Language Policy

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9489-z

ORIGINAL PAPER

A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and

management)

Bernard Spolsky1,2 

Received: 2 May 2018 / Accepted: 16 August 2018

© Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
Earlier, I proposed that language policy could usefully be analyzed as consisting
of three independent but interconnected components, language practices, language
beliefs or ideologies, and language management. It was also argued that failure to
recognize that language policy can exist in other domains and at other levels than
the nation-state, ranging from the family to international organizations was one
of the reasons for the ineffectiveness of state planning efforts. From looking at a
number of cases, some modifications are now suggested. First, within manage-
ment, is to note the distinction between advocates (without power) and manag-
ers. Second, is to add the level of the individual, noting the importance of self-
management, attempts to expand personal repertoires to enhance communication
and employability. Finally, it is pointed out that even when this leads to a work-
able language policy, it may be blocked or hampered by non-linguistic forces such
as genocide, conquest, colonization, introduced diseases, slavery, corruption and
natural disasters.

Keywords  Management · Beliefs · Civil strife · Natural disasters · Corruption

Introduction

In earlier studies (Spolsky 2006, 2009), I suggested that a probable cause of the
general failure to develop and implement wise and effective national language poli-
cies was the result of ignoring the existence at other levels (family, education, work,

* Bernard Spolsky
bspolsky@gmail.com
1
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
2
Jerusalem, Israel

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 B. Spolsky

ethnic or religious group, region) of competing management goals and activities.1 In

the post-colonial years of the 1950s and 1960s, classical language policy, as Jernudd
and Nekvapil (2012) named it, concentrated on language planning at the state or
national level, aiming to solve the language ‘problems’ of new nations after inde-
pendence.2 Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) relaxed the restriction to nation-states by
using the term polities, defined by Wikipedia as “a state or one of its subordinate
civil authorities, such as a province, prefecture, county, municipality, city, or dis-
trict”, but in practice language planning continued to be widely interpreted as the
development of a central policy in support of a new national language, balancing the
demands of competing language varieties for that role.
This was a reasonable reaction to the situation after World War II, when a large
number of newly independent states in Africa, Asia and the Pacific were consider-
ing whether or not to replace imperial or colonial language policies that had gener-
ally been built around use of the metropolitan language.3 The Western experts’ main
interest in these cases was to encourage the competitive status of the indigenous lan-
guages, establishing their roles as official languages, and improving their ability to
handle modern tasks and concepts by inventing or modifying a writing system and
coining new terminology. These linguists assumed, as many economists and other
policy makers did in those innocent and optimistic days, the possibility of formulat-
ing a central government plan (a policy) to solve the problems. Starting sometimes
with a survey of local language use, as in the excellent Ford supported (Ford Foun-
dation 1975) studies of African countries, they believed it would be possible to plan
how to deal with the problems produced by diversity.
The assumption turned out to be wrong. Just as the various economic plans (such
as those of the Soviet Union) failed to work, so the language plans did not achieve
their goals (Spolsky 2006). Apart from some countries where a local variety has
been recognized,4 most African states have now accepted the need to continue to
offer school instruction in the former colonial language, producing a situation where
there is a huge number of children in schools who do not understand the language
used to teach them. The Global Education Monitoring Report (Policy Paper 24,

1
  An earlier version of this paper was read at a symposium on "Interests and Power in Language Man-
agement" held at the University of Regensburg in September 2017. I am grateful to audiences at the
School of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the Victoria University of Wellington, the School of
Languages and Linguistics at Melbourne University, and the Language Policy and Practice Research
Seminar at Hong Kong University, and to the anonymous reviewers of this paper, for comments and sug-
gestions that helped me rethink it.
2
  Classical language planning saw its task as the solution of language problems. The journal Language
Problems and Language Planning, which in 1977 succeeded the Esperanto-language journal La monda
lingvo-problemo [The world language problem] founded in 1969 preserves this orientation in its title at
least.
3
  In fact, in many newly-independent post-colonial states, the Imperial language was preserved (Spolsky
2018a, b). The exceptions were Asian colonies like Vietnam and Cambodia and some former British
colonies in Africa; Arabization efforts continue in North Africa.
4
  In Burundi, Kirindi is official as are English and French. Kenya and Uganda have Kiswahili and Eng-
lish as official languages. Tanzania has no de jure official language, but considers Swahili the national
language and uses English for many government activities.

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A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and…

February 2016) of UNESCO found that 40% of the world’s children do not have
access to schooling in a language they speak or understand.
“In many western African school systems, French continues to be the main
language of instruction, so the vast majority of children are taught from the
early grades in a language with which they have limited familiarity. This seri-
ously hampers their chances of learning. In Côte d’Ivoire, 55% of grade 5 stu-
dents who speak the test language at home learned the basics in reading in
2008, compared with only 25% of the 8 out of 10 students who speak another
language.” (Policy Paper, page 2).
The report confirms that 6 years of education in a child’s home language are
needed to reduce gaps for minority children.5 After more than 70 years of language
policy and planning, this irresponsible and damaging approach has not been seri-
ously challenged.
There are many other examples of the ways that centralized language plans did
not succeed. MacNamara (1971) drew attention to the failures of Irish language
planning, a topic since analyzed in various studies (Harris 2008; Ó Laoire 1996; Ó
Riágain 2001). Ó Riágain showed for instance that economic development of the
Gaeltacht had the effect of bringing back English speakers, reversing the efforts
at Irish language maintenance. Comparison of the Irish and Hebrew revivals casts
some light on the factors involved: the Irish revival, starting as a political movement
in the late nineteenth century, became a centralized state activity after 1919; the
Hebrew, with similar political and ideological history, was implemented by grass-
roots programs in the small pioneering farming villages of Ottoman Palestine that
developed family-supported schools and minority community activities under the
British Mandate, resisting the pressure from the majority regional language (Ara-
bic), the government-favored English, and the major heritage vernacular (Yiddish)
and receiving government support only after the United Nations established the
State of Israel in 1948. The pressure to “reverse language shift”6 and re-establish
Hebrew as a dominant vernacular and hegemonic official language coming from
many different levels and in many domains, led to success at the same time as Irish
continued to wither although it was centrally supported.7
Colin Williams (2012) has demonstrated the shortcomings of a centralized pro-
cess of language management, calling referring to the studies of European Union
governance and its relation of language and identity by Kraus (2008) to illustrate
how many agencies and institutions at different levels are involved in the current
program of Welsh revival.8 In essence, the classical model was a “top-down” only
process, tending to ignore demographic pressure. To make this over-simplification

5
 Walter (2003) summarizes studies showing the value of using children’s home language for initial
instruction. A study in Israel found that former Soviet immigrant children also require 6  years before
their cohort reaches local standards in Hebrew and mathematics (Levin et al. 2003).
6
  The term comes from Fishman (1991).
7
  It seems there are more speakers of Polish and Mandarin in Dublin than of Irish.
8
  Williams (2017) discusses continuing difficulties in Welsh language policy and implementation.

13
 B. Spolsky

work, some scholars identified competing forces, which they labeled “bottom up”,
perhaps not realizing that one is dealing with a complex and chaotic non-hierarchi-
cal system. Each level and each domain within a sociolinguistic ecology can have its
own variety of language policy, and each can influence and be influenced by all the
other domains.9 For example, schools and religious leaders often interfere in family
language policy, businesses sometimes set rules for language use by employees, and
hospitals may instruct staff not to use certain languages in the presence of patients.
The model I proposed suggested the value of seeing language policy as com-
prising three independent but interconnected components. The first of these was
language practice, the actual choice of language varieties and the nature of speech
repertoires10 known and used by speakers in the domain concerned. Describing
this is the task of sociolinguistics, involving studying the full range of social situ-
ations in which communication occurs. It ranges from the supranational (e.g. the
European Union) through the nation-state and the education system to the city and
the family, a topic being increasingly studied. The second componens was language
beliefs, often collected as established ideologies, which assigned values to named
and unnamed varieties and to identifiable variations in language choice. The third
was management, the way in which some individual or group or institution set out to
modify the practices and beliefs of members of the community. I now suggest two
important modifications to the original model.
The first is to add advocates to the management component, individuals or groups
who lack the authority of managers but still wish to change its practices. Language
activists, such as writers or grammarians, may wish to revive a variety (one thinks
of those responsible for the efforts to restore Irish or Hebrew or Maori or Basque as
vital vernaculars), but until they obtain power (as happened with each of these lan-
guages), they remain ineffective) (Spolsky 2018c).
The second is to incorporate self-management.11 It seems now almost trivi-
ally obvious to include in language management theory the attempt of speakers
to modify their own linguistic proficiency and repertoire. It is first and obvious,
for this is the process involved as children learn12 proficiency in the language of
their environment, their parents and other caretakers, and later, of their peers and
other adults. While some argue that the process is purely internal,13 it is agreed
that children normally develop proficiency in the language variety (or varieties) to
which they are exposed. Among the debated issues concerning is whether this is
a special kind of learning or not. Other issues are systematicity, learning of form

9
 The relevance of domains and levels was suggested in Spolsky (2004) and developed in Spolsky
(2009).
10
  The value of talking about repertoires (individual or collective) is argued in Benor (2010) and Spolsky
and Benor (2006).
11
  In the theory of language management proposed by Nekvapil 2012, 2016, Neustupný and Nekvapil
2003, this is referred to as “simple” language management. Until now, I have preferred to consider it as
accommodation (Giles et al. 1991; Giles et al. 1973).
12
  Or since Chomsky (1965, 1992), “acquire”.
13
  The work of a language acquisition device (Cazden et al. 1975; Chomsky 1967; Clark 1973; Ervin-
Tripp 1973) or other learning modules.

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A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and…

and function, and the role of linguistic input. There is a consensus that some of the
process is innate (every normal child learns a language) but that the specific vari-
ety learned depends on the external linguistic environment. This second process
is covered by the field of language socialization, which can be seen as an aspect
of simple language management, namely speakers modifying and developing their
linguistic repertoire and proficiency according to their sociolinguistic environment.
The process starts with children who build a growing repertoire of varieties and
styles as they interact with caretakers, peers and a widening circle of other speak-
ers. As a speaker moves into different and richer environments, there continues
to be pressure to increase and modify language. This has been studied under the
rubric of accommodation theory.14 If a speaker is positively attracted to an inter-
locutor, there is a tendency to modify speech towards that of the interlocutor; if the
reaction is negative, there can be a reverse effect.15 Accommodation tends to be
unconscious, but a similar process is the result of adapting one’s speech to that of
expected listeners.16
More formal self-management is shown when speakers set out to learn another
accent or language.17 Self-management is an extremely important aspect of the
development and modification of the language repertoire of individual speakers. It
depends ultimately on a recognition by speakers of their own lack of proficiency to
operate in a needed or desirable linguistic environment, and may also be the result
of external advocacy or management. It accounts for the widespread development
of private commercial language teaching schools to fill gaps in language teaching
provided by state institutions. It also depends on the possibility of learning the target
language, which can be hindered or blocked by external policies, such as the ban-
ning of the teaching of Hebrew in Soviet Russia, or the desire of speakers of the
target language to use a prospective learner’s own language. Self-management then
must be considered an additional important component of language policy, account-
ing for individual resistance to national management goals. This model, as I have
revised it, accounts for the difficulty in producing a workable language policy, held
up by the complexity of interests and forces at the various levels. But even if and
when a policy is formulated and promulgated, its implementation is commonly com-
promised or blocked by a number of non-linguistic forces that I next describe.

14
  The basic study was Giles et al. (1973), with continuing studies (Coupland 1984; Giles et al. 1991).
15
  After over 50 years of marriage, I now have adopted my New York-born wife’s “flapped d” as the cen-
tral consonant of “butter” rather than the “t” I grew up with.
16
  This is called audience design in studies of radio announcers by Bell (1984).
17
  The study of this appears in the work on language learning motivation (Dörnyei 1999; Gardner 1960;
Ushioda 1993).

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 B. Spolsky

Non‑linguistic forces

One of the major sociolinguistic effects of colonization was the destruction of lan-
guages by killing (or expelling) the indigenous peoples.18 This happened not just
in the case of colonies—for example, the Nazi attempt to wipe out all Jews which
led to the obliteration of Yiddish as a secular vernacular or the Turkish genocide of
Armenians and persecution of Kurds—nor did every case involve actual killing, as
in the original definition of genocide,19 but includes other cases of the destruction of
indigenous peoples by the introduction of diseases,20 the stealing of their land,21 the
exploitation of natural and mineral resources,22 the implementation of forced labor
and slavery,23 the imposition of alien religious beliefs and practice,24 and the ban-
ning of indigenous culture.
This destruction commonly accompanied the spread of colonial rule. An early
account of Spanish genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas was written by
a Dominican friar (Casas 1583). Some scholars however have argued that the mil-
lions of deaths after the arrival of Columbus were largely the result of introduced
European diseases.25 Many indigenous peoples were annihilated during the Rus-
sian expansion into Siberia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Bonhomme
2012). Similarly, many Ainu were killed during the Japanese conquest of Hokkaido,
leading to an 80% population loss starting in the sixteenth century (Sautman 2006:
18). Many Hmong were killed by orders of the Manchu emperors in the eighteenth
century and their land given to Chinese soldiers (Cha 2010: 13). Some consider the
huge reduction in surviving indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada and New Zea-
land as British examples of genocide involved in land grabs and settlement (Wolfe
2006). Tasmania is often presented as a classic case, with 10,000 native people
killed by settlers and police in the nineteenth century (Lemkin 1944).26 A well-
described African example is the Herero genocide during the early twentieth century

18
  Totten and Hitchcock (2011) open their collection with the definition of indigenous peoples, aborigi-
nal or “First people”, a category recognized by the United Nations in a covenant, and applying to some
360,000,000 to 600,000,000 people today—the wide range is because few nations recognize or count
them.
19
  The term was first used by Lemkin (1944), a Polish Jew who escaped to the US and became a profes-
sor of law, to refer to both the Armenian genocide and the Nazi killing of members of his family.
20
  Cook (1998; Cook and Lovell 2001) describe the effect of European diseases on native peoples during
the conquest of North and South America.
21
  Belich (1986) describes the wars the followed and then provided excuses for seizure of Maori land in
nineteenth century New Zealand.
22
  For example, Marsh (2013) describes the effects of mining on an Australian aboriginal people.
23
  Klein and Luna (2009) describe slavery in Brazil.
24
  Spolsky (2018b) draws attention to the forced conversion to the Catholic Church in the Portuguese
Empire. Okwu (2010) describes the work of Christian missionaries in Nigeria.
25
  Cook (1998) argues that there were too few invading Spaniards to account for the death of millions,
and so suggests introduced diseases like smallpox. There is dispute as to whether the “extinction” of
the Arawak people was genocide or an internally generated loss of identity (Grenke 2005; Provost et al.
2010).
26
  See, for example, Lemkin (1944). Tatz (2001) analyses the reluctance of many Australians to recog-
nize that this was genocide.

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A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and…

colonization of Southwest Africa by Germany (Gewald 2003). Genocide continued

in Brazil, Bangladesh, the Congo,27 East Timor, Guatemala, Irian Jaya (under Indo-
nesian rule), Myanmar (the Karen, and currently the Rohingya), Paraguay (espe-
cially the Aché) and Tibet. There were many massacres during the American Indian
wars. The western movement of European settlement in the United States, supported
by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 moved many tribes including Cherokee and
Seminole west of the Mississippi, leading to what is known as the Trail of Tears.28
In California, an indigenous population of several hundred thousand was reduced
to 20,000 by 1890 (Madley 2016). Some eighty indigenous tribes were claimed to
have been wiped out in Brazil between 1900 and 1957 (Hinton 2002). In Argentine
and Chile, settler expansion led to the extinction of many native peoples. In all these
cases, early death reduced the number of speakers of indigenous languages, and the
survivors were often mistreated and persuaded to give up on culture and language.
The cases of actual slaughter were supplemented by destruction of native cul-
tures. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard evidence from
two thousand witnesses about the effects of residential schools and other mistreat-
ment of indigenous peoples and the resulting “cultural genocide”. Navajo Indian
children were taken from their home and neighborhood to schools sited by the Corps
of Engineers to meet building and water criteria.29 And in the Bureau of Indian
Affairs schools, there was enforcement of the an “English only” rule, and punish-
ment for speaking their home language.30 McGregor (1836) reported on the death of
the last member of the Newfoundland Boëothic tribe. In Mexico, there were boun-
ties offered for killing indigenous peoples.
Conquest also produced or aimed at language effects—the spread of Arabic after
the Islamic victories or the Japanese banning of Korean during the occupation, for
example—but colonization, with its long-term effects on education, was also a major
force. The overall policy of colonial governments was to change the language situa-
tion, preferring the ease of use of the imperial language by administrators sent from
the home country over communicative effectiveness in local languages, but imple-
mentation was slow and incomplete, largely because the prime motivation of colo-
nization was profit and power. Though colonizing nations covered selfish economic
motivation with claims of a civilizing mission, their emphasis was on preserving
calm and making money rather than educating the local peoples. This showed up
especially in the policy of “divide and rule” which exacerbated the effects of the
boundaries they had imposed forcing competing ethnic and religious groups into
artificial geographic units, and in their seizure of land and importation of slaves to
work the plantations in the new polities (Förster et al. 1988). As a result, only rarely

27
  About 5,000,000 people are estimated to have died in the wars at the end of the twentieth century in
Congo, but by the mid-2000 s, thing had become calmer; however, In February and March of 2018, vio-
lence resumed and the UN says 400,000 have been displaced.
28
  Basso (2016) describes the Cherokee, the Herero and the Greek Pontic genocides.
29
  There are many reports of Navajo children frozen to death as they tried to escape the boarding school
and find their way home.
30
  Similarly, in schools in Wales, children were beaten for using a Welsh word or sentence.

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 B. Spolsky

was there a large enough cadre of educated local peoples able to build a strong and
effective government when independence was finally won or granted.
The deleterious effects of colonialism on language continued as a result even
after independence. The states formed after they won or were granted independence
from colonial rule were left with social, economic, political and linguistic problems
that are still hard to solve. In looking at these French and Portuguese empires, it
becomes clear that the period of monolingual hegemonic imperial language policies
failed to produce a well-educated citizenry or overcome the conflicts of ethnic diver-
sity, for the first task of government was to impose order and then develop methods
of exploiting the pacified territories. More effort was put into pacification than into
education.
Most of the former colonies in Africa and the Americas and the Pacific31 contin-
ued the use of the metropolitan language as sole official language, partly for conven-
ience (there were said to be too many indigenous local languages to develop school
instruction in them32), partly to preserve the power and advantages of the small elite
who had developed mastery,33 and nominally because it was argued that choosing
any local language would unfairly favor the ethnic group that spoke it.
As it turned out, non-linguistic forces continued to prevent or handicap severely
the implementation of a language policy in these new states. Although a small elite
(the new governing classes) had developed proficiency in the metropolitan language,
a successful language policy that produced a literate population aware of and able
to participate in political affairs was generally blocked by continued civil strife, for-
eign military intervention, a corrupt leadership, serious public health issues, poverty
and starvation, and regular natural disasters like droughts and floods. Most of these
former colonies then appear high on the lists of failed states, having been exploited
by their colonial rulers for economic gain under the excuse of serving as a civilizing
power, and suffering after independence from external or internal strife, wars, cor-
ruption, and damaging natural disasters.
Apart from the failure of the colonizing powers to solve ethnic, social, and eco-
nomic problems leading to continued linguistic imbalance, the new governments
were similarly confronted with political and economic challenges which prevented
attention to educational weaknesses. Angola is an excellent example of the harmful
effects of internal conflict and external military intervention.34 Although there was a
local underground in Angola starting a dozen years before independence, conducted
by several different anti-colonialist movements, it was only with the Portuguese sur-
render of sovereignty after the Carnation revolution in the months before November
1975 that they saw a chance to seize power. Immediately, the movements began a
struggle for primacy, each soon appealing for international support. First to inter-
vene were the South Africans, who had long been cooperating with the Portuguese

31
  In Asia, local languages took over, and in North Africa, Arabization is being attempted.
32
  Successful implementation of constitutional recognition of nine indigenous languages in South Africa
has been handicapped by the limited resources allocated to each for modernization (Heugh 2003).
33
  Myers-Scotton (1990) called this “elite closure” and presents a number of cases from Africa.
34
  Written as a doctoral thesis, Guimarães (2016) is a full account of the Angolan wars.

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A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and…

colonial government in military and development affairs. Other superpowers were

soon involved. In April, an officers’ coup formed a government, which was in con-
flict with more radical elements. Three distinct movements sought power, with
the Army often refusing to intervene on behalf of the colonialist settlers, so that a
radical group took power in 1975, with support and weapons supplied by the Rus-
sian government, complicated by disagreement with Chinese interests. But other
movements were still challenging, one supported by US, Zaire and Chinese fund-
ing. Soon, Cuban advisers arrived to set up training camps, obviously a concern to
the CIA. Also, Zaire sent troops. The three local movements built up their military
power with foreign assistance, and started to divide the country. In October, the
South Africans sent in a military force, counteracted by the later arrival of Cuban
troops, who soon became the major influence.
Preceding this struggle had been authoritarian Portuguese colonial rule, estab-
lishing a small elite of family-controlled financial and industrial oligarchs and the
maintenance of a semi-feudalistic system. Hiding behind a superficial humanizing
and civilizing program, their unpopular policies encouraged the development of
anti-colonialist left-wing movements. Colonial economic policy had been aimed at
supporting Portugal rather than the local population, and government was central-
ized and not open to change. Most local produce was exported and local industry
was not encouraged. Cotton, coffee and diamonds were valuable exports and the
proceeds supported the Portuguese economy. By 1950, fewer than 1% of the African
population of colonial Angola were “civilized”, a status requiring Catholic church
membership and high proficiency in Portuguese. A recent report summarizes the
current situation: “More than a decade after the end of Angola’s 27-year civil war,
the country still faces a variety of socioeconomic problems, including poverty, high
maternal and child mortality, and illiteracy. Despite the country’s rapid post-war
economic growth based on oil production, more than forty percent of Angolans live
below the poverty line and unemployment is widespread, especially among the large
young-adult population. Only about 70% of the population is literate, and the rate
drops to around 60% for women.”35 The long internal civil war, bolstered by support
from Cuba, Zaire, and South Africa locally and the Soviet Union, the United States
and China globally, left a heritage which prevented attention to educational and
linguistic problems. As with other parts of the former Portuguese empire, Angola
demonstrates the results of a long ambivalence towards language policy. On the one
hand, the hegemony of Portuguese is firm, with acceptance of the language as a
major element in civil status; on the other hand, there is some recognition of the
potential importance of indigenous languages, both as initial medium for education
and an identifying factor for ethnic groups. But after nearly 50  years of civil war,
massacres, and forced population movement, and in the current state of dictatorship
reflecting the loss of democracy in most of Africa, language problems tend to seem
trivial.
Another former Portuguese colony shows the damaging effect of wars and foreign
invasion. Timor Leste, exploited by the Portuguese from the sixteenth century, was

35
  Central Intelligence Agency (2017).

13
 B. Spolsky

invaded by the Japanese during the Second World War, resulting in tens of thou-
sands of deaths. Restored briefly to Portuguese rule after the war, civil war followed
the independence that came with the Carnation Revolution in 1974, but shortly after,
the country was occupied by Indonesia, an occupation unrecognized by the United
Nations, and that resulted in the killing of 100,000 Timorese. A US-backed guerrilla
movement continued to struggle, until in 1999 an Australian “peacekeeping” force
arrived, passing control the next year to the United Nations which recognized inde-
pendence for Timor Leste in 2002; fighting continued and the UN force remained
until 2012. These successive occupations—Portuguese, Japanese, Indonesian, Aus-
tralian, UN—had major effects on the basic language repertoire,36 setting a complex
language policy challenge that is far from resolved. During Indonesian rule, Por-
tuguese was banned and Indonesian was made official. Portuguese and Tetun were
treated as unifying languages by the resistance, and were adopted as official after
independence. Indonesian and English remain working languages. The 2008 Educa-
tion act calls for the teaching of both Tetum and Portuguese, and a 2011 strategic
plan allowed use of local languages with transition to the two official languages.
A language education working group proposed initial teaching in the students’
native languages, gradual introduction of Tetum and Portuguese, and later addition
of Indonesian and English. Macalister (2016) notes that English remains a popular
second choice of Timorese parents; private instruction is common, and English is
widely used in the public domain. In East Timor and other former Portuguese colo-
nies, internal strife and foreign intervention led to wars that had a major effect in
preventing solution to language problems.
An even more egregious example is the Belgian Congo, granted by the European
powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885 to a private company owned by King
Leopold II of Belgium (Förster et al. 1988). There followed years of atrocities under
Belgium rule which required forced labor for plantations. After independence in
1994, there was a genocide of Hutu by Tutsi,37 invasion by forces of Angola, Zim-
babwe and Namibia from 1998 until 2002, and the genocide and expulsion of Tutsi
in the next stage.38 These problems continued until recently, but there are signs of
improvement under a president elected in 2000 and eligible to continue in power
until 2034. The majority of the population speak Kinyarwanda, but English (becom-
ing the main language of education) and French are official; Swahili is taught at
secondary schools. Education up to twelfth grade is compulsory and free, but com-
pletion rates are low; under 8% go on to tertiary education.
Among former French colonies, Haiti was the first to obtain independence in
1804, after a slave revolt that shocked European slave-owning powers. Violence
continued, including wars with Dominica in the nineteenth century, and occupation

36
  Twenty languages are spoken in Timor: Portuguese with a few native speakers and Tetun-Dili with
about 400,000 speakers are statutory national languages. Tetun with 65,000 native speakers is important,
and another 12 are classified as vigorous. Many older people still use the Indonesian in which they were
educated.
37
  Hutu and Tutsi are not ethnically or linguistically different, but under Belgian rule, Tutsi leadership
was encouraged; later, the majority Hutu seized power and targeted the former ruling class.
38
  Turner (2007) gives a full account of these complex and involved events.

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A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and…

by the United States from 1915 until 1934. French colonies in Vietnam and Algeria
won independence only after long struggles with French (and in Asia US) troops.39
In all these cases, there were sociolinguistic outcomes: in Haiti, Haitian Creole
developed as the main spoken language, with some official recognition; in Vietnam,
Vietnamese has become the de facto national language; and in North Africa, French
maintains some importance in spite of Arabization and the challenge of English.
Another former French African colony, Côte d’Ivoire took many years to con-
quer; after independence, it was perhaps the most successful former French colony
in Africa, but civil strife followed a military coup in 1999; in 2002 French troops
defeated a northern rebellion; and 2011 there was another civil war, leaving a major
challenge to overcome its effects; for instance, students enrolled in tertiary education
dropped from 9 to 4% between 2009 and 2012, and unemployment increased.
Two recent studies help account for the failure of so many former African colo-
nies to deal with their linguistic problems. The first reported the state of children’s
health, mapping child growth failure and associated poor health and increased risk
of death.40 Using data from fifty-one African states, there has been great variation in
success in meeting World Health Organization Global Nutrition Targets.41 There has
been progress in eastern and southern Sub-Saharan Africa, but no evidence across
the northern and central (Sahel) region.42 The state of child health is an indicator of
why there has been little or no attention to language education in these areas, and
is to be explained by lack of international assistance, low attention to maternal and
child health, the long period of civil strife and conflict, and the effect of famine in
arid regions.
These forces also show up in evidence of variation in educational attainment in
Africa.43 One major source of variation is socioeconomic status: in countries like
Cameroon, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Nigeria and
South Sudan, three out of four rich children complete primary education, but only
one out of four poor children.44 In particular, there is a major gap between men and
women, with lowest levels of attainment in rural areas and across the Sahel region.
While there has been some improvement, gains have stopped in many regions.
Those communities with low levels of education for women are also likely to be
low in public health. These educational failures account for inability to deal with

39
  Spolsky (2018a).
40
  Model-based geostatistics are reported to have shown accurate estimates of nutrition in Burkino-Faso,
Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, and Somalia; in a new study (Osgood-Zimmerman et al. 2018), data from
fifty-one African states show measures of Child Growth Failure between 2000 and 2015.
41
 The Millennium Development Goals aimed to improve nutrition by 2025 and end malnutrition by
2030.
42
 Northern  Senegal, southern  Mauritania, central  Mali, northern  Burkina Faso, the extreme south
of Algeria, Niger, the extreme north of Nigeria, central Chad, central and southern Sudan, the extreme
north of South Sudan, Eritrea, Cameroon, Central African Republic and extreme north of Ethiopia.
43
  Graetz et al. (2018) mapped variation on the basis of 173 unique census and survey sources.
44
  UNESCO on Sustainable Goals.

13
 B. Spolsky

linguistic problems. It is not surprising then that many of these countries appear also
high on the Fragile States Index.45
Corruption is another problem. Many African nations appear high on the Cor-
ruption Perception Index,46 reflecting the fact that local mineral and other sources of
wealth are often exploited by political leaders for personal gain and not used for the
common good. A review of corruption (Olken and Pande 2012) notes that it appears
more prevalent in developing nations than in rich countries. There is variation, but
it is also apparent that “corrupt behavior has significant adverse consequences for
efficiency and equity outcomes” (2012: 3). One type of corruption is measurable,
namely bribery. Studies suggest that politicians in Peru received as much as $50,000
a month in bribes. In Indonesia, truck drivers paid bribes amounting to 13% of the
cost of the transport to police at checkpoints (more than the 10% salary paid to the
driver). In the port of Maputo, Mozambique, bribes amount to 14% of the shipping
cost. A study in Uganda estimated over 80% of the funds sent in block grants to
schools were misused. This widespread corruption reduces the availability of funds
to improve schools and educational levels.47
The World Bank summarizes the resulting state of education: “Developing coun-
tries have made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom and the
majority of children worldwide are now in primary school. Nevertheless, some 260
million children are still out of primary and secondary school, and hundreds of mil-
lions of children cannot read or write, despite having attended school.”48 In this situ-
ation, it is obvious that language education, an expensive business if it is to be effec-
tive, must also suffer greatly. When so many African schools lack desks, one can
hardly wonder about the poor preparation of their teachers.
Adding to man-made weaknesses in fragile states, many of them have also suf-
fered from natural disasters. Haiti has experienced many earthquakes, with the 2010
earthquake being catastrophic. Each year about a fifth of Bangladesh is flooded, kill-
ing about 5000 people. In 2000, a flood in Mozambique left 44,000 people home-
less. In 2007, fourteen African countries suffered a major flood affecting over a
million people. Huge wildfires in 2015 occurred in Indonesia and surrounding coun-
tries. While developed nations have the economic resources to overcome these dis-
asters (one thinks of the rebuilding of Japanese cities), in fragile poor corrupt states
they further weaken any implementation of language management.
All of this calls for attention to the effect of non-linguistic factors to the possibil-
ity of language policy and management.

45
  Formerly called the Failed States Index, the classifications are made by the US Fund for Peace, a non-
government non-profit research organization which now includes 178 countries. South Sudan, Somalia
and the Central African Republic are the top three, followed by Yemen, Sudan, Syria, and the Demo-
cratic Republic of the Congo.
46
  Issued by Transparency International, a German-based based international organization.
47
  There are many well-publicized cases of the corruption of individual political leaders and their close
associates: Trump in the US, Putin in Russia, Zuma in South Africa, Lula, Rousseff and Lerner in Brazil,
dos Santos in Angola, Gaddafi in Libya.
48
  http://www.world​bank.org/en/topic​/educa​tion/overv​iew.

13
A modified and enriched theory of language policy (and…

A modified theory

Language policy in a speech community in any domain or level depends on three

components, language practices, language beliefs or ideologies, and language man-
agement; in the latter, I now recognize the distinction between advocates without
power and managers with authority. While a great deal of scholarly attention in the
field of language policy focuses on the development and evaluation of policy from
the point of view of language rights (Pavlenko 2011; Romaine 2008; Skutnabb-Kan-
gas and Phillipson 2017), to understand the potential for management requires atten-
tion to the three components. Given the complexity, it is not surprising that state lan-
guage policy making is seldom successful, or why attempts at other levels including
activist endeavors to maintain minority languages have such limited effects. A totali-
tarian or authoritarian government may have some significant effects—one thinks of
the concentrated efforts of the People’s Republic of China (Spolsky 2014) that have
succeeded in persuading so many that the topolects are dialects and that maintain
the common writing system, or the success of a powerful prime minister to change
the language repertoire of Singapore (Dixon 2009; Xu and Wei 2002)—but even in
a modern nation with a strong economy and education system, continuing immi-
gration and heritage language loyalty leaves multilingualism and language islands
(Hélot and Erfurt 2016). And while the strength of major languages continues (“big
fish eat little fish”), minority and indigenous languages survive (Coronel-Molina and
McCarty 2016; Hornberger 2008; King and Benson 2008; McCarty 2003; Reyhner
and Lockard 2009). Many smaller languages are disappearing (Austin and Sallabank
2011; Hale 1991; Krauss 1991; Labov 2008), as their speakers die or shift, but new
varieties are continuing to appear especially in multilingual urban areas. This com-
plexity explains why the development and promulgation of a workable language
policy is so difficult, calling for the balancing of many different factors and interests.
But even when such a policy is developed, its successful implementation49 is com-
monly blocked or vitiated by non-linguistic events or forces such as wars and cor-
ruption which rob the plan of the needed funding and resources to effect it.

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Bernard Spolsky  a founding editor of Language Policy, has continued to publish since he retired from
Bar-Ilan University. Recent books include Language Policy (2004), Language Management (2009), The
Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy (2012), all three of which have now appeared in Chinese trans-
lations, and The Languages of the Jews: A sociolinguistic history (2014).

13