World Language Policy Essay example -- Globalization Localization Lang

Globalization, Localization, and speech communication ChoiceIn Britain they used to call a barometer a ?glass.? One would visit the ?glass? in themorning in order to get a sense of what the weather would be for the day. It was of sort a rather chancy business, not least because on the reasonable day in Britain you havea little of everything anyway. The poet Louis MacNeice caught the sentiment in a wellknownpoem about impending doomThe glass is travel hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,But if you banish the bloody glass you won?t hold up the weather. perchance the least observed phenomenon in the global system is language. Because it is so prefatory to human communication, we are apt to regard it simply as an perpetual part ofthe communication process itself ? a kind of natural phenomenon as ordinary andineluctable as weather.In fact, language is a mixer institution of enormous importance, and one over which wehave a majuscule deal of control (Edwards 1994, Tonkin 2003a ). Human utterances areelective we can every make them or not make them, and we are potentially commensurate ofmaking these utterances in any language. Since language is fundamental to human tenderinteraction, we begin by choosing our utterances in accordance with the code that we are natural into language is a form of human behavior, and we learn to talk by dint of the needand the desire to participate in the community of which we are a part. Thus the languagethat we use also has symbolic value it is a marker of our identity and it reinforces oursense of belonging. But it is an accident of geography or economics that we learn onelanguage or another, that we are born(p) into one speech community rather than another.Within that community, we lear... ...Werner, ed. 1998. Multilingual the States Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages ofAmerican 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 downwind Chong-Yeong & LiuHaitao, ed. Towards a New International Language Order. Rotterdam Universal EsperantoAssociation. 96-105.Tonkin, Humphrey & Timothy Reagan, ed. 2003. Language in the 21st Century. Amsterdam Benjamins.Wright, Sue. 2004. Language Policy and Language be after From Nationalism to Globalisation.Basingstoke & New York Palgrave Macmillan.