Making Languages an Object of Public Policy

Abstract

This public multilingual article policy explores competence with key particular issues of Australians involved reference and in the to making perceived the language relation national between an object need the for of public policy with particular reference to the relation between the multilingual competence of Australians and the perceived national need for competence in the languages of key trading partners. The theoretical framework that dominates in this field of making policy around language issues emerges from applied linguistics and sociolinguistics and is generally known as language planning. These branches of scholarship locate the systematic study of language within either a pedagogical framework or a sociologically oriented framework (Kaplan and Widdowson, 1992). Within these frameworks many language planning scholars locate the practice of public policy making on languages under three broad categories. 'Status planning', which addresses the relative position and role of different languages (or varieties of a single language) within a single administrative or political unit. 'Corpus planning', which involves technical work to the internal resources of a language (its words, grammar, sounds, writing system etc.) usually aimed at permitting the target language to handle technical or advanced scientific discourse. Finally, 'acquisition planning' which refers to the policies that public authorities adopt towards the learning and use of new languages or of new forms of language (Cooper, 1989). This article concerns itself only with aspects of status and acquisition planning in the Australian context. The range of specific issues of language taken up within explicit policy determinations is extremely vast and involves both multilingual societies and 'monolingual' societies. Monolingual societies, or societies in which minority languages are very marginal to public life, tend to evolve policies around questions of language style, accent, pronunciation (even spelling and writing conventions) and these can become the object of debate and contest. However, explicit policies on language are more typically found in multilingual societies the great majority of the world's societies are multilingual and face more challenges in developing languages policies (Edwards, 1994). A problem arises when there is a perceived mismatch between what might be called the existing domestic language resources and the language skills perceived to be needed by a society. Such a problem is highly relevant to Australia's language policy making. Much recent policy making in Australia has been driven by the idea that the bulk of Australia's bilingualism is contained within immigrant communities and is perceived by government to be different from the languages