Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2007

This paper provides an overview of the emerging debates over language policy and linguistic diversity within political philosophy. It outlines the larger context of this debate and identifies its protagonists and the main issues at stake in it. In addition, it presents an interpretive scheme for the analysis of the variety of approaches that have so far been developed within this field. This scheme relates these approaches back to two clashes of different language ideologies. The first clash is between instrumentalism and constitutivism. The second clash is between transparency and hybridity. Finally, the paper explains why the sociolinguistic literature on language policy should interest political philosophers, and vice versa: why sociolinguists should engage with political philosophy.

The 2004 draft of the EU Constitution contains legal language defining the linguistic obligations of the EU and the language rights of its citizens, but the draft fails to achieve language justice for EU citizens who speak regional minority languages. These minority languages include Catalan, Basque, and Galician in Spain, Welsh in the UK, and others.

Increasingly, foreign contacts are a daily fact of life for many companies. It is therefore remarkable that little to no empirical research has been conducted into the language policy applied by such organizations. Companies with transnational contacts are generally assumed to use English throughout the world as a “lingua franca,” yet whether this is actually the case is questionable. In a multicultural Europe that is striving to unite, there may well be other languages that could qualify as the international language of choice. Research is needed to investigate which language or languages are chosen, by whom the choice is made and why, in certain situations, speakers switch to different languages. This article focuses on the report of an empirical study addressing these aspects. A case study of a Dutch parent company that runs a holiday centre in Germany is presented in order to analyse micro-level interactions which can only be understood by considering the language choice as a result of the way in which the environment is “enacted.” For this analysis, use was made of an interview conducted with the Dutch head of the human resources department, along with transcripts of audio-recorded conversations, and also documents such as the mission statement.