Language Policy and Linguistic Justice: Economic, Philosophical, and Sociolinguistic Approaches
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Language Policy and Linguistic Justice: Economic, Philosophical, and Sociolinguistic Approaches Michele Gazzola, Torsten Templin & Bengt-Arne Wickström (Editors). Cham, SWZ: Springer, 2018, pp. vi, 540 Peter Sayer1 Received: 15 September 2019 / Accepted: 10 November 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The authors of this volume take up the topic of linguistic justice in language policy from a perspective of political economy. The overarching question of the volume is how language policy should evaluate the importance of resource allocation (efficiency) versus resource distribution (fairness). The volume may be seen as a contribution to the critical responses (De Schutter and Robichaud 2015; Ives 2014) to Van Parijs’ (2011) seminal work Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World. While it does not specifically take up Van Parijs’ argument about English as global lingua franca (cf. May 2015), the papers do collectively take a deep dive into the question of the normative role of language policy in ensuring linguistic justice, which Van Parijs has argued should be based on a strong interpretation of the territoriality principle so as to protect minority languages. Significantly, this work foregrounds economic aspects of linguistic justice and extends the work of scholars who argue that language policy should be informed by economic analyses (Grin 2003). The book presents 17 chapters organized into four parts: an overview of the literature, political and philosophy perspectives, economic approaches, and sociolinguistic views and applications. The two introductory chapters run quite dense (over 60 and 80 pages respectively), but do present a fairly comprehensive framing of the issue of linguistic justice in LP. Organizationally, the reader perhaps would have had an easier time navigating the density of the work if the introductory chapters would have been shortened, and instead the corresponding pieces used as separate section introductions. In the opening chapter, the editors frame the book through an economic lens, arguing that the use of “concepts and analytic tools from economics and policy analysis in the study of language policy and planning has become not only desirable but perhaps unavoidable” (p. 4). They enumerate three reasons for this, including the * Peter Sayer [email protected] 1
Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, Arps Hall 346A, 1945 N High St, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
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need for governments to make language policy decisions, the power of economic arguments in language policy debates, and the limitations of discourse analytic approaches to evaluate language policies. Within an economic model of linguistic justice, the authors insist that LP work needs to consider costs. The cost–benefit analysis they have in mind, in linguistic justice terms, is a consideration of LP as promoting efficiency versus one that emphasizes fairness. They argue that public LP informed by economic policy supports an interventionist position of governm
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