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The Folk Linguistics of Language Policy

Nathan Albury

May 2013

Abstract

Even without professional linguistic training, individuals of a speech community

routinely engage in language policy as an area of applied linguistics. By default,

these individuals are folk linguists: they interpret and apply folk knowledge about

language to give life to language policies and they even create language policy

solutions for local language problems. In language policy research, folk linguistics

has traditionally provided sociocultural and ideological perspectives about language

to furnish language policy illustrations. While this is valuable, I propose that

positioning language policy as an explicit topic of folk linguistic research offers an

exciting paradigm to examine how non-linguists, armed with folk linguistic

knowledge, do language policy. To explore the salience of this repositioning, I reflect

on instances where I observed folk linguists doing language policy in the civil service

and consider the contributions a folk linguistic approach may have made.

Introduction

Language policy extends beyond the official discourses and documents of authorities

to include shared frameworks about language as they are locally understood, executed

or even created by individuals, families and communities. A key difference, however,

is that unlike official language policy makers and planners who have presumably

attained a level of linguistic training that qualifies them to carry out their duties, these

individuals, families and communities are in the vast majority of cases neither

linguists nor employed in a professionally linguistic capacity. Their inexpert status in

linguistics as an academic discipline, however, does not prevent them from drawing

on their knowledge and beliefs about language to do linguistics. This includes

carrying out and even designing language policy to decide how, when and where to

use language. Consequently, these inexpert linguists are by default folk linguists of

language policy.

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I suggest that positioning language policy as an explicit topic of folk linguistic

research offers much merit to applied linguistics. To date, folk linguistic perspectives

have commonly, and very appropriately, contributed descriptions of collective

language beliefs and ideologies that contextualise, augment and complete language

policy illustrations. Ethnographic perspectives have also provided sociocultural

analyses of folk interpretations and appropriations of policy within community

cultures to examine bottom-up responses to policy directives. Reconfiguring the

relationship between folk linguistics and language policy, so that an explicitly folk

linguistic paradigm is applied to language policy, allows researchers to discover the

machinery of language policy, from a primarily linguistic perspective, as it is

performed by non-linguist individuals. This stretches folk linguistic research about

language policy beyond ideologically-centred or ethnographic commentary, which

draws on the sociology of language or linguistic anthropology, to include the ways

specific items of linguistic knowledge are harnessed in language policy activity. To

illustrate the proposal and its merit, I will reflect on some instances where I observed

non-linguists interpreting, implementing or creating policies to manage linguistic

diversity in the workplace during my tenure in the New Zealand and Australian civil

services. I will then explore the ways a folk linguistic approach may have helped to

deconstruct the deliberations and decisions of individuals I observed who, as non-

linguists, gave life to language policy.

Folk linguistics

Folk linguistics researches non-linguists doing linguistics. This means examining

individuals who are not trained in linguistics as they exhibit and apply their inexpert

knowledge and perceptions about linguistic topics. The topics of enquiry can

conceivably be drawn from across the linguistics discipline and can therefore be as

vast as a researcher’s interests and as one can possibly examine the folk linguistic

knowledge where it exists. Research to date has especially investigated how the folk

perceive and describe language variation and dialect areas in their language (see

Preston, 2011 for examples from the United States and Japan) or focussed on

soliciting folk attitudes to, or beliefs about, language acquisition and language in

society (see Baker, 2006 for an introduction to psycho-sociological research in

language policy). Paveau (2011) contributes a typological framework to the

scholarship to set out who does linguistics in society and for what purposes. Using a

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co-efficient of language knowledge, Paveau proposes a graded continuum of linguists,

including professional linguists at one end of this continuum and ordinary speakers as

the most folk of linguists at the other. A range of intermediary roles are also included,

including ‘amateur linguists’ such as lawyers who necessarily engage in semantic

analysis to undertake their work, ‘correctors/editors/proof-readers’ involved in

prescriptive grammars, and ‘ludo-linguists’ such as comedians who might draw on

shared folk knowledge or perceptions of language variety or phonetics and phonology

to furnish their linguistically-oriented humour. The typology is clearly useful in

establishing a scope of linguist roles and purposes, but is above all a reminder that the

folk actively engage in matters of linguistic in a range of societal contexts and that

this engagement is ripe for academic attention.

Rationale for folk linguistic research

The rationale for folk linguistic research derives from a principled belief that folk

linguistic perspectives, like folk sciences more generally, are legitimate. For applied

linguists, this is not in the least because their discipline is commonly concerned with

the “language-related problems of non-linguists” (Wilton and Stegu, 2011, p. 1) and

because folk belief “reflects dynamic processes which allow non-specialists to

provide an account of their worlds” (Preston, 1994, p. 285). From the perspective of

folk theory, non-linguists are also likely to have some knowledge about language by

virtue of being language users - meaning folk research can solicit that knowledge -

and their linguistic commentary constitutes and reveals local, shared and operable

logics that become socially and culturally-situated understandings about language.

Even if their content is empirically inaccurate, these logics may nonetheless be real

for those non-linguists (Paveau, 2011). For example, Preston (1996), when offering a

taxonomy of modes of linguistic awareness, drew the pertinent conclusion that

socioculturally-oriented perspectives about language primarily influence folk

linguistic talk, rather than linguistic factors themselves. This denotes that folk

linguistic beliefs, even if they are wrong from the perspective of the linguistics

discipline, can form shared knowledge for non-linguists when engaging on linguistic

topics and for interpreting, understanding and perpetuating perceived truths. In New

Zealand and Australia, for example, I have found it not uncommon to hear popular

psycholinguistic and theoretical linguistic logics such as:

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English is the most difficult language to learn because it is a bastardisation of

other languages.

Chinese is grammatically simple because it has no past tense.

If I send my child to a bilingual school, she won’t learn English properly.

Sociolinguistic or ideological commentary also seems particularly common, such as:

Speaking Te Reo Māori won’t get you a job.

You’re not a real Samoan if you don’t speak Samoan.

They don’t speak real French in the Pacific.

Such commentary, at least on its own, is scientifically flawed, but it does reveal

shared knowledge or logics about aspects of language.

Depending on the content, subjective truths about language may be manifestations of

a more fundamental linguistic belief or ideology. Llewellyn and Harrison’s (2006)

study of how corporate communications were perceived by a company’s employees

found that folk beliefs about the nature and characteristics of corporate language

influenced folk linguistic descriptions and attitudes to specific managerial

communications. This meant that folk linguistic commentary reflected underlying,

structure-giving folk linguistic belief. Verschik and Hlavac (2009) found that the

metalanguage knowledge of the folk, especially about language variation and

accented talk in Eastern Europe, helped to make sense of folk linguistic opinions that

were expressed in Serbia about Estonian imitations of the Serbian language in the

2008 Eurovision Song Contest. When researching the influences of folk linguistics

on attitudes to English language acquisition in Poland, Krzyzynski (1988) found that

local, pre-conceived ideas about what language is and what knowing a language

means premised general folk linguistic commentary about learning English.

Ultimately, the often belief-driven character of folk linguistic talk commonly makes

folk linguistic research “indistinguishable from the ethnography of language”

(Preston, 2011, p. 16).

The relationship of folk linguistics to language policy

Without a doubt, folk linguistic research is thematically akin to language policy

research when folk linguistic commentary concerns matters of language in society.

This is especially the case if we consider the ideas of language policy theorists such as

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Schiffman (2006, 2011) and Spolsky (2004). Although these scholars theorise

language policy differently, they agree that language belief systems of the folk are

central to completing any overall language policy illustration. For Schiffman,

language policy is constituted by a nexus of overt policy mechanisms (such as

interventions by government) and covert policy behaviours (the practices of

community members that act like de facto policy). Both are products of linguistic

culture which Schiffman considers “the sum totality of ideas, values, beliefs,

attitudes, prejudices, myths, religious strictures, and all other cultural “baggage” that

speakers bring to their dealings with language from their culture’ (Schiffman, 2006, p.

112). For Spolsky, language beliefs or ideology are instead an independent aspect of

a tripartite definition of language policy alongside language management and

language behaviour. This envisages language beliefs and ideologies to be equally as

pertinent to language policy narratives as any official intervention by the authorities.

Thinking about the salience of ideology in language policy illustrations, Machill

(1997) discusses how French mythology convincingly narrated an official, purist and

pervasive French language policy that in fact never existed until the Loi Toubon of the

1990s. The folk conviction that an official policy was in place, albeit empirically

incorrect, served as a de facto policy and was nonetheless central to folk knowledge

about language and, consequently, to France’s unwritten language policy. Similarly,

Spolsky (2004) emphasises the relevance of an English-only language ideology held

by many American folk which guides American language behaviour and decisions,

despite an absence of any English-only policy from the perspective of authorities.

These perspectives, by their very nature, amount to shared beliefs that equip

communities with a framework for understanding or resolving language matters. As

such, folk linguistic belief has been positioned as a necessary contribution to language

policy as a field on enquiry.

The ethnography of language policy makes similarly valuable contributions. Drawing

on its traditions in social anthropology, an ethnographic approach observes language

policy from a discursive, grassroots and sociocultural perspective of a community,

including the impact of policy on relationships between policy actors. It also

concerns language policy development and implementation from the ‘bottom-up’ as a

way to examine the appropriation of policy discourses, embedded ideologies and “the

largely unconscious “lived culture” of a community” (Canarajah, 2006 p. 153). This

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makes ethnography especially valuable in analysing the nexus between the macro-

level policy objectives and micro-level appropriation of language policy, as Canarajah

(2006) discusses. Taking this lead, Johnson (2009) proposes “a methodology that

compares critical discourse analyses of language policy texts with ethnographic data”

to reveal “how micro-level interaction relates to the macro-levels of social

organization” (Johnson, 2009, p. 139). In doing so, Johnson specifically provides an

ethnographic account of the interpretation and appropriation of language education in

a Philadelphia School District with reference to policy agents, goals, processes,

discourses and social and historical context (Johnson, 2009).

However, neither language ideology research nor the ethnography of language policy

are synonymous with the folk linguistics of language policy. The traditional role of

folk linguistics within language policy has been to solicit attendant sociocultural

perspectives about language, not to examine language policy as a linguistic activity of

non-linguists per se. These perspectives contextualise language policy with local

context, rather than examine how non-linguists access and employ linguistic

knowledge to perform language policy. This is also distinct from the ethnography of

language policy. Whereas ethnographic approaches concern descriptive observations

of the macro-micro paradigm and of socioculturally-situated and ideological

interpretations, creations and appropriations of policy, the folk linguistics of language

policy would have a more explicitly linguistic interest. Here the focus is the

mechanics of language policy, first and foremost as a linguistic activity as it is

performed and reported – overtly or covertly - by non-linguists. Rather than

maintaining a primary reference to sociocultural context, the folk linguistics of

language policy considers folk knowledge about linguistic matters and the folk’s

broader engagement with the linguistics discipline when performing language policy.

Ethnographic research would no doubt be valuable to, or might form a crucial part of,

folk linguistic enquiry. This is because ethnography necessarily connects policy to its

cultural locus and because the activity of non-linguists doing language policy is

necessarily situated in sociocultural and ideological context. However, given its bias

to descriptions of ideology and sociocultural relationships, ethnography does not in

itself provide a focus for examining language policy activity by non-linguists from a

defined linguistic perspective. Like the ethnography of language policy, folk

linguistics can and would most likely seek an emic perspective (Canarajah, 2006) in

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order to gain participant accounts that contextualise linguistic behaviour, but it would

also entail critical analysis by linguists of linguistic processes and themes, building on

grassroots discourse or enactment of ideology. It is also significant that folk linguistic

research would be weighted towards the actions and comments of individuals,

meaning an interest will lie in a folk linguist’s own engagement with language policy:

this contrasts with the socioculturally-situated group themes of language ideology and

ethnography.

Positioning language policy as a topic of folk linguistic enquiry

These distinctions, and the fact that language policy theory has already positioned

non-linguist community members as influential language policy actors, bring me to

my salient point that there is much merit in situating language policy as a topic of

expressly folk linguistic research. In the same way that language policy can be

studied from a range of ethnographic, political, geo-linguistic, psycho-sociological

and economic lenses (see Ricento, 2006 for an overview of theoretical and

methodological perspectives), folk linguistics also offers a valid platform for enquiry.

This is especially because it moves away from drawing on folk linguistics purely for

ideological or sociocultural context towards examining how non-linguists interact

with linguistics to actually do language policy, across a spectrum of local and national

contexts. In this way, language policy can be examined from a primarily linguistic

perspective as a linguistic activity of non-linguists, like any other topic in folk

linguistics.

The opportunities and benefits of the folk linguistics of language policy seem as vast

as the language policy interests of a folk linguistic researcher in the many ways

linguists do language policy. Positioning non-linguists as policy makers who engage

existing frameworks and ideologies and solve local language problems, such as in the

home, workplace or community, offers the opportunity to examine the folk

knowledge, processes, deliberations, engagement with linguistic resources and

conceptual parameters that inform language decisions. For example, folk linguistic

research of language policy could include a bilingual couple’s decisions about

language in the home, with the view to ascertain folk knowledge about bilingualism

as it evolves in the family, to examine whether and how the couple engaged linguistic

resources in their decision-making, or to solicit commentary about linguistic

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challenges and successes in implementing policy. By positioning non-linguists as

language policy implementers, research could provide insights into folk knowledge

and folk enactment of policy agendas, such as those in corpus planning, language

revitalisation or status planning, including how pertinent linguistic themes are

understood and relayed. Together with ethnography, this offers a platform for

investigating the depth and breadth of an official policy agenda’s influence as it

concerns the mechanics of language policy by non-linguists. More experimentally,

research might even task non-linguists to hypothetically design and describe ideal

language policy frameworks or propose language policy outcomes. This could serve

as a methodology for revealing the language ambitions and ideologies held by

community members as they are embedded in folk linguistic knowledge and ideas.

This also advances Preston’s suggestion, as a leading scholar in folk linguistics, that

“a modern research programme [will take respondents] down path which they have

not previously trod upon” as “a productive way to reveal folk concepts” (Preston,

1994, p. 285). The ideas I have proposed are by no means an exhaustive account of

the possibilities inherent to placing language policy under a folk linguistic lens.

Instead, the opportunities and directions are as vast as the interests of researchers in

retrieving folk knowledge and belief about language policy.

Folk linguists of language policy: reflections from the civil service

In identifying instances where I have observed folk linguists performing language

policy, I am especially drawn to my previous workplaces in the New Zealand and

Australian civil services over the past several years. In the first instance, these

workplaces - primarily central policy offices in Wellington and Canberra – confronted

linguistic diversity in the workplace and in external business, meaning questions of

language choice as a matter of language policy would at some point arise. Secondly,

the workplaces predominantly comprised non-linguists and the subject matter did not

concern language policy in any official capacity. Thirdly, the role of a civil servant as

a non-linguist policy maker strikes me as particularly dynamic: the civil servant not

only brings to this role his or her own language knowledge and beliefs to solving local

language problems, but is also expected to represent and enact the policies and

interests of government and the ministry, including those pertaining to language.

What follows is an account of some instances in which I observed non-linguist civil

servants performing language policy as it concerns linguistic diversity. My intention

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is not to critically evaluate the linguistic knowledge or decisions of my former

colleagues, nor to conduct exhaustive folk linguistic enquiry into the cases I raise.

This is not in the least because I was neither a professional linguist nor conducting

folk linguistic research at the time of the examples. Instead, I offer reflections that

illustrate why positioning folk linguistic research on non-linguists as language policy

actors is worthwhile and by suggesting lines of enquiry that, upon reflection, may

have been of interest from a folk linguistic perspective.

Folk linguists of language policy in the New Zealand civil service

English and Te Reo Māori are both official languages in New Zealand and the

government explicitly encourages civil service organisations to operate bilingually.

The policy impetus, as reported by the Māori Language Commission (n.d.), resides in

an interest and obligation to revitalise Te Reo Māori after its near extermination in the

post-colonial context, to raise its status in high profile language domains, and to

respond to an increasing demand for Te Reo Māori services from a growing Māori

population. To help advance this policy, the New Zealand Cabinet has directed civil

service organisations to develop and implement their own Te Reo Māori language

plans. The staff of the Māori Language Commission can for the sake of applied

linguistics be considered professional linguists by nature of their mandated role to

create a linguistic product. However, it seems feasible to assume that the

responsibility of creating and delivering Te Reo Māori language plans, and guiding

non-linguist civil servants in the execution of that plan, has been delegated to non-

linguists in non-language policy oriented organisations.

This creates, to my mind, two key processes of language policy performance by non-

linguists in New Zealand’s civil service. In the first instance, this is the process of

non-linguists in corporate areas of public organisations implementing the Māori

Language Commission’s and Cabinet’s language policy directives. Their task is to

interpret the national and civil service language policy and, on the basis of that

interpretation, design and deliver a plan that will achieve the stated policy objectives

within their local organisation. This already offers a rich environment for folk

linguistic research: folk linguistic research might have encompassed, for example,

how pertinent linguistic themes, such as language revitalisation as a linguistic

concept, were described and understood, or how robustly the brief provided to the

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corporate departments equipped non-linguists to create linguistic products. Research

might also have examined the nexus between descriptions and understandings of

language policy as they were relayed parallel to Cabinet’s intentions, what

sociolinguistic assumptions the non-linguists held about their organisations (such as

extents of Te Reo Māori proficiency, perceived attitudes to Te Reo Māori and

language revitalisation among Māori and non-Māori staff) and how these assumptions

guided the language plans. Research might have considered whether and how

linguistic resources and expertise were accessed in designing language plans, how

expert knowledge was managed, and what beliefs existed amongst the non-linguists

before and after the event about what an effective local language plan constitutes.

Fields of enquiry like these seek to strike at the heart of language policy as it concerns

the machinery of its development and execution: they would have sought, in this case,

to reveal and analyse attitudes and understandings about New Zealand language

policy generally; to assess the extent of pre-existing and consequent folk linguistic

knowledge relevant to a linguistic task; and to identify and analyse the steps the folk

took in creating a linguistic product.

The second key process I encountered in the New Zealand civil service concerns

general staff deciding when and where using Te Reo Māori was appropriate against a

backdrop of the national language policy and the local language plan. I am especially

reminded of a colleague’s farewell function where the colleague delivered a

considerably lengthy farewell speech to his colleagues in what appeared to be

advanced Te Reo Māori. What was striking is that the colleague - a non-linguist who

shall remain anonymous - was an Asian-New Zealander with no Māori ancestry, that

the audience of his speech were all non-Māori, that no one in the audience was known

to have more than basic proficiency in Te Reo Māori, that the office operated only in

English, and that his colleagues and I, much to our surprise, were mostly unaware of

his language competency. Three salient lines of enquiry immediately come to mind

when considering a folk linguistic take on this event. These are:

why my colleague delivered his speech in Te Reo Māori despite the fact this

was an illogical code for communication considering the immediate audience;

the factors my colleague experienced that led him to apparently not use Te Reo

Māori in that workplace, except in his farewell speech; and

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the actions and narratives of non-linguists that explain why the speech fell on

deaf ears even though New Zealand public agencies were supposedly on a

pathway to operational bilingualism under the Cabinet-mandated language

plans.

The opportunity has passed to find answers to these questions through folk linguistic

accounts of those involved. On the face of it, however, it seems that the folk

linguistic behaviours were indeed premised within engagement in a shared language

policy framework. An ethnographic perspective is no doubt valuable, as it seems

possible my colleagues may have appropriated and implemented a monolingualist

language ideology that exists in New Zealand whereby the relationship between

English and Te Reo Māori is one where English is “the default language, the

‘working’ language for normal life in New Zealand” (Harlow, 2007, p. 208) and the

indigenous language plays a purely iconic or ceremonial function. If we agree that

the language ideologies of the folk are as much policy as any official intervention,

then this needs to be seen as my non-linguist colleagues interpreting a language policy

and implementing it locally as folk linguists. Interestingly, however, this ideology

was at odds with the Ministry’s local language plan at the time. Rather than confining

Te Reo Māori to an iconic status, the plan provided staff opportunities to attend Te

Reo Māori classes and encouraged Te Reo Māori in everyday business, broadly

reflecting the Māori Language Commission’s policy agenda. Consequently, language

policy research alone might have argued that the language plan was destined to fail

because language policy cannot succeed if it does not “conform to the expressed

attitudes of those involved” (Lewis, 1981, p. 262).

However, the benefit of a folk linguistic approach is that it could have more deeply

interrogated the specific deliberations and experiences of non-linguists that

manifested into language decisions and, ultimately, a situation that favoured one

policy over another. For example, folk linguistic research could have revealed

whether the non-linguists knew about the official language policy and plan, what

explicit or implicit regard they had for these, and how relevant they considered the

policy and plan to their own practical and ideological needs. If they were indeed

cognisant of the policy and plan, did they recognise - and could they describe - the

dichotomy these formed against a socially-situated monolingualist culture? A folk

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linguistic interview might have enquired what my departing colleague knew about the

monolingualist ideology and whether he indeed drew on this, whether he personally

endorsed that ideology, whether he perhaps simply enacted it on the basis he

understood it to be the preeminent guide to workplace language choice, regardless of

his own belief, or whether another linguistic motivation was at play. It might also

have sought to identify the assumptions he held about his sociolinguistic environment,

about the social, political or cultural impact of his decision, whether he perceived his

linguistic behaviour as predictable for the context, and whether he engaged linguistic

resources to support and advance his speech as an act of language policy. Interviews

with the staff and their manager might have revealed folk belief that explained the low

proficiency in Te Reo Māori, albeit that language acquisition was cornerstone of the

local language plan. This might have included, for example, assumptions about any

perceived difficulties or challenges in learning Te Reo Māori, views about their own

proficiency or language needs, about the quality, relevance and accessibility of

learning opportunities, and folk knowledge about the policy impetus for Te Reo

Māori acquisition and revitalisation. It is clear from the context and the many

questions it inspires that folk linguistic enquiry could have helped to deconstruct folk

deliberations and activity that gave life to language policy. Importantly, such an

enquiry has the opportunity to assume a focus that includes but also stretches beyond

matters of ideology that feature in traditional language policy research.

Folk linguists of language policy in the Australian civil service

My final reflection is from the Australian civil service. Although English is not

legislated as the official language, it is without question the national working

language and is complemented by numerous indigenous and immigrant - especially

Asian and European - languages. Australian language policy has, in general terms,

promoted linguistic diversity as a valuable resource: this has included an impetus for

language skills to advance Australia’s economic and international interests by

fostering and teaching community languages (Ingram, 2003), and for protecting

Aboriginal languages which suffered gravely under colonisation. Other than a de

facto understanding that the civil service operates in English, language policy in

Australia’s public administration primarily concerns the responsiveness of

government services to Australia’s linguistic and cultural diversity in the interests of

access and equity (Australian Government, 2011). For civil service organisations, this

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makes for a situation whereby the government’s official policy narrative advocates for

harnessing linguistic diversity in Australia’s interests but is silent on language within

public administration.

How then might an individual manager in the Australian civil service address

linguistic diversity in the course of his or her duties? I am reminded of my

employment in a team whose responsibilities included bilateral case management with

international partners. In the case of one particular telephone-based discussion with

an office in the Netherlands, it was clear the vocabulary and grammar pertaining to

the subject matter presented discernible challenges for our Dutch counterparts when

using English as a foreign language. Continued breakdowns in communication meant

a new linguistic arrangement was imperative if the negotiations, which predominantly

favoured Australian interests, were to progress. Given I possessed relatively

advanced proficiency in Dutch and had estimated that proficiency to be higher than

the English exhibited by the Dutch counterparts, it seemed logical to suggest to my

manager – a monolingual English-speaking Anglo-Australian non-linguist - that I

conduct the discussions in Dutch. My manager declined this proposal, requested the

Dutch counterparts engage the services of an interpreter, and continued the

negotiations in English. Unless the manager had specific reason to avoid delegating

the negotiations to a staff member, the decision appears grounded in the folk

performance of a language policy because the manager seemingly deemed it

imperative that negotiations be in English and that the Dutch meet that language

requirement by meeting the costs of an interpreter. This conviction appeared so

resolute that the manager’s decision could not even be influenced by the nuances of

the situation, such as that it was Australia – not the Netherlands – that had a vested

interested in the outcome of the negotiations, that Australia had a Dutch language

resource at hand, and that interpreting services would incur costs for the very

audience the manager sought to persuade.

An obvious first task for a folk linguistic researcher would have been to identify

whether the manager’s decision did in fact amount to language policy, or whether

other objectives were at play. Assuming the decision was one of language policy, the

goal would be to discover the folk linguistic deliberations that led to the decision he

took, including what policy or ideology, if any, the manager had explicitly or

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implicitly in mind in the absence of a formal local language framework. This would

also have motivated an enquiry about whether the manager was even aware that the

government explicitly encouraged linguistic diversity to advance Australia’s

international interests and whether this at all resided in his deliberations. As in the

New Zealand example, it is again possible that the decision-making centred in a

monolingualist ideology whereby only English should serve as the working language

of Australian workplaces. If this is the case, folk linguistic research might have

revealed whether that ideology was shared locally, or whether the manager’s approach

was individualised and prompted by personal experiences or belief. It may also have

sought to reveal whether – and why - the manager consciously avoided linguistic

diversity in the negotiations, or whether for example, as a self-professed monolingual,

the idea that an Anglo-Australian staff member might possess suitably advanced

foreign language proficiency had simply passed him by. More pragmatically,

research might have sought to reveal the strategy the manager pursued to execute his

language policy decision, how he formulated that strategy, and how he recounted the

event as a non-linguist’s lived experience.

The transnational context of the discussions, which my manager apparently saw as

necessarily situated in English, might also have flavoured the folk linguistic

investigation. The preference for English in international dialogue, even though both

English and Dutch were practical options, might have encouraged a line of enquiry

about participation in English as the ultra-successful international language, beyond

its domestic status in Australia. In drawing possible connections between folk

linguistics, a monolingualist ideology, and conceptualisations such as De Swaan’s

(2001) whereby central language speakers (such as the Dutch) acquire supercentral

languages (such as English) as a lingua franca, research might have discovered that

the manager simply assumed that negotiations should adhere to an international

business culture that prescribes English - his native language - as its medium, even if

it disadvantaged the Dutch in this case. In this sense, the option to carry out

Australian government affairs in a language other than English was perhaps so foreign

to the international business culture as the manager understood it that he immediately

reacted by upholding linguistic norms as he knew them. Reflections in the aftermath

of the event may also have been valuable in examining any impact the language

policy decision might have on local folk linguistic ideas and behaviour moving

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forward. This could have included, for example, how successful and appropriate the

manager considered his decision and execution of language policy, how he perceived

his decision to have been appropriated by the Dutch, and whether and why the event

may or may not set a precedent for future language choice decisions. Discourse might

even have revealed whether attendant ideologies, such as about the value of linguistic

diversity in government business, were revalidated, were nuanced or even shifted

subsequent to the event. The scope of enquiry makes it clear, to my mind, that folk

linguistics could have examined the machinery of language policy as it was performed

and recounted by a non-linguist enacting and creating ideology and policy to solve a

language problem.

Conclusion

The discussion I have offered is not an exhaustive summary of the opportunities a folk

linguistic study of language policy might offer. Conversely, it is hoped these few

reflections illustrate not just the salience of applying a folk lens to language policy,

but also the breadth and depth of enquiry and interests that a folk linguistic approach

might inspire. The traditional role of folk linguistics in language policy and the

ethnography of language policy, both of which valuably augment language policy

narratives with ideological or culturally-situated perspectives of the folk, no doubt

remain relevant. My thesis is that when language policy becomes a defined topic of

folk linguistic enquiry, unique opportunities arise to critically examine how language

policy as linguistic activity, with inherently linguistic processes, is performed by the

very non-linguists who engage it. This advances the relevance of folk contributions to

include but also conduct folk linguistic enquiry beyond the ideological perspectives

that often characterise research in language policy. This means the folk linguistics of

language policy can become holistically concerned with how the folk do linguistics

for the purpose of language policy. In the very least, this adds to the body of research

into the many ways non-linguists participate in the vastness of linguistic topics that

folk research can conceivably encompass. This, to my mind, makes the folk

linguistics of language policy an exciting research paradigm and a valuable

contribution to applied linguistics.

16

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