Lectures and presentations
Human capital and capabilities in language policy: using language to help people, or using people to help language? [Download link at the bottom of the page]
All experts: Sayers, Dave
Activity details
Audience: Scientific
Nature of event: Other scientific event
Name of event: Human capital, languages, and new literacies: Theories, policies, and impacts Fifth biannual interdisciplinary symposium of the RESEARCH GROUP “ECONOMICS, POLICY ANALYSIS, AND LANGUAGE” – REAL
Presentation type: Other public presentation
Start date: 03/06/2024
End date: 04/06/2024
Year: 2024
Description
On the one hand there are policies that aim exclusively to boost human capital by seeking out linguistic interventions that give people greater autonomy over their own lives, raising individuals’ life chances and ‘capabilities’. Ultimately this form of language policy is not strictly interested in language as such, only insofar as it delivers other human freedoms.
On the other hand there are policies that position language as an independently valuable entity, in need of protection and worthy of prioritisation whether or not this increases human capital. Ultimately the balance here is reversed: the focus is on language itself, not human freedoms.
Between these two extremes lies the complicated and diverse reality of much, if not most contemporary language policy: with a fascinating breadth of ideologies attached to both language and human capital.
But these extremes, and the spectrum of realities in between, are seldom clearly discussed. Indeed, minority language policy is often assumed to be inherently and unarguably emancipatory and freedom-enhancing. I argue that this assumption weakens our capacity to understand language policy and its link to human capital. I explore a range of case studies illustrating points between those two extremes, and I build towards a typology of ideologies to clearly identify the relative weighting of these end goals. The purpose is to give a simple gauge to identify these diverging goals within any given language policy, to add structure and coherence to our field of research.
Follow-up groups: School of Wellbeing (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Well; School of Resource Wisdom (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Wisdom; Teacher education research (teaching, learning, teacher, learning paths, education) (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Edu; Formerly JYU.Ope
Profiling areas: Behaviour change, health, and well-being across the lifespan (University of Jyväskylä JYU) BC-Well
Keywords (YSO): linguistic rights; linguistic minorities; language policy; capability
Main country visited: Spain (ES)
