15 - Language and Politics
State Traditions and Language Policy
from Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2024
Summary
The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.
Keywords
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- States of Language PolicyTheorizing Continuity and Change, pp. 289 - 302Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024
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