This chapter focuses on the synergy that researchers in language policy have developed by integrating two other subfields of sociolinguistics: critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography. The chapter begins by discussing the meanings of the three key concepts used in these approaches, albeit sometimes in significantly different ways: critique, ethnography, and discourse. It then examines how these concepts are relevant to contemporary analyses of language policy, focusing particularly on their potential to open new and innovative avenues of research. To demonstrate how an integrated critical discourse and ethnographic approach can be applied in concrete empirical research, the chapter presents an analysis of language policy and practice in the European Union before providing an overview of other relevant studies in the area.
… the fact that as an individual person's experience of language in its cultural contexts expands, from the language of the home to that of society at large and then to the languages of other peoples (whether learnt at school or college, or by direct experience), he or she does not keep these languages and cultures in strictly separated mental compartments, but rather builds up a communicative competence to which all knowledge and experience of language contributes and in which languages interrelate and interact. In different situations, a person can call flexibly upon
Analysis of signage has traditionally represented a point of entry into examinations of language policy, with the visibility of different languages seen to be potentially indicative of repression of multilingualism, of struggles between different language regimes or of grass-roots resistance to top-down agendas. This paper argues for a more discursive approach to the nexus between linguistic landscape and language policy in investigations of multilingual spaces. I present two case studies of the interaction between language policy and linguistic landscape in the southern Thai city of Hat Yai, the first examining part of the central commercial district and the second the cafeteria of the main university located in the city. The findings highlight numerous points of interaction between language policy and public signage, though they also underline the complex and sometimes tenuous nature of this relationship.
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