Heritage Language Education Policies and the Regulation of Racial and Linguistic Difference in Ontario

doi:10.1017/9781108684804.012

11 - Heritage Language Education Policies and the Regulation of Racial and Linguistic Difference in Ontario

from Part III - The Canadian Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2019

Jeff Bale

Edited by

Thomas Ricento

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Thomas Ricento: Affiliation:
University of Calgary

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Summary

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.

Keywords

Ontario Heritage Languages program language socialization political economy capitalism racialized languages social reproduction language discrimination

Type: Chapter
Information: Language Politics and Policies
Perspectives from Canada and the United States
, pp. 213 - 231

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108684804.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

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