Mapping the language ideologies of organisational members: a corpus linguistic investigation of the United Nations’ General Debates (1970–2016)

Abstract

Supranational and international organisations have long experienced difficulties in implementing multilingual policies, and this is, in part, due to a lack of activism on language matters by their membership (Author, forthcoming; Kruse & Ammon, 2018). The aim of this paper is not only to highlight the importance of investigating language ideology within the field of organisational language policy, but also to scrutinise the language ideologies particular to an influential body of institutional members. Using the United Nations as a site of exploration, and the UN General Debates Corpus (Mikhaylov, Baturo and Dasandi, 2017) as a dataset, this paper traces if and how issues of language have preoccupied the deliberations and work of UN member states over the course of 46 years, and if these discussions align with organisational policy. Using corpus linguistics, the paper maps the ideological landscape and language policy discourses across time, identifying a paucity of discussion over almost five decades. The paper argues that attention to the absence of references to language problems/language policy in the organisation is just as important as an exploration of language problems themselves. If organisations wish to make changes to language policies, and/or prioritise policy implementation, they would do well to attend more closely to the language ideologies of their membership and/or to reasons for their apparent inattention to language issues.

Chinese universities’ special programs supporting talents to seek a United Nations career: a center-periphery-model analysis

“…It is noteworthy that apart from English, French, and Spanish, other languages including Chinese, Arabic, and Russian are also official UN languages, but they are not valued equally by the special programs. Additionally, the UN has made efforts to deal with “the pervasive hegemony of English” in its language use and language policy, and has started to embrace multilingualism for reasons including peace, security, and diversity (McEntee-Atalianis & Vessey, 2020 ). Despite that, the Chinese HEIs tend to attach higher value to the languages used by the center countries in both the selection criteria and curriculum design of the special programs.…”

Evaluative reactions to minority languages and their varieties: Evidence from new speakers of West Frisian

“…3 Inter alia, our reluctance to do so is based on the fact that there is a growing number of corpus-assisted discourse studies which use quantitative corpus-linguistic procedures alongside qualitative data analyses to investigate language ideologies (e.g. Vessey 2016;McEntee-Atalianis & Vessey 2020;Kircher & Kutlu 2023). By contrast, language attitudes have also been studied on the basis of qualitative data (e.g.…”

Evaluative reactions to minority languages and their varieties: Evidence from new speakers of West Frisian

“…2 Inter alia, our reluctance to do so is based on the fact that there is a growing number of corpusassisted discourse studies which use quantitative corpus-linguistic procedures alongside qualitative data analyses to investigate language ideologies (e.g., Vessey 2016;McEntee-Atalianis & Vessey 2020;Kircher & Kutlu 2023). By contrast, language attitudes have also been studied on the basis of qualitative data (e.g., Hundt et al 2015;Karatsareas 2018;Leimgruber 2019).…”