World Language Policy Essay example -- Globalization Localization Lang

Globalization, Localization, and Language Choice In Britain they used to call a barometer a ?glass.? One would visit the ?glass? in the morning in order to get a sense of what the weather would be for the day. It was of course a rather chancy business, not least because on the average day in Britain you have a little of everything anyway. The poet Louis MacNeice caught the sentiment in a wellknown poem about impending doom: The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever, But if you break the bloody glass you won?t hold up the weather. Perhaps the least observed phenomenon in the global system is language. Because it is so basic to human communication, we are apt to regard it simply as an unchangeable part of the communication process itself ? a kind of natural phenomenon as ordinary and ineluctable as weather. In fact, language is a social institution of enormous importance, and one over which we have a great deal of control (Edwards 1994, Tonkin 2003a). Human utterances are elective: we can either make them or not make them, and we are potentially capable of making these utterances in any language. Since language is fundamental to human social interaction, we begin by choosing our utterances in accordance with the code that we are born into: language is a form of human behavior, and we learn to talk through the need and the desire to participate in the community of which we are a part. Thus the language that we use also has symbolic value: it is a marker of our identity and it reinforces our sense of belonging. But it is an accident of geography or economics that we learn one language or another, that we are born into one speech community rather than another. Within that community, we lear... ...Werner, ed. 1998. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York: New York University Press. Tonkin, Humphrey. 2003a. Language and Society. New York: American Forum for Global Education. Tonkin, Humphrey. 2003b. The search for a global linguistic strategy. In Jacques Maurais & Michael A. Morris. Languages in a Globalising World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 319-333. Tonkin, Humphrey. 2004. Language equality in international relations. In Lee Chong-Yeong & Liu Haitao, ed. Towards a New International Language Order. Rotterdam: Universal Esperanto Association. 96-105. Tonkin, Humphrey & Timothy Reagan, ed. 2003. Language in the 21st Century. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Wright, Sue. 2004. Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.