ABSTRACT
As ideological constructs, language policies both reflect and (re)produce the distribution of power within the larger society. Language policies may be officially sanctioned, as in the 1887 dictate of Commissioner Atkins, just mentioned, or as exemplified a century later in the 1986 passage of California’s Proposition 63, making English the state’s official language. Language policies are often assumed to involve “government action or lack of it” regarding language statuses and uses (Ricento & Burnaby, 1998, p. 33). This definition, however, tends to reify official acts and formal state policies, and to obscure the complex human dynamics these policies represent. Here, I view language policy as a sociocultural process: that is, as modes of human interaction, negotiation, and production mediated by relations of power (see, e.g., Bourdieu, 1977; Levinson, Foley, & Holland, 1996; Wiley, 2000). From this perspective, language policy includes public and official acts and documents, but equally important, it constitutes and is constituted by the practices each of us engages in every day. “When we fight in support of a community-based language program,” Pennycook (2001) writes, “when we allow or disallow the use of one language or another in our classrooms, when we choose which language to use in Congress, conversations, conferences, or curricula, we are making language policy” (p. 215). Holm (in press), and Parsons-Yazzie (1996/1997) provide a more specific and intimate example: When a bilingual Navajo child hears a request in Navajo from her parent and chooses to respond in English, that child is also responding to a wider discourse on language policies. At the same time, child and parent are negotiating the language policy of the home.
