ABSTRACT
Question: How do language policies in education create inequalities among learners?
There are a lot of different levels to that question. One is a global level. For instance, the way to approach this is to look at the birth of Esperanto in the 19th century. Esperanto was designed, among other things, to create world peace. One of its goals was to create an international language that could easily be learned by everyone in society so that you wouldn’t have growth of inequality, where there would be some who didn’t know the international language and there would be some who did. Unfortunately, Esperanto never took hold. That leaves us with the choice of two global languages right now, English and Mandarin. So in many countries where they’re not English speaking, those who speak English are the ones in terms of class who are able to move into the international corporations and global economy. So, on a global scale, we are seeing the difference between those who know English and those who don’t know English, or those who know Mandarin and those who don’t know Mandarin. Then, in a particular nation, any subset within the nation who doesn’t participate in the dominant language, obviously, has a level of dispossession from the economy and the political system. And, then of course it depends on what happens in the schools with the learning of the non-dominant language speakers.
