Language Policy and Identity in Mauritania. El Hacen Moulaye Ahmed
and low economic development. “The many ‘deviant’ countries (rich but heterogeneous; poor but homogeneous) make this relationship a tenuous one” (Fishman, cited in the International Development Research Centre, 1997, p. 17). Besides, if the healthiness of communities and states is related positively with their monolingual homogeneity, civil wars would never have taken place in linguistically homogeneous states, such as Somalia and Rwanda, one of the rare countries with a tendency toward monolingualism, argued UNESCO (August 27–28, 2008, p. 47).
Bilingual students have a hard time at school. Some parents think that their children would perform better at school if they have been speaking one instead of two or three languages. However, researchers have proved that students who speak more than one language do not do less than those who are monolingual. In fact, speaking two or more languages benefits the students. For instance, “it increases neural pathways and improves memory and attention . . . this is a life-long advantage. A bilingual (or multilingual) brain ages more gracefully . . . it resists the inevitable decline in memory and other cognitive functions related to problemsolving, verbal reasoning, and attention” (Burton, Déchaine, & Vatikiotis-Bateson, 2012, p. 324). It is clear that speaking more than one language benefits the students’ brain. It helps them perform well throughout their learning journey as well as their social life.
Besides, some research studies claimed that bi- and multilingual students have smaller portion of vocabularies in each language and are slower to process words than monolingual students. Nevertheless, the reality is quite the opposite. Burton, Déchaine, and Vatikiotis-Bateson (2012) summed up the finding of researcher studies that refute such claim in the following passage:
[B]ilinguals perform differently on these tasks according to how balanced their bilingualism is. If they use both languages across a wide range of social contexts, they’ll learn the vocabulary items for those contexts. But if they use one language at home and another language at school, then, over time, the vocabulary items that they learn in each language will reflect these differences in social context. And as for longer processing time, this is the case only for tasks that require a bilingual to monitor both languages at the same time. In such bilingual contexts, monolinguals don’t pay attention to the other language (because for them, it’s just noise), while a bilingual pays attention to both languages. So bilinguals take longer to process the information because they’re processing more information. (p. 324)
The findings present the premise that bilingual and multilingual students have more cognitive ability than the monolingual ones.
Finally, women talk more than men do is a folk-linguistic idea that crosses freely in most societies. As such and as vehicles of society folk-ideas, many proverbs, sayings, and stories capture and read this folk-linguistic idea as follows:
a. Women’s tongues are like lambs’ tails—they are never still. (English)
b. The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for words. (Jutlandic)
c. Many women, many words; many geese, many turds. (English)
In addition, some adages and sayings advocate that while women talk, men are silent patient listeners.
a. When both husband and wife wear pants, it is not difficult to tell them apart—he is the one who is listening. (American)
b. Nothing is so unnatural as a talkative man or a quiet woman. (Scottish)
In her book, Gender and Discourse, Tannen (1994) told the following story:
A joke has it that a woman sues her husband for divorce. When the judge asked her why she wants to be divorced, she explained that her husband has not talked to her in two years. The judge then asked the husband, “why haven’t you spoken to your wife in two years?” He replies, “I did not want to interrupt her.” (pp. 54–55)
Nevertheless, the vast majority of research studies dispel the above-stated claims. When men and women converse, males talk more than their female counterparts do. Two Canadian researchers, James and Drakich (1993), reviewed sixty-three studies that address the question of gender differences in the amount of talk. The researchers found out that among the sixty-three studies only two studies concluded that women talk more than men (p. 284). Similarly, the result of a study carried out by Unger (2001) concluded that men are more likely than women to engage in classroom and boardrooms activities (p. 248). In addition, other studies debunked the claim that the gender differences of the amount of talk correlate with the context. While men talk more in public spaces, women talk more in private ones (Gamble & Gamble, 2014, p. 75). The different quotations unseat the myth that says women talk more than men. In fact, some of them show quite the opposite. Men tend to talk more than women. Others refute the myth by saying that the myth screams a false generalization since their findings showed that the amount of talk produced by men and women correlates with the context.
Defining Language Policy
What is language policy? Such question is commonly raised in most literature, but concrete definitions are less common than discussion of types, goals, and shapers of language policy. To fill that gap, we address the murky issue of definition in a separate entity in a separate heading. In so doing, three definitions, which might be of help in reaching appropriate synthesis of the phrase “language policy,” are discussed. The first definition is proffered by Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) who articulated that “the exercise of language planning leads to, or is directed by, the promulgation of a language policy by government. . . . A language policy is a body of ideas, laws, regulations, rules and practices intended to achieve the planned language change in the societies, group or system” (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. xi). In this definition, Kaplan and Baldauf point out that language policy is an amalgamation of abstract and concrete items that include ideas, rules, and practices. The goal of this amalgamation is to arrive at an elevation of a language or some languages on behalf of others at both social and administrational levels. It is worth noting that Kaplan and Baldauf introduce language policy as an activity or activities that are enacted by an authoritative body, government, for example. Moreover, Kaplan and Baldauf introduce the phrase “language planning” as an activity that leads to and comes as an outcome of language policy. No further explanation to disambiguate this interconnection between the two phrases was introduced in the above-cited definition. A clear disambiguation is laid out later.
A further definition to the phrase “language policy” was suggested by McCarty.
I have characterized language policy as a complex sociocultural process [and as] modes of human interaction, negotiation, and production mediated by relations of power. The “policy” in these processes resides in their language-regulating power; that is, the ways in which they express normative claims about legitimate and illegitimate language forms and uses, thereby governing language statuses and uses. (McCarty, 2011, p. 8)
Unlike Kaplan and Baldauf, McCarty’s definition extends the scope of language policy. She recognizes language policy not only as an authoritative but also as a multilayered intervention. In other words, she reveals that language policy is enacted as assemblages of the various institutions in a state from social, cultural to those which are governmental. The different angles of language policy, which are illustrated above, clarify how fuzzy the phrase “language policy” is. Putting the different threads of the above-stated definitions together, one can remark that language policy is a set of thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that are generated about different languages, enacted consciously and unconsciously by governmental and nongovernmental institutions through different rules and regulations in order to put some languages in hierarchical orders.
Moreover, to clear up the phrase “language policy,” it is worth clearing up an issue which crops up a lot with it. The issue is that the phrases “language policy” and “language planning” are frequently used, both in the technical and popular literature, either interchangeably or in tandem. Opting for the latter use of the phrases, one can argue that such phrases are different ones as the following passage reveals:
“Language planning” is an activity, most visibly undertaken by government, intended to promote systematic linguistic change in some community of speakers. The reasons for such change lie