Conference Agenda

Subject: The presentation deals with the evaluation of the language policy for the protection and promotion of the Friulian language in the Autonomous Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the North East of Italy. The legal basis of the current language policy is the regional law (L.R.) of 18 December 2007 no. 29, but concretely the language policy is designed in the General Language Policy Plan, which is drawn up and adopted every five years. The current Plan covers the period 2021-2025. The three aims of the PGPL are: (i) to favour the restoration of the intergenerational transmission of the Friulian language; (ii) to improve the qualitative level of competence in Friulian (also in writing); (iii) to increase the social use of the Friulian language.

Theoretical approach. Our evaluation of the General Language Policy Plan 2021-2025 follows the approach of public policy analysis. In this presentation, we adopt the framework of the public policy cycle and focus on the phases of policy design and policy implementation. We will focus on the assessment of language policy outputs, i.e. the direct realisations of the Plan, to evaluate the current degree of administrative efficacy of the General Language Policy Plan (i.e. “in media res” evaluation).

Method. We have developed a system of 204 output indicators of the General Plan, covering all areas of intervention of the Plan, i.e. corpus, public administration, media, social presence, technologies, and language acquisition (education and training). Data to feed the indicators were collected through 20 separate questionnaires sent to all entities involved in regional language policy, i.e. 215 public bodies, of which 173 municipalities.

Results: The results show that the degree of implementation of the language policy is unequal and still partial. The presentation concludes with some reflections on why differences between domains and areas exist.

2023 marked a paradigm shift in Canadian language policy. Canada’s new official languages legislation, which had not been overhauled since 1988, recognizes for the first time the asymmetrical nature of Canadian language dynamics by explicitly recognizing the particular need and federal responsibility to protect and promote the French language. This and other objectives of the new legislation are ambitious. They include the restoration of the demographic weight of francophone minority communities through immigration, but also the expansion of the federal language regime beyond government to private businesses that are federally regulated. At the same time, the modernization effort raised questions concerning the extent to which official languages policy needs to be sensitive to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and what alignment should exist between official and Indigenous languages. Having contributed to the five-year policy-making process in a senior civil service position and having appeared as a witness before parliamentary committees, the presenter will offer insights into the policy-making phases from conceptualization to adoption, including the intricate dynamics of stakeholder interaction. The paper will finish with an outlook on effective mechanisms for implementation and an evaluation of Canada’s new federal language regime. Based on previous international work carried out by the presenter, parallels with other jurisdictions will be drawn throughout the paper.

Although Canada’s national language policy was originally designed to officially recognize French and English as Canada’s two official languages, it was also unofficially designed to recognize that Canada is a binational state. From the onset and since the establishment of the language policy, seeing Canada as a binational state has been met with resistance by English-speaking Canadians who focus more on multiculturalism, by indigenous peoples who, for obvious reasons, feel rejected by the concept, and by many French-speaking Canadians who would prefer a two-state model. The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution of the binational state model in Canada within the context of its language policy, from the historical antecedents of the Two Solitudes to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, from the institutional bilingualism of the 1969 Official Languages Act (OLA) to the linguistic duality of the 1988 OLA, and from the principle of territoriality proposed in the 1967 États généraux du Canada français to the revised 2023 OLA. This paper will combine a comparative approach with a discourse analysis of the many iterations of Canada’s language policy to argue that they have been implicitly yet progressively constructing Canada as a successful binational state. The paper will also explore the political ramifications of this view and its potential usefulness to other political contexts.

Policy makers and language planners are increasingly aware of the importance of new speakers (individuals acquiring a language outside the home, typically later-on in life) for the revitalisation of minority languages. Specifically, knowledge about new speakers’ motivations for minority language learning is important because it enables the development of policies and planning measures that support new speakers’ activation (the process by which they become active and habitual minority language users). Yet, the topic remains under-researched.

This presentation provides insights from new speakers of Frisian in the Netherlands. Following an overview of previous policies and planning efforts regarding Frisian, we present a corpus-assisted discourse study of qualitative questionnaire data from 264 new speakers. We analyse frequencies and collocations to establish statistically significant and meaningful trends, as well as considering concordance lines and longer discourse segments that allow for meaning to be established in context. The findings reveal one primary motivation for learning Frisian: namely new speakers’ desire to be part of Frisian-speaking social groups. Most of these social groups are highly local, including village communities and even specific neighbourhoods. We interpret these findings with reference to the notions of integrativeness (cf. Gardner and Lambert 1959) versus individuals’ identifications with different self-concepts (cf. Ushioda and Dörnyei 2009).

We discuss the implications of our findings for future policies and planning measures to support new speakers’ activation, thereby promoting the revitalisation of Frisian. We focus on prestige planning (cf. Haarmann 1990) – and specifically, measures to ameliorate intergroup relations between traditional and new speakers, encouraging the former to use Frisian with the latter, thus enabling new speakers to develop a sense of belonging to their local communities. We present a language campaign we designed based on our findings, and research-based science communication we provided for local policy makers and language planners.