Language does matter. Book review: Lui, Amy H. Standardizing diversity: The political economy of language regimes (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 2015. 265 p.)
Keywords:
language policy, language regime, ethnolinguistic heterogeneity, political economy, political and economic aspects, social capital, Southeast AsiaAbstract
The article provides a review of Amy Liu's book Standardizing Diversity: the Political Economy of Language Regimes. The paper discusses the concepts "language policy" and "language regime" and shows the different types of institutional agreements that form the basis for the classification of different language regimes developed by Liu: power-concentrating, power-sharing, power-neutralizing, and neutralizedsharing. In the typology of language regimes, the researcher relies on two types of criteria: the number of recognized languages (one or many) and the nature of recognized languages (mother tongues or lingua franca). Ethnolinguistic heterogeneity, according to Liu, is one of the key factors in choosing a particular type of institutional agreement. A low level of heterogeneity enables power-concentrating regimes, whereas a high level creates power-neutralizing ones. In fact, Liu notes, language regimes are political institutions that determine which language group will possess and distribute resources in a given political system. Liu believes that ethnolinguistic heterogeneity is an obstacle to the successful economic and political development of the state; therefore, it is necessary to strive for reducing the level of linguistic diversity by institutional means. Each type of language regimes identified by the researcher has a number of advantages and disadvantages, encouraging cultural egoism, communicative efficiency and collective equality to various extents. However, the researcher argues that in terms of fairness the powerneutralizing regime with lingua franca as the only recognized language is the most successful one. The equality of language groups increases social capital, attracts foreign capital and generally has a positive impact on the economic growth in the state. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17072/2218-1067-2018-3-166-174References
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