Language Planning and Policy: Ideologies, Ethnicities, and Semiotic Spaces of Power
Language policy is heterogeneous and varies according to its object, levels of intervention, purpose, participants and institutions involved, underlying language ideologies, local contexts, power relations, and historical contexts. This volume offers unique cross-cultural perspectives on language planning and policy in diverse African and Middle Eastern contexts, including South Africa, Bahrain, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Zambia, and Algeria. The African diaspora is also considered, as is the case of Brazil. By bringing together diverse contexts in Africa and the Middle East, this volume encourages a dialogue in the burgeoning scholarship on language policies in different regions of Africa and the Middle East in order to inspect the intersection between language policy discourses and their social, political, and educational functions.
Ashraf Abdelhay is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Arabic Lexicography at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. His research focuses on the cultural politics of language in Sudan with specific emphasis on the intersection of policy discourses, ideologies and power relations.
Sinfree Makoni teaches in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Program in African Studies at Pennsylvania State University and is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of the North West, South Africa. His main areas of research are language and politics, the intersection between language and health, and philosophies about language.
Cristine Severo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Portuguese at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, and Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brazil. She has conducted research on colonial linguistics, language policy, African languages and resistance.
“The publication of this book is a welcome addition to a growing literature on the topic and is sure to provide a highly needed jolt to those who still need it to wake up from their “dogmatic slumber.” What stands out as we peruse the ten chapters that make up this volume is that the authors are fully aware of the importance of viewing language planning as key to offsetting the corrosive aftereffects of the legacy of colonialism that still persist, albeit in subtle and often imperceptible ways, in many of these nation states, most of them relatively recently carved out from the shambles of colonialism.”
Kanavillil Rajagopalan
Professor of Linguistics at the State University of Campinas, Brazil
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