Political Conflict over Bilingual Initiatives: A Case Study

Abstract

There can be little doubt that the issue of language policy and its implementation is located at the interface of language conflict and political conflict. Yet there is equally little doubt that the major sociolinguistic contributions to the analysis of this issue have chosen to sacrifice the notion of conflict in the interests of eliciting general and universally applicable models. Models, typologies, frameworks, and the like are born out of static, descriptive accounts of situations and imply permanent relationships between the elements of a situation. Since the essence of conflict is its dynamic and shifting nature, it is perhaps unremarkable that it fails to be captured by these predominating devices of sociolinguistics. The aim of this paper is to explore the adequacy of such devices by referring to the events involved in a concrete instance of conflict over language.