INVITED SPEAKERS

What can the study of Language Policy contribute to South Asian Linguistics?

Harold F. Schiffman

University of Pennsylvania

The topic of language policy is a focus of interest for people from a number of academic disciplines, so at best, it is 'interdisciplinary' and perhaps at worst, 'multidisciplinary', meaning that there are people from various disciplines who study issues pertaining to 'language and politics' or 'language and decision-making' (or 'language conflict') but there is no one discipline where 'language policy' is central to the discipline as a whole.

This is the problem I wish to address in this talk, because it is not only social-science disciplines like political science that are guilty of this marginalization, but linguistics as well. The result is that while various disciplines deal with language policy tangentially, in no discipline is it a central issue. This means that language policy exists in a kind of theoretical 'no-man's land', and attempts to bridge the gaps between the various disciplines concerned with the topic are, given the political structure of academia, extremely problematical. In this talk, I will try to propose some solutions for this problem-solutions that might require Linguistics as a discipline to undergo some change of emphasis, especially as it concerns the notion of Linguistic Theory.