of the importance of language is required. At first blush, to state that language is important seems commonsensical. The real issue is how and why it is important. For it is not just language writ large that is important but the specific languages of our linguistically diverse world and communities. Specifically, then, I want to focus on the importance of language to identity, with the ultimate purpose of discussing (over the trajectory of this book) how liberalism must inform language policy.

Language, Identity, and Liberalism A key discussion in language policy, especially as regards the extent to which liberal democratic societies must formally recognize languages other than the dominant language, concerns the link between language and identity. On the one hand, if language shapes who we are and, more ­thoroughly, who we can be, then it must be considered a crucial element in any conception of autonomy, a stalwart principle of liberalism. On the other hand, language is necessarily a group-level phenomenon. That is to say, even as individuals have language, its meaning and its enactment are necessarily engaged in association with others. Thus, it requires group rights, seemingly contrary to the liberal ethos of individualism. Later, I will argue that this

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  5

argument is a bit of a red herring, even as it directs policy-making from some liberal lenses, what I refer to subsequently as formalist liberalism. What I determine to focus upon in this chapter is deeper consideration of the first problem: whether language can or should be seen as a constitutive marker of identity and, if so, to what extent. In the end, I think this is the wrong question vis-à-vis liberalism. Nevertheless, it takes up many important pages in language policy debates and requires some review up front since it is this connection that, in large part, undergirds the relevance of liberal political theory to questions of language policy. Generally, the link between language and identity (mainly ethnic identity) is theorized in one of two ways (more or less strongly): there is the ‘thin’ camp, whose members theorize language as a ‘surface feature’ of identity; and there is a ‘thick’ camp, whose members theorize language as a primordial feature of identity. For the former, language loss may be unfortunate and even un­necessary, but not harmful since language is not essential to identity or culture. For the latter, language loss is typically harmful to individual identity and/or cultural groups since language loss alters identity and culture.

The Language–Identity Link: Thin and Thick John Edwards defines ethnicity as a ‘sense of group identity deriving from real or perceived common bonds such as language, race or religion’ (Edwards, 1992: 130). While any one of these ‘objective markers’, as Edwards calls them, may be strong enough to give one a sense of ethnic identity, ‘[n]o single objective marker is necessary for the continuation of identity’ (Edwards, 1988: 203). Among such non-essential markers we should include language. In this view, language policy researchers are cautioned not to essentialize identity, especially the language–identity link (Eastman, 1984; May, 2008, 2012). Indeed, May rejects ‘unequivocally any conception of language as a “primordial” feature of identity, along with any related essentialist notions of the language–identity link’ (May, 2003: 140). For language is a contingent factor in identity. Since language is, as noted, a group phenomenon, to suggest that it is more than a contingent factor ‘is to reinforce an essentialist conception of groupness’ (May, 2003: 140). Therefore, May concludes, ‘Language clearly does not define us, and may not be a necessary feature, or even an important one, in the construction of our identities, whether at the individual or the collective level’ (May, 2003: 141). So, while language, for May, can be a constitutive factor of identity, even a significant factor, it is not a necessary or essential factor; it is but ‘one cultural marker among many’ (May, 2008: 8). Even though language can be significant to identity

6  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

in many cases, in the end, ethnic identity does not necessarily change just because people or groups of people experience language shift or loss. Again, the thin conception asserts that language is merely a surface marker of identity. Its loss does not affect the core belief of who one is. As Eastman notes, A transformed language aspect of one’s ethnic identity is still an aspect of that identity (and the transformation is from use to association – a change not a substitution) much as are ethnic dress and cuisine, no longer features of daily life but brought out for ‘special’ expressions of group identity. (Eastman, 1984: 264) Eastman tries to establish ethnic identity as a two-level structure where one level is based on belief and the other on behavior. Eastman argues that actual language use in a cultural context may be one of the aspects of the behavioral level of ethnic identity, but the belief level is not necessarily dependent upon specific behaviors. In this view, a person is still French, for example, as long as she believes herself to be French, even after she no longer speaks French. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, for one, takes issue with this position. She argues that the thin position legitimates ‘a reversal of what [she] ha[s] experienced as the most common occurrence (language is important), so that this becomes more or less an exception’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2003, np). On the one hand, I think Skutnabb-Kangas is right to reject the view that language is not essential to identity. ‘If linguistic minority children want to be able to speak to their parents and grandparents, know about their history and culture, and know who they are, they have to know their mother tongue, for identity reasons’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 500). In this vein, it can certainly be said that Richard Rodriguez (1982), for example – who provides a moving account of his ‘hunger of memory’, that is, his alienation from his family due to language loss – is not the same person he might have been. On the other hand, I do not think that those who hold what I have called thin and thick conceptions of language are as far apart as SkutnabbKangas seems to paint it. May’s (2008, 2012) use of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to inform the language–identity link, for example, does not strike me as too far afield from Skutnabb-Kangas’ explanation: Because of the primordial resources, reaching back into infancy and personal history, neither ethnicity nor mother tongue(s) can be treated as things, commodities, which you can choose at will and chuck out like an old coat if that is what you want. On the other hand, this does

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  7

not mean that they are unchangeable givens or impossible to influence change, either. (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 137) In the end, perhaps the difference here is that May thinks that language can be an important marker of identity – and, as Edwards (2010) points out, it certainly has powerful symbolic value – while Skutnabb-Kangas believes that language is an important marker of identity and this is not just ‘accidental’. The latter is closer to my own position. For May’s primary concern seems to be with the link between ethnic identity and language as opposed to identity period. I shall argue that language is not only a part of culture/ ethnicity that shapes ethnic identity but also a unique epistemic code that can shape how we know. Thus, I consider three lines of argument in favor of a thicker conception of the importance of language(s). They are interrelated to such an extent that a perfect separation of them is impossible. But nonetheless I deal with them under the following separate broad subheadings: language as an essential cultural marker; language loss and children; and the epistemic nature of language.

Language as an essential cultural marker Language is an essential marker of cultural identity for many people because it is closely connected to the original formation and the main­ tenance or transformation of identity (Cropley, 1983; Phinney, 1990, 1991; Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 1995). For example, Rumbaut discovered that: [those in his study] who prefer English and who speak only English with their close friends are significantly more likely to identify as American, and less likely to self-define by national origin. Conversely, youths who do not prefer English and who report greater fluency in their parents’ native languages are most apt to identify by national origin. (Rumbaut, 1994: 780) Rumbaut observed that: acquiring English may entail abandoning not only a mother tongue but also a personal identity. Between these two groups are the bilingual children who choose additive or hyphenated-American identities. (Rumbaut, 1994: 780) Thus, contrary to Eastman, this evidence suggests that not everyone remains ‘French’ when they no longer speak French. Language shift causes, in many instances, identity shift.

8  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

Part of the reason for this causal link between language and identity may be explained by the fact that for many groups (or individuals) language is the essential marker. As a Puerto Rican college student revealed: I think that the only thing that Puerto Ricans preserve in this country is their language. If we lose that, we are lost. I think that we need to preserve it because it is the primordial basis of our culture. It is the only thing we have to identify our culture. It is the only thing we have to identify ourselves as Puerto Rican.… [S]o, who are you if you don’t know your own language? … [N]othing. (Zavala, 1996: 2) For this student the essential marker of his culture and, thereby, his identity as a Puerto Rican is the Spanish language. Similarly, 93% of Chicano respondents in a study by Leticia Galindo remarked that they would encourage their children to speak Spanish: ‘[t]hey viewed Spanish as an integral component of their Mexican heritage and culture’ (Galindo, 1995: 88). Similar results have been found among other language minority populations. Romaine, for example, studied the attitudes of language minority groups in England. She writes, ‘Without exception all of our Panjabi- and Urdu-speaking respondents said that language and culture were closely related, and that culture could not be preserved without language’ (Romaine, 1995: 304). Romaine also quotes a Maori leader who, echoing the sentiments of Zavala’s Puerto Rican student, declared, ‘The language is the life force of our Maori culture and mana. If the language dies, as some predict, what do we have left to us? Then, I ask our own people who are we?’ (Romaine, 1995: 304). We see such responses, in these cases of language loyalty, because, as Edwards puts it, ‘every language and dialect has symbolic value for its speakers’ (Edwards, 2010: 102). Similarly, Ferdman argues, an ethnic group’s cultural identity involves a shared sense of the cultural features that help to define and to characterize the group. These group attributes are important not just for their functional value, but also as symbols. For example, for many Puerto Ricans in the United States, the Spanish language is not just a means of communication; it also represents their identification as Latinos and their difference from the majority culture. (Ferdman, 1991: 355) This assertion is supported by research in the African American community in the United States and the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The use of AAVE (or ‘Black English’) is a living symbol of double consciousness given that its speakers, especially in schools, navigate at

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  9

least two different linguistic worlds – the other being that of standardized4 English. It is intimately connected with race, marking difference. As a participant in a study by Valerie Kinloch noted, ‘Black English is a language that I speak. If I was ashamed of it, that would mean I’m ashamed of who I am and my race. I’m not ashamed’ (Kinloch, 2010: 14). In these group-specific cases, it is clear that language shift would cause identity shift. Perhaps, the Puerto Rican student would still identify as Puerto Rican at some level, but what Edwards and Eastman ignore is the depth of that identity and the importance of maintaining this depth for some groups (and individuals). Certainly, the ‘Mexican-ness’ or ‘Puerto Rican-ness’ that might obtain after language loss would not be deep enough for these respondents. In other words, even as Edwards recognizes the symbolic value of language, he is confused to suggest that such powerful valuing might not make language the single objective marker or, at least, the most powerful marker of identity. The views of the parents who encourage the maintenance of their children’s first language similarly strengthen the idea that for some people language is an essential marker of cultural identity. These views also support Fishman’s contention that the ‘beliefs about the relationship between language and culture are part of any culture itself and they are culturally transmitted from one generation to the next’ (Fishman, 1991: 15). As a specific example of this relationship between language and culture and the reason such importance is placed on its transmission, we can consider the generation gap observed by many parents. One Panjabi-speaking parent explained, ‘In our society we attach a lot of importance to respect. Knowing our language would mean knowing respect. Lack of our own language would mean that the child has no understanding of respect of others in his own community’ (Romaine, 1995: 305). Part of the problem here is that the respect prevalent in Panjabi culture is expressed by using specific language structures and vocabulary that are not available in English. The same dilemma is faced by Korean speakers (Wong Fillmore, 1991) and certainly learners of Spanish are very aware of the formal and informal uses of ‘you’ in Spanish that no longer exist in English. If language is the essential marker of a particular culture and the identity that is developed through this connection, it seems to follow that the removal of this marker would cause the culture to change. Dewey’s observation regarding this link between language and culture is instructive here. He argued: [c]ulture and all that culture involves, as distinguished from nature, is both a condition and a product of language. Since language is the only

10  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

means of retaining and transmitting to subsequent generations acquired skills, acquired information and acquired habits, it is the latter. Since, however, meanings and the significance of events differ in different cultural groups, it is also the former. (Dewey, 1938: 56) Being a product of language, the culture that remains once a group has ex­perienced a shift from the historical language to another language is invariably different. This point, especially as regards meaning-making, might also be recalled in the discussion of the epistemic nature of language below. Fishman (1991) is worth citing at some length to illustrate this causal relationship between language shift and cultural shift: the traditionally associated language of any ethnocultural collectivity is associated with the total ethnocultural pattern of that collectivity at a particular time and place. Jews who have lost their familiarity with Hebrew have lived a different daily life-pattern (a different Jewishness) than have Jews who did not, regardless of whether both groups continued to call themselves Jews and to be so called by others. The discontinuance of Hebrew in daily life was often lamented by rabbis and other Jewish community leaders (rabbis are not merely religious spokesmen; they are often community leaders in all other respects as well), because this discontinuance was associated with other profound changes as well: with a greater incidence of leaving the historic homeland, with a greater incidence of non-observance of then-current traditions, with a greater incidence of intermarriage, with a greater incidence of new customs (not hallowed as were the original ones), with a greater incidence of mispronunciation of hallowed ritual texts – all in all, therefore, with a greater incidence of culture change. (Fishman, 1991: 16) Given this link between language and these detailed patterns of culture, when Eastman concludes that a non-French-speaker can still be French, she ‘confuse[s] continuity of label with continuity of the phenomenon to which the label originally applied’ (Fishman, 1991: 36). One may still be French, but that Frenchness is very different from the Frenchness that existed before language loss occurred. Thus, by not protecting languages, we remove a primary means by which groups can regulate cultural change. To conclude that such cultural change does not affect one’s identification with the historical group and, thus, the depth of one’s identity is to view too parsimoniously the influence of culture on identity, especially as this derives also from language.

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  11

Language loss and children The views expressed above regarding the link between language and identity and the intergenerational conflict potentially generated by, for example, not understanding how one demonstrates respect for others, especially elders, through language leads to another justification for language protections: not providing them can lead to the grave consequence of loss of the first language for children. Wong Fillmore describes the external and internal forces acting upon children that result in the replacement of their first language with the dominant language. Externally, ‘[t]hey can tell by the way people interact with them that the only language that counts for much is English – the language they do not as yet speak’ (Wong Fillmore, 1991: 342). They rapidly learn what is and what is not going to be rewarded in school and, for that matter, in the larger society. The internal force is their desire for acceptance in school by their teachers and peers. Commins, for example, observed that the first-generation immigrant students in her study ‘were acutely aware of being different. To be the same as everyone else translated into denying their language, and by implication their homes’ (Commins, 1989: 35). Confronted by such overwhelming forces, children quickly make the dominant language their language of choice. In the US context, Wong Fillmore notes that this process is particularly problematic for younger children, who have ‘simply not reached a stable enough command of their native language not to be affected by contact with a language that is promoted as heavily as English is in this society’ (Wong Fillmore, 1991: 342). Reports by language minority parents that the use of English at home had steadily increased as their children progressed through school are not surprising. One mother observed that her son and his older sister used English almost exclusively with each other except when they were mad, upset or especially happy. On occasion they would also speak English to her in order, she said, to annoy her. Other language minority parents have reported that as early as second grade their children began to use English as much as possible, bringing development in their own language largely to a standstill (Commins, 1989; Romaine, 1995). Language shift and then loss seems to most pervasively affect young children. However, the effect does not stop at the very young. One teenage Chicano male noted, ‘I don’t wanna use that language [Spanish] because people will make fun of me and they’re gonna go, “Well, you know Spanish, you’re part of those wetbacks that come over here and all they wanna do is work”, and you get stereotyped with a class just because you know a language’ (Galindo, 1995: 86). Similarly, a student in another

12  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

study observed, in reference to her cousin, that ‘[i]t’s like if he didn’t want anyone to know he was a Mexican, but he can’t even talk to all his family’ (Commins, 1989: 34). It is not the fact that children are using English that is problematic. What is problematic is the rapid and pervasive language shift that occurs among children. The familial stress that such shift causes cannot be taken lightly. In a study of the children of immigrants, Rumbaut (1994) found that ‘the strongest predictor variable associated with lower self-esteem and higher depression was [his] measure of parent–child conflict’. Not surprisingly, ‘conflict is significantly increased in cases where the child prefers English and also has a poor command of the parental native language – a recipe for communication problems, as well as posing problems of parental control and authority’ (Rumbaut, 1994: 786). Furthermore, the communication problems have an effect beyond the family. As Cummins points out, ‘Adult–child interaction in the home is certainly important, as is the sharing of literacy from an early age, but the specific language of communication is much less significant than the quality and quantity of communication … a switch to English in the home can result in lower quantity and quality of adult–child interaction, with unfortunate consequences for children’s academic progress’ (Cummins, 1984: 271–272), not to mention their identity formation. The argument presented by those who deny the crucial link between language and identity is quite tenuous, especially when applied to children. Given the inexorable social forces (both in and outside of school), most children of immigrants whose first language is not English nevertheless choose English over that first language. They want to be like the other children who interact ‘normally’ with the teacher, who navigate the system with so much greater ease. In other words, they want to identify as speakers of English, and this tends not to be additive. It comes with the cost of the identification as speakers of X-ish. This can lead to problems for children both at school and at home.

The epistemic nature of language Language, as a medium of communication, not only shapes individual identity but also thought. Here I do not mean to support a Sapir–Whorfian position, at least not a very strong one. Instead, I am suggesting that language functions in a Foucauldian way, shaping how we perceive and interact epistemically with the world. In other words, language functions much like discourse. While I will have much more to say about discourse in Chapter 5, my point for now requires digging into the work of Michel Foucault’s

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  13

intellectual predecessor: Ferdinand de Saussure. For it can be argued that Foucault’s project has been to Saussurize social systems generally (whereas Saussure was interested in language specifically). Especially important here is Saussure’s notion of langue. In his generative Course in General Linguistics (first published in 1916), Saussure makes key distinctions among langage, langue and parole. He also argues that languages, specifically langue, must be studied synchronically as opposed to diachronically. I return to some of these distinctions in Chapter 5. For the purposes of my argument now, what it is important is Saussure’s notion of langue. La langue refers to the semiotic system developed within the social system – ‘[Language] is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and acoustic images’ (Saussure, 2000: 15) – whereas langage refers to the general human faculty of language, the mechanism(s) of human speech. The importance of language as discourse is driven by the ideas that this union is developed within language communities, and communities differ in the ways that matrices of signifieds are constructed. For signifieds have meaning only by their relation to other signifieds. Extending this, it must also be the case that, as signifieds differ, the ways that different peoples understand their worlds and linguistically organize these understandings differ. Take for example the different set of relations that leads to different understandings of ‘river’ in French and English. The French words rivière and fleuve, which have different meanings in French, translate as ‘river’ in English. Thus, the distinction between rivière and fleuve (the latter flows into the sea but not the former) is lost in translation. Or, we might consider the extent to which the two ways of ‘knowing’ in Spanish (saber, conocer) lead to very different psycho-social organizations of otherwise basic information. Conocer is a knowing that can never be ‘known’, for it is situational and relational. It is the sense of being acquainted with something and depends on interactivity. Saber, however, is to know a fact. It claims a level of universal certainty and/or objectivity.5 The two verbs here open a ‘bifurcated epistemological space’, ‘epistemological spaces that are difficult to think about in English alone’ (Padilla, 2004: 4 and 3, respectively). More to Saussure’s point, we cannot tell the difference between riviere and fleuve and saber and conocer without referring to the other. They are locked in meaning-constructing relationships. Recall how Dewey (1938), also influenced by Saussure, as well as Fishman (1991) extended this logic, drawing explicit links between language and culture. In addition to the cultural change effected by language shift, we may also need to consider how language shift involves tacit acceptance of the regimes of truth, the meaning-making, entailed in membership of the

14  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

new language community. This point is also a reminder of the earlier strong connection Fishman makes between language and culture.

Why Language Should Figure in a Liberal Theory of Language Policy The presentation above demonstrates several things. First, ‘language is a highly visible marker of group identity; indeed, for many [members of the cultural group] it is the essential marker’ (Edwards, 1984: 283; see also Edwards, 1992, 2010). Second, language loss leads to cultural and identity change. Third, language operates as an epistemic code, shaping (but not determining) the way we understand our world. I think that each of these should lead to a thick, although certainly not essentialist, position as regards the language–identity link. So, even as I might agree with Skutnabb-Kangas and her thicker approach, I diverge from her position in noting that this thicker stand should not mean that language (and, in the case of the present argument, mother tongue) and the identity it engenders are absolutely necessary to human flourishing. For we are well within our rights to determine our own identity, including at least one of its markers: language. On the one hand, while Skutnabb-Kangas disagrees ‘with those researchers who see both ethnicity and mother tongue from an instrumentalist point of view, as something you can choose (to have or not to have, use or not to use), according to your own whims and wishes’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 137), I refer back to Richard Rodriguez’ autobiography as a case in point. For Rodriguez (1982) provides a striking denunciation of bilingual education, valorizing his assimilation even as he wrestles with his ‘hunger’. On the other hand, I think Skutnabb-Kangas’ point, something which Rodriguez also reveals, is that this choice is not free: it has an identity cost. In the end, it is necessary to establish this thicker conception given that some conceptualizations of liberalism call on far too thin a connection between language and identity. If no single cultural feature is essential, then there is no need to protect any cultural features, including language. As regards identity, it is incumbent upon liberalism to allow choice. But this requires recognition of language as a key marker of identity, such that choice can be authentic and not of the Faustian kind made by Rodriguez. As I shall discuss in Chapter 2, assimilationist policies are justified (wrongly) through liberal political theory. Earlier I suggested that the debate as to whether language is or merely can be an essential marker of identity is the wrong question vis-à-vis liberalism. That is a question for psychology, not political

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philosophy. The point for political philosophy, specifically liberalism, is that members of the cultural group negotiate their own identity through the differential valuing of various features of their culture. Notice that it is because of the need for such individual negotiations through the culture that liberalism, with its emphasis on individual autonomy, gains relevance and engenders suspicion against internal restrictions on challenging or defending cultural markers, habits or customs. But also notice that without external protections for the cultural community to exist in the first place, to protect what the community views as essential markers, the choices available to individuals would be unnecessarily attenuated.6 Contrary to so-called liberal justifications of assimilationism, liberalism requires the creation of such space for negotiation. In the United States, this space has been radically narrowed. For example, despite President George W. Bush’s promise of smaller government, the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002 ushered in un­prece­ dented federal involvement in education policy. The term ‘bilingual’ was purged from federal vocabulary. For example, the Bilingual Education Act was replaced with the ‘Language Instruction for Limited English Proficient and Immigrant Students’ provision (Title III) of the 2002 Act. Similarly, the Office of Bilingual Education and Language Minority Affairs was replaced with the Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited English Proficient Students. This change in language ideology at the federal level evidences the assimilation­ist attitude that contradicts some basic ideals of liberal democratic societies: liberty and the pursuit of freedom, to name two. These are staples of liberal political theory, my point of departure to establish a philosophical foundation for recognizing the languages and language varieties that contribute to identity and that, as regards language-in-education policy, children bring with them to schools.

Progression of the Argument Some of this philosophical groundwork has been laid out quite nicely. Rob Reich (2002), for example, employs the notion of individual autonomy – a fundamental tenet of liberal political theory – to develop a liberal defense of multiculturalism in education. His, however, is a theory of multiculturalism generally and he pays little attention to issues of language specifically. Michele Moses (2002) begins from a similar point of departure – personal autonomy and the social context of choice – to defend ‘race-conscious education policy’. While Moses spends more time on language issues, specifically bilingual education, her project is not meant to be a sustained

16  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

treatment of language policy and, therefore, leaves out a number of other questions that must be entertained. From a sociolinguistic perspective, a liberal defense of positive language policy begins with the premise that what are being discussed are two (or more) recognized languages, say Spanish and English. But a thorough language policy in education must wade through somewhat more muddy waters. What does a liberal theory of language policy in education say about Ebonics or other language varieties, for example? If we defend language varieties in the same way as languages, will this not lead to some form of linguistic relativism wherein ‘anything goes’? Such questions foreshadow the necessity of a post-modern analysis of language and of the ways in which liberals continue to frame language and, therefore, language policy, in problematic, modernist ways. Over the past several decades, the debates between political modernists and postmodernists have become increasingly interesting. Liberals have criticized post-modernism as nihilistic, condemning its proponents to moral silence (see Howe, 1997). Nevertheless, post-modernists have provided relevant critiques of modernist political ideals, including liberalism. Chet Bowers (1987), for example, draws on Foucault to provide a critique of liberalism. Given the connection between language (discourse) and power, it is in fact modernist liberalism, not post-modernism, that leads to nihilism, by seeking continuously to enhance individual autonomy. Further, discourse, and liberal discourse specifically as far as Bowers’ work is concerned, guides the possibilities of conduct and puts in order the possible outcomes. While liberalism seeks to ratchet up individual autonomy, people cannot be responsible only to the dictates of their individual judgment. Bowers’ next move is to draw on communitarianism to address what he sees as an uncritical pursuit of individualism. His goal is to find a balance in the social ecology that recognizes human connections, cultural embeddedness, and the social responsibility that these generate. Will Kymlicka (1995) similarly draws on communitarianism to reveal the robustness of liberal ideals. This discussion suggests that a new species of political liberalism is required, one that recognizes and balances the beliefs that individual freedom can neither be totalized nor abandoned. It cannot be totalized given the socio-cultural embeddedness of the human condition and the predictable decline in social (communitarian) responsibility. It cannot be abandoned since the liberal faith in reason and individualism is necessary to break through the discursive field to ensure a moral voice. But this necessarily occurs within and through the extant, dominant discourse of liberalism, the promises and contradictions of which must be exploited. In the end,

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  17

One may bemoan the impressive hegemony of liberal discourse or one may celebrate it; but one need not dwell on it. It has simply been part of the discursive landscape that political actors inhabit. We use it as we will and fashion it to our own ends if we can, but we seek to escape it only at the cost of becoming historically irrelevant. (Bowles & Gintis, 1986: 62) Given this, the aims of this book are twofold. First, I propose to develop further post-liberal theory as a liberalism that takes both the communitarian and the post-modern analyses of society and language and critiques of liberalism seriously: liberating liberalism from unnecessary and, in fact, inconsistent modernist strictures. Second, by applying the specific aspects of post-liberalism to language issues, I propose simultaneously to apply post-liberalism to a philosophy of language policy. As noted previously, the issues dealt with to build a post-liberal philosophy of language policy fall under the broader policy concerns of status and acquisition planning, the latter as mostly related to language-in-education policy. Therein, I shall consider policies that promote monolingualism or recognize and promote multi­lingualism. Specifically, I develop this theory by looking at some increasingly specific language policy issues, such as: official, national languages; bilingual education; and uses of language varieties within classrooms. Working toward a post-liberal analysis, I would argue, for example, that official languages – especially when it is officialization of a single language under the ethos of ‘one nation, one language’ such as the Englishonly movement in the United States – are a betrayal of some fundamental tenets of liberalism. As I have noted elsewhere (Petrovic, 2010: xvii), in the midst of debate on English-only legislation, Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, quipped, ‘I think that anyone who thinks we should have more than one national language doesn’t understand how human societies operate’. In fact, all human societies – at least to the extent that we tend to equate society with nation-state – are bi/multilingual. Progressive language policy demands that this condition be reflected in policy and practice, especially school practices. Given the fact of multilingualism, not promoting bilingual or multi­ lingual education, programs that draw on children’s first languages, denies a commitment to the ideal of community and our socio-cultural embedded­ ness. Bilingual education typically refers to the practice of providing students content area instruction in two languages, generally the student’s mother tongue or first language and a second language. A full description of the variety of program models for bilingual education is unnecessary for my purposes. Bilingual education can be contrasted with monolingual education, defined by specific practices or goals, or both. A child who ex­periences content area

18  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

instruction in more than one language is ex­periencing bilingual education. Even though it is typically cast this way in the US context, one of the languages need not be the child’s first language. Or, a child who ex­periences total educational immersion in a language other than her first language with the goal of bilingualism is in bilingual education. Historically, unlike, say, French immersion programs for English-speakers in Canada, immersion programs in the United States have had as a goal and, in fact, an outcome, monolingualism. Thus, French immersion programs in Canada would be considered bilingual education, whereas English im­ mersion programs in the United States would not. Debates continue to rage over whether or not bilingual education is more effective for language minority students. What programs will be effective depends greatly on the students being served and the socio-historical contexts in which they find themselves. Canadian French immersion programs have generally been demonstrated to be effective, while US English immersion programs have not. Furthermore, defining ‘effective’ requires a reasonably broad approach. In the US context (it is important to specify), if one means by ‘effective’ that language minority students are able to maintain and develop their first language, bilingual education is superior for the obvious reason that children will not progress in what they are not taught. If one means by ‘effective’ that language minority students do not fall as far behind academically as their peers in immersion education, much more than a preponderance of the evidence supports bilingual education. Much more than a preponderance of the evidence supports bilingual education also if one means by effective that language minority students learn the second language, in this case English, as quickly as or more quickly than their peers immersed in that language. The solid, international empirical base on the effectiveness of bilingual education (see Appel, 1988; Lin, 1997; Modiano, 1968; Özerk, 1994; Rolstad et al., 2008) should be kept in mind as the philosophical foundations for progressive language policy are subsequently laid out. One problem with bilingual education, and in fact with language education generally, is that dominant language ideology leads to instructional practices that tend to assume the superiority of certain language forms or varieties. It is here that the post-modern critique of the arbitrary regimes of truth that are socially constructed around ‘language’ becomes so important.7 When I teach courses on language politics and education, the class inevitably, and sometimes fruitfully, arrives at the discussion dealing with the difference between a dialect and a language. In these discussions, I am always reminded of the age-old question: Is it pornography or art? (I’ll know the answer when I see it.) ‘Is it a dialect or a language’ is not a dissimilar question. People are generally quite certain whether or not a given

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  19

language variety qualifies as a language or a dialect even when they have given little thought to what it is that distinguishes them. The Encyclopedia of Linguistics declines to give a definition of ‘dialect’, but defines ‘dialectology’ as a field that ‘investigates regionally and socially conditioned linguistic variation’ (Strazny, 2005: 266). Appositively, ‘a dialect is either a regional or a social variety of a language; it is distinguished by specific phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features’ (Farr & Ball, 1999: 206). There are two points of import here. First, the distinguishing features are not idiosyncratic but consistent across speakers of the dialect. The syntax is rule-governed such that a speaker of African American vernacular, for example (now popularly referred to as ‘Ebonics’) does not simply drop the verb ‘be’ willy-nilly (as in, say, the interrogative sentence ‘Where your mama?’). The presence or absence of be or the use of the base form as opposed to a conjugated form is rule-governed and provides different meaning. But this discussion is rather circular. Saying that a dialect is a dialect because it is not a language but a variety of a language still begs the question: What is a language? How does one determine which is the variety and which is the language? I will have more to say about this conundrum in Chapters 4 and 5. The point for now is that drawing the line between a language and a dialect is not straightforward. Both art (as per the earlier invocation of pornography) and language are determined more, if not solely, by politics rather than by art theory or linguistics. But the point here is that people do indeed speak different varieties of language and this must factor into language policy. For example, in education, the language/dialect debate was reignited in 1996 when the Board of the Oakland Unified School District in Oakland, California, resolved, that: the Superintendent in conjunction with her staff shall immediately devise and implement the best possible academic program for imparting instruction to African-American students in their primary language for the combined purposes of maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language whether it is known as ‘Ebonics’, ‘African Language Systems’, ‘Pan-African Communication Behaviors’ or other description, and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills. (See Rickford & Rickford, 2000: 168) Such expansions of ‘language’ add a challenging practical twist to the already puzzling aspect of language planning in terms of what to do about language varieties.

20  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

Related to this notion of expanding language is the issue of academic language. ‘Academic language’ often refers to specialized languages, es­ pecially as they exist and develop in various academic fields. It is typically set in contrast to ‘plain English’, as when my wife frequently laments, ‘Why can’t you academics write in plain English?’ Sometimes this has to do with using language that is seen as ‘high brow’, expressions such as ‘apropos to this…’. Sometimes it has to do with the way that academics make word choices that require an understanding of the secondary or tertiary meaning of a word. For example, ‘obtain’ is usually a synonym of ‘acquire’. But philosophers are fond of using ‘obtain’ with its secondary meaning, ‘to be in effect’, as in ‘justice obtains when conditions x and y are met’. Mostly, however, complaints about ‘academic language’ arise in response to the use of specialized vocabulary, which, let’s admit, academics often make up. The term ‘performativity’ comes to mind here. This is a concept developed by linguists which has become a staple lexical item of queer theorists. As academics, we must, of course, reject this complaint, knowing that it is important to name our world and the phenomena we are trying to think about. Otherwise, how do we talk about them? This said, I want to talk about ‘academic language’ in a somewhat different, although clearly related, way. For my purposes, ‘academic language’ refers to the language children must understand and employ to be successful in schools. All aspects of language are involved here. Lexically, we expect students to expand their vocabularies generally.8 Further, there are a number of lexical items that are quite specific to schooling. For example, something as simple (in an adult world) as the word ‘chalk’ may not be in the vocabularies of many children until they begin school. Phono­logically, we expect students to pick up ‘standard’ pronunciation. Generally as regards syntax, we become prescriptivist about such things as ‘ain’t’ or the difference between ‘may’ and ‘can’. But more specifically as regards syntax, there are syntactical styles that are more or less frequent in certain academic subject areas. For example, the passive voice is probably more frequent in history: ‘The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776’. Pragmatically, we expect children to be able to adjust all of these aspects of language according to the demands of the situation. The issue of ‘academic language’ is not as straightforwardly an issue of language planning and policy. Never­the­less, I will argue that the move from ‘dialect’ to ‘academic language’ is as logical a step in the progression of my argument as the move from ‘language’ to ‘dialect’. It should be pointed out that as the idea of language is expanded in the ways discussed, the locus of language policy becomes more focused. That is to say, there is little that macro-level policy (e.g. officialization) can do to

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  21

address language variety. But it is to say that there is much that language-ineducation policy can do. Thus, as I work through the arguments in this book toward a post-liberal philosophy of language policy, I do so in a way that expands the conception of language – in the vein of Pennycook (2006) and Shohamy (2006) among others – which simultaneously requires a narrowing of the policy focus, ultimately ending in the classroom. The notion of the ‘post-liberal’, then, refers both to the fact that language is considered in post-structural terms and to the fact that I am seeking to move beyond traditional liberalism, drawing on communitarianism for example, while appealing to liberalism’s fundamental principles. In this work, I consider how different invocations of liberalism inform language policy. In Chapter 2, I review what I consider some key tenets of liberal political theory as they inform language policy, arguing that these tenets can be read more or less progressively. I note how they are used to justify very different policies vis-à-vis language. The purpose of the second half of Chapter 2, then, is to demonstrate how they have been invoked as what I call ‘language negative liberalism’ to promote an ideology of assimilationism. In Chapter 3, I consider the work of philosophers whom I would call liberal-communitarians. Important among them, to my mind, is Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka proceeds from a liberal starting point, taking on communitarian critiques. The point is that liberalism is much more robust than communitarians paint it. While Kymlicka informs a language positive liberal­ism that is, I argue, more true to the spirit of liberalism, his distinction between two different kinds of cultural minority communities is, nevertheless, too discrete. As such, it loses sight of the importance of language to all minority communities. In Chapter 4, I review the arguments of linguistic human rightists, such as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, who claims that ‘Many of those who criticise a linguistic human rights approach know little about human rights law; many of those who question the importance of mother tongue medium education for minorities know little about education and little about any other aspects of applied linguistics’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2003: n.p.). Of course, one may logically know a lot about education and recognize the importance of education in the medium of the mother tongue and still disagree with a rights perspective. I will argue that while the linguistic human rights (LHR) framework is defensible within political liberalism, it is unworkable as a thoroughgoing approach to language policy. Furthermore, it is probably inadvisable linguistically to the extent that it can be read, ironically, as under­mining linguistic diversity. To address the unworkability of LHR, I draw on Patten’s notion of pro-rated multilingualism, arguing for what I call a rights/goal approach to language policy.

22  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

The unworkability of LHR is evident even if thinking about language in only modernist ways, that is, as having ontology, and the problem only grows for LHR when we think about language in broader ways (as we should). Therefore, in Chapter 5, I draw on post-structuralism and notions of ‘discourse’ to argue that liberalism calls language into being in particular ways. Specifically, it grants language an ontology it does not have. Linguistic human rights, born from liberalism, reinforce this process. If we conclude that language has no ontology, then the problem that LHR already has is certainly exacerbated. This said, I argue in this chapter that a thorough­ going anti-foundationalist view of language is just as problematic for policy. In Chapter 6, I bring these arguments to the classroom for resolution. For it is here, perhaps, that the most important linguistic work can be done, both practically and politically. Going back to LHR, I argue that all students have a right to their language variety in the classroom. Even where this takes more traditional, foundationalist forms, such as through bilingual education, teachers and students must still be made aware of and respect language as always already a variety. This includes the much ballyhooed, but problematic (Edelsky, 1983; Wiley, 1996b), notion of academic language. Here I argue that instructional practices that assume the superiority of certain language forms or varieties ignore the post-structural critique of the arbitrary regimes of truth that are socially constructed around ‘language’ (see Petrovic, 2013), reinscribing deficit notions (MacSwan, 2000; Petrovic, 2013; Petrovic & Olmstead, 2001). The overarching purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how a post-liberal theory of language policy should guide our thinking from the classroom up. In Chapter 7, I try to layout more precisely what the previous chapters have led to in terms of a post-liberal approach to language policy. I argue that language policy should not be seen as a single construct. Instead, our thinking about such issues should derive from the interface between language and policy. For the way that one views language (as a bounded system or from an anti-foundational perspective) clearly has implications for policy in terms of the kinds of work policy can do and at what levels.

Notes (1) Much of this section owes to Petrovic (2007), extended parts reprinted with permission. See also Wiley (1996a) for a thorough overview. (2) Thus, although it is oftentimes illiberal, I do not think there is an inherent animosity between language officialization and liberalism. See Branchadell (1999) for a dis­ cussion of two types of liberalism as informed by language debates in Cataluña. (3) See Cooper (1989) for a thorough discussion of each.

Language Policy, Identity, and Liberalism  23

(4) I employ the adjective ‘standardized’ as opposed to ‘standard’ to highlight agency in the process of making some particular variety a standard and to contradict the implication that a ‘standard’ simply and naturally exists. Since a standard is something by which other things are judged, it is important to understand that the standard itself is socially constructed and will tend to serve the interests of some over others. This is certainly the case with language. (5) Similar distinctions exist in other languages as well (e.g. connaître and savoir in French and kennen and wissen in German). (6) The notions of internal restrictions and external protections owe to Will Kymlicka and are presented more thoroughly in Chapter 3. (7) I will use ‘post-modern,’ ‘post-structural’ and, in later chapters, ‘anti-foundational’ interchangeably. (8) It strikes me here that recent (false) complaints about how public schools are ‘dumbing down’ the curriculum seem to stand in contradiction to complaints about the language of academicians.

2 Formalist Liberalism and Language Policy

Civilisation is, before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilised, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Ortega y Gasset (1932: 83)

Introduction My point of departure to begin a journey to a post-liberal philosophy is liberalism. I choose this point of departure for several reasons, both ideo­ logical and practical. First, I consider myself a political liberal, a modernist to a degree. Second, I believe that since liberalism is the frame that most Western states work within, anything we propose is necessarily a reaction to, with, or against that frame. Thus, promoting progressive change – meliorism arguably being a historical hallmark of liberal theory – may be more realistic­ally engaged in by harnessing the language already available to a given audience. Both the language of possibility and the language of critique are born from reactions to or within an extant frame and its language. As Bowles and Gintis argue, ‘The liberal vision of people effectively controlling their lives is not a hollow promise doomed by human nature and modern technology. Liberalism’s fault lies not in overstating the possibilities for human freedom, but in failing to recognize the roots of domination’ (Bowles & Gintis, 1986: 176). Thus, if the ideal is possible, not a hollow promise, then it should be pursued. Of course, Bowles and Gintis find the roots of domination to be primarily economic. Even though its effects are undeniable, it is not my project to expose the ways in which capitalism affects language policy.1 Given my own ideological positioning, this book necessarily seeks to make normative claims about the good life. What I do not do is argue that these claims should be universal (as Martha Nussbaum does) or not (as John 24

Formalist Liberalism and Language Policy  25

Rawls does). In short, it is not at all clear to me that liberalism is the best point of departure for such a project. It is one of many possibly fruitful points of departure; but it is the one to which I cleave. Further, one might argue that there exists a variety of liberalisms born of very different sociohistorical contexts. Nevertheless, here I tend to agree with John Gray that it is ‘a mistake to suppose that the manifold varieties of liberalism cannot be understood as variations on a small set of distinctive themes’ (Gray, 1986: xi). Gray boils liberalism down to four broad elements: individualism, egalitarianism, universalism and meliorism. Subsequently, I pluck, for the purposes of my framework, several more specific ideals which I think also fit into the manifold varieties of liberalism. This said, it is important at the outset to clarify how liberalism is used throughout the book. In everyday parlance, liberal is set against conservative in neatly packaged, uncomplicated ways. In the US political context, for example, one is a pro-choice liberal or an anti-abortion conservative; a supporter of same-sex marriage or a defender of traditional marriage; a laissez-faire capitalist or a big-government socialist. What my argument addresses is the liberalism derived from the Enlightenment question of determin­ing by what political authority the divine rule of monarchs might be challenged. From this, a number of tenets of political liberalism developed. It is the belief in or, at least, recognition of the importance of many of these that makes both George W. Bush and Barack Obama ‘liberals’. I turn now to an overview of liberalism in this sense and, subsequently, to a discussion of the implications for language policy.

A sketch of political liberalism In the epigraph to this chapter, José Ortega y Gasset decries the barbarism of disassociation. Despite his disappointment with the human capacity to pursue liberalism, understandable given the totalitarianism he witnessed during the Spanish Civil War, José Ortega y Gasset nevertheless describes liberal democracy as ‘represent[ing] the loftiest endeavour towards common life’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1932: 83). He goes on then to define liberalism as that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. (Ortega y Gasset, 1932: 83) Dating from ideals of the Enlightenment, liberal political theory sought, among other things, to prioritize liberty and individual rights over

26  A Post-Liberal Approach to Language Policy in Education

monarchical decree, reason and scientific method over faith, and political neutrality over predetermination as regards conceptions of the good. Locke, for example, conceived of a civil society – ‘the society of free men, equal under the rule of law, bound together by no common purpose but sharing a respect for each other’s rights’ (quoted by Gray, 1986: 12). Specifically, he argued that men are naturally in ‘a state of perfect freedom to order their actions’ and ‘a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal’ (Locke, 1823: 106). Again, it is this sense of liberalism in which some fundamental tenets are widely valued that join present-day ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’. In this view, what distinguishes members of the two camps is their individual and group-influenced interpretation of these tenets, as well as the contradictions with which each is willing to live as the tenets overlap. How, then, have the fundamental tenets of liberalism been defined and what are the implications for language policy? I think the tenets of liberty, autonomy and neutrality (especially as related to ‘individualism’) are key to developing the liberal foundation of the framework for language policy which is the ultimate goal of this project.

Liberty/freedom As one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers, the work of John Locke sets much of the stage for liberal political theory. Responding in contradiction to Robert Filmer’s contention that people are born into subordination, Locke’s idea of freedom, as noted above, derived directly from a view of human nature wherein people are born in a state of perfect freedom. This necessitated, for Locke, a political theory that turned on the notion that societal institutions should serve the end of the freedom of individuals, individuals being the basis of society. Should restrictions against individual freedoms be deemed necessary, this necessity must be proven by those who seek to limit those freedoms and such limits must be ‘only for the public good’ (Locke, 1823: 195). Thus, freedom is the non-restriction of options, to the extent that the option one might choose does not interfere with the freedom of others to pursue their options. This, then, alludes, more specifically, to a notion of negative freedom. Negative freedom drives libertarian positions such as that of Robert Nozick. Distinguishing his position from the ultra-minimal state of monarchists, Nozick defends a merely minimal state. This is the ‘the nightwatchman state of classical liberal theory’, which is ‘limited to the functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts, and so on’ (Nozick, 1974: 26). This notion has a

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long history famously invoked in John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, stated in 1859: ‘That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’ (Mill, 2003: 80). In short, negative freedom, as expressed by Isaiah Berlin,2 refers to a simple absence of interference and freedom from coercion. Berlin (1969) is worth citing at some length here. He writes: I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind … it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by other human beings. (Berlin, 1969: 122) This idea of negative freedom has, of course, its inverse: positive freedom.

Positive freedom or autonomy The state of freedom necessary for the pursuit of one’s options assumes and is based on the ideal of the autonomous individual. One way of defining autonomy is provided by Scanlon, who posits that for someone to regard himself as autonomous ‘a person must see himself as sovereign in deciding what to believe and in weighing competing reasons for action’ (Scanlon, 1972: 215). Scanlon goes on to argue that the autonomous person, while she might consider the judgments of others, must, in the end, demonstrate independence of reason in terms of deciding which judgments and subsequent actions might be correct and why. Similarly, Christman defines autonomy as ‘the capacity for critical self-reflection in the development of value systems and plans of action’ (Christman, 2005: 87). Such conceptualizations of autonomy are what Berlin (1969) refers to as positive freedom. Positive freedom is presented as the freedom to conceive of, develop and pursue one’s goals. It is the sense of being one’s own master, ‘to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside’ (Berlin, 1969: 161). Note that the notion

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of freedom to might be confusing to the extent that it can be interpreted as addressing the question of whether or not I can act on the choices I make, whether or not the conditions exist such that I may do so. For now, it should be made clear that the notion of positive freedom posited by Berlin might be more accurately termed autonomy, as defined previously. Compare, for example, Christman’s definition of autonomy above with Berlin’s further description of positive freedom as being ‘conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for his choices and able to explain them by reference to his own ideas and purposes’ (Berlin, 1969: 161). Connecting the ideal of autonomy or positive freedom with the determination of what is correct, Rawls argues, It is in their public recognition and informed application of the principles of justice in their political life, and as their effective sense of justice directs, that citizens achieve full autonomy. Thus, full autonomy is realized by citizens when they act from principles of justice that specify the fair terms of cooperation they would give to themselves when fairly represented as free and equal persons. (Rawls, 1996: 77) In other words, Rawls’ notion of ‘full autonomy’ seems to capture and rely on both negative and positive freedom.

Neutrality Liberal political theory has roots in natural law, notably outlined in Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. As noted above, all people are, for Locke, born equal in the state of nature. They therefore enjoy certain natural, or in later language ‘unalienable’, rights.3 Among these, as exemplified in the US Declaration of Independence, are, for example, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Given that any one person’s happiness is not based in the same pursuits as another’s, neutrality is a necessary ideal in political liberalism. Neutrality refers to the idea that the state should not be involved in promoting any particular conception of the good life and should remain neutral among competing conceptions.4 Neutrality has been a cornerstone of very different applications of liberal­ism, ranging from Robert Nozick’s libertarianism to John Rawls’ liberal egalitarianism. This is so because the idea of negative freedom is necessary to both of these formulations of liberalism. Recall that negative freedom supports state neutrality to the extent that the role of the state is limited to maintaining the freedom of its citizens to set and pursue (free from obstruction and coercion) their own vision of the good life, to the

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extent that that vision is compatible with the same set of basic rights and freedoms of others. The importance of neutrality to liberalism is also reflected in Rawls’ defense of a neutrality of aim. Neutrality of aim requires that the state do nothing ‘intended to favor or promote any particular comprehensive doctrine rather than another, or to give greater assistance to those who pursue it’ (Rawls, 1996: 193). In other words, we should not stack the deck structurally to favor or disfavor ways of life that are not inconsistent with ideals of liberal justice. Especially when one considers the great lengths Rawls goes to in his thought experiment behind the ‘veil of ignorance’ to arrive at his principles of justice, his roots in Kantian contractualism are clear. As Kant argued, ‘society, being composed of a plurality of persons, each with his own aims, interests, and conceptions of the good, is best arranged when it is governed by principles that do not themselves pre­suppose any particular conception of the good’ (cited in Sandel, 1982: 1). This said, Rawls distinguishes his liberalism from the comprehensive liberalism of Kant: Kant’s doctrine is both political and ethical, while Rawls ‘affirms political autonomy for all but leaves the weight of ethical autonomy to be decided by citizens severally in light of their comprehensive doctrines’ (Rawls, 1996: 78). Here Rawls is careful to distinguish neutrality of aim from neutrality of effect. The former requires that the state do nothing ‘intended to favor or promote any particular comprehensive doctrine rather than another, or to give greater assistance to those who pursue it’ (Rawls, 1996: 193). The latter suggests that ‘the state is not to do anything that makes it more likely that individuals accept any particular conception rather than another unless steps are taken to cancel, or to compensate for, the effects of policies that do this’ (Rawls, 1996: 193). Rawls goes on to dismiss neutrality of effect as a pursuable notion of neutrality. First, even a political conception of justice will have ‘important effects and influences as to which comprehensive doctrines endure and gain adherents … and it is futile to try to counteract these effects’ (Rawls, 1996: 193). One of these effects is, of course, the inculcation of an overlapping consensus on the political structure of the society based on the value of liberalism, its constituent principles and certain political virtues (e.g. civility, tolerance, fairness). Second, neutrality of effect would require affirmative action on the part of the state to make pursuable all conceptions of the good. For Rawls, this is simply not possible practically, and philosophically it is the case that not all conceptions of the good are compatible with justice. However, there are certain doctrines and/or components of views of the good life – those things that give life meaning and, in Rawlsian terms, serve

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as the bases of self-respect – that are more or less served by neutrality of aim and more or less affected by the impossibility of neutrality of effect. Those components of the good life that are better served are so served because Rawlsian neutrality, by one interpretation, is a brand of neutrality that provides background fairness. This interpretation of neutrality is evident in the disestablishment of religion, toward which the state requires liberty and equality (see Patten, 2003). This is, I believe, the received understanding of neutrality, becoming a principle of what I subsequently relate as ‘formalist liberalism’. However, while perhaps self-justifying, the basic rights that neutrality is meant to help flourish – the ideal that citizens be equally able to pursue their vision of the good – are not self-enforcing. Thus, liberal political theory moves a society toward a social contract and increased statism in the form of positive law, such that the inherent rights of natural law are protected in fact. This will require a different kind of neutrality. It is important to note, however, that in liberal political theory the principle of equality was historic­ally paired with a principle of limited government, the concern being that government may be the biggest threat to equal liberty. The balancing act between the necessity of statism and the fear of statism is reflected in the notion of negative freedom, as adumbrated above, impacting how ­neutrality is interpreted. This fear of statism is what drives formalist liberalism, to be contrasted with ‘actualist liberalism’.

Formalist Liberalism Earlier I made the claim that what separates conservatives and liberals is their individual and group-influenced interpretation of the various tenets of liberalism as well as the contradictions with which each is willing to live as the tenets overlap. Here I want to suggest two quite broad forms of liberalism: formalist and actualist. The former is driven more by the fear of statism and the latter by the necessity of statism. As Gray (1986) puts it, the concerns of classical liberalism ‘are those of the age – the overexpansion of government, with all the dangers to liberty that it entails, and the control of policy by rivalrous special interests whose machinations defeat the public interest’ (Gray, 1986: 42). Now, I recognize two immediate problems in this framing. First, such broad labels cannot capture much political complexity, as there can be many strange bedfellows in politics. (Since his election as Senator from Kentucky in 2010, for example, Rand Paul, right libertarian, has teamed up with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, socialist, to promote cuts in defense spending and to condemn recent invasions of privacy by the National

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Security Administration.) Secondly, it is somewhat US-centric, given that the essentially two-party political system in the United States allows only a very limited range of official political expression.5 Nevertheless, I think this a generative way to work toward a more robust iteration of liberalism in language policy. Formalist liberalism assumes a natural passivity on the part of the state – with the exception, of course, of protecting one’s negative freedoms. From this view, such passivity is a predictable necessity of each of the tenets reviewed. Furthermore, this passivity is (re)inforced by the fact that the tenets themselves are mutually reinforcing. Thus, I am permitted to do X as long as my X does not interfere with the freedom of someone else to engage in Y. But notice that autonomy is necessarily subsumed in negative freedom, given that, prior to acting on my freedom, I must have weighed my reasons for doing X as it fits into my life plans. Similarly, state ­neutrality must obtain, since pursuing my life plans requires the absence of most deontic constraints beyond those set out by Locke. The passivity inherent in formalist notions of liberalism assumes a rugged-individualist stance. That is to say that, assuming the development of one’s autonomy and given negative freedoms within a neutral state, pursuing one’s good life becomes an individual responsibility. Thus, by formalist, I refer to a kind of liberal state which provides de jure equal access to the good life, without interference by the state and dependent only upon individual will. Actualist liberalism, on the other hand, requires intervention by the state to ensure a degree of equality of condition such that one’s capacity for autonomy may be developed and that choices available within one’s state of natural freedom are actionable. This goes back to the notion of positive freedom (autonomy) as the ‘freedom to’, which I noted previously might be confusing to the extent that it can be interpreted as addressing the question of whether or not I can act on the choices I make, that is to say, whether or not the conditions exist such that I may do so. Following Kai Nielsen, I will refer to this as effective freedom – further introduction of which I provide in Chapter 3. For now, I elaborate on formalist liberalism, noting that it tends to play out in one of two ways vis-à-vis social policy generally and language policy specifically.

Formalist liberalism, not just a variety of actualism As regards social policy, it seems to me that formalist liberalism can follow one of two paths. First, following its more libertarian impulse, it can embrace its non-interventionist, individualist stance, leaving individuals

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to develop and follow their own life plans regardless of social situation, as sketched out above. The state would neither actively help nor hinder pursuits, rightly determined by individuals. In such a laissez-faire state one would expect to see, for example, the legality of abortion and same-sex marriage. One might also expect to see a lack of social welfare provisions (e.g. social security, state-provided health care, welfare). In the area of language policy, official language policies would have to be abandoned, given their violation of the fundamental tenet of neutrality. Nevertheless, formalist liberalism rarely takes this tack, at least not completely. Instead, it, or, I should say, its leaders, frequently and paradoxically invoke its more authoritarian impulses. This is because key tenets – freedom, equality, neutrality and so on – are interpreted within and through very different lenses. Historically, defenders of a traditional strand of liberalism were laissez-faire on both the economic and social fronts: government should not ‘interfere’ in the free market and government should follow a strict interpretation of negative freedom as regards how people lead their lives. But these conservatives (née ‘classical liberals’) have morphed into neoconservatives, dominating, at least on the US political scene, the political discourse of the right. Neoconservativism is driven, Michael Apple argues, by a fear of the ‘Other’, a fear of difference and ‘a clear sense of loss – a loss of faith, of imagined communities, of a nearly pastoral vision of like-minded people who shared norms and values and in which the “Western tradition” reigned supreme’ (Apple, 2006: 40). Given this, neoconservativism, which I tenuously include as a strand of formalist liberalism, takes much more authoritarian forms, betraying its own appeal to negative freedom and small government. Neoconservativism is interventionist and prohibitionary. Some neoconservative interventions that I have in mind that betray liberalism’s libertarian impulse include prohibitions such as the Orwelliannamed Defense of Marriage Act, essentially a prohibition of same-sex marriage. Another example here might be the outrage against President Obama’s position that religious organizations must provide contraceptive coverage in their employees’ medical coverage. Note that permitting same-sex marriage and requiring contraceptive coverage expand individual freedom, the raison d’être of political liberalism. In the area of language policy (which I treat separately in subsequent sections), I note, among other interventions, efforts to make English the official language of the United States and the severe curtailing of bilingual education over the past two decades. If formalist liberalism can take more authoritarian or neoconservative forms, logically, then, that would mean a certain amount of state intervention, à la actualist liberalism, as opposed to the laissez-fare positions it should logically occupy. The point here is to note that as interventionist as it is,

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this formalist strand of liberalism should not be confused with actualism. First, notice that where these kinds of interventions promote equality of condition, they do so in regressive ways. That is to say, they tend to do so in ways that reduce one’s freedom to being ‘free’ to be more like everyone else.

Why Formalist Liberalism is Problematic My notion of formalist and actualist liberalism reflects, in many ways, Michele Moses’ distinction between traditional and contemporary strands of liberalism. The traditional strands, she argues, ‘view social problems as the responsibility of the individual, in such a way that social policy must somehow compensate for individuals’ cultural deficiencies’ (Moses, 2002: 12). But, as discussed above, formalist liberalism can take different shapes, such as libertarian laissez-faire or neoconservative interventionist. Traditional liberalism more greatly resembles the latter, even as it seeks to cloak itself in the neutrality of the former. In the end, neither is acceptable, for both reinscribe inequitable status quo social relations, one through benign neglect and the other through cultural imperialism. Contemporary liberalism, on the other hand, ‘attempts to move liberal political theory … toward the idea that oppressive social structures and systems need to be changed so that oppressed persons … may flourish’ (Moses, 2002: 12). In this view, the social structures and systems that formalist liberalism reinscribes actually serve to construct the cultural deficits that formalism seeks to overcome. This is because, paradoxically, a great amount of homogeneity, cultural and otherwise, is required for formalist liberalism to live up to its promise of allowing the pursuit of competing conceptions of the good. Thus, I review each of the previous tenets of liberalism in this vein.

Freedom I noted previously that the neoconservative strand of formalist liberalism betrays even the most basic liberal ideal of negative freedom. While liber­tarian­ism upholds this ideal, the freedom of libertarianism surely cannot serve the interests of democracy. Recall that negative freedom is posited as the freedom from interference or external constraints, in other words, calling for minimalist government. Berlin explains that one is ‘normally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes with [his or her] activity’ (Berlin, 1969: 156). Following Locke, there are limits to the extent or area of one’s freedom. However, the notion of negative freedom lends some guidance in determining a minimum. The contraction of the area

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within which one is able to pursue one’s freedom beyond this minimum can be said to be coercion, Berlin argues. Here he is careful to note that this refers to deliberate interference by others, as opposed to, say, one’s natural abilities. I am not ‘unfree’ to become a professional basketball player because the bulging discs in my back do not allow me to jump. ‘Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom’ (Berlin, 1969: 156). Berlin is able to make this claim because he is careful to maintain his focus on political freedom. The incapacity to which Berlin refers, then, is better explained, he suggests, by a notion of economic freedom. Berlin accepts that if one cannot, for example, afford to purchase a particular item – be it a necessity such as milk or bread or a luxury such as a fine cigar – ‘he is as little free to have it as he would be if it were forbidden him by Law’ (Berlin, 1969: 156). But, is there not a similar connection between economic freedom and political freedom? Answering this question requires, first, a consideration of what political freedom should entail. Rawls, for example, suggests that political freedom refers to ‘the freedom to participate equally in political affairs’ (Rawls, 1971: 201), including the right to vote and to be eligible for public office. Even in this much narrowed sense of political freedom, there are obvious connections to economic freedom. For example, in the negative sense of freedom one would still have the formal right or the political freedom to vote if voting stations were 500 miles away. Economic freedom is clearly implicated here. For lacking both the pecuniary and temporal assets required, one is as little free to exercise one’s political freedom as one would be if it were forbidden by law. Rawls indifferently dismisses such constraints of poverty or lack of means as definitive of liberty by differentiating between liberty generally and the worth of liberty: ‘the worth of liberty is not the same for everyone. Some have greater authority and wealth, and therefore greater means to achieve their aims’ (Rawls, 1971: 204). First, the idea that it is acceptable for some to have greater authority than others seems, to my mind, to be an­ athematic to liberalism generally. Furthermore, it is often the case, especially in liberal capitalist states, that greater wealth (instead of, say, expertise) is the generator of greater authority. In education, it is arguably the case, for example, that Bill Gates drives or, at least, inordinately influences, through his Foundation, educational policy in the United States.

Autonomy Recall that autonomy names a capacity for critical self-reflection, to develop and evaluate value systems or competing conceptions of the

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good, to determine one’s plans of action accordingly, and to be moved by one’s own reason(s). I agree that these capacities are crucial to liberal democracy. However, it must be noted that what is referenced here is individual autonomy. At first blush, this might seem obvious and redundant. But the liberal notion of autonomy derives from Enlightenment thinking vis-à-vis the moral worth of the individual and individualism has become a core characteristic of liberalism and/or definitive of autonomy. Therefore, I also agree with Bowles and Gintis that formalist or traditional liberalism tends toward ‘a radically individual conception of autonomy to the detriment of a conception of community which might form the basis of democratic empowerment’ (Bowles & Gintis, 1986: 176). This is because the ideal of community – in its richest sense as ‘the repository of loyalty, learning, identity, and solace’ – is seen as anathematic to individualism (Bowles & Gintis, 1986: 16). In these iterations of liberalism, individuals have rights, communities do not. There are, of course, rights of association but not collective forms of liberty properly construed. And, so, community is given short thrift in liberal theory, that is, unless ‘community’ refers to the political state. But the state of formalist liberalism is, in its libertarian form, a regulatory structure – an inculcator of obedience, not a progenitor of identity. Or, it is, in its neoconservative form, a dismantler of identity, not a source of loyalty.

Neutrality Even as formalist liberalism tends to entail a radical individualism, it does not, thereby, promote neutrality. Indeed, the benign neglect of its libertarianism necessarily succumbs to the cultural imperialism of its neoconservativism. That is to say, benign neglect in the form of neutrality among individuals disregards the sociohistorical forces that have shaped institutions, cultural and otherwise, and inequality becomes part of the ‘natural’ order of things. Thus, something like Rawls’ neutrality of aim is insufficient. For even if not ‘intended’ to favor any particular comprehensive doctrine, it certainly does. Therefore, dismissing neutrality of effect, as Rawls does, is far too convenient, given the strong tension between the ideal of neutrality and the pluralism that exists in contemporary states. For neutrality is never neutral and even though steps to compensate for or cancel out the effects of policies and institutions that reinscribe non-neutral relations may be difficult or hard to determine or even impracticable, this should not mean that they should never be considered and enacted when practicable.

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Formalist Liberalism and Language Policy 6 If language planning is, as defined in Chapter 1, an activity, most visibly undertaken by government, intended to promote systematic linguistic change (or to stop change from happening) in some community of speakers, then notions of positive and negative language planning can be deduced. In a brief discussion of negative language planning, Kaplan and Baldauf get at this by noting that ‘certain types of language planning are intended not to increase the number of linguistic options, but rather to restrict severely the number of such options’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 230). Although Kaplan and Baldauf do not employ the term, logically, ‘positive language planning’ would seek to increase the number of linguistic options. Unfortunately, Kaplan and Baldauf leave it to the reader to discern what is meant by ‘linguistic options’ and confuse the issue further through the use of unparallel examples. On the one hand, to contrast with the notion of negative language planning, the Treaty of Maastricht is invoked as an exemplar in the support of cultural diversity and positive language planning. Educational goals – student familiarity with other European languages and cultures, language learning, and the promotion of trilingualism through compulsory language qualifications into and exiting from higher education – are highlighted from the Treaty. On the other hand, the example of negative language planning is exemplified by Kaplan and Baldauf in the Englishonly movement in the United States as it arises mostly in proposals for amendment of the US Constitution. There are, of course, a host of issues here but mostly the movement raises federal language issues, for example concerning the language of government, (non) translation of government publications, and citizenship ceremonies and requirements. Since education is a state-level issue in the United States, most proposals for constitutional amendments have avoided questions over bilingual education. The point here is that Kaplan and Baldauf confuse the issue by juxtaposing acquisition planning (the educational goals cited in the Maastricht Treaty) with status planning (official language legislation).7 This deeply begs the question as to what the term ‘linguistic options’ refers and this must, therefore, be defined at various administrative (read: governmental) levels for a variety of institutions. It is here that the interface between language planning and political theory (liberalism in this case) is revealed. For while the question of what ‘linguistic options’ refers to may be readily answered (e.g. the ability to seek governmental services in a variety of languages, the provision of bilingual or multilingual education, translation services in judicial concerns, multilingual voting materials, etc.), the answer to the question of which such options should be provided finds its natural home

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in political theory. Liberalism, of course, offers one such home for language policy. Nevertheless, given, as I have explained, that quite a broad array of interpreters of the fundamental tenets of liberalism fall under the umbrella of ‘liberal’, liberalism can provide contradictory guidance vis-à-vis language policy. That is to say, it can be used to support both positive and negative language planning. This is what Petrovic and Kuntz (2013) have called ‘language positive liberalism’ and ‘language negative liberalism’. In what remains of this chapter, I want to argue that formalist liberalism is also language negative liberalism. ‘Language-negative liberalism can be defined as invocations or interpretations of liberal political theory and/or specific tenets thereof that support or justify negative language planning’ (Petrovic & Kuntz, 2013: 133). Examples of language negative liberalism are provided by some of the proposals to make English the official language of the United States. A backlash against language minorities, especially Spanish-speakers, rose in the wake of the somewhat progressive language policies vis-à-vis bilingual education during the Carter administration. In 1983, two years after introducing a (failed) constitutional amendment that would make English the official language of the United States, Senator S.I. Hayakawa founded ‘US English’. The organization quickly became, and remains, a tenacious political interest group lobbying for an amendment to make English the official language of the United States. One of its other stated goals is to ‘reform’ (read: eliminate) bilingual education. Similarly, anti-bilingual education policies became a cornerstone of the Department of Education under the leadership of Secretary William Bennett in the 1980s. US English was founded to ensure that ‘English continues to serve as an integrating force among our nation’s many ethnic groups’. Further, the language negative liberalism of US English is defended by the fact that English ‘remains a vehicle of opportunity for new Americans’ (see http:// usefoundation.org/view/8). US English pursues the same policy objectives as ProEnglish, including official English and English-only education. ProEnglish was formed in 1994 with the explicit purpose of persuading lawmakers to declare English the official language of the United States, arguing ‘In a pluralistic nation such as ours, the function of government should be to foster and support the similarities that unite us, rather than institutionalize the differences that divide us’ (see www.proenglish.org/ about-us/mission.html). ProEnglish, according to a note on its Facebook page, seeks to achieve two objectives: 1. Encourage individuals to learn a common language that will provide them with equal opportunity to the American dream.

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2. Limit the amount of taxpayer dollars that will go to provide expensive translation services. ProEnglish goes on to explain: In many areas of the country there are so many individuals who do not enjoy true equality to what America has to offer, because they given [sic] a false sense of opportunity by being provided services in their own languages at the tax-payers [sic] expense. Ironically, supporters of these translations services are often guilty of what has been called the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, by refusing to believe that immigrants who do not speak English, are unable to learn it. (ProEnglish, 2010) This kind of language negative liberalism, alluding to educational policy, can be seen more explicitly in responses to bilingual education. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, argues that ‘Institutionalized bilingualism shuts doors. It nourishes self-ghettoization, and ghettoization nourishes racial antagonism’ (Schlesinger, 1998: 113). So, in a form of liberal double-speak, an increase in linguistic options shuts doors, hampering equality and freedom, while limiting one’s linguistic options promotes these liberal ideals. There is not just a (liberal) philosophy behind such thinking but also a psychology. Recall my earlier mention of Richard Rodriguez’ (1982) influential autobiography, Hunger of Memory. Rodriguez tells his story of growing up in a Spanish-speaking household and an English-only school. Despite the pain of having ‘shattered the intimate bond that had once held the family close’, Rodriguez took his acquisition of English and loss of Spanish as a liberal necessity: ‘Only when I was able to think of myself as an American, no longer alien in gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality’ (Rodriguez, 1982: 30 and 26–27, respectively). Schlesinger, who is certainly not alone in his reaction, tells us the moral of Rodriguez’ story: ‘Using some language other than English dooms people to second-class citizenship in American society’, whereas ‘Monolingual education opens doors to the larger world’ (Schlesinger, 1998: 113, 114). Schlesigner’s must have been a small world indeed. As another example of negative language policy in education, consider the resolutions of the group English for the Children. In the United States, this group successfully campaigned for a severe curtailing of bilingual education in the states of California, Arizona and Massachusetts (Proposition 227 in 1998; Proposition 203 in 2000; and ballot Question 2 in 2002, respectively). This group defended English-only education by arguing that:

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(a) WHEREAS the English language is the national public language of the United States of America and of the state of California, is spoken by the vast majority of California residents, and is also the leading world language for science, technology, and international business, thereby being the language of economic opportunity; and (b) WHEREAS immigrant parents are eager to have their children acquire a good knowledge of English, thereby allowing them to fully participate in the American Dream of economic and social advancement; and (c) WHEREAS the government and the public schools of California have a moral obligation and a constitutional duty to provide all of California’s children, regardless of their ethnicity or national origins, with the skills necessary to become productive members of our society, and of these skills, literacy in the English language is among the most important…. (From the text of Proposition 227, available at http://primary98.sos. ca.gov/VoterGuide/Propositions/227text.htm) First, I should point out that bilingual educators and language pluralists generally in the United States do not dispute the importance of English. Moreover, the bogus claims made against bilingual education in terms of the effects on English language acquisition and academic achievement by the English for the Children group have been thoroughly refuted, as I have already pointed out in this volume. The point of these examples is to note the appeal to notions like equality and opportunity, and the extent to which their achievement promotes freedom and ‘full public individuality’, that is, an appeal to liberal ideology. These examples consist of a series of doublespeak propositions: coerced linguistic assimilation makes one more free; monolingualism increases autonomy; and officializing English (or any other language) in a linguistically diverse state is neutral. In the end: Those who promote negative language policies ignore the historical record that demonstrates that the endeavor to plan language behavior by forcing a rapid shift to English has often been a source of language problems that has resulted in the denial of language rights and hindered linguistic access to educational, social, economic, and political benefits even as the promoters of English immersion claim the opposite. (Wiley & Wright, 2004: 144)

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Conclusion: A Thicker Conception of Liberalism is Required In this chapter, I have provided an overview of liberal political theory. In that overview, I focused on three ideals foundational to political liberalism: freedom, autonomy and neutrality. I then made a distinction between formalist and actualist liberalism, focusing my attention on the former in order to develop the latter more fully in subsequent chapters. Both strands of formalist liberalism – libertarian and neoconservative – should be dismissed as viable promoters of democracy generally because they either betray or provide a far too thin account of the tenets of liberalism to be justifiable. As concerns language policy specifically, both strands reflect language negative liberalism, ultimately decreasing the range of linguistic options societally, thus attenuating both freedom and autonomy and promoting non-neutrality. From these iterations of liberalism, the achievement of positive language policy would seem to turn on the question of whether or not access to and maintenance of one’s own language is a right or, more specifically, an inalienable right. Those who defend language as a right often do so by quasilegal authority. Eliana Rojas and Timothy Reagan argue, for example, ‘The right of the child to an education in his or her native language is violated on a daily basis throughout the United States, of course, but even beyond this, the denigration and exclusion of languages in both school and society constitutes an on-going assault on meaningful linguistic human rights (Rojas & Reagan, 2003: 15). Given that the right here is assumed and no argument is provided as to why education in one’s native language is a right, I find the argument philosophically unconvincing, even as I am sympathetic to it. Presumably, the authors intend the foundation of this claim to be certain international declarations. But by what authority are such declarations made? Certainly, the United Nations is a political, international authority with a certain amount of power. This is not to what I refer by ‘authority’. Basically, Rojas and Reagan, relying on ‘declarations’, are forced into a tautology: children have a right to bilingual education because language is a right because there is such a thing as linguistic human rights (as declared by various organizations).8 More convincingly, political philosophers, such as Will Kymlicka and Stephen May, argue from the philosophical authority of liberal political theory. Such philosophical work is what gives impetus to the declarations upon which linguistic human rightists need rely. Thus, the question of whether liberalism supports language as a right or not is tackled mainly in

Formalist Liberalism and Language Policy  41

debates around the ideal of ‘linguistic human rights (LHR)’, the arguments of which I take up in Chapter 4. Prior to doing so, it is necessary to note that LHR derive from a somewhat different variety of liberalism: an actualist liberalism that takes communities seriously into account, while applying liberal political theory toward the end of justifying some rights for some groups. I take up this discussion next.

Notes (1) Elsewhere, I explore how neoliberalism affects language policy. See Petrovic (2005). (2) This is not to suggest that the notion of negative freedom was elaborated by Berlin. Arguably, some notion was around well before the Christian era. In Politics (III, ix), for example, Aristotle argues for the virtuous state, ‘not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange’. Here he seems to be expressing a notion, more skeletal than contemporary notions perhaps, of negative freedom. (3) This is not to suggest that there aren’t other important views on the state of nature or upon the role of government given that state. We might consider Hobbes’ contention that the state of nature is a state of war, lack of morality and fear, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Rousseau’s description of the noble savage. It is to suggest that Locke’s ideals occupy liberal political theory in a dominant way. (4) Admittedly, the inclusion of neutrality in matters of language policy may stretch the concept to the extent that neutrality typically relates to moral and metaphysical beliefs surrounding ‘the good’ and the imposition of certain beliefs on others. Nevertheless, it is used throughout the diversity literature in the way I invoke it here. (5) Republicans and Democrats, for example, control the Presidential Debate Com­mission and can control who is or is not invited to participate. The Debate Commission was formed in order to wrest control from the League of Women Voters, who tended to allow too much participation and too many difficult questions. (6) A significant part of this section is from Petrovic and Kuntz (2013). Reprinted with permission. (7) Of course, there may be a slippery slope here, to the extent that status planning influences acquisition planning. (8) Another declaration of sorts that Rojas and Reagan refer to is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. They write: ‘insofar as the case of Spanish speakers in the southwest are concerned, given the stipulations agreed to by the United States and Mexico in the “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo” in 1848, one could certainly argue (as have some Chicano civil rights advocates) that common practice remains to some extent a treaty violation’ (Rojas & Reagan, 2003: 9). It is difficult to see how this argument can be made, since the Treaty never mentions language. The arguments may be based on article VIII of that treaty, which states, ‘Those who shall prefer to remain in the said territories may either retain the title and rights of Mexican citizens, or acquire those of citizens of the United States’, or on article IX, which guaranteed former citizens of Mexico ‘Free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and … free exercise of their religion’. Since Mexico does not have and did not have at the time an official language, it is hard to see how it would have been seen as a right.

3 Saving Liberalism: Communities, Language, and Schooling

Introduction In the previous chapter, I presented an overview of liberal political theory and some of its fundamental tenets. This led into the discussion of a variety of liberalism I called formalist liberalism. Finally, I reviewed the language negative policies that this variety of liberalism potentially and/or really generates. Despite such policies of formalist liberalism in the United States, it is important to note that Hispanic leaders organized quickly against the English-only backlash. In 1985, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Spanish American League Against Discrimination (SALAD) joined forces to launch a campaign known as English Plus (Crawford, 2004). Attracting more than 50 other organizations opposed to official English and the English-only movement, the English Plus campaign resulted two years later in the formation of the English Plus Information Clearinghouse (EPIC). EPIC’s main purposes were (1) to foster the development of the second or multiple language skills of everyone and, especially, (2) to promote the retention and development of a person’s first language. Language policy actively seeking to promote bilingualism, as proposed by English Plus, would indeed be historical change. English Plus represents a policy position that would promote transformation by providing second language instructional programs at all school grade levels, especially through effective approaches such as bilingual education for both language minority and language majority students. While the goal would not be to de-emphasize English, the transformation here would be an emphasis on individual bilingualism never before pursued in the United States. Such policies also derive, I will argue, from liberalism, what I call actualist liberalism, and more defensibly so. While the promotion of individual bilingualism is an important step toward making concepts of liberty and 42

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autonomy more robust, it is insufficient. For opportunity to learn requires incentive and this requires a community that provides a rich context of choice. Therefore, it is important to problematize an overemphasis on individual­ism generally, which is put into starker relief vis-à-vis issues of language specifically. To do this, I briefly review the important political theory of communitarianism. Subsequently, I consider a more robust theory of liberal­ism that takes into account the very legitimate communitarian concerns regarding it. Will Kymlicka has taken on this task in prior projects, namely in his Liberalism, Community and Culture (1991) and Multicultural Citizenship (1995). I therefore borrow heavily from Kymlicka. This work is nicely supplemented by the liberalism of John Dewey, on whom I also rely in this chapter. Having outlined the points of a more robust liberalism, I conclude this chapter by arguing that liberal-communitarians, among whom I place Kymlicka, do not completely resolve my concerns around issues of language policy.1 I provide a specific example of where Kymlicka fails and argue that a different communitarian tack is required. Specifically, I argue that a broader notion of ‘community’ vis-à-vis language minority groups is required to carry on toward a post-liberal philosophy of language policy.

The Communitarian Challenge to Liberalism As Coulombe summarizes it, ‘the underlying dispute [between liberals and communitarians] is whether those goods that embody deep [cultural] attachments receive enough recognition in liberal frameworks of rights’ (Coulombe, 1995: 41). Communitarian critics contend that this attention is lacking and argue, specifically, that the liberal focus on the individual ‘does not sufficiently take into account the importance of community for personal identity, moral and political thinking, and judgements about our well-being in the contemporary world’ (Bell, 1993: 4). Such a focus is ill-advised, argue communitarians, because it assumes that the interests, values and ideals of the good life are totally determined by a culturally unencumbered self, giving too little regard to the fact that interests and so on are developed socially. Communitarians reject the idea that a person can be detached from or can detach herself from the community that has provided her social identity. In this vein, Sandel argues that: we cannot conceive ourselves as independent in this way, as bearers of selves wholly detached from our aims and attachments … certain of our roles are partly constitutive of the persons we are … if we are partly

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defined by the communities we inhabit, then we must also be implicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities. (Sandel, 1991: 248) Here, Sandel, as do other communitarians, rightly holds a thick conception of ‘attachments’. Recalling the discussion from Chapter 1, Clifford Geertz offers a similarly thick look at culture in his notion of ‘primordial attachments’. He defines a primordial attachment as something that stems from the ‘givens’ – or, more precisely, as culture is inevitably involved in such matters, the assumed ‘givens’ – of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that stems from being born into a particular language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves. (Geertz, 1963: 109) Given this thick conception of the attachments that members have to their communities and cultures, it is right to conclude that these attachments do not receive enough attention within some interpretations of liberalism. Rehearsing the line of argument from the previous chapter, Arthur Schlesinger, for example, opines that the ‘American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves’ (Schlesinger, 1992: 134, emphasis added). Such views ignore the context of choice. They ignore the communities within which choices and options are made available. Thus, it should be noted, on the other hand, that over the past 50 years, the focus on individual freedom within liberalism has led to a disregard of the social milieu that shapes in important ways the choices available and conditions necessary for individuals to act on their freedom. Proper recognition must be made of both our deep attachments and our obligations to the communities, cultural and otherwise, that shape our choices. Given the power of these attachments, it is unreasonable (and, ultimately, undemocratic) to demand that any group of people give them up or replace them. For people have ‘shared final ends and they value their common institutions and activities as good in themselves’ (Rawls, 1971: 522). Consider a specific application of Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’. Imagine that noone knows the culture that she or he will be born into and imagine that these cultures will engender in each of us the deep attachments that

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Geertz describes. Under this veil, we would surely reject any notions that would lead to the empowerment of one cultural group to force any other cultural group(s) to abandon their cultural attachments – for we may be members of one of the latter groups.

The Problem with the Communitarian Critique The problem with the communitarian view is that it ‘denies that our essential interest in having a good life can be conceived of as potentially different from our interest in the goods internal to the communal relations and practices we’re currently situated in’ (Kymlicka, 1991: 100). Contrary to the communitarian claim, liberals recognize that the self is culturally encumbered and that people have strong attachments. The difference is that communitarians seem to believe that that encumbrance is inescapable, because the self is constituted by its communal ends. ‘Liberals, on the other hand, insist that we have an ability to detach ourselves from any particular communal practice. No particular task is set for us by society, and no particular cultural practice has authority that is beyond individual judgement and possible rejection’ (Kymlicka, 1991: 50).2 If this were not the case, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to criticize and to change community norms. If a woman’s identity were constituted, for example, through sexist community norms, most women today would still accept the misogynous maxim to remain ‘barefoot and pregnant’ or to continue the practice of female circumcision in some cultures. Thus, the communitarian position may be morally and politically dangerous to the extent that it provides no clarification of how to deal with internal criticism of a community’s practices, especially unjust ones. In other words, while ‘communitarians worry about the concentration of power in both the corporate economy and the bureaucratic state, and the erosion of those intermediate forms of community that have at times sustained a more vital public life’ (Sandel, 1991: 248), they ignore the fact that concentration of power within these intermediate forms of community can become equally oppressive. It is because communities have the potential to limit the freedom of individual group members to question and revise community norms that a liberal theory of minority rights ‘accepts some external protections for ethnic groups and national minorities, but is very skeptical of internal restrictions’ (Kymlicka, 1995: 7). In other words, it is not unreasonable to expect groups to make their cultures more consistent with the demands of liberal democracy, even (to communitarians) or es­ pecially (to liberals) demands that respect and promote individual rights to question and seek to change community norms. For, simply put, there are

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some attachments and community norms that detract from democracy and human flourishing.

A Communitarianized Liberalism The communitarian critique of liberalism requires a serious response and, to some degree, a realignment of the liberal ideal to meet the critique. It does not, however, require abandoning liberalism. Even though writing (in 1939) specifically about ‘the American democratic tradition’, John Dewey’s description of that democracy is certainly relevant more broadly. It is the case, he noted, that democracy is moral – not technical, abstract, narrowly political nor materially utilitarian. It is moral because based on faith in the ability of human nature to achieve freedom for individuals accompanied with respect and regard for other persons and with social stability built on cohesion instead of coercion. (Dewey, 1989: 124) Here, and as per Chapter 2, the individualism that communitarians condemn is invoked. However, it is a mistake to see individualism and communitarianism as an either/or political proposition. Kymlicka (1989, 1995) argues that post-war defenders of the liberal tradition have been so eager to promote the overarching value of individual freedom that they have virtually disregarded the communities in which individuals flourish. Indeed, as early as 1927, Dewey, even given the import he placed on individualism as evidenced above, pointed out that the tendency to equate democracy with individualism and individual freedom makes the ideals of fraternity, liberty and equality ‘hopeless abstractions’, by isolating them from communal life (Dewey, 1927: 149). Contemporarily, the goal in liberal democracies has been to promote the freedom of individuals qua citizens, that is to say, as members of and participants in a particular nation-state. But, as Benedict Anderson (1983) would put it, this is an ‘imagined community’. Policy that views citizens narrowly defined by this framing ignores the smaller, real communities that give individual lives meaning and this is particularly important to recognize in culturally plural nation-states. The omission of this point by post-war defenders of liberalism should not be seen as an inherent flaw of liberalism generally. It is a neglect that requires that we recast liberalism, not reject it. The liberalism upon which our liberal democracies rest must not only promote individual freedom but also the flourishing of cultural groups, because ‘human beings become who they are as individuals only as members

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of groups’ (Schmidt, 1993: 82). That is to say, our cultural attachments help to define who we are as individuals. This is because it is through our cultural group membership that the choices that we make as individuals (and the estimations of their value) are made available to us. Kymlicka is worth citing at some length here. He observes that: Different ways of life are not simply different patterns of physical movements. The physical movements only have meaning to us because they are identified as having significance by our culture, because they fit into some pattern of activities which is culturally recognized as a way of leading one’s life. We learn about these patterns of activity through their presence in stories we’ve heard about the lives, real or imaginary, of others. They become potential models, and define potential roles, that we can adopt as our own. From childhood on, we become aware both that we are already participants in certain forms of life (familial, religious, sexual, educational, etc.), and that there are other ways of life which offer alternative models and roles that we may, in time, come to endorse. We decide how to lead our lives by situating ourselves in these cultural narratives, by adopting roles that have struck us as worthwhile ones, as ones worth living (which may, of course, include the roles we were brought up to occupy). (Kymlicka, 1991: 165) Now, this view of the role of the cultural community is distinct from the communitarian view, since ‘the primary good being recognized is the cultural community as a context of choice, not the character of the community or its traditional ways of life, which people are free to endorse or reject’ (Kymlicka, 1991: 172). Given the importance of cultural membership as a context of choice and, therefore, to the promotion of individual freedom, the protection of minority cultures and the recognition of the importance of groups is a consistent part of liberalism. In other words, by refusing to see the importance of communities to individuals, we create a bogus dichotomy between individuals, whose freedom is the raison d’être of liberalism, and the groups that help to forge their individual identities.

Recasting liberalism to incorporate community Earlier, I mentioned the imagined community in contrast to ‘smaller, real communities’. In culturally plural societies, liberalism must be robust enough to secure recognition of two types of community. First, there is the political community,3 which we might take as part and parcel of Dewey’s (1902) discussion of the great community and what we would typically

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refer to as the nation-state. Within this community, individuals ‘exercise the rights and responsibilities entailed by the framework of liberal justice’ (Kymlicka, 1991: 135). The political community also provides structures for free interaction, ‘ordering the relations and enriching the experience of local [communities]’ (Dewey, 1927: 211). In order for such interaction and enrichment to occur, all groups must be assimilated to ‘a socialism of the intelligence and of the spirit’ (Dewey, 1927: 383). This socialism involves acceptance of the ideal of a larger community (political community or nation-state) in which citizens share a common understanding. Part of this common understanding should be based on the ideals of liberalism. While assimilation to this common understanding is required, it is completely consistent with the existence and maintenance of myriad local communities – be they religious, linguistic, ethnic or cultural. For the great community ‘can never possess all the qualities which mark a local community’ (Dewey, 1927: 211).4 The second type of community is the cultural community (or communi­ ties) defined by the shared cultural characteristics of its members. These characteristics include a shared history, religion, language and customs. It is within this community that individuals ‘form and revise their aims and ambitions’ (Kymlicka, 1991: 135). That is to say, they enact their autonomy. Thus, it is necessary in liberal democracy to accept, as Rawls (1996) argues in response to critiques of his theory of justice, a criterion of ‘reasonable pluralism’. As Rawls maintains, in order to achieve overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice – à la Dewey’s great community – we must accept the fact of ‘reasonable pluralism’. People inevitably have comprehensive views of the good and all reasonable ones must be accepted. In other words, à la negative freedom, in the pursuit of their view of the good life individuals must respect the pursuits of others, even when these differ significantly. In the United States, such communities include many indigenous populations, including the myriad Native American nations in the contiguous states, the Inuit, and native Hawaiians. We could also include a number of immigrant communities such as those of Chinatown and Little Italy in New York, Little Saigon in California and Cuban districts in Miami. Recognizing these distinct local communities, assimilation to the ideal of the great community should not require sacrificing one’s cultural heritage, including language. For some people, those born into or completely assimilated to the dominant culture, the two communities discussed seem to be one and the same. However, a source of tension in culturally plural societies is that for many people these communities are not the same. In such societies,

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members of the culture of power, in what one might call application of a grand or great communitarianism, often demand the assimilation of minority groups to the majority culture, as per formalist liberalism. In fact, they typically demand assimilation to the political community, not recognizing or disregarding the fact that their vision of the political community is so culturally encumbered as to pose a threat to minority cultures. Cultural minorities (groups or individuals), in the meantime, struggle to maintain a balance between their loyalty to their cultural community and their obligation to the political community. They struggle to balance the preservation of their culture and sense of who they are while simultaneously recognizing the need to adopt the features of the political community necessary to their political and economic survival. It is this tension that a reconceptualization of liberalism that recognizes these two types of communities seeks to address. On the one hand, we [must] have a common unity, a basis of unity; [we must] have enough common work, common responsibility and common interest and sympathy so that in spite of all these other distinctions we can go on working together. (Dewey, 1923: 516) On the other hand, these commonalities should not be narrowly defined by culture, and the process by which they are realized should not be coercive or subtractive. That is to say, assimilation necessary to the sustenance of the political community need not involve the abandonment or ‘melting’ of minority languages and cultures.5 Unity cannot require such homogeneity in liberal societies. For Dewey was right in his characterization of Americaniz­ ation in the United States: it was not a solution to a lack of national unity; on the contrary, it was ‘more effective in depicting an evil than in setting forth a remedy’ (Dewey, 1916b: 334). Of course, such coercive policies are not uniquely American. Consider historical examples such as French policies in relation to Alsace or Spain’s fervent policy of castellanización, both at home and abroad. For example, Heinze-Balcazar (2010) points out that fervent castellanización in Guatemala, originally a tool of Christianization in colonial times, did not begin to wane until the mid-1980s, with the creation of the Program Nacional de Educación Bilingüe.6 Nevertheless, while such blatantly racist, ethnocentric and coercive forms of assimilation may be more controversial than they used to be, they are certainly alive and well in such things as the English-only movement and recent immigration laws passed in Arizona and Alabama in the United States, or the continued mistreatment of Koreans, zainichi, in Japan and Okinawan Amerasians (see Ide, 2014, for discussion of

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the last). Again, Dewey is eloquent in presenting the problem. He describes how assimilation causes cultural minorities to lose the positive and conservative value of their own native traditions, their own native music, art, and literature.… [The children] even learn to despise the dress, bearing, habits, language, and beliefs of their parents – many of which have more substance and worth than the superficial putting-on of the newly adopted habits. (Dewey, 1902: 377) The kind of unity one embraces determines the means for achieving it. For example, those who supported Americanization programs saw unity as homogeneity; therefore, the assimilatory process had to be subtractive. It required minority groups to give up their cultures and languages in exchange for becoming ‘American’. Liberalism requires that the process of assimilation be additive. It must add the ideals of the great community and democracy to existing ethnic differences and the flourishing of local cultural and linguistic communities, as well as myriad other groups (professional groups, church groups, unions, etc.).

(Limited) Community Rights and Language Policy In the claim that cultural communities must be considered an essential component of a conceptualization of liberalism, I assume that language and an individual’s or cultural community’s use of their heritage language is entailed in this ideal. Minority languages can be just as important to the liberal democratic tradition as cultural communities, for a number of reasons. Language is interwoven with culture and is therefore a primary support for culture. To restate the primary point of Chapter 1, ‘language is not just a neutral medium for identifying the content of certain activities, but itself is content, a reference for loyalties and animosities, a marker of the societal goals, the large scale value-laden arenas of interaction that typify every speech community’ (Fishman, 1986: 175). Because this connection between language and culture will typify every speech community, I hold that primary or heritage languages should be promoted for all language minorities. While liberals have responded to the communitarian critique by recognizing the importance of cultural communities, they fall short as regards the consideration of minority language groups. Therefore, in this section, my purpose is to problematize the dominant communitarianized view of liberalism and the implications for language policy. Joined by that of Stephen May (2008, 2012), Kymlicka’s work continues to feature here.

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On the one hand, Kymlicka (1991) agrees with Fishman and argues that language and culture are indeed intimately linked. On the other hand, Kymlicka (1995) wavers in his commitment to the maintenance of this valuable piece of culture for certain groups. Here he distinguishes between national and ethnic minorities. National minorities are groups that were once self-governing, that are geographically concentrated and that have been forcibly annexed by the larger nation-state. Ethnic minorities include ethnic and racial minorities who do not meet the criteria above, as well as immigrants. Kymlicka advances the view that both groups should be afforded some external protection; but for Kymlicka (1995) there is a clear difference in the types and strengths of the protections each group can demand. He includes language rights among the protections that should be guaranteed to national minorities, arguing ‘we should aim at ensuring that all national groups have the opportunity to maintain themselves as a distinct culture’ (Kymlicka, 1995: 11). Furthermore, this aim requires certain measures of self-government through ‘the explicit recognition of national groups, through such things as language rights’ (Kymlicka, 1995: 71). However, as regards protections for ethnic minorities, Kymlicka’s position is as follows: In deciding to uproot themselves, immigrants voluntarily relinquish some of the rights that go along with their original national membership … immigrants to America have no basis for claiming the language rights or self-government rights needed to recreate their societal culture. (Kymlicka, 1995: 96) Examples of Kymlicka’s approach can be found constitutionally codified in a number of countries. The Constitution of Slovenia (see www.servat.unibe. ch/icl/si00000_.html), for example, gives ‘everyone … the right to freely express affiliation with his nation or national community, to foster and give expression to his culture and to use his language and script’. Further­more, ‘Everyone has the right to use his language and script in a manner provided by law in the exercise of his rights and duties and in procedures before state and other bodies performing a public function’. So, these provisions apply to both national and ethnic minorities. But, consistent with Kymlicka’s approach, greater rights are accorded national minorities, as outlined in article 64: Special Rights of the Autochthonous Italian and Hungarian National Communities. More than a right to ‘affiliate’, these communities are guaranteed the right to use their national symbols freely and, in order to preserve their national identity, the right to establish organisations and develop economic, cultural, scientific and research activities, as

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well as activities in the field of public media and publishing … the right to education and schooling in their own languages, as well as the right to establish and develop such education and schooling. (Emphasis added) This is fair enough. But not all protections for languages need have re-­ creation of societal cultures as their purpose and need not be served by ‘rights’. Apropos, May notes that ‘distinguishing between the rights of national and ethnic minorities still affords the latter far greater linguistic protection than many such groups currently enjoy’ (May, 2006: 266). As May refers to the protection of language minority groups to pursue their linguistic practices ‘in the private domain’ (May, 2006: 266), one assumes that the ‘many such groups’ to which he refers are those under quite dictatorial circumstances, such as, perhaps, the Catalans under Franco. But even there, language use was prohibited only in the public domain. Indeed, protecting private domain use of language is, as May acknowledges, the very least that should be done. But I cannot see why we should see this as an improvement, and it is certainly not what language minority groups should settle for. There are certain language protections that even voluntary immigrants should not have to relinquish.7 These are the protections associated with how to treat ethnic minorities along the way to their integration, as opposed to their assimilation. They are protections that promote participation in the political community while also promoting minority language maintenance. Such protections are at the heart of actualist liberalism, which is and should be a language positive liberalism – ‘invocations or interpretations of liberal political theory and/or specific tenets thereof that support or justify positive language planning’ (Petrovic & Kuntz, 2013: 131). Given the importance of community to self, such protections promote autonomy, making, as argued in Chapter 2, language negative liberalism illiberal. Thus, such language protections are meant to promote freedom beyond the negative sense. To some degree, it is the responsibility of government (statism) to create the conditions for effective freedom. This refers to freedoms, opportunities and/or ‘rights’ that are not just formally available but actually and meaningfully actionable. Certainly, the pursuit, as some would have it, of negative freedom alone results in grossly disparate life chances and a certain level of equality of condition is necessary for equality (see Nielsen, 1985; Rawls, 1971). For Nielsen, ‘substantive legal and political equality [are] in reality importantly dependent on economic factors’ and, therefore, formal legal and political equality ‘are not nearly sufficient conditions for equality’ (Nielsen, 1985: 6). Nielsen’s point is to provide a certain level of equality of condition in order to lessen the huge differences in life prospects – because of power,

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authority or privilege over others – that we currently see. The promotion of the moral power to determine one’s vision of the good life – autonomy – is meaningless if it is not pursuable. Thus, what I am suggesting is that linguistic privilege should be included among the conditions that must be addressed, whether through material resources (e.g. educational materials for language instruction) or language protections. Given this, on the one hand, the fact that May makes strong claims – for instance he declares that ethnic minorities should enjoy ‘active linguistic protection by the state for the unhindered maintenance of their first language’ (May, 2006: 266) – which are then qualified as only ‘potentially’ applicable in the public domain is, I think, problematic. For it seems to not take sufficiently into account the context of choice that serves as hindrance. Formal protections positively affect the context of choice. On the other hand, May’s hesitancy here is understandable, given the strict discourse of rights that tends to saturate these debates. Thus, May is right to point out that arguing that only national minorities may claim linguistic rights ‘is not an argument for simply ignoring the claims of other ethnic groups’ (May, 2006: 267). So what form should such protections take? Should language be a right, for example, or should there just be legal protections? These are questions to which I return in the next chapter. The point for now is twofold. First, Kymlicka’s notion of context of choice should be applied not only to the local community but the great community, such that effective freedom is enhanced. Second, although May (2008, 2012) certainly pays more attention to this than Kymlicka, the delimitation of the two communities – national minorities and ethnic minorities – can lead to overlooking the fact that both these groups include language minorities. Language minorities, just as cultural communities, deserve special consideration and, therefore, the issue of language merits far more consideration. Specifically, there are protections due both national and ethnic minorities as language minorities.

Which Language Protections for Whom? Taking the example of voting (a minimal participatory ideal), language negative liberalism denies language minority adults effective membership and active participation in the political community as citizens. This seems to be a betrayal of even the minimum criterion of negative freedom and certainly undermines effective freedom. This situation is resolved by fairly straightforward means: bilingual ballots, plus possibly some other voter information, such as issues summary sheets, in languages other than English. Such protections benefit both national and polyethnic minorities. For it is not

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clear that they would be included among the rights for national minorities, since they are not absolutely required to maintain their societal structure.8 But effective freedom cannot apply only to participation in the political community. The other arguments presented in Chapter 1 – language as an essential cultural marker and language loss – boil down to a need to promote language maintenance for the goals and purposes of the cultural community and the individuals of which it is comprised. The justification for language maintenance is that language minorities should have some control over their own culture and the rapidity with which it changes or not. Language is a key component here since, as I argued, language shift results in culture and identity shift. Language shift is particularly destructive for people who view their language as the essential marker of their culture. To the extent that the state can be said to have caused or coerced such shift – through official language legislation and monolingual education, for example – this, too, betrays the minimum liberal tenet of negative freedom. But, further, given the take on the epistemic nature of language, a betrayal of the promotion of autonomy is also implicated. For any conceptualization of liberalism to be consistent with the fundamental ideal of individual autonomy, there must be maneuvering space in the decision of who one wants to be. Individuals should have some choice in being able to identify as primarily Korean, Korean-American, or American, for example. Further, this may require identification as a speaker of Korean. Of course, there is no formal prohibition against language maintenance. However, in order to meet the more liberally robust standard of effective freedom, language maintenance cannot be looked on with such benign neglect. It requires some resources. If it can be demonstrated that some adult members of a community have indeed lost their first language, specific resources would be justifiable. But the real concern for language minority communities trying to maintain their languages involves children. On the point of language maintenance and children, Kymlicka (1995) points out that ‘the goal of ensuring that immigrants learn English need not require the abandonment of the mother tongue’ (Kymlicka, 1995: 97). He certainly gives national minorities the rights necessary to ensure this (but not necessarily the resources).9 However, he emphasizes ‘language training’ for integration for ethnic minorities. Here he pays precious little attention to the issue that I have raised of language loss and the consequences of such loss for minority communities, families, and individuals. He thus avoids the fact that language training as it is presently implemented leads to that language loss, especially for children. Kymlicka’s neglect of children is particularly evident and problematic in how his view of ‘polyethnic rights’ plays out for them. He claims,

Saving Liberalism: Communities, Language, and Schooling  55

the children of immigrants do not consent [to the relinquishing of their rights], and it is not clear that parents should be able to waive their children’s rights. For this reason, it is important that governments should strive to make the children of immigrants feel at home in the mainstream culture, to feel that it is their culture. Adult immigrants may be willing to accept a marginalized existence in their new country, neither integrated into the mainstream culture nor able to re-create their old culture. But this is not acceptable for children. It is they who would suffer most from the marginalization, since the parents at least had the benefit of being raised as full participants in a societal culture in their homeland, and can draw on this to add meaning to the practices they seek to maintain, in a diminished and fragmented way, in the new land. Children have the right to be raised as full participants in a societal culture which provides them with a diverse range of options, and parents cannot waive this right. For this reason, if we do not enable immigrants to re-create their old culture, then we must strenuously work to ensure that the children integrate into the mainstream. (Kymlicka, 1995: 215–216) Here, Kymlicka begs the question: why must cultures be re-created as they were in the immigrants’ homeland in order to provide a meaningful context of choice? He seems to suggest that (1) there can be whole cultures and ‘fragments’ of cultures, and that (2) the latter have little importance or can even be harmful to children. Taking the second point first, I suppose that if parents do not allow their children to integrate to a meaningful extent into the mainstream culture, then those children can be harmed and their futures jeopardized. But the conditions under which such a scenario could occur are so extreme as to make Kymlicka’s point moot. As for the first point, it is not clear to me that there is such a thing as a partial culture, es­pecially for children. Miami, for example, is in no way a complete re-creation of Havana. Anglo-Americans say it is far too Cuban and Cuban-Americans probably say it is not Cuban enough.10 Yet it serves as a whole culture and context of choice for those Cubans living there. Adults having arrived from Cuba will see Miami as a ‘diminished’ Cuban culture. But for children, this Cuban-America is or becomes their culture and it is in no way ‘fragmented’ to them. It serves as a rich context of choice and a point of departure to take on the characteristics necessary to function in the political community. Thus, Kymlicka’s proposition that we either allow the re-creation of societal cultures or insist on the full integration of children into the mainstream, dominant culture violates the importance that he places on cultural communities in the first place. It violates his important communitarian-esque reconceptualization of liberalism. For children will have a bond to their

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cultures, even if it has in some ways been diminished for their parents. ­Kymlicka’s point that marginalization from the majority society harms children is well taken. However, he ignores the fact that estrangement from their families, and their ‘fragmented’ cultures, occurs among children and can be just as harmful as marginalization from the mainstream culture. In short, Kymlicka argues that children have the right to be raised as full participants in a societal culture which provides them with a diverse range of options, and parents cannot waive this right. My parallel claim is that children have the right to be raised as full participants in a family and local community, including its culture, which also provides them with a diverse range of options, and governments should seek to avoid undermining this. For this to occur for language minority groups and families, language loss among children must be avoided. The specific protection required here is bilingual education. More specifically required are bilingual programs that most effectively promote maintenance of the first language. But this begs the question of how to operationalize this requirement, given increasing societal diversity. This is another task I take on in the next chapter.

Conclusion: Liberal Democracy Cannot Be Politics as Usual In 1915, Horace Kallen claimed that ‘[o]ur spirit is inarticulate, not a voice, but a chorus of many voices each singing a rather different tune’ (Kallen, 1915: 217). He then asks, ‘What must, what shall this cacophony become – a unison or a harmony?’ Kallen is calling into question here the homogeneity involved in the melting pot versus the maintenance of cultural identities. The liberalism described in this chapter helps us address this question by requiring a certain amount of assimilation. It requires assimi­lation to the ideals of the great community and the liberal democratic principles that direct it. Beyond that, it must allow for cultural maintenance within local communities. Unison versus harmony is not an ‘either … or’ proposition but ‘both … and’. We must avoid falling into the trap of making unity and homogeneity synonymous – be it homogeneity of culture, traditions or language. The political unity of the nation-state requires assimilation to a shared vision of liberal democratic culture. Liberal democracy requires recognition of differences and, indeed, their maintenance within local (cultural and lin­guistic) communities as long as social interaction occurs between communities. For it is through social interaction with peoples of differing backgrounds, races, ethnicities, languages and experiences that expansion of our views of the good life occurs.

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Even though rooted in individualism, recognizing and protecting cultural communities is eminently consistent with liberalism. This is so because it is through communities that individuals develop their understanding of who they are, who they want to be, and the choices available to them. In other words, protecting cultural communities and their languages is more than ‘consistent’ with liberalism vis-à-vis autonomy: it is required. Ferdman sums up this position nicely by noting that ‘[b]y its very nature, culture is meaningful only with reference to the group, yet it is enacted by individuals’ (Ferdman, 1991: 355). In order for genuine equality to obtain and in order for liberal democracy to be upheld, differences must be accommodated, not eliminated. People must be equipped to flourish from and within their particular cultural communities. Flourishing within the cultural community must include some control by community members over the changes that their community undergoes. In many instances, a key to controlling such change is preventing language loss. I am not arguing that the ethnocultural change related to language loss is in principle negative or should not occur. Cultures are not static; they are dynamic. Furthermore, such change is often necessary to liberalize (read: make more democratic) cultures. Take for example the rescinding of laws against homosexuality in England. Changing this characteristic of English culture did not bring down English culture more generally. It only made English culture more democratic (see Kymlicka, 1991, especially chapter 8). The danger is that some people (recall the arguments of Eastman and Edwards from Chapter 1) would try to make the same argument regarding language: language is a ‘characteristic’ of culture, the changing or loss of which does not lead to that culture’s death. Even if this is true theoretically, it is not for people outside the cultural group to decide. For the cultural change that occurs from language loss does indeed represent, for many in the language group, the death of the culture. This is because language is for some groups the essential marker of culture and identity. Some, like Eastman and Edwards, might argue that that is empirically false. If people in these groups were to lose their language, they would probably still identify ethnically or culturally as a member of that language group. This tack is inconsistent with liberalism. What matters are the present sentiments and loyalties of the language minority group, how they are treated on the way to also becoming part of another group, represented by the political community, and the effective freedoms made available to them that promote autonomy (which could include choosing not to maintain one’s ancestral language). Since language shift does not make cultures more liberal, requiring language shift (via English-only laws or other coercive measures) is

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in­defens­ible. Furthermore, given that such measures are often perceived as being discriminatory, and given Rumbaut’s conclusions on the negative effects of discrimination on self-esteem, they are not only indefensible but also unwise. If a given cultural community does not desire or is not ready for language shift, then maintenance of the ancestral language should not be discouraged or blocked. Indeed, resources should be made available to support it.11 Liberalism requires that we strike certain balances. There is a balance to be struck between the protections that cultural communities are granted to thrive and the protections that these communities must provide their members to question community values. There is a balance to be struck between the needs of the political community and the cultural communities within it. The political community can require of its members assimilation to certain ideals (e.g. individual freedom) and procedures (e.g. voting, representative democracy) that help it to remain stable and, in fact, help its members to flourish within it. However, the political community cannot demand that cultural minorities cast off their other attachments that help to define their own conceptions of the good life and promote their flourishing as individuals. I might agree with Kymlicka that ethnic minorities have no basis for claiming the same self-government rights as national minorities, that is, the rights necessary for them to reproduce and/or maintain their societal structures. But, contrary to Kymlicka, ethnic minorities have a basis for claiming certain protections as language minorities toward the liberal end of autonomy. Ultimately, the problem in the approach reviewed in this chapter is that it attempts to apply both a formalist and an actualist conceptualization of neutrality or, recall, in Rawlsian terms, neutrality of aim and neutrality of effect, respectively. The question now is how to operationalize language protections that help to promote a neutrality of effect, as far as possible, not just for national minorities but also for ethnic minorities. In the next chapter, I consider one such approach, that of linguistic human rights, and offer an approach that may lead to some middle ground.

Notes (1) Laitin and Reich label Kymlicka a ‘liberal culturalist’, who ‘marries ethical individualism with group rights for cultural minorities’ (Laitin & Reich, 2003: 89). In the end, I think our labels name a very similar reading of Kymlicka. We differ, however, in our critiques. (2) Contrary to communitarian intimation and the contemporary emphasis on indi­ vidual­ism, the important role that culture plays has been in evident in liberal thought

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for quite some time. Danley (1991), for example, points out the pre-condition of diversity in the liberal theory of John Stuart Mill. (3) ‘First’ refers only to the order in which I treat the two constructs and it is not to imply a meaning of, say, ‘first and foremost’. Indeed, I will state in Chapter 6 that there is a legitimate argument to be made that the political community (read: the modern nation-state) is a (or the) source of the challenges generally attributed to diversity. (4) Dewey calls his ideal of unity by various names: a unified social consciousness, national mindedness, community, and democratic culture (see, respectively, Dewey, 1923, 1916a, 1916b, 1902). (5) Here I refer to the melting pot metaphor that came into common usage in the United States in the early 1900s to describe the process of assimilation. (6) It is important to note that Heinze-Balcazar (2010) also points out that students in bilingual programs outperform students in comparison schools on seven of 10 measures of academic achievement. (7) The notion of ‘voluntary’ immigrant raises another problem for Kymlicka: is all immigration voluntary? If not, and it certainly is not, then where do such immigrants fit into Kymlicka’s approach? Note also that the notion of ‘voluntary’ is a matter of degree and resources. And what of groups that are both voluntary and ‘national’, such as the Mexican community in the United States? (8) As an important side argument, the discussion of loyalty to cultural community and obligation to political community can be reinforcing. The promotion of effective participation not only strengthens a primary good for language minorities but also may have the added bonus of strengthening the political community as well. As Rumbaut concludes from his study of immigrants who had just become citizens, Citizenship [and the rights that that entails, or should entail] matters, over and above nativity. It may be interpreted here as signaling a stake in the society as a full-fledged member, legally as well as subjectively, with an accompanying shift in one’s frame of reference. Indeed, these variables – nativity and citizenship – have far stronger effects on ethnic self-identification than our measure of years in the United States, suggesting that it is not so much the length of time in the country, but rather the nature of one’s sociopolitical membership status that is more determinative of the psychology of identity. (Rumbaut, 1994: 778) On the other hand, ‘respondents [in the same study] who [had] experienced discrimination [were] significantly less likely to identify as American’ (Rumbaut, 1994: 780). Denying citizens effective participation in the political community is tantamount to ‘exile’, as described by Walzer (1983). Such exile is simply not consistent with liberalism and is certainly perceived as discrimination. (9) Even here, national minorities could benefit from my defense of specific protections for ‘language minorities’ more broadly. For, once given the rights necessary to maintain their own cultures (from Kymlicka’s perspective), it is conceivable and probable that national minorities would then also be subject to a policy of benign neglect by the governing structures of the political community. (10) I hope the point stands even as it lacks any real empirical support. Of course, recent immigration laws and perennial complaints about immigrants generally would seem to support the first half of the claim. (11) There are certainly other sources of self-esteem that many would argue should be supported, religious beliefs for example. I am not against teaching about various

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religions in schools. But this is far from the thoroughgoing use of language and culture that I defend. Given that religions have a pre-conceived notion of the good, the use of any given religion would be tantamount to cultural imperialism, since it would necessarily exclude the use of other religions and views of the good life. Catholic schools, for example, would refuse to observe Jewish customs and beliefs. This certainly does not promote the participatory ideal required in liberal democracies. Thus, the burden of maintaining beliefs, ideals, world-views and so on that are undemocratic falls to individuals (parents) and not to the state. Furthermore, religion, unlike language, is not required to learn a school subject. Thus, the exclusion of religion from schools in no way jeopardizes other realized capacities.

4 The Promise and Problem in Linguistic Human Rights

Introduction In Chapter 2, I pointed to particular iterations of liberalism that reveal how liberalism can be interpreted in formalist ways. Ultimately, such interpretations undermine the very principles upon which they rest, becoming far too anemic to do the kind of political work required in diverse democratic societies. One reason for this is the narrow focus of liberalism on the individual. Language issues necessarily involve not only individuals but also communities, given that linguistic flourishing requires a community of speakers. In Chapter 3, I pointed out the ways that some liberals have attempted to rescue liberalism by drawing on communitarian critiques. I agree with the sound argumentation that liberalism is robust enough to handle communitarian concerns, and suggest that liberalism neither entails a hyperindividualism that Bowers (1987) claims nor necessarily detracts from a more relational understanding of democracy (see Thayer-Bacon, 2008, as an example of the latter critique). I also acknowledge that the approach advanced by Kymlicka enhances the discussion vis-à-vis cultural and linguistic pluralism. Nevertheless, this approach, I argued, advances the discussion more as regards cultural minority groups (whether national or ethnic and so comes somewhat short of what I believe is required when we consider not only cultural but also language minority groups. Ultimately, as I suggested, I think the problem here lies in a Janus-faced neutrality. In this chapter, then, I turn to a focus on the liberal tenet of neutrality and a discussion of how it informs language policy. If neutrality of aim is too formalist to help direct liberal democratic language policy and if a dual application of neutrality (neutrality of effect applied to some groups and neutrality of aim applied to others) betrays the liberal ideal for language minorities more broadly speaking, then the answer should lie in a stricter 61

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application of neutrality of effect. But this is not the case. I argue that the liberal approach that most promotes neutrality of effect, linguistic human rights (LHR), is ultimately untenable. Rejecting the formalist antipathy to statism, and unlike the liberalcommuntarian approach, which discriminates between different kinds of cultural groups, LHR instead presents an enhanced statism as regards inter­ vention in the form of protection of language maintenance for everyone. LHR are appealing, given that, in the realm of the educational ‘rights’ of language minority students, we are not making progress, at least not in the United States. For example, at the time of writing, 31 states have established English as the official language (despite or because of a lack of such recog­ nition federally) and successful attacks on bilingual education have severely restricted students’ LHR in education. Such linguistically regressive policies may be evidence that people do not view language as a human right. Or, if they do, they draw an arbitrary line between public and private, with language (minority languages at least) typically left in the private realm. From one understanding of neutrality, most people believe that as a private activity everyone has the ‘right’ to speak and maintain their language, regardless of its status in the larger community. The public/private binary is certainly false; nevertheless, it forces us to address the question of whether or not language should be a ‘right’ in both the public and the private sense. It would seem that a thoroughgoing neutrality of effect would require this. Language, then, should be a right for all language minority groups, argue champions of a LHR approach, not just for national minorities. Building on Alan Patten’s (2003) notion of ‘prorated official multi­ lingualism’, I problematize the LHR approach to language policy to the extent that the received view of the inalienability of rights raises concerns about the capability of providing for them, raising the potential for states to be held to political ransom. What is required is a hybridized notion of neutrality of effect as ‘even-handedness’ (Patten, 2003), which helps to establish background fairness (Patten, 2003; Jacobs, 2004) for language minority groups to pursue their linguistic goals, within reason.

Why Linguistic Human Rights? In two critiques of Kymlicka that apply also to LHR, David Laitin and Rob Reich argue, first, that Kymlicka is ‘over-hasty [in his] assumption that all members of cultural minorities value membership in their own culture above all others’ (Laitin & Reich, 2003: 90). Here Laitin and Reich are simply wrong in their reading of Kymlicka. After all, heterogeneity within groups among individual members was the whole point of being cautious

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about internal restrictions. Second, they argue that the distinction between internal restrictions and external protections ‘fails when we consider the problems involved with the intergenerational transmission of language’ (Laitin & Reich, 2003: 90). Here, their argument is one of social mobility: to the extent that parents may reduce the opportunities of children to exercise their freedom and broaden their opportunity in the great community by learning the dominant language, the external protections that are the foundation of the local community become, in fact, internal restrictions against children. And because Laitin and Reich, in illiberal fashion, believe that ‘the consumption of a language community as a public good requires no defence’ (Laitin & Reich, 2003: 94), they apply a formalist neutrality that, to my mind, boils down to politics as usual. Their solution is for individuals with similar views on the necessity of language maintenance to come together in the political process and reveal their preference through action in democratic contestation. Much more convincing in this vein – because he pays greater attention to language and has an antipathy toward their ‘consumption’ – is Lionel Wee’s (2011) nuanced description of ‘deliberative democracy’ in language policy.1 One of Wee’s concerns about rights is that they rely on the state, or other institutional structure, for their recognition and provision. Here we again see the concern over statism, albeit from a different vantage point than that of formalist liberals. The point for Wee is that rights rely on the very institutions often responsible for their violation in the first place. À la Laitin and Reich, Wee’s deliberative democratic approach is not aimed at the state but works ‘through the whole of civil society’ with openness and fluidity allowing different social groups ‘to improve their lot’ (Wee, 2011: 187). Furthermore, as noted, it pays more attention to language in the sense, as Wee argues, that deliberative democracy must permit the kind of metadiscourse about its own processes such that it includes not only reflection upon who is and who is not participating but also how, that is to say, in what language(s) or varieties. This would, in optimistic turn, encourage broader participation in a greater number of languages and varieties, such that attitudes about language change – presumably in favor of language pluralism. I am certainly sympathetic to the ideal that everyone would/should be involved in the deliberative process of deep democracy, abiding by august principles of reflection, reason, recognition and/or reciprocity. But this cannot overturn the fact that those people who benefit from their membership in the culture of power are unlikely to begin such a process and are less likely to pursue it to the extent that it troubles the very institutions of their power. Therefore, the approach of appealing to debate, reason and

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engagement – hallmarks of liberalism – is somewhat convenient and may even be elitist, to the extent that it ensures the status quo or worse. In other words, it is just as likely that such deliberation results in reinforcing attitudes against language pluralism. This is precisely what happened in Arizona, California and Massachusetts, where, as I pointed out in Chapter 2, the political activities of the group English for the Children led to a severe curtailing of bilingual education in those states. In this case, the deliberative process led to decisions made primarily by the language majority community. In other words, the group least affected by the decisions had the far greater say in their determination. Language minority groups, especially Latinos, who voted overwhelmingly for bilingual education,2 suddenly had little or no say in determining the way in which their communities would evolve, at least educationally and linguistically. From the perspective of language-in-education policy, this dilemma is not as complicated to remedy as it seems. Bilingual education promotes both native language maintenance (or revival) and learning the dominant language. Drawing on a single piece of evidence (an unpublished doctoral dissertation), Laitin and Reich dismiss bilingual education as a solution since the data are ‘ambiguous’ (Laitin & Reich, 2003: 94). A more thorough review of this literature reveals that both the theoretical work and the empirical evidence support the superiority of bilingual over English-only approaches as regards the promotion of academic achievement, English language learning, and certainly bilingualism – see, for example, Cummins (1999), Rolstad et al. (2008) and the many studies cited in Chapter 1.3 Now, this argument will not appeal to Wee, who, rightly, points to the problematic nature of viewing language in the essentialist way directed by liberalism – an issue I address directly in Chapter 5. Nevertheless, regardless of how we conceptualize language, language minority communities cannot be provided merely with a greater space for democratic contestation. They must be provided a greater space for effective freedom, effective democratic contestation. As regards questions of justice around language, effective democratic contestation requires that there be a reasonable chance of success in implementing practices and policies furthering language maintenance. This will require certain external protections within political processes, given that extant processes are generally aligned to the satisfaction of monolingual English-speakers. This will require a much more actualist interpretation of neutrality. Again, the most thoroughgoing version of this comes from LHRists.

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What Does LHR Require? While Laitin and Reich ‘demand’ that language minority parents provide their children other opportunities (i.e. learning the dominant language), Skutnabb-Kangas points out that, as regards language-in-education policy: All this coercion by researchers and the state is seemingly only needed in relation to minority parents. Dominant group parents seem to have a self-evident right to have dominant-language medium education only (with no foreign languages on the curriculum) for their children; these are allowed to become and remain monolingual. (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2003, n.p.) In short, language majority parents are neither irrational nor do they ‘violate the liberal principle of autonomy’, as Laitin and Reich argue in relation to language minority parents, by handicapping their children with mono­ lingualism. Following from this kind of rational choice argumentation, language loss or shift or consumption becomes a natural process for liberals of this sort. It is simply the way that societies function. It would also follow, as Lin and Martin observe, that, for example, ‘we see the local communities in Hong Kong voluntarily choosing English-medium schools for their children despite the fact that many of these children can hardly function in an English medium classroom’ (Lin & Martin, 2005: 11, emphasis added). But this is not natural, not reasonable and not simply an outcome of deliberative democracy. While it is not irrational for parents to make ‘choices’ in this vein, such choices are demanded by culturally and linguistically hegemonic forces propped up by global capitalism, among other things.4 In other words, such choices are made within attenuated contexts of choice, not robust democratic contexts in which effective opportunity or real choices are available, resulting in linguistic imperialism, that is, ‘the expansion of a small number of privileged languages at the cost of a large number of others’ (Muhlhausler, 1994: 122). Given the anemia of these more formalist approaches to linguistic justice, LHR presents as another ideal that derives from liberal theories of political rights. The most sacred freedoms of liberal democracy (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of conscious, political participation, etc.) are codified as rights. For Skutnabb-Kangas, human rights ‘are supposed to be ONLY those rights which are so fundamental for a minimum of dignified life that no state is allowed to violate them’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2004: 132, original emphasis). This includes language, an ‘intricately interlocking

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element’ of civil, political, economic, social and cultural inalienable rights (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995). This formulation of LHR is formulated along the same liberal-­ communitarian perspective described previously. At the individual level, this right should, as they argue it, guarantee that everyone may: • identify with their mother tongue(s), and have this identification accepted and respected by others; • learn the mother tongue(s) fully, including at least basic education through the medium of the mother tongue; • use [the mother tongue] in many (official) contexts;5 • learn at least one of the official languages in one’s country of residence. (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995: 488) At the collective level, these individual rights suggest other rights, namely: • to use develop [sic] their language and to establish and maintain schools and other training and educational institutions, with control over the curriculum, and with teaching through the medium of their own languages; • to representation in the political affairs of the state, and the granting of autonomy to administer matters internal to the groups … with the financial means to fulfil these functions. (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995: 488–489) Furthermore, these sets of rights help to ensure the additional right that ‘any change of mother tongue is voluntary, not imposed’ (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995: 500). Note that Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas’ more general use of singular pronouns such as ‘everybody’ and ‘s/he’ throughout their work is probably not accidental but dictated by the liberal frame from which their notion of rights proceeds. Liberalism speaks, by definition, to individual rights. Indeed, these authors emphasize that ‘The primary goal of all declarations of human rights is to protect the individual against arbitrary, unjust, or degrading treatment’ (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995: 484, original emphasis). Of course, a language is dependent upon a community of speakers to give it meaning and purpose or, as Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1995: 485) argue it, language is the kind of right that ‘presuppose[s] [its] social

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and collective exercise’. Thus, just what liberalism means to rights generally and to rights that necessarily, in this case, move beyond the individual is key to this discussion, as it was in Kymlicka’s distinction between national and ethnic communities. Again, my position is, on the one hand, that the national/ethnic minority division gives too little attention, in terms of language positive attention, to these cultural minorities as language minorities. On the other hand, the LHR approach, while giving proper attention in this regard, probably sets a standard that is too stringent. So what, then, is the responsibility of government to meeting which demands, by whom, and to what extent? I start from the position that while the deep deliberative democracy envisioned by Wee should be passionately defended and pursued, it places (or maintains) the greater burden on the less powerful. Therefore, deliberative democracy should not be placed against or as an alternative to some level of statism. It is not an either/or proposition. The point is to balance the firmer language of rights with the more fluid language of deliberation. What, then, is the problem with language rights as LHR?

The Problem with Inalienable Rights 6 The problem that LHRists identify is that linguistic assimilationism seems to be written into the conceptualizations of the social contract of the majority, interfering with rights. On the one hand, I agree that there is an overemphasis (among assimilationists) on responsibilities over rights – the scales being balanced in most conceptualizations of democracy. On the other hand, some claims of ‘language rights’ (among language pluralists) dilute the meaning of ‘right’ to the extent that states can be held to political ransom. What I mean here is that if something is a right, then it seems to me that it must be provided. In some cases, rights require no societal resources beyond those required to maintain negative freedom. Freedom of speech comes to mind here. On the other hand, there are other things that might be considered rights that require additional resources. These tend to be the kinds of ‘rights’ that generate debate as to whether or not they should be a right. But take, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes an adequate standard of living, that is, social security as a basic human right. This is a right that requires additional societal resources. Further, if it is indeed a right, then there should be very little leeway here for states. Thus, the more things that are claimed and recognized as rights, especially those that might require additional societal resources, the more stretched the state becomes to provide them. Therefore, I think it is necessary to reconsider the kinds of work that ‘rights’ can do.

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Randy Hewitt argues that ‘there is no such thing as freedom in general but rather freedom or capacity (power) to do specific things within a given context or set of circumstances’ (Hewitt, 2005: 48). Freedom is a much grander ideal in the abstract; the case is the same, I would argue, for in­ alienable rights. There is no such thing as an inalienable right in general. While states may or should have very little leeway in providing for rights, they always have some leeway. There are many rights that we can agree on ‘in general’. Say, the right to life. But, is the right to life inalienable? Black’s Law Dictionary defines an inalienable right as one that ‘cannot be transferred or surrendered’ (Garner, 2009: 1437).7 Note that the need to include non-transferrability in discussions of such rights is precisely because no rights are inalienable. If they were truly inalienable, the zero-sum game inherent in the concept of transfer would not obtain, since specific ‘rights’ in the abstract do not come in finite quantities.8 James Nickel defines inalienable as meaning that the ‘holder cannot lose it temporarily or permanently by bad conduct or by voluntarily giving it up’ (Nickel, 2006: 4). I think a better word for this notion of inalienable is probably inviolable. In other words, Nickel’s definition suggests a moral absoluteness, immutable even by law. By this definition, inalienability is even less plausible. Going back to the example of the right to life, we take life all the time (and justify it) through capital punishment, war and impoverishment. It would seem, however, the right to vote in a democracy should not be particularly contentious. But this is not the case. Over the course of the experiment that is the United States, for example, the Supreme Court has said both that the Constitution ‘[u]ndeniably’ protects the right to vote in state and federal elections and that the right to vote ‘is not a constitutionally protected right.’ According to the Court, the right to vote is the most fundamental of rights ‘because [it is] preservative of all rights’ and its abridgment must survive strict scrutiny; yet the Court has also insisted that ‘the Constitution … does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one’. (Gardner, 1997: 894) In short, the right to vote is utterly indefinite, it seems. Thus, as much as we might like certain rights to be inviolable or in­ alienable, this is theoretical; practically, it seems that all rights are violable and alienable. Despite this, we can and must grant certain societal goods the rhetorical and often legal heft of a ‘right’, those minimal standards by which societies should operate, making them as absolute as possible. In doing so, we still must recognize that some rights are not feasible in many countries

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(due primarily to lack of resources to uphold them). Nickel therefore argues that ‘standards that outrun the abilities of many of their addressees are good candidates for normative treatment as goals’ (Nickel, 2006: 15). Given that, as I suggested earlier, the point is to balance the firmer language of rights with the more fluid language of deliberation, I think applying this distinction between rights and goals (what I will refer to as the rights–goals approach) is a generative way to approach the issue of language rights. Rights and goals, as well as the rules and procedures by which they should be applied, must be in place, such that the deliberative playing field is brought closer to being level, in order for the disproportionate burden that minority groups already face not to be overwhelming. As suggested earlier, this requires an interpretation of neutrality as ‘even handedness’ (Patten, 2003), which establishes fair background conditions (Patten, 2003; Jacobs, 2004). It is necessary, therefore, to return to the discussion of neutrality begun in Chapter 2, after which I consider two key issues in language policy – voting and education – and when they should be a right or goal and how they should be informed by this actualist interpretation of neutrality.

Neutrality and the Unavoidability of Language Despite probable objections from formalist liberals, just as there is no such thing as freedom in general, there may be no such thing as neutrality. For freedom and neutrality must still play out in specific social and political contexts. Looking back at Rawls’ neutrality of aim, I would argue that it lost some meaning or importance immediately upon Rawls’ dismissal of neutrality of effect. This is so because it is confounded by intention. Recall that the state is not ‘intended to favor or promote any particular comprehensive doctrine’. The idea of a lack of intention here might, in theory, be applied to a state qua state, but not a state qua nation-state. Arguably, most, if not all, governments and their representatives (the symbol and operationalization of the state) engage not just through reasonable political conceptions of justice but also through cultural, religious and other commitments that are always already political. This, recall, was the basis of Rawls’ dismissal of neutrality of effect: the state cannot avoid inculcating certain values or meanings and, in so doing, creating privilege for those people who already share those values and meanings. Thus, neutrality of effect would require that the state take affirmative action to neutralize such effects. Language is unavoidable, as communication must take place. Thus, it is inevitable that states, in the necessary choice of lingua franca(s), will privilege speakers of some language(s) over others and this has effects. For example, it is not necessarily the intention of official language policies to

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coerce the loss of one’s ancestral language. But this is often the effect, es­ pecially to the extent that such policies drive language-in-education policy. Of course, that may, in fact, be the intention, as it has been historically across the globe. Therefore, as Wee points out, ‘this unavoidability [of language] makes it critical that language policies appeal to some notion of language neu­ trality’ (Wee, 2010: 422), even as language seems to be ‘irreducibly illiberal’ (Wee, 2011). So, then, what is a defensible notion of language neutrality and how should it be operationalized? I want to suggest that even though language may be irreducibly illiberal in some idealized notion of neutrality, for instance neutrality of effect, effective freedom requires that steps be taken toward that end. Such steps should help to create a context of choice that serves language positive liberalism. In language planning, increasing the number of linguistic options available, especially to language minority communities, can take quite prescriptive forms. Official language policies that recognize a number of official languages could be one such example. But notice that these prescriptions become illiberal as regards the remaining language minority groups. Thus, Patten’s (2003) liberal neutrality model is instructive here. For Patten, ‘the task of language policy is not to realize some specific linguistic outcome but to establish fair background conditions under which speakers of different languages can strive for the survival and success of their respective language communities’ (Patten, 2003: 366). This seeks to create a kind of background fairness such that all members of society start on a level playing field. Notions of background fairness, however, often refer to a form of status equality wherein people hold the same moral status within a given society.9 This, in theory, then sets up a fair competition. Nevertheless, given the unavoidability of language, a completely level playing field cannot be achieved. Therefore, Patten defends a notion of neutrality as even-handedness, which requires offering assistance to or recognition of the various languages spoken by the citizenry such that the playing field – access to linguistic opportunities and language maintenance – is made as level as possible. This should be seen as part and parcel of what I have been calling protections that promote effective freedom. Essentially, my goal is to wriggle into the rather narrow space between liberal-communitarians who recognize language rights for certain groups and LHRists and the thoroughgoing rights they demand for all language groups. I think this is also the space that May tries to occupy when, as noted in Chapter 3, he views language protections as ‘potentially’ applicable in the public domain. As May (2012) observes, ‘there is an increasing recognition within international and national law that significant minorities within the

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nation-state have a reasonable expectation to some form of state support’ (May, 2012: 204; see also May, 2011). But how should this be reasonably operationalized? I agree with Patten that a prorated official multilingualism might be fruitful.

Rights, Goals, and Prorated Official Multilingualism Consider that in the United States recent surveys indicate that twothirds (67%) of Americans say that those who move to the United States should ‘adopt America’s culture, language, and heritage’. Four-fifths (79%) say immigrants should be required to learn English before they are allowed to become citizens. Large majorities of both Republicans (84%) and Democrats (78%) say that learning English should be required before citizenship is offered (Rasmussen reports, 2005). Attitudes such as these reflect a general belief that English is not only the language for citizenship (you must learn it before becoming a citizen) but also the language of citizenship (you must use English in the practice of many of your rights as a citizen). Reflected in such attitudes is the conception of neutrality held by formalist liberals: providing services in one language for everybody is neutral. Of course, this puts language minority groups at a clear disadvantage in pursuing even basic equality of opportunity. But it also betrays the liberal ideal that I have argued concerning the right of language minorities to have some control over their construction of a version the good life (autonomy) and their ability to pursue it (effective freedom). Neutrality, then, must help to support the achievement of these other liberal tenets. Basic liberal fairness, or even-handedness, in this regard is realized in language policy ‘when people receive services in their own language equivalent in value to their fair claim on public resources rather than when they receive equivalent resources’ (Patten, 2003: 372). This is what Patten means by prorated official multilingualism, which goes well beyond the benign neglect of libertarian laissez-faire liberalism mentioned in Chapter 2 or the similar benign neglect of the deliberative democratic approach of Laitin and Reich, while recognizing the importance of language for all groups, not just national minorities. The problem with prorated official multilingualism is that even though it defends ‘a more restricted set of official language rights’ (Patten, 2003: 372) and is, therefore, more practical than LHR, it continues the language of rights nonetheless. As I suggested above, rights should be reasonably absolute. So how should language policy proceed in light of neutrality as even-handedness and the problem of rights? Still following the general idea of proration, I address this by considering voting and education.

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As concerns the first issue, the indeterminacy of US Supreme Court rulings discussed above notwithstanding, the vote is widely accepted as a right in general. As noted in article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives…. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures. (See www.un.org/en/documents/udhr) Unlike some other aspects of citizenship, the vote is not only a privilege of citizenship but also its enactment is evidence of good citizenship (‘due process’, for example, is only the former). The vote is and should be a right.10 But should bilingual ballots be a right? Chalsa Loo (1985) nicely sums up many of the arguments for and against bilingual ballots in the United States. On the one hand, bilingual advocates (1) assume that immigrants want to learn English and to integrate and (2) argue that bilingual ballots encourage assimilation, prevent discrimination, promote more informed voting and are, therefore, cost-effective. On the other hand, English-only advocates (1) assume that immigrants do not want to learn English and do not want to integrate and (2) argue that bilingual ballots discourage assimilation, represent reverse discrimination, permit the uninformed to vote and are too costly. Notice that none of the arguments for or against bilingual ballots speaks to whether or not voting should be a right. What is subject to dispute here is when and why the right can (should) be violable. This is one of the challenges of the rights–goals approach: ‘it allows the addressee great discretion concerning when to do something about the right and how much to do’ (Nickel, 2006: 16). Voting has meaning only if it is a right not merely to vote, but a right to vote for or against something. At first blush, this would seem to suggest that bilingual ballots, which should provide some explanation of what one is voting for or against, should be a right. While I am sympathetic to this argument and want to say that bilingual ballots are a right, I am reluctant to do so. I am reluctant for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the political ransom argument. I should point out that this argument, when made primarily as a financial cost argument, goes against current legal precedent in the United States. As Guerra points out, ‘Cost efficiency … has not been accepted by the judiciary as a compelling governmental interest sufficient to survive even an intermediate degree of scrutiny’ (Guerra, 1988:

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1434). On the one hand, I concur with the impact of the legal precedent in wealthy countries such as the United States. There is abundant evidence that the provision of multilingual ballots is not so costly as to represent a ‘political ransom’. In the case of the United States (and many other nations), multilingual ballots certainly fall within a cost range that should be compelled. On the other hand, I think the precedent is problematic as a universal, normative position. If something is a right, it must be provided as an effective freedom, it seems to me. This ‘must’ is the rub; it is the reason to appeal to a rights– goals mix. For if a right must be provided (effectively), we have also to consider at what cost. For example, to say that all children have the right to 12 years of free education in an impoverished country may interfere with the more basic right to life (freedom from starvation). It is here, then, that limits to the notion of effective freedom (as driven by ‘right’) necessarily arise. Consider the potential cost of the right to vote in this positive ideal. In fuller iterations, it could come to entail government subsidies to non-English newspapers or other news sources, the dubbing or subtitling of debates in X1–n languages, and the provision of bilingual ballots in X1–n languages at municipal, state and federal levels. Such provisions would certainly go a long way toward creating the material conditions necessary for effective freedom vis-à-vis language and linguistic privilege. Wealthy states should certainly consider all of these options, especially the last. But states struggling to provide even more basic rights are rightly exempt from such provisions, at least temporarily. So where does this leave us as regards bilingual ballots? In order to avoid holding states to a political ransom (e.g. wherein the expense of providing bilingual ballots in, say, a poor country comes at the cost of perhaps more basic rights), compromise is necessary. The vote qua right must be provided at least in the negative sense. The vote in the positive sense (one positive provision being bilingual ballots) should be a goal. I think the 1975 Amendment to the Voting Rights Act in the United States provides an example of a good beginning compromise, even as it wrongly restricts the protection to Alaska Natives, American Indians, Asians and Spanish heritage persons.11 Among other things, the 1975 Amendment states: No State or political subdivision shall provide registration or voting notices, forms, instructions, assistance, or other materials or information relating to the electoral process, including ballots, only in the English language if the Director of the Census determines (i) that more than 5 percent of the citizens of voting age of such State or political subdivision are members of a single language minority…. (Voting Rights Act, Public

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Law 89–110, p. 19: see http://library.clerk.house.gov/reference-files/ PPL_VotingRightsAct_1965.pdf) This 5% rule is a good beginning compromise since it takes cost into account through the criterion of numerosity and is inherently ever-expanding in its reach. I think this is consistent with the idea of multilingual proration. This will not satisfy LHRists. Full, multilingual enfranchisement should be the goal to provide for the exercise of fundamental rights on an equal basis. The 5% rule excludes great numbers of voters from the assistance pledge in the Voting Rights Act. Furthermore, English-only legislation threatens the practices of jurisdictions that voluntarily go beyond the Act’s minimum requirements. Finally, minimal as it is, the Act is under fire from the political right (see Babington, 2006) and in June 2013 the US Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Act requiring certain states (namely those with a history of disenfranchising minority voters) to seek federal approval prior to changing state voting laws. Arguably, education, too, is widely, if not universally, accepted as a right. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, for example: ‘Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages’. To the extent that one believes that the right to vote implies an informed vote, the connection to the right to education should be reasonably clear. More important to my discussion is the connection of the right to education to language rights. Recall that the LHR orientation suggests that everybody has the right, among other things, to ‘learn the mother tongue(s) fully, orally (when physiologically possible) and in writing. This presupposes that minorities are educated mainly through the medium of their mother tongue(s), and within the state-financed educational system’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 502). Elsewhere (Petrovic, 2006), I argue that because of LHR views on dialects and languages (they make no distinction), the burden of their framework is overwhelming and this is an issue I take up in Chapter 5. However, even holding to lay understandings of language and dialect, LHR still face a tremendous challenge in dealing with the immense diversity that already exists from the strict ‘rights’ framework they employ (again, such diversity is increased exponentially when one includes ‘dialect’ among ‘language’ rights).12 In the United States, there is no right to an education in one’s mother tongue per se (just as there is no right to education, despite its general acceptance as such). In Lau v. Nichols (1974), the Supreme Court ruled simply that equal educational opportunity must be provided to language minority students. While the Court ruled that affirmative action must be taken, it suggested no specific remedy. Ironically, as the empirical support

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for bilingual education (over English-only methods) has grown, political support has certainly waned in the United States. Internationally, similar politics can be found. For example, in Australia bilingual education was undermined in the Northern Territories of Australia (Simpson et al., 2009). Despite the empirical research and convincing moral claims for bilingual education (defined for current purposes as education through the mother tongue and a majority language), the position of LHR may not be possible in practice. As a former teacher of English as a second language in Virginia, I recall the representation of 40 different languages in my school district. In most instances, there were very few speakers (in some cases only one speaker) of a given language. This stretches resources quite far – even when the resources are available. However, there is understandably both a lack of teachers who can teach in the necessary languages (given the number of languages) and a lack of materials. Even when there are more significant numbers of students of any given language background, they are probably at different grade levels, and so still stretching the resource problem. So, on the one hand, requiring the district to provide instruction to students ‘mainly through the medium of their mother tongue’ would have been fiscally disastrous, even in this relatively wealthy district. On the other hand, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (see http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=96), there were approximately 4.4 million English-language learners in schools in the United States in 2011/12. The government could provide each of them with a private teacher at approximately $55,000 a year, at a cost of 50% of its current defense budget.13 So, providing every student a bilingual education in this way is certainly within the financial possibilities – although this strikes me as an extraordinarily high cost given other areas of need. However, the fact is that most language minority children are concentrated within certain states and jurisdictions. Thus, individual provision would certainly not be the norm, and the cost – in most cases – is drastically reduced to be on a par with providing English-only education. But such national wealth is not universal. As with bilingual ballots, bilingual education enhances and makes the basic right to education an effective opportunity. Note that it also impacts, in the longer run, the right to an informed vote. As noted, research overwhelmingly demonstrates that bilingual education (using English and the mother tongue as media of content area instruction in the United States) is more effective (in terms of both the learning of academic content and English acquisition) than English-only education. Nevertheless, it is not clear that there is a right to the best or most effective education. Rights, again, tend toward minimum requirements. Thus, one compromise here has been to apply the numerosity criterion of proration as well. Where there is a viable

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number of students who speak the same (non-majority) language at the same or similar grade levels, bilingual education should be provided. In fact, a successful case in point would be the enforcement of the Lau Remedies that resulted of the Supreme Court decision Lau v. Nichols. Until their abandonment by the Reagan administration, the Lau Remedies were meant to keep school districts from choosing minimalist approaches to comply with the decision. Schools were directed to provide bilingual education where numbers made it practical to do so. The stronger goal should be to provide every language minority child with some instruction or instructional aid in their first language. Unlike multilingual ballots, however, there is somewhat greater financial cost to this, which could result in clashes with the provision of other equally important basic rights in poorer countries. In sum, the right to vote and the right to education are basic rights. Both, however, can be enhanced through naming specific goals, such as bilingual ballots and bilingual education. These goals are necessarily ever-shifting, and their setting must take into consideration local (read: national) conditions and the provision of other rights. They should have increasingly stringent criteria for their achievement. The principle of numeros­ity in the provision of bilingual ballots could be strengthened by a principle of declining numerosity. The principle of numerosity suggests that the number of different-language minority groups served expands as the numbers in the group grow, that is, as they achieve a certain percentage of the population. However, since the vote is an individual right, the goal should be to provide bilingual ballots (or translation service) to increasingly smaller groups (and so more people in total). Instead of requiring 100 people to speak language X before bilingual ballots are provided, the goal would be that, within some time period, only 50 people would be required, then 30, and so on, as equality of condition is achieved in more basic areas. This principle of declining numerosity would function equally well in determining the provision of bilingual education.

Conclusion: Language Requires Protections But Does Not Command Rights Rights are a matter of political will and fulfilling their demands is often a matter of economic privilege. As such, and going back to the earlier dis­cussion of inalienability/inviolability, they will always be susceptible to political compromise. This should not necessarily be seen as a problem. Indeed, the determination of the appropriate mix of rights–goals is properly determined through deliberative democracy. However, it does not follow that issues

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of cultural attachment or identity should be subject to such scrutiny and test of deliberative democracy, at least not all such issues. Certainly, not all aspects of every culture are worth saving and can be rightly dismissed (at least by the standards of liberal democracy). The practice of female circumcision and laws making homosexuality illegal come quickly to mind. But, should other, non-illiberal aspects of culture, including language, be subject to the deliberative process? An answer here depends on what kinds of issues the deliberative process might rightly include and the reasonableness of the demands. It is at best problematic for (and I would argue precluded by) liberal theory to open for ‘democratic deliberation’ the question of whether or not people should use a particular language or language variety generally. Given the importance of language, language minorities should be provided with at least some material resources for the pursuit of language main­tenance. This should include not only private language rights (i.e. the right to use the language of one’s choice) but private protections. Private protections might include material resources provided to numerically inferior language groups or individuals, to be used for language maintenance (e.g. tax rebates for educational materials). In other words, I agree with LHRists that language protections should be provided. The problem, I argued, is in the identification of language as an absolute right. On the one hand, such naming would certainly help level the political playing field by giving impetus to the point of deliberation. But this, I think, could be equally accomplished through other legal means by which language is recognized as a goal, in ways that do not hold states to the political ransom once ‘right’ is properly conceived, that is, as absolute. Therefore, broader public protections, such as bilingual ballots or bilingual education, must be considered within a notion of prorated multilingualism. Wee’s (2011) claim is that deliberative democracy is the best approach to address problems of linguistic discrimination, because the process of deliberation is dynamic and able to deal with preferences and assumptions that inevitably change; and this is why his approach is important to the rights–goals approach I advocate (even as I remain skeptical of the power of deliberative democracy, especially when it is carried out on a playing field as uneven as the ones frequently drawn up in language policy). Therefore, protections that Wee might still object to are required nonetheless. This said, Wee and I both remain suspicious of rights, albeit for different reasons. Similarly, Laitin and Reich (2003) argue against a rights approach, including Kymlicka’s more tempered one. For them, language should be seen as morally neutral, to be deliberated – akin to whether or not to provide resources to subsidize a football stadium. While this position should be dismissed, Wee’s position is much more sensitive to language itself – linguistically in terms

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of how language is conceptualized and politically in terms of whether we should be concerned with language communities or speech communities. These are additional formidable challenges to LHR.

Notes   (1) See especially Chapter 8 in Wee (2011).   (2) Two-thirds of Hispanics voted against proposition 227 in California (Tobar, 1999). An exit poll conducted by the Mauricio Gastón Institute showed that 93% of Latinos rejected Question 2 in Massachusetts (Capetillo-Ponce, 2002). No exit poll was conducted for proposition 203 in Arizona.   (3) Laitin and Reich (2003) also criticize the quality of the research in the field. For a response to similar claims see McQuillan (2005).   (4) See Fishman (1991) for other causes. Specifically, Fishman discusses physical and demographic dislocation, social dislocation and cultural dislocation.   (5) Later in this same article (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995) ‘many’ (p. 488) becomes ‘most’ (p. 500). Given that rights do not exist in general and are often a matter of degree, I do not think this subtle difference in language is unimportant.  (6) Much of the following discussion comes from Petrovic (2011), and sections are reprinted with permission.  (7) Black’s also lists ‘unalienable’ as a synonym.   (8) My argument here fails when applied cross-nationally. For example, transferability makes sense in the case of, say, my transferring my right to vote in any given election to a non-citizen. This, of course, begs the question of why non-citizens should not have a right to vote, especially permanent residents but also perhaps others who, in an increasingly shrinking world in these times of globalization, have a legitimate interest and stake in the outcomes of elections in their non-home countries.   (9) See, for example, Jacobs’ (2004) ideal. (10) That is to say, it should be as absolute as possible, but the question of inviolability will still be debated in some circumstances, such as whether or not felons forfeit this right. (11) Recall that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to eliminate literacy tests and other tools of disenfranchisement of African Americans in the south. In effect, the Act ensured people illiterate in English the right to vote; it also recognized the need for some multilingual assistance – secured with the 1975 Amendment. (12) Note that I happen to agree with the LHR position that there is no linguistic reason (only political reasons) to distinguish between a language and a dialect. However, this position, I believe, strengthens my subsequent argument that language in education be ‘demoted’ from a right to a goal. (13) The discretionary defense budget stands at approximately $534 billion, not including the nearly $160 billion in mandatory funding (United States Department of Defense, 2009).

5 Post Linguistic Human Rights?

Introduction In the previous chapter, I argued that the liberal project of LHR is, in some ways, an improvement on liberal-communitarian approaches to language policy (which was an improvement on formalist liberalism). It is an improvement since it recognizes cultural minority communities, be they national or ethnic communities, as language communities writ more broadly, with concomitant linguistic needs and liberally defensible demands. However, LHR may be too demanding upon states, holding them, especially poorer states, to political ransom in the balancing of limited resources. I suggested a rights–goals approach as a potential middle road between liberal-communitarian and LHR approaches. The primary issue up to this point has concerned providing access to ways and means to mother tongue maintenance and a linguistically robust context of choice such that individual and group decisions regarding language maintenance or language shift are made as freely as possible. In distinction, Kymlicka’s primary concern seems to be whether or not different kinds of communities should be provided with the resources (legal and otherwise) to re-create their societal cultures. I have no specific animosity to Kymlicka’s approach in this vein beyond the general concerns about rights approaches and the need for stronger protections for ethnic communities qua language communities.1 The idea of LHR helps create this context of choice, to the extent that it seeks to provide legal recognition to language minority groups. This recognition provides a fulcrum from which counter-hegemonic liberal discourse (juxtaposed to formalist liberalism, which is linguistically hegemonic) might gain pressure. Because of the political ransom problem, I suggested a rights–goals approach would attend to this while still making an argument to establish legal means – other than through the problematic language of rights – by 79

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which to meet the needs of language minorities. LHR is also problematic to the extent that it reinscribes narrow understandings of ‘language’, thereby narrowing the range of linguistic diversity it can address. Ultimately, in order to avoid holding states to a political ransom, not only will a rights–goals approach be necessary in terms of what various language communities can demand of the state, but also political distinctions among languages and the reasonable accommodations that can be provided. I suspect that the first half of this proposition might be rejected by LHRists and the second half rejected by post-structuralists. Nevertheless, there are real political and economic challenges that necessitate both. On the linguistic front, this simple fact requires that we simultaneously problematize any thoroughgoing application of both synchronic and diachronic analyses of language while recognizing the importance of each. It is to these discussions that I now turn.

Liberalism, Linguistic Anti-Foundationalism, and the Problem with LHR Put simply, a synchronic analysis finds language at a given point in its history. It provides a description of the linguistic system at this point, providing a ‘snapshot’ of the language. Thus, in English, we can compare 17th-century ‘thou’ and ‘thine’ with contemporary uses of ‘you’ and ‘yours’. A diachronic analysis traces language across time, noting its changes and development. In other words, it connects the snapshots. I take the naming of languages, even as we may recognize that they are dynamic and ever-changing, to be a sort of application of a synchronic analysis. The mere fact of naming something as French or Spanish or Chinese requires, then, an identification of the aspects of the named that make it what it is. This gives license to the work of the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et Aux Langues de France and the Real Academia Española in Spain, for example, to keep the language what it is and is supposed to be, exemplifying a form of applied synchronicity. These attempts at standardization seem to seek to overcome the dynamic nature of language, the fact that it is ever-changing in response to the myriad uses to which it is put, contact with other languages, use in varied socio-cultural and political milieu, and so on. This kind of corpus planning that comes through the reifica­tion of ‘language’ is highly problematic. As Shohamy argues, ‘if languages are personal, evolving and changing, it also means that issues such as language correctness and language purity and language policy may not be relevant’ (Shohamy, 2006: 9). The point here is to establish that LHR and

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the liberalism upon which they are founded function to shape ‘language’ in ways that the Délégation Générale and the Academia welcome. Having discussed the practical problems that LHRists have vis-à-vis language variety, it is necessary to establish theoretically the way that liberal­ism functions to shape ‘language’, to bring it into being in linguistic­ ally problematic ways. Such an analysis invokes an anti-foundationalist view of language, revealing the linguistically arbitrary but politically and discursively determined distinction between language and dialect, among other distinctions such as vernacular or patois. Such linguistic arbitrariness is revealed through a post-structural lens (and it is this argument that reveals the necessity of the ‘post’ in the title of this project). As Pennycook puts it, post-modernism is ‘a skepticism toward … takenfor-granted categories such as … language, power, policy, or planning’, which should be seen ‘as contingent, shifting, and produced in particular, rather than having some prior ontological status’ (Pennycook, 2006: 63). Postmodern analyses require problematizing, questioning and deconstructing the coordinates set by language. For the purposes of the present discussion, I will focus on the language of language, that is, the language used to talk about language itself (e.g. language, dialect, pidgin, academic language) or what I have elsewhere called the ‘discourse of language’ (Petrovic, 2006, 2013a, 2013b) or what is also related to what Foucault (1972) calls the enunciative field. Lemke (1995) summarizes that the enunciative field ‘specifies, roughly, the rules of use of a statement in various contexts in relation to other statements’ (Lemke, 1995: 30). In other words, words and statements find their meaning within the enunciative field, through their relationship to other terms, constructs and ideas. In this sense, what is referred to as a language has no meaning unless it is constructed among and against other constructs that are not ‘language’. This is precisely why Pennycook (2006, 2010) argues for an anti-foundationalist view of language, as an emergent social act, as opposed to an ontological entity (see also Heller, 2007; Shohamy, 2006). We must recognize that ‘language’ is a signifier – a sign or reference to something a community recognizes and uses as meaningful – but the thing to which it refers, the signified, is the product of social and historical processes. Further, the language of language, the signifiers that we draw on to talk about language, is a force in this process, despite the arbitrariness of the signifiers, constructing as superior (and therefore privileging) certain language varieties, forms, and repertoires. Having already discussed the way that language is discourse in Chapter 1, let me build on this argument through two additional and related notions: discourse and the discourse of language.

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Discourse is a means of authority and social control, an institutionalized way of thinking. In setting the bounds of speech, discourse constructs ‘truth’ and defines our reality in certain ways. Are we speaking of terrorists or freedom fighters? Are you with the President or are you against America? As Foucault illustrates in his Society Must Be Defended, a discourse is not attached to any one subject; it is productive of that subject. Rationality, of the kind sought in liberalism for example, is always historical and contingent, that is, dependent upon discourse. Discourse produces what Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’, which facilitate ‘normalization’. These regimes of truth are a source of power since they limit the conceptual categories of what is, what matters, and what is true. Take, for example, neoliberalism, an ideology that permeates our language. This permeation refers to the idea that the ideology tacks taken-for-granted meanings to the words and ideals we employ and naturalizes them. ‘Democracy’ and ‘capitalism’ or the ‘market order’ become a matched set. Or, worse yet, they become synonyms. As Bourdieu (1998) argues, This fatalistic doctrine [of neoliberalism] gives itself the air of a message of liberation, through a whole series of lexical tricks around the idea of freedom, liberation, deregulation, etc. – a whole series of euphemisms or ambiguous uses of words … designed to present a restoration as a revolution, in a logic which is that of all conservative revolutions. (Bourdieu, 1998: 50) This thesis is similarly laid out, albeit more broadly, by Chet Bowers, who argues that ‘the invisible hand of language appears to be at work in organizing the most basic conceptual coordinates used by nearly all liberal educational theorists’ (Bowers, 1987: 5–6). On the one hand, ‘the power to establish the legitimacy of new names, explanations, and sources of authority involves a partial escape from the embeddedness of tradition’ that liberalism requires (Bowers, 1987: 12). On the other hand, this ‘escape’ simply becomes an instantiation of the larger political aspect of the cultural milieu, limited in this case by the frame of liberalism. This frame is a unique epistemological code that not only shuts out other ways of thinking but also provides the illusion that we are thinking differently. This basic position on the discursive construction of reality can also be applied to language. There is a discourse of language, by which I mean to say that there is a discourse about language as a medium of communication that constructs a regime of truth around ‘language’, a term that is given meaning in relation to other terms such as dialect or patois. This is despite

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the fact, as pointed out some time ago by Joshua Fishman, ‘there is no way to distinguish between a dialect and a language on the basis of objective linguistic discriminada alone, whether phonological, lexical, or morphosyntactic. There is no linguistic tattle-tale gray that gives the dialect away’ (Fishman, 1977: 316). In other words, we cannot reach up into Plato’s cabinet and pull out the form of ‘English’. Nevertheless, just as the example of riviere and fleuve provided in Chapter 1, these terms – language juxtaposed to dialect – are locked in meaning-constructing relationship. It is this relation that constructs ‘language’ in ways that reinscribe status quo power relations vis-à-vis language varieties. Even though there is no real linguistic distinction between language and dialect, anyone on the street will tell you that there is. Furthermore, they will tell you that the former but not the latter is school-worthy (a point to which I return in Chapter 6). A false belief in a pure English (or any other language) form is exactly what any distinction between language and dialect must be based on. The perpetuation of this false belief, this regime of truth, is a sociopolitical, not a linguistic, project. It is precisely for socio­ political reasons that the discursive categories of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ must exist. For without the regime of truth they create, on what would linguistic power rest? Dominant groups would be forced to recognize the linguistic privilege gained by the subsequent ‘truths’ that the language/ dialect truth generates: a language is standard and a dialect is ‘non’ – nonstandard, non-school-worthy, non-existent, except from the mouths of sub-standard people. While this position is applicable across a number of linguistic boundaries, for example Caló or Pachuco and ‘Spanglish’ in the United States or Singlish in Singapore,2 I will illustrate it below through the case of Ebonics. I should point out here that while contemporary debate in this vein focuses on language versus language varieties, historically such notions of linguistic inferiority applied across ‘languages’. Just as one historical example, consider the response of George Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, when asked, in 1902, about the poor living and working conditions of miners. Baer’s response was, ‘They don’t suffer; they can’t even speak English’. This arbitrary hierarchization of languages and language varieties (and, inherently, the placement of their speakers into dominant or subordinate social positions) is part of the social construction of ‘language’. Here, prior to the discussion of language variety and the case of Ebonics, it is important to observe how political discourse, in particular the discourse of liberalism, brings about a particular view of language (see Petrovic & Kuntz, 2013; Stroud, 2010), serving, in other words, to reinscribe a particular discourse of language.

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Liberalism and the Construction of ‘Language’ In Chapter 2, I introduced and defined language negative liberalism as invocations or interpretations of liberal political theory and/or specific tenets thereof that support or justify negative language planning. This was dismissed as anathematic to liberalism. Therefore, I argued in Chapter 3 that liberalism can be of the language positive sort – defined as invocations or interpretations of liberal political theory and/or specific tenets thereof that support or justify positive language planning, that is, language planning or policies that are intended to increase the number of linguistic options. In this vein, language pluralists, both individually and via the institutions they represent, often make broad positive statements promoting language diversity. For example, the mission statement of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) in the United States reads as follows: NABE’s mission is to advocate for our nation’s Bilingual and English Language Learners and families and to cultivate a multilingual multi­ cultural society by supporting and promoting policy, programs, pedagogy, research and professional development that yield academic success, value native language, lead to English proficiency, and respect cultural and linguistic diversity. (See www.nabe.org/NABEMission) The political authority to which NABE appeals to legitimize this mission is liberal political theory, as NABE implicitly invokes such liberal notions as equity and equality of opportunity. The connection here between the appeal to liberalism and the way that ‘language’ is invoked in NABE’s mission should not be lost, for it helps to make Stroud’s argument that ‘political discourses construct and performatively bring into existence a particular view of language’ (Stroud, 2010: 196). The policy recommendation – which for NABE is to provide bilingual or even multilingual education in the child’s ‘native language’ and another language, typically the lingua franca or dominant language of the given society – further reinscribes a particular view of language. Thus, it is the case that some iterations of language positive liberalism – even as they intend to recognize language diversity – can help create and reinforce a discourse of language detrimental to that diversity. First, liberalism functions in the same way as the discourse of language. Certain terms, constructs and ideals hold sway – equality, autonomy, freedom and so on – and take on meaning in relation to each other. Liberalism has a need to name and codify – largely within the language of rights – those things that should or must be deemed to require ‘equal’ treatment. Thus, ‘language’ is

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defined and some things are named as language (Spanish, English, Russian, Chinese, etc.) and other things are not (Caló or Pachuco, Ebonics, Alsatian, Singlish – Singapore English, etc.). If language has ontology, then it is, in this way, a politically constructed one (see Heller, 2007). First, language positive liberalism as invoked by NABE and, as another example, language officialization policies necessarily create linguistic hierarchies, if only due to the practical considerations such as those discussed in Chapter 4. The language positive liberalism invoked in the official bilingualism in Canada or the three-language formula in India or the official recognition of five minority languages (Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani Chib, Sami and Yiddish) in Sweden, while increasing the number of linguistic options, still smuggles in linguistic hierarchy, marginalizing languages not empowered by numerosity or history (indigenous groups, for example, as they are recognized in Kymlicka’s framework or, as in the case of Sweden, minority groups who can be accorded language rights only after several generations of language use). Again, the problems of language positive liberalism above stem from a view of language having prior ontological status. Once this status is challenged, language positive liberalism generally and LHR specifically face even greater challenges. For there are many Englishes (e.g. Singlish, Ebonics, Spanglish) and Spanishes (e.g. Calo, Pachuco, Spanglish) or Swedish (e.g. Rinkeby Swedish). It is the case that some variety is politic­ ally privileged. Not only is some variety privileged (the variety of those in power, frequently referred to as ‘standard’), but other varieties are, in turn, marginalized. As Stroud observes regarding Rinkeby Swedish, ‘[it] comprises a powerful but subtle means for the exclusion and stigmatization of migrants in Swedish public spaces, at the same time that the significance of speaking [standard] Swedish is resymbolized’ (Stroud, 2004: 197). This political privileging and stigmatization assumes an ontology of language despite the fact that ‘languages are not so much ontological systems that precede the utterance as the products of language use sedimented through acts of identity’ (Pennycook, 2006: 71). I do not want to suggest that LHRists are oblivious to the issue I am raising. They are, for example, quick to observe that the designation of language (as opposed to dialect) is as much an issue of power as the designation of ‘official’ languages (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 311). Further, they certainly agree with Fishman’s assertion of the non-existence of some ‘tattle-tale gray’. In spite of this, I am suggesting that LHRists simply cannot redress the negative ramifications of the rights orientation (at least when expressed in inalienable forms). These ramifications are brought into starker relief by the language/dialect conundrum highlighted. The problem

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here, as I see it, is that the post-structural analysis that LHRists rightly recognize simply does not fit into the more structuralist-appealing rights orientation overall. Looking specifically at language-in-education policy, recall that the LHR orientation suggests that everybody has the right, among other things, to ‘learn the mother tongue(s) fully, orally (when physiologically possible) and in writing. This presupposes that minorities are educated mainly through the medium of their mother tongue(s), and within the state-financed educational system’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 502). This, of course, begs an operationalization of ‘mother tongue’, which must now include much more than a foundationalist understanding of ‘language’. Are Singlish or Ebonics mother tongues? Native languages? Should students be educated through these media? Widening the concept of ‘language’, a linguistic necessity, exacerbates the problem that LHRists already have: the challenge of dealing with the immense diversity within the strict ‘rights’ framework they employ. The point for LHR is to recognize legally such linguistic diversity. In order to do so, the object of such legalization must be named, taking us back to a foundationalist view of language and the undermining of linguistic diversity such a move entails. On this point, David Sayers (2009) argues that linguistic diversity is an ideal without definition. What it identifies is the ‘problem’ of language shift or loss caused by dominant languages through a process of linguistic hegemony.3 The solution is education, which requires a two-step process: first, minority languages must be defined; second, these languages must be propagated and their use then measured. In this process, languages are defined as, and thereby constructed as, discrete and severable systems of communication. Indeed, we do not need a linguist to tell us that English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and so on are different languages. Defining something like bilingual education, thus, is fairly straightforward and the idea that children in such programs are provided content area instruction in both their first and second languages is a notion that most people can get their brains around (whether or not they support it being a different matter). It is this kind of approach that LHR necessarily takes. A language positive liberal approach to policy requires defining and naming, begging the question that Pennycook and others raise: ‘If the languages that language policy claims to deal with cannot themselves claim ontological status, what then is language policy concerned with?’ (Pennycook, 2006: 67). Or, as Stroud (2010) notes, ‘rather than asking whether language is an appropriate type of object for a rights discourse … critics of LHR frameworks ask what sort of object/entity language is construed as in terms of rights discourses’ (Stroud, 2010: 197; see also Wee,

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2011, or Shohamy, 2006). Given the sort of object that is typically named (Spanish, English, as above), Stroud’s point raises another question: ‘what categories of speakers have the right to language rights (and under what conditions)?’ (Stroud, 2010: 199). Notice that this is somewhat different from the question Kymlicka addresses as his approach tracks from a foundational perspective of language. Thus, there are two issues that Stroud’s question, as it derives from an anti-foundationalist view, brings to light. First is the issue to which I have already devoted some discussion: the distinctions among languages, language varieties, and dialects. Second is the related but slightly different issue of codeswitching. In plurilingual societies, communication takes place in a number of languages and language varieties. Individual speakers switch from one medium to another based on any number of factors, including the task at hand, location, person(s) with whom they are speaking and so on. Whereas the language/dialect issue is anti-foundational in the sense of disrupting the category ‘language’, codeswitching is anti-foundational in the disruption of the way that we think language should be used. Following Wee’s (2005) lead, both of these points are fruitfully explored through the distinction between a language community and a speech community. Note, however, that both issues raised here, being anti-foundational, are issues inherent to speech communities.

Speech Communities: Language Varieties and Transborder Languaging The notion of a language community assumes both a foundationalist view of language and that a language objectively maps onto a cultural community. A speech community (SC), in contrast, assumes linguistic variability in several ways and here, for discussion purposes, I would divide speech communities into two sorts (SC1 and SC2), as noted above, even as they thoroughly overlap. For a SC1, it is recognized that even something named ‘language’ is dynamic and changing – language without ontology, called into existence, in my argument by liberal discourse generally, but even more specifically by the discourse of linguistics. Given this, any community of speakers will in fact consist of various groups of speakers of myriad language varieties. Finally, any community is linguistically diverse, either in the ways just mentioned, or by virtue of speaking different ‘languages’. For a SC2, it is recognized that different people will use different languages or varieties strategically, at different times for different purposes. Furthermore, people may use their various linguistic repertoires simultaneously.

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Thus it is necessary to ‘consider language in much more naturalistic terms and at the level of daily practices (i.e. in a way that has not initially been framed through a normalizing liberal discourse)’ (Petrovic & Kuntz, 2013: 140). As an example, Stroud provides an interesting transcription of a political conversation between two women traders in a market in Mozambique. The women codeswitch between Ronga, Portuguese and local forms of Mozambican Portuguese. Stroud points out that: millions of speakers, rather than being divided by their multilingualism in African languages, are actually linked into regional speech communities through linguistic continua. This demonstrates the point that purely linguistic demarcation of language or dialects … does not translate into actual boundaries of communication. (Stroud, 2010: 205) Notice, then, that, vis-à-vis SC1, LHR is much more entrenched in the assumptions inherent in language community. For this, Wee (2005) reminds us that LHRists can be criticized for being much more concerned with interlanguage discrimination – the provision of language rights and privileges to certain language speakers and not others – rather than intra-language discrimination – the assumption of superiority of certain language varieties over others. Challenging the ontology of language, Elana Shohamy (2006) refers to different forms of ‘languaging’. Languaging, for Shohamy, refers to multiple ways of representation, of expression, of communication, including food, clothes, architecture, visual images, and numbers. The point, however, is still that ‘language is personal, creative, dynamic, open and free with no fixed or closed boundaries’ (Shohamy, 2006: 20). This point applies equally to SC1 and SC2. For my immediate purposes, it is sufficient to restrict analysis to utterances and communication through a more narrow understanding of language, perhaps along the lines of ‘multilanguage’. Rama Kant Agnihotri, for example, contemns the fact that policy-makers in India ‘believe that children should be educated in “a language”, and that the administration and judiciary should also be conducted in “a language”’ (Agnihotri, 2006: 185). Here, Agnihotri refers to the history of corpus and status planning in India that has led to the imposition of particular ‘high-brow’ language forms to the disregard of the ‘dialectal’ or mixed forms of language that people actually use – also against conceptualizations of both SC1 and SC2. A case in point here is that of the Ebonics controversy in the United States.4

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Language varieties: The case of Ebonics Ebonics, or Black English or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), is a variety of English used in both spoken and written forms in the United States. A perennial question regarding AAVE concerns its origins. Linguists working with hypotheses addressing the origin of AAVE fall into one of three generally held points of view: creolist, Euro-centrist, and Afrocentrist (see Fodde, 2002, for an overview). Regardless of the explanation of the origins of AAVE, its systematicity, regularity, and rule-boundedness cannot be denied. There is a long history of research on distinctive features of AAVE, its uses and features, and the need to resist the linguicism surrounding its use (Baugh, 1983; Labov, 1972; Rickford & Rickford, 2000; Smitherman, 1987). Nevertheless, the use of written AAVE seems to be fairly rare, even among black authors, prior to the 20th century. Even in the work of someone as radical as Frederick Douglass, or perhaps because he sought radical equality, we see only standardized English. Fodde argues that this is because the main interest of African American writers ‘lay in denying the white public’s institutionalised racist beliefs, and in convincing them that they were capable of performing art forms’ (Fodde, 2002: 62). In the early 20th century, some space was created to use and perform AAVE. One might consider, for example, the work of the many talented voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, etc.) or the even earlier bilingual poetry of Paul Dunbar (1872–1906). Compare the following stanzas from two of Dunbar’s poems, ‘Accountability’ and ‘We Wear the Mask’, respectively, which exemplify both AAVE and standardized English (bilingualism):5 Accountability FOLKS ain’t got no right to censuah othah folks about dey habits; Him dat giv’ de squir’ls de bushtails made de bobtails fu’ de rabbits. Him dat built de gread big mountains hollered out de little valleys, Him dat made de streets an’ driveways wasn’t shamed to make de alleys. We is all constructed diff ’ent, d’ain’t no two of us de same; We cain’t he’p ouah likes an’ dislikes, ef we’se bad we ain’t to blame. Ef we’se good, we needn’t show off, case you bet it ain’touahdoin’ We gits into su’ttain channels dat we jes’ cain’the’ppu’suin’.

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We Wear the Mask We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,– This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be otherwise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. Despite this history and the abundant research on AAVE, the School Board in Oakland, California, caused quite a stir with its resolution recognizing Ebonics as a ‘language’, as I introduced in Chapter 1. On the one hand, soon after the Oakland resolution, the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) issued its own resolution supporting the School Board. The LSA, affirming on its website (www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/lsa-resolution-oaklandebonics-issue) its earlier statement of language rights, noted: there are individual and group benefits to maintaining vernacular speech varieties and there are scientific and human advantages to linguistic diversity. For those living in the United States there are also benefits in acquiring Standard English and resources should be made available to all who aspire to mastery of Standard English. The Oakland School Board’s commitment to helping students master Standard English is commendable. and There is evidence from Sweden, the US, and other countries that speakers of other varieties can be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective, the Oakland School Board’s decision to recognize the vernacular of African American students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound. Despite these progressive statements, the popular response tended not to be as sympathetic. In fact, the oppositional reactions evidence, to my mind, the colonial nature of this particular regime of truth.

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Similar to the Speak Good English Movement in Singapore in reaction against Singlish, the reactions of two prominent African Americans, Jesse Jackson and Maya Angelou,6 are illustrative in the Ebonics debate. Jackson opined, ‘you don’t have to go to school to learn to talk garbage’. Similarly, Angelou was ‘incensed’ by ‘the very idea that African-American language is a language separate and apart’.7 The paradox of Angelou’s position is revealed in her poetry of the 1970s, in which she employs many of the rules and structures of AAVE that linguists long ago identified as consistent, stable aspects of the language that John and Russell Rickford (2000) refer to as ‘Spoken Soul’. By the 1980s, these structures had all but disappeared from Angelou’s poetry. These prominent African Americans, who have consistently found the voice to speak out against injustice, provide stark examples of the disciplinary power of discourse. Through the discourse of language, they have come to ‘understand’ that some language is superior, or right, or correct, or standard, or academic, and some is not. If language is discourse, as I argued in Chapter 1, and if this, as pointed out, involves tacit acceptance of the regimes of truth inherent in a given language community, is the choice for bidialectal speakers like Maya Angelou to accept one ‘truth’ over another, rejecting their linguistic roots? It was part of the goal in Oakland, I believe, to avoid such a Faustian proposition. However, for this to be accomplished, leaders in the African-American community must accept that a rap song can be as culturally laden, academic­ ally rich and school-worthy as a Shakespearean soliloquy. Otherwise, the language and, thus, the culture of the community are undermined.

Conclusion: Liberalism and the Need for Both the Post and the Structural In Chapter 3, one aspect of the question raised by Stroud – what categories of speakers have the right to language rights and under what conditions – was addressed by Kymlicka and rejected. This discussion of the ontology of language requires us to think about ‘categories of speakers’ in a different way: those who speak a ‘language’ and those who speak something else, what I have been referring to as language varieties,8 and, then, those who, given local multilinguistic need, employ languages in different ways. The rights approach, because of its earnestness to promote language diversity and the inability to deal with things not so named or the discursive outcome of such naming, promotes language diversity from a foundationalist perspective and undermines it from an anti-foundationalist perspective. It is simultaneously liberatory and oppressive in this way. In order for

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rights to obtain, the right to what must be named. We could name, simply, ‘language’. On the broad policy level, this is of crucial importance as a right to freedom of speech (including in one’s own language) and to the use and maintenance of one’s own language, certainly in the private sphere but also in the public square. One certainly has the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of one’s language, for example, or denied access to the system of jurisprudence because of one’s language. More specifically, everyone who speaks a ‘language’ can demand, from a strict LHR approach, bilingual ballots, bilingual education and service in their own language when dealing with government institutions. I have argued against this from a strict rights approach, but, again, this does not and should not preclude advancing recognitions by other means through the legal system, given the importance of language. What other institutions and service providers should be obligated thusly? For these sorts of policy issues, ‘language’ must be operationalized, named more specifically with all of the attendant problems of doing so from a diachronic point of view. This is required in order to determine what is and is not possible or practicable as a ‘right’. If we do not discriminate in this way, how manageable politically are language varieties? What if we, in fact, do need a linguist to tell us that we are speaking different languages? In the examples of, say, Russian and Spanish, people recognize quite easily when someone is or is not speaking one language or another. But what if we are dealing with mutually intelligible languages, for example? As Skutnabb-Kangas (2005) explains it: if you understand a ‘language’, A, without being taught that ‘language’, it is a dialect (or another variety) of your own ‘language’, B. Or your own ‘language’ B is a dialect of the one you can understand, A. Or what if both of you speak (A & B), [which] are dialects of some third entity, C, which is then called ‘a language’. But if you don’t understand A, it is a different language. But the criterion of mutual intelligibility is also far from unambiguous. Let us say that speaker A understands B, and speaker B understands C, who in her turn understands D. On the other hand, speaker A does not understand C, and speaker B does not understand D. Where is the boundary then between language and dialect? Or if A understands B but B does not understand A (non-reciprocal intelligibility), are A and B dialects of the same language for speaker A who understands both, but two different languages for speaker B who does not understand both? (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2005, n.p.) Here, Skutnabb-Kangas reveals the problem of distinguishing between a language and dialect. If this is indeed a problem, then it complicates

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Wee’s (2005) distinction between intra-language discrimination and interlanguage discrimination. Therefore, it is interesting to observe that, on the one hand, even as LHR problematize the language/dialect distinction, they must, nevertheless, make such a distinction in order to render a rights approach comprehensible. Otherwise, we are faced with an infinite, and therefore unmanageable, linguistic regress. Take, for example, the variety of English in the southern United States. At one level of policy, a basics rights level, it is reasonable, defensible and, in fact, required, that one has the right to express oneself in the vernacular – ‘ya’all’ and ‘might could’ included. (Note that in my home state of Pennsylvania, ya’all should be replaced with ‘yins’ in the western part and ‘yous’ in the eastern part.) But, at other levels, it is reductio ad absurdum. On the other hand, if Skutnabb-Kangas’ logic above is correct, and I think it is, then an anti-foundationalist view of language requires abandoning the distinction between inter- and intra-language discrimination. Preferable is the more general notion of linguicism: a ‘form of oppression deriving from the presumption of superiority of some languages, language varieties, or language forms over others and the assumptions made about their speakers, especially the assumptions made about speakers of non-­ privileged languages, language varieties, or language forms’ (Petrovic, 2011: 394). However, we must also capture the institutionalization of linguicism and the ways that linguistic privilege is (re)produced. Skutnabb-Kangas captures this in her definition: ‘ideologies, structures, and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, regulate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 30). In short, linguicism becomes part of the social contract. For this reason, it is problematic for Wee to assert so casually that ‘speakers may themselves decide to stop speaking a language because they are more interested in adapting to prevailing economic conditions than maintaining some of kind of cultural association that the language may represent’ (Wee, 2005: 62). Embedded in this claim is a sense of choice: speakers of language X simply choose or not, as a case of free will. But this is certainly not the case. It is more telling of the fact of an intolerable context of choice, one in which linguicism drives ‘choice’. Furthermore, Wee contends that Singaporeans are divided in their views on Singlish and questions ‘to what extent linguistic rights can be plausibly championed if there is no group solidarity’ (Wee, 2005: 61). Here one can see the parallel with Ebonics. But why should solidarity count only if it is with the whole – Singaporeans? Why doesn’t solidarity stand if it is among Singaporean speakers of Singlish or even some fraction thereof? If a Korean

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family living in New York wishes to maintain Korean customs and language and their Korean neighbors want to be ‘Americanized’, do they have to agree? Whose view should be surrendered and what does this mean for how we treat Korean-speakers more broadly? Traditional views of language arguably came about because of myriad historical influences: Western liberalism, the rise of the nation-state and the concomitant linguistics of community, and the advent of print capitalism, which preceded and, according to Anderson (1983), drove the rise of the modern nation-state, among others. According to these traditional views, languages are fixed entities, and so they provide a somewhat cut-anddried approach to policy. However, this cut-and-driedness not only makes language policy practicable but also challenges the linguistic status quo in many ways. I would argue that official bilingualism, as in Canada, or trilingualism, as per the three-language formula in India, to some extent challenge linguistic hierarchy, at least among the dominant language groups. These policies expand the linguistic options. But, as I noted, they undermine language diversity in other ways, through the construction of ‘language’. In short, a strict approach along liberal-LHR lines requires a synchronic take on language and, therefore, cannot deal with language varieties. Second, it does not consider, at least not sufficiently, the fact of linguistic change. LHR, as I mentioned, seem to give license to the practices of the French Délégation or Spanish Academia. This said, anti-foundationalist approaches cannot escape the simultaneity of the liberatory and oppressive. An anti-foundationalist view that is unwilling to name language renders policy-making impossible beyond the very broad level of basic (private sphere, mainly) rights, providing little guidance in terms of policy beyond this. In an analysis of language policy in India, Petrovic and Majumdar put it this way: an unwillingness to name language is a lot like playing chess without naming the pieces…. We can play the game without knowing the names…. However, we cannot read the rules or even create them without such naming. (Petrovic & Majumdar, 2010: 16) While such a turn challenges linguistic privilege in theory, it is certainly not transparent as to how it does so practically, deliberative democracy notwithstanding. For example, Stroud’s cosmopolitan citizenship emphasizes the importance of the local in the reimagining of social solidarity, thereby shaping the transnational. This emphasis, in turn, requires recognition of transborder languages. If Stroud (2010) is correct in pointing out that multi­ lingualism in African languages actually links people into regional speech

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communities through linguistic continua rather than dividing them and if he has demonstrated, by empirical example, that the space for multilingual practices along these continua already exists to some degree, then the question is how do we, from a policy perspective, operationalize ‘recognition’ to ensure that the spaces broaden, that the voices are heard? If rights discourses promote an ‘autonomous view of language, and essentialist view of identity in relation to language [that] implies a particular sociolinguistic ordering, regularization, and hierarchization of language ecologies that may not be readily acceptable to indigenous communities [thereby] consitut[ing] new hierarchies of difference and disadvantage’ (Stroud, 2010: 211), how, again from a policy perspective, do we promote consensus and accommodation instead? Given this discussion, language policy writ large seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place (Petrovic, 2013). Not to put too fine a point on it, a thoroughgoing anti-foundationalist view is politically naïve. Calling language into existence politically, even as such existence is linguistically problematic, is a necessity. Otherwise, the linguistic status quo maintains and the hegemony of dominant languages is ensured. Taken in light of very real contexts of linguicism, we cannot simply leave this to ‘neutral’ democratic deliberation. Steps must also be taken to disrupt the hegemony of ‘language’ (as a linguistic construct) itself, whether this refers to the naming of language as such or to the use of language(s), as per the discussion on languaging/multilanguage. I see no principled means of enacting policy that might do this, that is, a policy that might capture and promote Stroud’s linguistic citizenship. Indeed, it seems to me that this more ecological approach demands the undoing of the modern nation-state in favor of some organization of loosely knit communities, perhaps some vision of anarcho-syndicalism. I am certainly not against this, but do not foresee its coming. Thus, in the meantime, I think this latter project (of disrupting the hegemony of ‘language’) is a job for language-in-education policy as opposed to language policy more broadly. It is to this, then, that I turn my attention in the next chapter.

Notes (1) This said, it is incumbent upon Kymlicka to spell out more concretely the criteria by which a national community is deemed such. Some cases are more transparent than others. Native American nations in the United States or the Ainu in Japan, for example, seem straightforward cases. But what about Mexican Americans in the United States – some of whom crossed the border (à la members of ethnic communities), some of whom had the border cross them (à la national communities)?

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(2) See Zentella (1997) and Stavans (2000) for discussions of Spanglish and Wee (2005) for a discussion of Singlish. (3) See also Tollefson’s (2006) critical approach to language policy, influenced by critical theory, which considers the way that power functions in language policy-making and language behaviors through a variety of mechanisms, including hegemony and ideology. (4) It is interesting to note that Agnihotri seems to theorize language in an anti-­ foundational way, but he writes about it in ways that invoke language with and without ontology simultaneously (see Petrovic & Majumdar, 2010, for a critique). Thus, I argue that language must be named. Ultimately, both ways of looking at language must be recognized for policy purposes, as I will argue in Chapter 7, even as we might reject foundationalist views on linguistic grounds. (5) Both poems, as well as Dunbar’s other works, were previously available at www. dunbarsite.org, which no longer appears to be extant. The collection of poems at this site could be read and listened to, beautifully interpreted by Herbert Woodward Martin, Professor Emeritus, University of Dayton. For text source, see Braxton (1993), pp. 5–6 and 71 respectively. (6) Jesse Jackson is an important leader and activist in the African American community who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. The late Maya Angelou was a poet and memoirist widely acclaimed for her series of auto­ biographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). (7) Both quotes from ‘Black English proposal draws fire’, at www.cnn.com/us/9612/22/ black.english. (8) I should note on this point that it is not at all clear to me that reference to ‘language variety’ in preference to ‘dialect’ does more than change the terms in the same debate. For it still begs the question of which is the language and which the dialect or variety; the post-structural linguists’ take being that the question is political, not linguistic.

6 Post-Liberal Language-inEducation Policy

Introduction The ideal of individual rights coming from the liberal tradition allows for, indeed requires, linguistic pluralism to the extent that individuals have the right to speak their first languages and maintain their language communities. However, when this truism is set as ‘linguistic human rights’, the conditions that such a notion have been argued to require become un­manageable and the notion has too many predictable unintended consequences. Thus, I have argued that the right must be far more narrow and the ideal widened by ‘goals’. Despite their awareness of the problem, the other issue making LHRists’ position unmanageable is the linguistic inability of saying what is or is not a language. When this task is taken on politically, there are linguistic ramifications. Given the discussions up to this point, there are two problems that must be addressed. First, the linguistic relativism discussed in Chapter 5 certainly complicates workable policies. This raises the politically messy and linguistically tenuous project of distinguishing between languages and dialects, a project that nevertheless must occur. On one side of the issue, this is something that is crucial to making the LHR position coherent, even as LHRists go to some trouble to explain why it is problematic. Nevertheless, a foundationalist approach to, if not understanding of, language seems to be implicit in the LHRists’ position. In other words, they recognize the commonalities of aspects of the ‘language’ of a group of speakers. The second problem, then, is that education in a mother tongue (a requirement of LHR) requires corpus planning, a certain degree of standardization, because not doing so leads logically to reductio ad absurdum, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Is it the case that ‘we have, strictly speaking, to differentiate as many languages as there are individuals’, as 97

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Hermann Paul argued so long ago (Paul, 1888: 21)? On the one hand, the idea of individual languages should be granted some legitimacy through a post-structural lens: the idea being that communication, even in the ‘same language’, is a constant process of translation as interpretation. On the other hand, the idea of individual languages leads to no practical solution (or, worse, practical monolingualism) as regards language policy generally and in education. Any standardization, nevertheless, is bound to draw objections from anti-foundationalists.

Issues and Approaches These problems will be most effectively addressed at the level of education or, even more focused, at the classroom level. The discussion here becomes increasingly specific in terms of language. The school/classroomlevel issues concern instruction in the child’s first language and dialectal education, the latter subsuming the even more specific issue of so-called academic language proficiency. For the most part, I have already stated the policy-level approach to instruction in the first language in my discussion of bilingual education: where numbers warrant and following the principle of declining numer­ osity, content area instruction should be provided through the medium of a student’s first language or mother tongue (L1) as well as the dominant language of the society (L2) and/or other languages. I refer to other languages here since it might be determined, as in the case of India, that more than one other language beyond the L1 should be required. Such decisions should be left to policy-makers looking inward, taking into account the local sociolinguistic-political context, as well as outward, to issues of globalization. A concern here might be the extent to which linguistic globalization implies or reinforces linguistic hegemony, as per the literature on the hegemony of English (Macedo et al., 2003; Pac, 2012; Phillipson, 2008). Nevertheless, the liberal concern is the creation of a rich context of linguistic choice. Providing students with L1 education enhances this context. I have already pointed out the research demonstrating the superior effectiveness of providing instruction through the L1 at least part of the time; but, even if L1 did slow the acquisition of L2, the trade-off in terms of the linguistic autonomy, self-respect, and identity for both students and the cultural group is well worth it. As has been pointed out, bilingual education proceeds from a ‘language with ontology’ framing. The language is named and standardized and its speakers identified. With LHR, not only do I not see this as a problem, I see it as necessary. There are two caveats here. First, pedagogy must be

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approached with the lessons of anti-foundational views of language in mind, as I shall reiterate below. Relatedly, also to be kept in mind is the discussion provided in Chapter 5 of ‘transborder languaging’ and other antifoundational observations about the ways that language is actually used. Here, it is necessary to expand upon this in a different way: the ways that language is used must inform our views of the bilingual student. If languages (and dialects) are used in border-crossing ways, then we cannot make the mistake of viewing students through a parallel monolingual paradigmatic lens. Through this lens, the bilingual or multilingual people are viewed as having separate underlying proficiencies in their languages. Certainly, people are capable of separating languages in communication. However, as Kathy Escamilla and Susan Hopewell note, as opposed to parallel monolingualism, ‘theories of bilingualism examine the totality of the bilingual [or, I would add, multilingual] experience as a unique and unified whole rather than as a fractional representation’ (Escamilla & Hopewell, 2010: 72). Children in linguistically diverse societies are more often than not simultaneous ­bi­linguals – exposed to and acquiring more than one language – as opposed to sequential bilinguals, who have a dominant first language base and begin L2 acquisition only after that base has been established (usually after age six or so). This should inform the way that instruction takes place, the ways that teachers receive language(s) from their students, and the ways that students are assessed.1 Even as programs like bilingual education reinscribe foundationalist views of language, they should stay informed by anti-foundationalist views in order to promote respect for broader styles and varieties of expression, and to be able to think critically about the ways in which discourses of language help construct arbitrary hierarchal social relations. Teachers must understand their own language ideology and be able to reflect on the discourse of language. As Jaffe explains, language ideology and the ways that we talk about language become ‘refracted in practices that orient towards or draw upon ideologies as resources’ (Jaffe, 2009: 391). From her research in bilingual Corsican/French schools, Jaffe finds teachers’ ideological suppositions about language and the relationship among different languages and language varieties affect teaching and, therefore, reproduce language ideologies for students. And while this can be problematic, it is ‘the interconnection between experiences and ideology [that] allows us to locate the potential for ideological change in systems of practice’ (Jaffe, 2009: 403). Furthermore, from this take on language ideology, teachers must under­stand that, standardized or not, what we identify as language for the purposes of instituting bilingual education programs is always already a language variety among many in the classroom. Having identified, for

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example, ‘Spanish-speakers’ to participate in bilingual education, we will find ourselves faced with any number of varieties of Spanish. Teachers must be concerned with how to approach instruction given this simple fact. As I pointed out in Chapter 5, such varieties are not simply bad versions of some pure form. They must be recognized in the classroom as legitimate and important ways of expressing oneself, even as instruction in some standardized version is required. The use of non-standardized language varieties or of ‘foreign’ languages can signify resistance to school authority. It is a signifier of racial or ethnic or cultural difference. Even though their use is an inherent form of subversion, this use can also reinscribe difference, the normalcy and necessity of privileged ‘proficiencies’, feeding into dominant discourses of language. Given that ‘language’ creates meaning around itself, privileging certain forms or varieties both universally and context-specifically, teachers must be made aware of the practices that exacerbate privilege and reify dominant language forms as somehow natural and neutral, and engage instead in practices that promote a counter-hegemonic linguistic sensibility. In other words, teachers must be able to exploit strategically the inherent heteroglossic contexts of schools and classrooms, empowering students to navigate liminal, linguistic spaces.2 For resistance can promote agency (academic, personal and political) as students begin ‘to understand how their differing subjectivities can result in either passive acceptance or resistance and adaptation of the discourses and texts they’re subjected to’, in this case discourses of linguistic inferiority (Davis, 2009: 215). This discussion, while pointing to the issue of language varieties (as opposed to the ‘languages’ of use in bilingual or multilingual education), begs the question of what to do for students entering the classroom speaking these different varieties. This, recall, was the second problem identified at the outset of this chapter. Before trying to address the question of dialectal standardization and anti-foundationalist objections, it will be informative to think through the anti-foundationalist perspective as juxtaposed to a foundationalist perspective as prescriptivism. This, I hope, will reveal the anti-foundationalist position that I embrace as part of an overall language ideology, even as I must back away from it for the sake of practicality.

The Prescriptivist Lament Certainly, the anti-foundationalist view of language and the pedagogical approaches it requires are not without detractors. Recall the reactions of Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson from the previous chapter. For them, there is a standard that must be taught. The two primary arguments made

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to support this position are that it is required for national cohesion (à la language negative liberals) and that it is needed for effective communication (notice that this argument can become part and parcel of the previous argument given national, linguistic diversity). As for the first argument – see Schmidt (2000) and Baron (1990) for more thorough history of such arguments – I have already reasoned that the quest for such homogeneity is a betrayal of the same liberal values that language negative liberals pretend to embrace. Furthermore, national cohesion should be promoted instead through national political values that recognize diversity (Petrovic, 2001). For it simply is not the case that lin­ guistic homogeneity is required to keep nation-states bound, but language does become a shibboleth for myriad other national social tensions (Petrovic, 1999). Schmidt, for example, argues that ‘the dispute between nationalist and ethnic minority activists is essentially a disagreement over the meanings and uses of group identity in the public life of the nation-state, and not language as such’ (Schmidt, 2000: 47). The effective communication argument seems to rely on a kind of ‘folk linguistics’ (Preston, 1993) that assumes a national, neutral standard, ignoring issues of power (who determines the standard) and the linguicism that obtains therefore. Folk linguistics refers to the layperson’s beliefs about and attitudes toward language and language learning ‘that allows nonspecialists to make sense of their linguistic environments’ (Niedzielski & Preston, 2009: 357). As a field of study, it draws on, for example, perceptual dialectology (Preston, 1989) and the ways that people view language(s) and/or language varieties as more or less proper or correct, normal, polite, pleasant, educated and so on (Niedzielski & Preston, 2009). Furthermore, folk linguistics reveals the ways in which people assuredly and problematically discriminate between languages and dialects, in ways that linguists do not. Indeed, it is likely a folk linguistics that gives license to language negative liberalism. A folk linguistics also, then, ignores the dynamic nature of language, instead seeking to constrain it, à la the French Délégation or Spanish Academia. This is what I refer to as the prescriptivist lament. The lament is twofold: first, prescriptivists lament that language simply cannot be contained – even those who endeavor to use a standardized variety reveal that the dynamic nature of language simply projects itself in language use; second, prescriptivists must also lament that their attempts, against the grain, to constrain language actually have the effect of pushing language to be used in unintended (by prescriptivists) ways. As for the first lament, consider the example of sportscasters, whose profession it is expressly to communicate in a standardized variety. They are

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notorious, at least in the United States, for making up words and sometimes rules. For example, most sportscasters, at least those I tend to hear commenting on football games (‘American’ football, that is), prefer ‘resiliency’ over ‘resili­ence’. I don’t know if the former is a word or not or, if it is, then I don’t know why two words that name the same thing have developed. What I do know is that ‘defense’ is not, or historically has not been, a verb. Gary Daniels, an American sportscaster, is fond of saying things like, ‘They defensed that well’. Is this, let’s call it sport-ese, wrong or bad English? Arguably, it is no more or less defensible than any other variety. For language is dynamic and its patterns of use are in constant flux. In the case of the (new) verb ‘to defense’, it encapsulates football culture within the meaning of the original verb: to defend. Different from, say, a military use – we probably won’t hear generals reporting on how they ‘defensed’ a strategic position – the sports use perhaps makes some cultural sense, embedding the nature of the kind and context of the ‘defense’ in the verb. Language is thusly imbued with culture, while, then, reinscribing the culture. As a former English teacher, my own prescriptivist ear viscerally rejects such ‘malformations’. But, and this speaks to the second lament, it is this very rejection, the very naming of so-called good and bad language and the protection of the former that can lead to these malformations. For example, it is increasingly the case that US speakers of English do not know the difference between the nominative and objective cases. Utterances such as ‘Would you like to come with Margie and I’ or ‘That is between he and his coaches’ are commonplace. Sometimes people make up a rule: here, it’s because there are two objects. (In fact, it is the case that there is substantially less misuse if there is a single object.) The explanation for such projections of language is pretty simple: your English teacher clubbed you over the head when you asked, ‘Can Jimmy and me go to the bathroom?’ ‘Jimmy and who?’ she typically retorted. Since you really didn’t get the point, better to use ‘I’ all the time, and all other nominative pronouns while you were at it! Since language cannot be hemmed in quite so easily, prescriptivism has consequences. Sometimes, perhaps usually, the consequences are ‘bad’, if you are a member of the French Délégation or Spanish Academia, and they are ‘bad’ not in spite of but because of those bodies.

Language Varieties in the Classroom Given this discussion of prescriptivism, it seems to be straightforwardly the case that the use of the language varieties and modes of expression that students bring with them to schools should be accepted. But there are different ideas about what it means to ‘use’ a language in the classroom.

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For example, students should not be ridiculed or corrected for speaking their language variety, especially, but not only, when engaging in academic activities. Students who respond to an academic question posed by the teacher should be able to do so in the standardized variety or the variety they happen to speak. For the most part, it seems that the use in classrooms of non-standardized varieties is for contrastive analysis purposes in order to teach the standardized variety. This was the crux of the Ebonics movement in Oakland, California. This is the dominant recommendation of ‘use’ provided by Hudley and Mallinson as regards both Southern English and AAVE. As they note, ‘It is critical [for teachers] to be able to determine what are actual errors of understanding in students’ writing and what are errors based on language variation’ (Hudley & Mallinson, 2011: 52). So, in order to make these kinds of pedagogical decisions, teachers must have an understanding of the concept of language variety – including the way that the social construction of a ‘standard’ privileges some children over others (see note 4 to Chapter 1, p. 23) – as well as the disposition to respect and learn more about the particular language varieties their students bring to the classroom. But they also must understand it in order to empower students to do similar kinds of comparative analysis, again, with the end in mind of learning the standardized variety and of knowing when it is appropriate or not to use the non-standardized variety (even as part of the purpose is to disrupt such standardized linguistic spaces). But a more extended sense of ‘use’ might include writing in or producing other kinds of academic products in the non-standardized variety. It is simply insufficient to tell students that there is nothing wrong with their language; that it isn’t a case of it being correct or incorrect, but just different, when they see that the goal is to learn the standardized variety. Just as students can and should use their non-standardized varieties in oral engagement, academically and socially in schools, so must they have the opportunity to use it in other ways, in writing for example. Language Arts, as a course of study, is, at its best, a lesson on how to use language (and many varieties thereof) for different purposes, for different audiences, in different styles and genres. Students should be able to see their language performed in all of the same ways as the standardized version, in this case, by being provided with opportunities to write stories or other projects where, say, dialogue is important, in authentic ways. Approaching varieties in this way and at this level (i.e. the classroom) addresses the problem that Wee (2005) identifies with LHR: since LHR require that one’s mother tongue (and this must now include all varieties) be used as a medium of instruction, it will also require standardization. Wee

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contends that in this process the variety ‘would be changed so drastically that it would no longer be recognizable to its supporters’ (Wee, 2005: 62). This is another way that prescriptivism becomes problematic. But what I am suggesting is not language variety as medium of instruction, but language variety as a recog­nized and legitimate part of the educational process. This need not require a priori standardization. On the contrary, teachers and students might do classroom standardization. Teachers might, for example, engage students as linguists: ‘This is not a standardized word. How do you think we might spell it?’ Such an approach, I think, blunts to some degree anti-foundationalist concerns regarding standardization. This said, I also do not want to suggest that standardization is always problematic. There are, after all, very useful dialectal readers available and through which children can see and hear their language forms represented and legitimized. Teaching stigmatized varieties, furthermore, has actually been shown to contribute to the acquisition of the standardized variety, and teachers must engage in pedagogies that deal with stigmatized varieties in supplemental rather than suppletive ways, not merely or even foremost toward the goal of learning the standardized variety but in order to preserve students’ self-respect (Siegel, 1999, 2010).3 To put it bluntly, the fact that Singlish supporters do not want that variety taught or used in schools, as Wee claims, or the fact that Ebonics detractors such as Angelou and Jackson do not want that language taught or used in schools, is, to my mind, reflective of the hegemony of dominant languages or the false consciousness of a folk linguistics. In the end, these positions serve to reinscribe a language negative liberalism and the reification of linguistic superiority by denying children institutionalized access to their language variety. If, on the other hand, such positions stem from the legitimate desire to promote equality of access to the social and economic opportunities that stem from linguistic privilege, then this speaks to the educational point that Edwards makes, with which I agree: ‘Children generally do not respond well to approaches, however benevolently inspired, that essentially suggest to them that their maternal dialect is in some way flawed’ (Edwards, 2010: 113).

Academic Language One way that the deficit discourse of flawed language is perpetuated is through the notion of ‘academic language’, a topic of ongoing debate in the field of bilingual education and language studies. In the end, academic language should be seen as just another language variety. Entailing a

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­ oucauldian perspective, Pratt’s linguistics of community is also informative F here. Essentially, Pratt’s argument is that linguistics of community takes the shape and assumptive power of discourse, assigning social and verbal roles to discussants in an exchange as well as substantiating (or not) knowledge claims based on the authoritative power of the language specialized to the context. Here, Pratt gives the example of medical discourse, and even more specifically, gynecological medical discourse, in which a woman’s experience and knowledge claims can be dismissed as belief or emotion, as opposed to the doctor’s knowledge and fact. In this vein, I want to suggest that, just as there is medical discourse or, more specific to issues already raised, liberal discourse or discourse of language, there is school discourse. The problem is that this discourse is occluded as discourse couched, as it is, in the seemingly positive terms of ‘academic language’, a dis­curs­ ive formation that ultimately reinscribes itself only as useful and not problematic. The notion of academic language impacts the ways that we view certain language varieties and the practices implemented in schools, perniciously reinscribing conservative, foundationalist views of language. It does so in two ways. First, academic language becomes synonymous with educated language, the language forms, styles, lexicon and syntax used by educated people. In this moment, it becomes ‘proper’ language, a symbol of how people ‘should’ speak, reinscribing this standard to the detriment of other language varieties (Petrovic, 2013). Second, academic language has been defined as ‘decontextualized language’, a reification of a particular language form. Nevertheless, ‘academic language’ language forms are socio-historical constructions; thus, they are naturally contested and rightly so. The notion of decontextualized language describes the idea that meaning is conveyed primarily by linguistic cues that are independent of the communicative context. Reading expository text without pictures would be an example of this. In the area of language minority education, this construct has arguably been most promoted by the continuum of basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) introduced by Jim Cummins (1979: 121–129), later elaborated along intersecting continua of decontextualized/contextualized and cognitively demanding/undemanding language, commonly referred to as the quadrant model (Cummins, 1981). In the process, academic language – characterized, according to Cummins (2000: 36), by such things as ‘low frequency vocabulary’, ‘complex grammatical structures’ and greater knowledge of ‘language itself ’ – became synonymous with decontextualized language. Ultimately, the quadrant model – even though it has been argued to provide a practical tool to inform educational practice and policy (Cummins, 2003; Cline & Fredrickson, 1996) – becomes a nest of hidden assumptions about language,

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proficiency, school culture, and power similar to Cummins’ original constructs of BICS and CALP, becoming an error of commission toward deficit model thinking (see MacSwan, 2000; Petrovic, 2013). MacSwan (2000) argues that one of the problems with these constructs is that they tend to set CALP as a degree of language proficiency (as intimated in the name). Take, for example, the claim of Guiberson et al., who, drawing on Cummins, argue that: for true language maintenance to occur, children from linguistically diverse backgrounds must learn more than the household vernacular of their L1; they also need to learn the cognitive academic language that is typically fostered through educational experiences. (Guiberson et al., 2006: 5) This is a linguistically absurd claim. CALP has nothing to do with pro­ ficiency – which MacSwan argues is largely set by age six – but, instead, has to do with familiarity of a particular repertoire. As I have just suggested, it is about fluency or familiarity within a particular discourse. For example, while I am fluent in English, I cannot talk with my physicist colleagues about neutrinos in the same way that they speak among each other, even as I can certainly come to understand what a neutrino is in lay terms. Another problem that I would like to identify here is the neutrality implicit in the construct of CALP. Language, even so-called decontextualized language in schools, is never neutral, culture free, or value free, as if education were occurring through some purified medium. Not to put a fine point on it, there is no such thing as decontextualized language (Gee, 2009, 2014). What is typically referred to as decontextualized language is, in fact, hypercontextualized. This hypercontextualization manifests at the level of the school in terms of the general linguistic culture as well as more specifically in the different content areas provided within schools – the latter, in this case, might be said to be a second-level hypercontextualization. First, school language or academic language is a distinctly middle-class and upper-middle-class, mainly white (at least in the US), language variety. This is true from communicative styles, as documented by Shirley Brice Heath (1983) and Lisa Delpit (1988, 2006) in their classic works, to vocabulary. Lexical items often differ for historical and cultural reasons. The historical development of the acceptability of ‘ain’t’ and ‘won’t’ is illustrative here. Neither makes much sense as a contraction. However, only the latter is considered to be acceptable and school-worthy. This is due to the use of that contraction by the upper classes. ‘Ain’t’, on the other hand, came to be used more frequently by

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the lower classes. Thus, the ways that we view different language varieties or even certain repertoires of language, such as ‘academic language’, is a social construction privileging certain varieties over others. As I have argued elsewhere in this same vein, ‘Academic language’ is neither natural nor universal, but arrived at from a point of view, in particular contexts, by particular users. It has been called into being through the development of schools, an unnatural institution which is also a product of social and historical processes. (Petrovic, 2013: 422) The problem is that the socially constructed nature of academic language is occluded by the now reification of the construct.4 Notice, further, that if there is a construct of ‘academic language’, there must necessarily be things that fall outside the category, into the category of non-academic language, which may be deemed as non-school-worthy. This, then, speaks to the broader issue of dialects reinforcing exclusion of their very legitimate uses in schools. Second, hypercontextualization manifests even more visibly in content area instruction. Gee (2009), for example, deconstructs the following examples of vernacular and academic explanations: Hornworms sure vary a lot in how well they grow. Hornworm growth exhibits a significant amount of variation. As Gee explains, what distinguishes the second sentence from the first is not that it contains anything that is not part of one’s vernacular but that it ‘combines grammatical resources of a certain type in a certain characteristic way for certain characteristic purposes’ (Gee, 2009: 27). In other words, it is a hypercontextualized discourse that has nothing to do with proficiency per se. As such, it is also not neutral, just as school language more generally is not neutral. Now, the fact is that there is certain amount of scientific precision in the second utterance. ‘Significant’, of course, will refer to some statistical measure. Therefore, I am not suggesting that students ought not learn or be exposed to hypercontextualized language at the content area level. Obviously, this is, in part, what education is about. I am suggesting that the use of language here is as important a part of the scientific lesson as the lesson itself and that students should be guided to develop the meta­ linguistic awareness to sort through the different ways in which and

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contexts within which they express themselves and why. But even here, I might be going too far to accommodate the notion of CALP. For while something like ‘significant’ takes on more precise meaning through the educational process, other aspects of language use or syntax often identified with CALP develop naturally, without exposure in school or other academic contexts. For example, Lippincott and Hill-Bonnet (2008) identify comparatives (as in 6 is greater than 4) as ‘academic language’; it is, they claim, the language of mathematics. This seems to imply that people who never take on the formal study of mathematics or go to school do not or cannot acquire the concept of ‘more’ and/or the ability to express it.5 Thus, I am also suggesting, stepping back to the school level, that academic language as school language reflects a cultural time and place, thereby shaping what counts as cultural capital in schools. It becomes hegemonic, and once we admit that schools are discursive fields in this way, we must also admit that the concept (the signified) to which the signifier ‘academic language’ applies has no ontology, although it certainly has material consequences for certain groups of children. For the language of school or what counts as academic language becomes a disciplinary power. This disciplinary power enforces prescriptivism, re-creates schools in a particular image, and reinscribes linguistic privilege as a hidden part of the ‘natural’ order of schools.

Conclusion: A Post-Liberal Education Requires Challenging Linguistic Privilege The overarching point of this chapter has been to argue that children should have the right to hear and see their language represented in their curriculum. Wee seems to leave open for deliberation the status of Singlish and its use in schools, since ‘there is no general consensus amongst Singaporeans’ (Wee, 2006: 749). Nevertheless, LHRists would be correct to claim that right trumps consensus here, at least as qualified by considerations of the many factors mentioned in previous chapters. Other factors might include place and purpose. They should have the right to use their language or language variety in the classroom along with whatever other standardized varieties might be employed. Such a policy falls under the heading of ‘right’, as opposed to goal, as a case of freedom of speech. And, such use should be the case regardless of any consensus on the political or linguistic status of that variety. For regardless of consensus otherwise, the language simply is, belongs to someone, speaks to their identity and therefore belongs period, prescriptivists’ concerns notwithstanding.

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A related issue was the extent to which what is presented as ostensibly neutral academic language is just as culturally laden as the communication patterns discussed by, for example, Delpit and Heath. This is because schools are not natural. ‘School’ is a social construction and, as such, it is a unique and often foreign discourse. This discourse has its own system of meaning, into which students are more or less (or not at all) socialized. The meaning system of school has predetermined whose knowledge, ideas, experiences and language(s) will be valued. In talking about ‘academic language’ there must also exist ‘non-academic language’. The only reason to make distinctions between normal and abnormal or any other binaries – school language and home language or academic language and non-academic language – is to keep people in check, to regulate them so as not to upset the social order. But upsetting the linguistic social order, whether talking about language varieties or academic language, should be a hallmark of a post-liberal philosophy of language policy. Popularly received conceptualizations of language generally, and academic language specifically, which present as universal a particular school language must give way to the recognition of the heteroglossic nature of schools and the value (pedagogical, political, and otherwise) in that heteroglossia. Heteroglossia speaks to the multiplicity of languages, language forms, language varieties, language styles, and so on that exist within some apparently unified language. In his discussion of the novel, Bakhtin (1981) argues, The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistic­ ally organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases) – this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as genre. (Bakhtin, 1981: 262–263) Here, Bakhtin is not engaging in some simplified notion of ‘celebrating diversity’ or the mere co-existence of languages. He is speaking to the tension within which they co-exist and the resultant disruption of some stable language form, a disruption without which the genre dies. Again, a post-liberal philosophy of language policy challenges the received conceptualizations of language critiqued early on in this volume, since they privilege

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the language of authorities or languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day – languages that enforce disciplinary power. Learning in school, from the primary grades on, argues Gee is a matter not of learning ‘English’ or ‘literacy’ in general, but, rather, of learning specific social languages tied to specific communicative tasks and functions. In turn, these tasks and functions are tied to specific discourse communities, social practices, interests, norms, and values (e.g., those of certain branches of science or, in some cases, just ‘school science’). (Gee, 2014: 21) In this chapter, I addressed two levels of such contextualization as illuminated by Gee: the fact that schools and their presumed languages of operation are socially constructed and that, on that broad level, there can be no such thing as decontextualized language; further, in order for students to really get a handle on the repertoires of language used in schools, they must be hypercontextualized within the specific discourse community of history, science and so on. On the one hand, as regards school-worthy language in the case of language varieties and academic language as regards notions of de­ contextualized language, I am suggesting that this is merely a problem of terminology. In schools, the ways that language and academic language are defined are simply imprecise. Perhaps we might use ‘school repertoire(s)’ of language or, as Rolstad (2005) suggests, ‘second language instructional competence’ (although the latter is directed toward English-language learners and, therefore, would be imprecise for speakers of varieties of English). On the other hand, it is imperative to recognize the importance of this im­precision. The importance of the need to contextualize language (especially, apropos to my argument here, in school) as attempted here is seen in the materialist dimension, in the material consequences, of academic and/or school-worthy language as discursive practice. Language creates meaning around itself, privileging certain forms or varieties both universally and ­context-specifically (e.g. in schools). ‘Academic language’ becomes a discourse of deficit, since it has already been socially constructed through uneven power relations, reflecting, therefore, the language of the dominant group. Given that language creates such meaning around itself, teachers must be made aware of and taught to challenge the beliefs and practices that exacerbate privilege and reify dominant language forms as natural and neutral.

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Notes (1) See MacSwan (2005) and MacSwan et al. (2002) for discussions of the mis-assessment of bilingual students. (2) See Petrovic and Rankin (2007) for a discussion of the concept of liminality and language use in schools. (3) See also Delpit (2006) for the importance of teaching the language of power for language minority students. (4) Here I am intending the use of reification in the Marxist sense of ‘thingification’. (5) This example is from a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the two authors accessed online (7 January 2014), dated 14 November 2008 and titled ‘Academic language: What is it and how do I know it if I see it?’ (now available only as a cached source via Google).

7 A Post-Liberal Approach: Broadening Language and Narrowing Policy

Introduction Liberalism rests on the ideals that individuals are morally equal and hold conceptions of the good that often differ from the conceptions of others. Given this, another liberal ideal is that societies should not presuppose any particular conception of the good to which all must cleave, including, somewhat paradoxically, liberalism itself.1 Language negative liberalism and the formalist liberalism from which it derives, however, tend to follow a ‘one nation, one language’ ideology, presupposing a conception of the good as linguistic homogeneity. It thus serves as a force behind institutionalized linguicism, which, in turn, gives license to individual linguicism. Actualist liberalism requires us, instead, to consider the plurality of persons in our democracies and reconsider the institutions and policies that detract from them, such as blanket provisions against bilingual ballots and bilingual education, or the marginalization societally and educationally of language varieties that challenge the dominant standardized variety. While not ideal, the rights–goals approach problematizes existing structures, moves us closer to a democratic ideal wherein individual flourishing and civic engagement matter, while recognizing legitimate economic constraints. But these are just some of the more obvious observations that make language policy so complex. The very naming of language troubles the entire enterprise of language policy. I have set many pages to pointing out how ‘language’ is problematically granted ontology. In turn, ‘language policy’ becomes a singular construct that includes assumptions about the nature of language and policies to deal with language in that fashion. This is due in no small part to the discourse of liberalism, which tends to attenuate the range of options available to us to think about language – its nature, purpose, and what 112

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varieties count as a ‘language’ – and, therefore, language policy (see Petrovic & Kuntz, 2013; Stroud, 2010). Petrovic and Kuntz (2013), for example, argue that liberal cognitive framing shapes two functions in recursive interaction: the political and the sociolinguistic. Given this, I want to argue that language policy (1) analysts must consider the way that policy and, more specifically, liberal politics construct language and, therefore, (2) they must consider language and policy separately in order to engage in language policy.

Policy and Language/Language and Policy Language policy as policy and language, or vice versa, must consider the way that the political and the sociolinguistic interact. The political function is the way that the ideals of liberalism take linguistic form and are given meaning through a dynamic relation with the enunciative field. The sociolinguistic function is the way that language policy or linguistics, as fields of study, generates particular ways of talking about language (e.g. distinctions among language, dialect, pidgins, creoles, etc.) that create an enunciative field which, in turn, disciplines ways of thinking about the subject matter. In their model, Petrovic and Kuntz (2013) foreground the political function, given that liberalism is frequently foregrounded in questions around language policy. This foregrounding limits interpretations of language within the sociolinguistic function to those that make sense within the political function: language with ontology. In other words, the process works to reinscribe the ideas of folk linguistics, as linguistic critiques are typically not powerful enough to penetrate liberal discourse. Furthermore, an aspect of this that Petrovic and Kuntz fail to recognize in the original model is the extent to which linguists may themselves, through the discursive distinctions noted in Chapter 5, help to attenuate ‘language’. Thus, let me here state explicitly what this framework and the challenge of working through a post-liberal approach to language policy reveals: a more productive way to think about ‘language policy’ is not as a singular construct but as ‘language and policy’, such that the two sides of the construct are considered separately. For different readings of ‘language’ inform the shape that ‘policy’ takes and policy constructs language in particular ways. This interface between language and policy is illustrated in Figure 7.1. What I want to suggest with the language and policy triangles in Figure 7.1 is a broadening of the former and a narrowing of the latter. Language, as I have explored in previous chapters, can be constructed as a bounded system, narrowing the range of what counts as language. Let’s call this LB. What I have argued is that the idea of what counts as ‘language’ must take serious anti-foundational critiques, broadening the conceptualization of language

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Policy

Bounded

Anti-foundational

Language

Linguistics of community

Linguistics of contact

Figure 7.1  The language–policy interface

such that it includes language varieties and the ways that people actually and naturally employ language(s). Let’s call this LAF . The point, then, of the policy triangle is that it seems that as LAF becomes our linguistic point of departure, it necessarily narrows the contexts that policy can effectively occupy. That is to say that policy can deal with LB at the macro level (read: state level), but not LAF . To the extent that policy can deal with LAF beyond the requirements of negative freedom, it can only do so at more micro-level public spaces, such as schools. Another way to put this is that policy moves from a focus on a linguistics of community to a linguistics of contact. Linguistics of community builds, as Pratt (1987) develops it, from ­Anderson’s (1991) theorization of the origins and spread of nationalism, in which he describes the modern nation-state as an imagined community. For Anderson, the nation-state ‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson, 1991: 6). From this perspective, ‘language exists as a shared patrimony – as a device, precisely, for imagining community’ (Pratt, 1987: 50). There are, then, a range of policy implications that derive from a linguistics of community. As seen in Chapter 2, the language ideology of formalist liberals represents the most thoroughgoing version of a linguistics of community wherein language is seen as the device that will actually create that community, leading to language negative liberalism promoting monolingualism, at least in the public sphere. Similarly, although an improvement, policies that derive from language positive liberalism, where this assumes liberal constructions of language, reflect a linguistics of community. There are but more communities recognized.

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A linguistics of contact, on the other hand, decenters community. It is a linguistics that focuses on modes and zones of contact between dominant and dominated groups, between persons of different and multiple identities, speakers of different languages, that focused on how such speakers constitute each other relationally and in difference, how they enact differences in language. (Pratt, 1987: 60) In other words, the focus is on the way that speakers use and perform language across language (here, necessarily, in the anti-foundational sense). Recall from Chapter 5 Stroud’s important point that ‘millions of speakers, rather than being divided by their multilingualism in African languages, are actually linked into regional speech communities through linguistic continua. This demonstrates the point that purely linguistic demarcation of language or dialects … does not translate into actual boundaries of communication’ (Stroud, 2010: 205).

A Linguistics of Contact or Community for Policy? The problem with a linguistics of contact for policy is that the implications are not at all transparent, or at least they do not reveal themselves in ways as straightforwardly as a linguistics of community. One way to look at this is that a linguistics of community, and the homogeneity that it entails, focuses on naming language and the processes by which a certain homogeneity might be prescribed. This is, of course, within the very nature of policy. However, since a linguistics of contact focuses on the dynamic use and performance of language, policy setting, at least at the macro level, is antithetical to that focus. Stroud (2010), for example, opens discussion of the linguistic ramifications of cosmopolitan citizenship and globalization. But what policy, in terms of setting legal rights and standards, would help or encourage recognition or protection of the ‘existing vibrant markets of multilingualism’ (Stroud, 2010) in which people engage linguistically across multiple languages and that are so crucial to a cosmopolitan citizenship? Beyond the general right to freedom of speech and other such liberal values, such as equal opportunity (non-discrimination policies that, for example, include language or accent), it is not clear to me what policy has to say more specifically, beyond policy derived from negative freedom. On the other hand, at the micro level (read: school level), policy setting beyond this might be drawn. Of course, we could still begin with

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policy from a negative freedom perspective. For one thing, children do not generally enjoy freedom of speech or expression in the same ways. Teachers have historically trampled children’s freedom of expression on educational grounds: speak English only, or speak ‘proper’ English. So, educational policy should provide children with the same freedom of expression in schools as is provided to adults out of school. More specifically, however, in terms of positive freedom, educational policy must require that students hear themselves represented in the curriculum as a right, as argued in the previous chapter. As also argued, this is not to suggest that schools can only ever do one or the other. In bilingual schools, for example, students and teachers should be engaging in the same kinds of sociolinguistic analysis vis-à-vis language varieties to be respected in any multidialectal classroom – that is, of course, to say all classrooms. In reflection, what I have tried to do is to lay out a policy position that occupies what seems to be a very narrow space between a linguistics of community and a linguistics of contact, maneuvering between foundationalist and anti-foundationalist perspectives on language. In Chapter 2, I argued that a certain amount of statism is required, regardless of one’s positioning as a language negative or a language positive liberal. It is a difference of kind, purpose and degree, not one of whether or not. But, as one thinks toward a thoroughgoing linguistics of contact, it seems that what is at odds with it is policy itself. That is to say, a state of no state and, hence, no policy seems to be required. Therefore, is it the case that a different kind of space must be negotiated here, such as ‘liberal anarchism’?

Conclusion: Anarchism as Policy? Anarchism is, arguably, closer to the liberal tradition than many other alternatives (e.g. communitarianism). Indeed, Chomsky argues that what counts as liberalism today is a perversion of classical liberal ideals ‘into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order’ (Chomsky, 2005: 122). The defining feature of this emerging social order is capitalism and anarchism is argued in large part to be an anti-capitalist or, more contemporarily, an anti-neoliberal movement (Sheehan, 2003). But this, too, is consistent with liberalism. Chomsky goes on to argue, for example, that ‘on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable’ (Chomsky, 2005: 122), because of the exploitative nature of capitalism and the degree to which the labors of the many fill the coffers of the few, with concomitant attenuation of freedom (see Nielsen, 1985).

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Contrary to overly simplified notions of anarchy that frame the term as synonymous with chaos, anarchism draws from a history of political thought that emphasizes local, context-specific and anti-hierarchical manifestations of governance, what Sheehan (2003) refers to as affinity groups. These groups resist imposed, centralized authority, depending instead on participatory, democratic governance and action. To the extent that global neoliberalism is a form of neocolonialism, and I think it is, we can begin to see the ways that it might change cultures and linguistic affinities, to the extent that capitalist social relations will require such shift toward dominant cultures. This is obviously true in the case of language loss or shift. Consider the case study by Wan-Hua Lai (2012) on the loss of Taigi in Taiwan. Such loss was predicated upon state oppression, status planning that privileges a one-nation one-language ideology, and economic need. It is simply not the case that parents would freely choose for their children to lose their ancestral language or even language variety. The hegemony of English or of any dominant language is certainly directed by the neocolonial nature of global capitalism. Given this, language main­ tenance or transborder languaging (à la Stroud, 2010) or multilanguaging (à la Agnihotri, 2006, 2007) become forms of resistance. If, then, anarchism is ultimately the lack of state-imposed structures, in this case language structures, then that would help to create the spaces within which multi­ languaging occurs. Or it might be better said that anarchism creates no spaces – the creation of which would be institutionalizing. It is, instead, a space without spaces which inscribes the very need for multilanguaging. This said, it does not change the fact that these larger structures to be resisted are real. Given this, such resistance must take multiple forms and is, therefore, not inconsistent with either a LHR or a deliberative democratic approach that challenges the ontology of language. Though seemingly contradictory at first blush, I would argue that liberalism and anarchism (both Sheehan and Chomsky would call it ‘libertarian socialism’) can be joined by a common cause for social justice, both recognizing the impact of power discourses that extend beyond the boundaries of the individual typical of what is claimed to be liberalism today (e.g. language negative liberalism). Within the realm of language policy, liberal anarchism provides a new conceptual frame not built on static notions of language, but rather on language as dynamic and language as a process implicated by the micro-level contexts from which language emerges. Certainly Wee is correct in his assertion that ‘a speaker’s language preferences will change because language practices themselves inevitably change’ (Wee, 2011: 165). However, while languages certainly do change, we cannot ignore the context of that change, the context of so-called choice, be

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it global or local. As I have said, language practices do not just change willynilly; they typically change in response to the relational aspects within the larger context of choice. This is one of the dangers of embracing a thoroughgoing anti-­ foundationalist view of language in the existing state of politics. As I argued at the end of Chapter 5, it is important to recognize the limits of anti-foundationalism in this regard. For example, in Chapter 2, I mentioned the intergenerational conflict that can be caused by children›s language loss. One problematic aspect of that was the loss or misuse of formal forms of respect (e.g. tú or usted in Spanish). A thoroughgoing anti-foundationalist would have to reject this concern given that it reinscribes a foundationalist (or standardizing) view of language. Languages change; shift occurs. While this is inevitably true, within current contexts of choice, changes and shifts will most frequently reflect dominant cultural and linguistic interests. In this way, anti-foundationalism, as foundationalism, can become an error of omission undermining language diversity. The ration­ ality that leads cultural communities to ‘choose’ to abandon their language and culture develops within a context of choice that involves what Wee recognizes as the ‘unavoidability of language’. That is to say, societies and families must conduct their daily business in some communicative medium. This, recall, is why rules, procedures and rights must be part of the deliberative equation – to create a more robust context of choice – and it is here that liberalism helps inform, or is in fact inherent within, anarchism. For it is through an appeal to the very principles of liberalism – autonomy, neutrality, freedom – that a rationale for anarchism might be provided. This, of course, begs the questions for another volume: where does anarchism leave us in terms of language policy? How do anarchists deal with the unavoidability of language beyond linguistic affinity groups? How do they operationalize the linguistic coordination of democratic participation? Until such questions are addressed, a post-liberal philosophy of language policy might suffice.

Note (1) While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, I should point out the long-standing debate in political philosophy as to whether the ‘right’ should precede an ideal of the ‘good’ (or vice versa) and whether such a precedence is even possible. See Gray (2000) for a discussion.

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Index

language community 14, 63, 87, 88, 91 political community 47, 48, 49, 52–55, 57, 58, 59n context of choice 15, 43, 44, 47, 53, 55, 70, 79, 93, 118 culture 13–15, 36, 44–52, 54–58, 59n, 62, 63, 71, 77, 79, 91, 102, 106, 117, 118

academic language 20, 22, 81, 98, 104–110 African American Vernacular English 8, 19, 83, 85, 86, 88–91 anarchism 116–118 anti-foundationalism 22, 80–83, 86, 87, 91, 93–100, 104, 105, 113–116, 118 assimilation(ism) 1, 14, 15, 21, 39, 48–50, 52, 56, 58, 67, 72 Australia 75 autonomy 4, 15, 16, 26–28, 29, 31, 34, 35,39, 40, 43, 48, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 65, 66, 71, 84, 98, 118 background fairness 30, 62, 70 bilingual education 2, 141, 15, 17, 18, 22, 32, 36–40, 42, 56, 62, 64,75, 76, 77, 86, 92, 98, 99, 100, 104, 112 Bilingual Education Act 2, 15 bilingualism 4, 18, 38, 42, 64, 85, 94 sequential vs simultaneous 99

decontextualized language see academic language dialect 8, 18, 19, 20, 44, 74, 78n, 81–83, 85, 87, 88, 92, 93, 96n, 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107, 113, 115 discourse 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 95, 100, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112, 117 discourse of language 81, 82, 99, 100, 105 language as discourse 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 32, 53, 79

Canada 18, 85, 94 communitarian 16, 17, 21, 43–47, 49, 50, 55, 58n, 61, 66, 70 community cultural community 15, 42, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 59n, 87

Ebonics see African American Vernacular English English for the Children 38, 39, 64 enunciative field 81, 113 equal opportunity 37, 115 external protections 15, 23n 45, 63, 64 128

Index 129

first language 9, 11, 12, 17, 18, 42, 53, 54, 56, 76, 97, 98, 99 foundationalist views of language see anti-foundationalism freedom 15, 16, 24–27, 29, 32, 33–34, 38, 39, 40, 44–47, 52, 58, 63, 65, 68, 69, 82, 84, 92, 108, 115, 116, 118 effective freedom 31, 52–54, 57, 64, 70, 71, 73 negative freedom 27, 28, 30–32, 41n, 48, 53, 67, 114,–116 positive freedom 27–28

monolingualism 4, 17, 18, 39, 65, 98, 99, 114 mother tongue 5, 6, 7, 14, 17, 21, 54, 66, 74, 75, 86, 97, 98, 103

hypercontextualization 106–107, 110

prescriptivism 100–102, 104, 108 privilege 2, 53, 65, 69, 73, 76, 81, 83, 85, 88, 93, 94, 100, 103, 104, 107, 108–110, 117

identity 4–12, 14, 15, 35, 43, 45, 51, 54, 57, 59n, 77, 85, 95, 98, 101, 108 imagined community 46, 47, 114 India 3, 85, 88, 94, 98 individualism 4, 16, 25, 26, 35, 43, 46, 57, 58n, 61 internal restrictions 15, 23n, 45, 63 language loss 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11–12, 14, 54, 56, 57, 65, 117, 118 language planning 1–3, 19, 20, 36, 70 acquisition planning 3, 4, 17, 36, 41n corpus planning 2, 3, 80, 97 negative language planning 2, 36, 37, 84 positive language planning 2, 36, 52, 84 status planning 3, 36, 41n, 88, 117 language variety see dialect Lau remedies 76 Lau vs Nichols 74, 76 libertarian 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 40, 71, 117 linguistics 19, 21, 87, 90, 94, 101, 104, 105, 113–116

National Association for Bilingual Education 84, 85 neoconservative 32, 33, 35, 40 neutrality 26, 28–30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 40, 41n, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69–71, 106, 118 officialization 2, 3, 17, 20, 22n, 85

regimes of truth 13, 18 22, 82, 83, 90, 91 Singapore 83, 85, 91, 93, 108 Singlish 83, 85, 86, 91, 93, 96n, 104, 108 Slovenia 51 speech community 50, 87 standardization 3, 80, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104 statism 30, 52, 62, 63, 67, 116 Sweden 85, 90 unavoidability of language 69–71, 118 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 67, 72, 74 Voting Rights Act 2, 3, 73, 74, 78n