Language policy and political reality

Many political theories are limited by two perspectives regarding contemporary language policy: for theories concerned with ethnicity, language is often reduced to ethnicity - often seen as synonymous with ethnic conflict, while theories concerned with modernization may see aspects of language that appear to be retarding modernization as presenting insuperable problems. A critique of these theories is based on the issue of languages in the Soviet Union, the conflict between local & former colonial languages in Third World countries, & the search for appropriate language models in an increasingly integrated Europe. Three perspectives from contemporary social theory provide a way of relating languages to politics: (1) a sociological perspective looks at actual language use & attitudes rather than official pronouncements, (2) a cultural perspective analyzes the significance of language in cultural terms, & (3) a discourse perspective considers language & discourse on language, identifying the relative autonomy of language issues, rather than attempting to reduce language attitudes to supposedly more basic ethnic or structural factors. 69 References. Adapted from the source document