ABSTRACT

With roots going back to the 1980s, the ethnography of language policy has gathered significant momentum in the past decade. Canagarajah (2006) charts the rationale, development, and contributions of ethnographic methods in language policy. He highlights the potential of ethnographic research to provide knowledge on specific situations and communities as a starting point for language planning and policy (LPP) model-building, to point to cases of language planning from the bottom up (cf. Hornberger, 1996), and to counteract the unilateral hold of dominant paradigms and ideologies in LPP. He reviews findings of early ethnographic LPP studies which illuminated paradoxical tensions within communities (Hornberger, 1988, on Quechua and bilingual education in Peru) or across LPP levels (Davis, 1994, on multilingual education in Luxembourg), local classroom-level resistance to official LPP (Canagarajah, 1995, 1997; Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001), the power of community involvement in bilingual education (Freeman, 1998), and the paradoxical unintended consequences (Jaffe, 1999, on Corsica), positive side-effects (King, 2001, on Quichua in Ecuador), or covert underlying motivations (Schiffman, 2003, on Tamil in Singapore) in educational LPP.