Language Policy and Identity in Mauritania. El Hacen Moulaye Ahmed
select a language or few languages for official uses (p. 10). Scholars reduced sociolinguistic complexity to two languages or handy proportions of languages (Blommaert, 1996, p. 212).
The second stage, final stage, which started from the end of the second phase up to the present time, witnessed a move to broaden the scope of language policy. The scholars of this stage, who are postmodernists and human right activists, sought to provide alternative framework to language policy that the scholars of the first stage, who represented different schools, structuralism, pragmatism, poststructuralism, modernism, and critical linguistics, failed to present. The classification goes in line with that of Ricento (2000) who divided the stages of language policy intellectually into three stages. The scholars shifted from the processes of language standardization, codification, and selection limitation to the standards which were associated with the state-building, though still important, to “language revitalization, minority rights, globalization, and the spread of English, the preservation of linguistic diversity, and bilingual education” (Ferguson, 2006, p. 10). Indeed, typical example would be the works of Ferguson (2006) and Kaplan and Baldauf (1997).
The shift, therefore, turned the discipline’s attention to be no longer so geographically biased toward the postcolonial states of Africa and Asia. With migration, globalization, and the rise of regional nationalism, the issue of language policies crossed freely to the old established nation-states (Ferguson, 2006, p. 9). The overall trend has been a tendency toward geopolitical diversification since there is almost no country outside language policy consideration. Ricento, stated: “of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken today, 95% of the world’s population speak 100 languages, with 5% speaking the remaining thousands of languages” (2000, p. 17). In Alaska and the Soviet North, about forty-five of the fifty indigenous languages (90 percent) are waning. Similarly, in Australia, about 90 percent of the aboriginal languages still spoken are dying (Krauss, 1992, p. 5). In the United States, Krauss (1998) asserted that only twenty (13 percent) of the 155 extant Native North American languages are spoken by all generations (p. 11). Such statics depict a phenomenon which is described by sociolinguists as language loss and which, according to Dreyer (2009), refers to the suppression or the abandonment of a language or mother tongue (p. 146).
The primary reason behind the language loss is the policies adopted by the early stage politicians and academic scholars. For postmodernists, their policies were reductionist. Critical scholar, Phillipson (1997), viewed the reductionist approach as a mirror of what he described as language imperialism, unequal official use of languages (p. 239). In order to remedy the situation, many scholars called for the maintenance and the promotion of language diversity. The calls bred many policies which adopt language diversity. Two illustrative examples are
the 1996 post-apartheid South African constitution, which, in sharp contrast to the practice of most African states attaining independence in the early 1960s, extends official status to eleven languages and calls on the state to promote the status of previously marginalised languages, stated. Another, in a different context, is the qualified welcome given to the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which calls on signatory states to protect and promote these languages. (Ferguson, 2006, p. 10)
The above two examples are a celebration of language diversity which is the current supported trend by almost all academic scholars and some decision-makers.
Types of Language Policy
Even though scholars of language policy have offered many views and interpretation of issues related to language policy, almost all of them seem to overlook an offer of a well-organized framework of the typology of language policy. Instead, most of them discussed the types of language planning, status-corpus, and acquisition planning, which, as mentioned above, are only the practice of language policy. Among the few scholars, who categorized language policy, was Johnson (2013) whose integrative framework is presented in this work. Johnson (2013) articulated that there are four schemes based on which language policy can be classified. These schemes are mapped based on the following identifiers or criteria: Genesis, means and goals, documentation, and law and practice.
There are four typologies of language policy. The first typology, based on the genesis, classified language policy into two main categories, top-down and bottom-up. The former is carried out by people with power and authority (most of them are part of the body of the government) who make the decisions related to language in the state. The decisions are taken with minimal consultation with grassroots language learners and users, observed Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, p. 209). The latter, however, is derived by language learners and users. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that language policies are developed across multiple “levels” of policy creation and even a language policy typically considered bottom-up and become top-down. For instance, “a policy developed in a school district for that school district, can still be top-down for somebody (like, teachers or students)” (Johnson, 2013, p. 10). Accordingly, the terms “top-down” and “bottom-up” are relative since they depend on “who is doing the creating and who is doing the interpreting and appropriating” (Johnson, 2013, p. 10).
The second typology of language policy is defined by means and goals into two main types, overt and covert policies. To start with, overt policy, as its name suggests, is unhidden and overtly vocalizes spoken and written texts. Covert policy, however, intentionally makes no mention of any language in spoken and/or written texts. “The notion of ‘covert’ carries with it strong connotations of something that is intentionally concealed and, therefore, a covert policy is one which is intentionally hidden or veiled . . . , not openly shown, for either collusive or subversive reasons” (Johnson, 2013, p. 11). The slight difference between the overt/covert distinction from the following explicit/implicit dichotomy and the distinguishing characteristic proposed by Johnson is intent (Johnson, 2013, p. 11). He also provided a typology based on documentation in which language policy is either explicit or implicit. Explicit/implicit dichotomy points out to the official status of language whether it is officially stated or not and how a policy is documented. A typical example of this policy would be that of the status of English in the United States of America, for even though there is no official declaration of English as the official language, but unofficially, it certainly is (Johnson, 2013, p. 11).
The de jure and de facto labels are used slightly differently. Johnson (2013) asserted that respectively, “the terms are typically used to connote policies that are based on laws (de jure) versus what actually happens in reality or in practice (de facto)” (2013, p. 11). Johnson (2013) brought the situation of language policy in Morocco as a typical example of de jure and de facto policies. He argued that while the official languages are Arabic and Tamazight, in practice (in education) many Moroccans use French (p. 11). In this sense, it seems that the notion of de jure lines up with the notion of overt and explicit policies since all of them refer to the “official-ness” of language policy; nevertheless, Johnson paid attention to this overlap and in disambiguating it he asserted:
[A]n activity that is de facto is not necessarily covert or implicit or even a “policy” in the traditional sense—it is an activity that occurs in practice despite whatever the de jure policy states. This does appear to imply that whatever happens in practice is somewhat different than what is officially stated as a de jure language policy. For example, even within schools and classrooms which are officially monolingual, teachers can include the multilingualism of their students as resources for classroom practice. . . . In this case, de facto refers to both the classroom policy as created by the teacher and the classroom practices, which are closely related but (here proposed as) distinct nonetheless; thus de facto refers to locally produced policies that differ from what is explicitly stated (in law) and local practices that may be in line with local de facto policies but do not reflect what is officially documented in de jure policies. (Johnson, 2013, pp. 11–12, emphasis in original)
The distinction does not imply that policies do not overlap; in fact, it is worth noting that the above-discussed typologies are elusive since they are interconnected. That is, policies overlap both within and across typologies. For instance, a policy can be both top-down and bottom-up; top-down and covert; bottom-up and explicit, and so forth.
Factors Affecting Language Policy
Language policy is not a neutral phenomenon. In fact, the word “neutral” does not exist in the