Volume 2013, Issue 219 - Ethnography of Language Policy: Theory, Method and Practice

In this article we examine the theoretical and conceptual history of Language Planning and Policy (LPP) and situate the ethnography of language policy within the historical trajectory of the field. This is offered as a reprise to Ricento's (2000a) overview of the field, in which he examined the theoretical and conceptual contributions up to 2000. We review that piece, focusing on the three major epochs that Ricento identifies, and then examine developments within LPP over the past decade, including theoretical and empirical contributions from ethnographies of language policy.

In this article, I discuss my ethnography of the bilingual intercultural education (EBI) policy in the Peruvian Andes and how this ethnographic approach has shaped my analysis of language policy (LP). I start from a sociocultural, sociohistorical and critical approach for which I situate LP horizontally, by analyzing the ideological tendencies in its discourse historically in time, and vertically in space, by examining the sociopolitical impact of external influences on policy. Then I utilize the insights gathered to ethnographically interpret LP vertically through actors in the institutions and locales where they implement and (re)interpret LP. My ethnography of LP in the Andes intends to show that while the relationships of macro structures to the micro and vice versa are difficult to identify, an analysis of LP based on the understanding of macro-micro relationships, both vertically in space and horizontally in time, provides a clearer view of the complex multidirectionality and multidimensionality of LP in specific contexts.

Indigenous Māori communities in New Zealand, as with many indigenous communities around the world, have been subjected to research by non-indigenous researchers that has often cast them in a poor light and failed to provide any genuine benefits from the research process. As a response to this problematic research history, an indigenous Kaupapa Māori framework to research has been developed by the Māori community in New Zealand (see Mead 1996; Smith 1997; Bishop 1997). This approach directly incorporates Māori practices, value systems and social relations as a basis for researching appropriately and productively in Māori contexts. It provides clear lines of accountability and control in relation to the subsequent value for, and impact of the research on, Māori communities, particularly if the research involves non-indigenous researchers. This article explores the methodological implications of Kaupapa Māori research for two non-indigenous researchers who were involved in an ethnographic study of the teaching of English in three Māori-medium schools. The article will discuss the research approach and processes followed in these three Māori-medium contexts, and some of the findings, in light of the methodological parameters of Kaupapa Māori research.

Language policy texts, talk and practices are situated in specific sociocultural contexts, yet they also seem to move across time and social space: an official text drafted in governmental chambers may be discussed in teachers' professional development and instantiated in classroom practice. Drawing on linguistic anthropological work showing how communicative signs circulate among contexts to constitute such phenomena as culture and identity (Agha 2007; Agha and Wortham 2005; Urban 2001; Wortham 2005), this article offers an account of language policy implementation as a constellation of communicative events connected to each other through their use of the same cultural forms. These chains of communicative events link people together as they become first receivers and then senders of some message (Agha 2007), in this case messages about what it means to be a Guarani speaker. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of language policy in Paraguay, where all schoolchildren are to learn in both official languages, Spanish and Guarani, I trace two widely circulating images of the Guarani speaker as they appear in policy text, in educators' talk about policy and in practice as one way to make salient connections between texts and actors' interpretations of policy at various levels. Analysis reveals that educators bring to their appropriation of policy a meaning of the Guarani speaker that is not evident in policy text alone.

Building on Agar's (1996: 26) notion of rich points as those times in ethnographic research when something happens that the ethnographer doesn't understand, methodological rich points are by extension those points where our assumptions about the way research works and the conceptual tools we have for doing research are inadequate to understand the worlds we are researching. When we pay attention to those points and adjust our research practices accordingly, they become key opportunities to advance our research and our understandings. Drawing for illustrative purposes on ethnographic research on bilingual intercultural education policy and practice in the Andes carried out by Indigenous students for their Master's theses at the University of San Simón's Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB Andes) in Bolivia, I highlight methodological rich points as they emerge across language policy texts, discourses and practices. Framing the methodological rich points in the context of basic questions of research methodology and ethics, I borrow as organizing rubric the paradigmatic heuristic for sociolinguistic analysis first offered by Fishman (1971: 219) and here adapted to the ethnography of language policy to ask: who researches whom and what, where, how and why?

The book under review here represents an attempt towards paradigmatic change in the study of language policy. The attempt – characterized by the editor in terms of Hymes' “ethnographic monitoring” – consists of a series of shifts in objects, assumptions and methodologies. Policy research consists of work on a variety of distributed objects, organized along different scales and operating on a variety of levels and in a variety of modes. This review article organizes these shifts along three axes: (a) understanding language policies as ideological complexes; (b) incorporating history and globalization as crucial “contexts”, enabling a different kind of generalization about dynamic systems; and (c) the introduction of vertical processes of stratification and layering alongside horizontal processes of distribution and presence. Taken together, these shifts offer a new program for ethnographic monitoring.

Sardinian is spoken on Sardinia, the second largest of Italy's islands, and is one of a set of minority languages which are officially recognized according to Italian law. In recent years there have been attempts to codify Sardinian. These were presented as an important step towards language maintenance and revitalization at a time of visible decline in the use of, and competence in, the local varieties in competition with the national language, Italian. The process of normalization of written Sardinian, however, has not been smooth and it has led to a solution of compromise which is still the object of lively debate. The article analyses the different levels at which language ideology has operated in the Sardinian context, focusing on the emergence of conflicting ideologies which have been promoted by the different agents of language policy, be they national and regional institutions, cultural operators, language activists or language actors. The analysis of the results of a recent sociolinguistic survey reveals that internalized discourses of “language rights” have gradually incorporated contrasting discourses of “language citizenship” (Stroud and Heugh 2004) in the ongoing debate on the role of Sardinian. Looking at the Sardinian case from this perspective contributes to a reassessment of the role of the language community, of policy makers and of educational establishments.