Ethnography of language planning and policy

Abstract

A decade ago, Hornberger & Johnson proposed that the ethnography of language planning and policy (ELPP) offers a useful way to understand how people create, interpret, and at times resist language policy and planning (LPP). They envisioned ethnographic investigation of layered LPP ideological and implementational spaces, taking up Hornberger's plea five years earlier for language users, educators, and researchers to fill up and wedge open ideological and implementational spaces for multiple languages, literacies, identities, and practices to flourish and grow rather than dwindle and disappear. With roots going back to the 1980s and 1990s, ethnographic research in LPP had been gathering momentum since the turn of the millennium. This review encompasses selected ethnographic LPP research since 2000, exploring affordances and constraints of this research in yielding comparative and cumulative findings on how people interpret and engage with LPP initiatives. We highlight how common-sense wisdom about the perennial gap between policy and practice is given nuance through ethnographic research that identifies and explores intertwining dynamics of top-down and bottom-up LPP activities and processes, monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies and practices, potential equality and actual inequality of languages, and critical and transformative LPP research paradigms.

Reflect, Revisit, Reimagine: Ethnography of Language Policy and Planning

“…LPP ethnographers’ ways of seeing, looking, and being in the sites and with the participants of their research led to the emergence and burgeoning not only of empirical research, but also programmatic statements on ELPP, for example Canagarajah's (2006) chapter on ethnographic methods in language policy in Ricento's influential language policy textbook, Hornberger and Johnson's (2007, 2011) proposal for the ethnography of language policy, and McCarty's (2011) collection of research on ethnography and language policy. Nuances of terminology as to ethnography in, of, or and language policy may reflect slightly differing takes on the scope of the field, but, by and large, the agreed-on terrain of ELPP is substantially the same (Hornberger & Johnson, 2011; Hornberger et al, 2018).…”

“…Critical and transformative LPP research paradigms dynamically intertwine in the ideological and implementational LPP spaces of high stakes testing, bilingual education, and Yup'ik language endangerment in Alaska (Wyman et al, 2010), standards-based reform in bilingual classrooms and schools of Philadelphia, USA (Flores & Schissel, 2014), the Zapotequización of language education in Mexico (DeKorne et al, 2018), and the fostering of multilingual/plurilingual policies and practices in education in Pakistan (Manan et al, 2019). These instances of intertwining dynamics of top-down/bottom-up LPP activities and processes, heteroglossic/monoglossic language ideologies and practices, potential/actual (in)equality of languages, and critical/transformative LPP paradigms give nuance to our understandings of how implementational and ideological spaces play out in the proverbial and ever-elusive policy-to-practice gap in LPP (see also Hornberger et al, 2018).…”

Lisa Lim, Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee (Eds.). (2018). The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a politics of language for agency and change. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. xiv + 303 pp. €144.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781783099658

“…This volume builds on the growing body of work which explores linguistic citizenship (hereafter LC) as an alternative to language rights and recognition policies (Stroud, 2001;Stroud & Heugh, 2004;Williams & Stroud, 2013), directing focus towards "what people do with and around language(s) in order to position themselves agentively, and to craft new, emergent subjectivities of political speakerhood, often outside of those prescribed or legitimated in institutional frameworks of the state" (Introduction, p. 4). It is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on language policy and planning which gives serious consideration to the nature of language politics on the ground, and attempts to grapple with the inequalities that persist regardless of official pluralist policies (Canagarajah, 2005;Hornberger et al, 2018;McCarty, 2013;Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). In support of the overarching argument, the volume brings together conceptual framing chapters, case studies with a focus on southern multilingual countries which are generally underrepresented in sociolinguistic scholarship, and critical commentaries by scholars who question and push forward the development of the authors' contributions.…”

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“…This volume builds on the growing body of work which explores linguistic citizenship (hereafter LC) as an alternative to language rights and recognition policies (Stroud, 2001;Stroud & Heugh, 2004;Williams & Stroud, 2013), directing focus towards "what people do with and around language(s) in order to position themselves agentively, and to craft new, emergent subjectivities of political speakerhood, often outside of those prescribed or legitimated in institutional frameworks of the state" (Introduction, p. 4). It is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on language policy and planning which gives serious consideration to the nature of language politics on the ground, and attempts to grapple with the inequalities that persist regardless of official pluralist policies Hornberger et al, 2018;McCarty, 2013;Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). In support of the overarching argument, the volume brings together conceptual framing chapters, case studies with a focus on southern multilingual countries which are generally underrepresented in sociolinguistic scholarship, and critical commentaries by scholars who question Book review © De Korne and CMDR.…”