Overseas Studies on Language and Poverty: Origin, Core and Some Refl ections
Fang Xiaobing
Chinese Journal of Language Policy and Planning ›› 2019, Vol. 4 ›› Issue (1) : 22-33.
Overseas Studies on Language and Poverty: Origin, Core and Some Refl ections
This paper is a review of studies of language and poverty conducted by international scholars. Infl uenced by the US “War on Poverty” movement in the 1960s, international scholars began to explore the relevance between language and poverty.The focus of the studies are generally placed on four aspects: language capacity and poverty, language status and poverty,language rights and poverty, and language diversity and poverty. Some useful suggestions and countermeasures have been put forward for language diversity protection, language status planning, mother tongue education, language resource development and language diversity conservation. However, despite their promotion of Language Policy and Planning (LPP) as an academic discipline and their encouragement of social equity and justice, such studies also feature some problems in their argumentations.Among them, issues that are prominent and deserve attention include outweighing languages over human beings (e.g. sacrificing the rights of the speakers for the protection of linguistic diversity); advocating mother language while despising common language (e.g. overemphasizing the role of mother-tongue education in poverty alleviation); infeasibility in proposals (e.g. proposing to reduce indigenous poverty by means of upgrading their languages to offi cial status), and failure to distinguish absolute poverty from relative poverty (e.g. attaching little importance to the eff ect of perceptible poverty on the loss of native speakers).This review will inform LPP studies in China and provide a reference for policymaking regarding language and poverty.
relative poverty / language capacity / language status / language rights / language diversity / mother-tongue education
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