Linguistics and the state: How funding and politics shape a field

Christopher Hutton

doi:10.1515/ijsl-2020-2079

Abstract

AbstractIn this contribution, Christopher Hutton discusses how states have historically taken an interest in, and funded, linguistics research. For a range of political purposes – including colonial rule and military strategy – knowing about and learning the language of “others” has been part of the projection and use of power. The specific purposes and forms of state support for research on language, argues Hutton, does vary depending on whether states have authoritarian or liberal democratic regimes.

Highlights

Early state interest in linguisticsOne of the rare references to state funding in a work of linguistic theory can be found in the preface to Geoffrey Sampson’s Schools of Linguistics
In this contribution, Christopher Hutton discusses how states have historically taken an interest in, and funded, linguistics research
Sampson (1980) denies that “linguistics has any contribution to make to the teaching of English or the standard European languages,” commenting: “This would not matter, were it not for the extent to which the ‘applied linguistics’ industry, like so many other dubious modern enterprises, is financed not by those who see it as having some value but by taxpayers helpless in the grip of a voracious and tyrannical state.” (p.11–12) Yet, throughout modern Western history the state has made use of the study of linguistics

Summary

Early state interest in linguistics

One of the rare references to state funding in a work of linguistic theory can be found in the preface to Geoffrey Sampson’s Schools of Linguistics. In World War II linguists in the United States were engaged in teaching strategic languages and producing. The Yale linguist Bernard Bloch and Eleanor Jorden produced a two-volume guide to spoken Japanese that year, published by the United States Armed Forces Institute. Richard Smith states that “World War II Intensive Language and Army Specialized Training Programs in the USA [...] underlay the establishment of Applied Linguistics in the immediate postwar years.” area studies, including the linguistics of key languages, is generally viewed as a product of Cold War understandings of strategic knowledge. Linguists are involved in the state’s assessing of migrant and asylum-seeker claims to certain national or ethnic identities

Approaches to linguistics

Concluding thoughts