Conference Agenda

Together with 15 colleagues from 12 universities in seven countries, we recently submitted our under-contract edited volume titled States of Language Policy: Theorizing Continuity and Change to Cambridge University Press. The volume is situated within the field of comparative politics, and it highlights state traditions that produce language regimes, which themselves have a powerful influence on language policy choices. The volume builds and expands on State Traditions and Language Regimes, edited by Linda Cardinal and Selma Sonntag and published at MQUP in 2015. We are hoping to organize a two-part thematic panel (4 hours total) showcasing eight chapters from the volume. Our intention is to start the first panel with an overview of the book and its theoretical and empirical contributions, before giving way to authors of chapters focused on the cases of Algeria, Canada, Hong Kong, the Isle of Man, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and Global English.

For over 50 years, Canada’s language regime has centred—in theory, policy, and practice—on a binary: linguistic duality and authority of the two settler colonial powers, English and French. The legislative enshrinement of status for these colonial languages, by way of the 1969 Official Languages Act, has on most accounts failed in multiple ways. As is well documented, legislated equality between French and English has rarely manifested itself in practice. Less attention—scholarly or political—has been paid to the Indigenous languages erased by both political discourse, and public policy in Canada. What limited policy attention there has been has focused on Indigenous languages as second-languages. The development of the Canadian Parliament’s Indigenous Languages Act, launched by the Government of Canada on December 5, 2016, attempted to fill this gap. Analysis of this process reveals the tensions within Canada’s established language regime, while putting into sharp relief the difficulties of policy and policymakers to attend to—and move beyond—Canada’s colonial past and framework.

This chapter deals with the Algerian language regime and its formation/operation during the history of contemporary Algeria, making the Amazigh language activism the common thread through which this language regime has been shaped. The objective is to present a particular postcolonial language regime, which reflects an entire political system. Indeed, it approaches the situation of languages from a double perspective: the status conferred and the status anticipated/expected (Cardinal & Sonntag, 2015). The balance, or not, between the two levels helps to define the type of language regime and its stability. However, in this case study, the fact that the Amazigh language is marginalized and far from meeting the expectations of those who claim it, means that the gap between the two statuses is significant. Thus, taking the Amazigh claims as a guideline for approaching the Algerian language regime seems to be the most efficient way to understand and present this language regime. It is the Amazigh language that has experienced the most intense activism. This seems to have weighed the most in the Algerian language regime, pushing it from the inside to evolve, in particular through the critical junctures of political crises.

In an increasingly integrated Europe, state language regimes are not the only ones that matter. It is also essential to understand how supranational language regimes are interacting with state language regimes. As Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries worked towards and then gained European Union membership after 2000, to what extent did their state language regimes become ‘Europeanized’? I examine these questions through the case of Romani in Slovakia. This paper has two aims: first, to demonstrate that the concept of a language regime can be fruitfully applied to supranational entities, and second, to examine the impact of such regimes at the state level. The Council of Europe’s language regime led it to advocate for increased support of Romani, as well as increased minority language rights in member states more generally. This work became bound up in the wider dynamics of Europeanization and European pressure on CEE states. At the level of the Slovak state, official policies towards Romani were changed in response to such pressure. Implementation of such commitments was limited, however. An analysis of state treatment of Romani language in Slovakia from approximately 1998 to 2018 thus illustrates a process through which a state language regime was altered but not transformed.

Many academic and media accounts of the massive spread of English across the globe since the mid-20th century rely on simplistic notions of globalization mostly driven by technology and economic developments. Such approaches neglect the role of states across the globe in the increased usage of English and even declare individual choice as a key factor (e.g. De Swaan 2001; Crystal 2003; Van Parijs 2011; Northrup 2013). This chapter challenges these accounts by using and extending the state traditions and language regimes framework, STLR (Cardinal & Sonntag 2015). Presenting empirical findings that 142 countries in the world mandate English language education as part of their national education systems, I suggest there are important similarities with the standardization of national language at the nation-state level especially in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. This work reveals severe limitations of other approaches in political science to global English, including linguistic justice. I show how in the case of global English the convergence of diverse language regimes must be distinguished from state traditions but cannot be separated from them. With the severe challenges to global liberal cosmopolitanism, the role of individual state language education policies will become increasingly important.