Abstract
In a theory of language policy, managers are individuals or institutions with authority to require others to change their language practices or beliefs. Advocates are individuals or institutions who want the same result, but lacking any power to enforce, can only try to persuade. Language academies can be managers or advocates. Standardization is often the work of individual language reformers and missionaries, including those who develop writing systems. Advocates can persuade governments to implement language policy: examples are Hebrew, Irish and Māori. Examples of strong language managers are powerful leaders like Atatürk, Lenin, Stalin, and Lee Kuan Yew. But even powerful leaders find it hard to deal with the existence of policies at other levels and to implement unpopular policies.
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Notes
I distinguish between language policy as a theory (with the three components) and a language policy as a method of management (a regulation or law, for instance).
Other drivers include demographic changes like urbanization and migration, and political changes like conquest.
The need to distinguish between advocates and managers was suggested to me by an invitation to participate in a colloquium organized by Piet Van Avermaet and Elana Shohamy (Spolsky, 2018). I had earlier explored one aspect of the topic in a consideration of the nature of language academies and agencies (Spolsky, 2008). In a companion piece to this (Spolsky, 2020), I deal with agencies and institutions; in this paper, I concentrate on individuals.
The examples that Haugen (1987: 590) cited were the decisions to replace English with Irish in Eire and Yiddish with Hebrew in Israel.
An exception was Paul Simon, US Congressman from 1975 to 1985 and Senator from 1985 until 1997 who supported efforts to teach foreign languages in the US.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy “a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot”, Weinreich (1945) was told by a Bronx high school teacher who was attending one of his classes.
Dame Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira was a teacher and author (one of the few to write in Māori).
Sir Pita Russell Sharples later moved into politics and led the Māori Party and later the New Zealand Party until 2020.
I am grateful to Robert Kaplan for drawing my attention to these two examples.
Haugen (1983: 58) used the term “omnipotent”.
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Spolsky, B. Individual language advocates and managers. Lang Policy 21, 511–525 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-022-09618-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-022-09618-3