The expansion of transcultural connections has aroused increasing research interest in language policy and planning. Through historical-structural analysis (HSA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), this volume compares language policies in the European Union (EU) and India in domains of administration, legal safeguards for minority languages, law, education, media, healthcare, business, and social welfare, and further explores the role of power in language policy making.
The volume consists of four parts with eight chapters in total. In the first part, Sharma introduces the concept of power and ideology, presents the methods of HSA and CDA, and illustrates the overall research design.
Part 2 comprises chapters 2 to 4, focusing on case studies of the EU, Luxembourg, and Wales. Chapter 2 presents power constellations and internal language arrangements as the mechanism of EU language policies. Despite the prioritized position of English, French, and German, the EU makes statutory provisions for other languages in some political domains, and official multilingualism is reflected through the inconsistent use of modal verbs in statutes. Chapters 3 and 4 concern the cases of Luxembourg and Wales, which exhibit minimum and maximum deviation from EU language policies, respectively. The recent prioritization of Luxembourgish over other languages in multilingual Luxembourg, and the significant promotion of Welsh after the power devolution in the United Kingdom (UK), are reflected at a textual level particularly; however, the dominant language ideologies are abandoned in domains of health, social welfare, and so on. Additionally, grassroots-level organizations play an important role in promoting Welsh.
Part 3 comprises chapters 5 to 7, discussing the power and language policies in India, Manipur, and Tamil Nadu. Chapter 5 investigates how official multilingualism is practiced in India and shows that the needs of the minority language are considered in all examined policy domains except in the domain of law. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Manipur and Tamil Nadu, which exert minimum and maximum deviation from Indian central-level language policies, respectively. A new theoretical paradigm, categories of differentiation (COD), is introduced for analysing language policies in multilingual states. Sharma illustrates how a hills/valley divide influences the choice of Meitei as a Manipur official language and how several binaries—for example, Aryan/Dravidian, Hindi/Tamil—shape the extreme linguistic nationalism in Tamil Nadu. The two states also considered minority languages in certain domains, and, different from the EU, Manipur shows the non-legal means of constructing power constellations.
In Part 4, Sharma offers conclusions, including the major contributions, research limitations, and suggestions for future studies.
In a nutshell, this volume challenges the prevalent view that macro-level power is deterministic, introduces categories of differentiation as a new theoretical tool, and addresses the text-context divide in language policy research. The systematically designed comparative analysis with accessible language will enlighten scholars in the field of language policy as well as sociolinguists, language planners, and others interested in the topic.
