Language Rights, Policy, and Planning

Catalog description

This is a course on language rights, policy, and planning from individual, group, inter-ethnic, and national perspectives. Linguistic minorities are a consequence of colonization by European powers in different regions of the globe. Other effects of colonization and political conflicts include mass movement, migration, and the emergence of nationalism. In such contexts, minorities have made demands for language rights and used language policy and planning as strategies to realize demands for social justice. This course will examine how linguistic minorities secure opportunities to use their own languages and have them accommodated in official legislation as mother tongue, second, or foreign languages. The course will adopt a global perspective and analyze language rights as well as language policy and planning in diverse regions of the globe, including but not restricted to, Africa, Asia, and South America. Analysis will primarily focus on how language policies can be carried out from different perspectives (e.g., literary, linguistic, and political) in different geographical regions. After examining how language policies operate in and influence society, the course will use sociopolitical ideologies to explore the nature of the relationship between language policies and language rights and the ways this relationship enables one to achieve an expanded understanding of the impact of language policies and language rights on local language practices.