Contrasting Language Ideologies: Language-Related Policy Proposals in the Democratic and Republican Party Platforms in a Historical Perspective
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Czeglédi, Sándor [1]
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[1] University of Pannonia
University of Pannonia
Hungría
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- Localización: Concepts, Discourses, and Translations / Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed. lit.), Marcin Trojszczak (ed. lit.), 2022, ISBN 9783030960988, págs. 205-225
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The present paper examines how language-related issues have appeared on the official agendas of the major parties of the American political scene since the mid-nineteenth century. The analysis relies on Terrence G. Wiley’s extended comparative framework for formal language policy analysis (Wiley, 1999) to map and categorize all the relevant proposals and remarks concerning the English language plus “foreign” and “minority” languages in the party programs. Besides classifying the overt and covert language policy proposals into “promotion”-, “expediency”-, “tolerance”-, “restriction”- and “repression”-oriented initiatives, the present analysis also attempts to give a representative account of the areas of real and perceived language policy flashpoints by extending the traditionally recognized triad of (1) educational policies for language minority children; (2) linguistic access to civil rights and government services; and (3) the debates concerning the federal-level officialization of English (Schmidt, 2000). The corpus of the examination is based on the collection of relevant party platforms accessible via the online American Presidency Project database (maintained by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters). The ultimate goal of the paper is to compare and contrast the development of Democratic and Republican language ideologies for the past one and a half centuries. The results show considerable consistency in the respective partisan attitudes towards officialization, whereas references to access-oriented policy proposals and bilingual education have gone through more significant reinterpretation and reevaluation over the decades.
