Poverty is a complex phenomenon involving many factors, and it manifests in multiple dimensions and multiple levels. Theoretical exploration of language and poverty should also be a dynamic and complex adaptive system. Poverty has an impact on the development of both children’s language and the use of adult language. The factors aff ecting the former include social environments as well as neural mechanism, while the latter can be examined from the perspective of social networks and scarcity. From both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, the infl uence of language ability on economic and social conditions is crucial. Language is believed to be a probabilistic condition for the improvement of economic and social conditions. The role of language in poverty alleviation practice in China’s anti-poverty cause has become increasingly important, and the meaning of targeted poverty alleviation via language planning has been becoming ever clearer. This study shows that the scarcity theory can provide inspirations for poverty alleviation via language planning. China’s experience from poverty alleviation practice off ers a rare opportunity for the study on topics related to language and poverty, and it is reasonable to expect that China’s theory and practice will have wider implications for the international community.
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.
The relationship between language and poverty has become a research area in China’s language planning studies. At present, Chinese researchers mainly focus on the infl uence of language ability on poverty or vice versa from the perspective of economics. This paper makes a review of the domestic language-and-poverty studies in the lens of macro- and micro-economics:on the one hand, linguistic diversity aff ects economic development; on the other hand, language ability aff ects labor income. Previous studies have shown that linguistic diversity not only aff ects economic development, but also aff ects other variables that hold sway for economic development, such as labor circulation. The language-related factors that influence economic development may include linguistic diversity, communication, education and human capital accumulation, technology diff usion, and social trust. Moreover, foreign language ability and dialect skills play a role in the income and employment of workers under certain conditions. These studies provide a theoretical basis for language poverty alleviation in China. In addition, the findings about the heterogeneity, coexistence and periodicity of the language impacts on the economics of a society can provide a reference for the study of language and poverty, as well as the promotion of language poverty alleviation.
Since the 1970s, the interplay between poverty and children’s language development has gradually become a specialized area of study. Up to now, international scholars have carried out theoretical and empirical studies on related issues from psychology,pedagogy, linguistics, sociology, neuroscience and other disciplines. This paper reviews these overseas studies on poverty and children’s language development in order to explore the historical development, current status, and trend of this research topic.It also summarizes the viewpoints and theoretical basis of the language ability of poor children as well as the infl uencing factors and mechanisms of poverty on children’s language development from a multidisciplinary perspective. Finally, the paper points out the implication of these overseas studies for relevant research and practice in China.
Based on the empirical data drawn from complete sample of a questionnaire survey and interview, this paper attempts to fi nd out the relationship between language profi ciency and income of border residents living in Dongxing City, which shares 39 km borderline with Vietnam. A large volume of quantatitive data was obstained and processed according to theory of linguistic economics. Findings show that multilingual profi ciency can enhance employability of residents, helping them to obtain more employment opportunities in marketplace and stable income sources. In other words, there is a positive correlation between average annual income and multilingual proficiency, therefore, Putonghua promotion is an eff ective measure to achieve poverty alleviation in bordering area. This study thus suggests that while the local government should give full play to the positive economic and social benefi ts of Putonghua promotion, it is also very important for the authority to optimize and improve local industrial policies so as to foster new economic impetus and promote and protect the traditional cultural heritage of the local minorities.
The book Language Policy and Economics focuses on the relationship between language policy, language planning and socio-economic development in Africa. It addresses the perennial question of how to promote Africa’s indigenous languages as media of instruction in educational systems. including discussions of the status and role of language economics in language policy research,and an in-depth analysis of language policy in history and post-colonial period, the persistence of colonial linguistic ideology,and new trends of language planning in the context of globalization. In particular, economic theories are introduced to analyze some major issues, such as the question of why colonial linguistic ideology persisted in the post-colonial period of Africa, the dilemma of African languages in the context of globalization, and the prospects of African language planning. On this basis, the book argues that “language is an indispensable part of the social, political and economic development of a nation”. It holds that only by recognizing the actual value of African native languages economically and ensuring that they produce concrete economic returns in real life can policymakers be able to change their current situation. Addressing the usually overlooked the link between languages and economic development, this book not only provides a good example and an important reference for the application of economics to the study of language policy, but also has positive implications for the study and practice of language policy and planning in China.