ABSTRACT
Barbara Burnaby Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto Thom.as Ricento University of Texas at San Antonio We had several purposes in mind when we commissioned the chapters that comprise this volume. First, we wanted to demonstrate that the study of language policy is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary enterprise. The contributors to this volume come from the disciplines of demography, education, history, law, linguistics, political science, and sociology; however, the research and analysis presented here is interdisciplinary, providing expanded and integrated frameworks within which questions are posed and explanations provided. Second, we hoped that the individual work of these researchers taken together would provide not only new insights but also contribute to theory building in the still-emerging field of language policy studies. At the very least, we believed the work presented in these chapters would stimulate discussion while providing concrete data, information, and analysis to aid policy developers in their decision-making processes in the United States, Canada, and similarly situated countries. We hope we succeeded in achieving these goals, at least to some reasonable degree.
