Nation-states are key players in the design and implementation of language policy. Language communities can rarely fully decide the future of their language, but they often have their own strategies to revive and strengthen their language. This chapter defines top-down and bottom up language policies, exemplifying how they may be implemented in different types of language planning (corpus, status, prestige and acquisition planning). It identifies issues that may arise in dealing with policy makers. Language rights are supported by various international legal instruments (such as the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights) and activists may refer to these for support, although appeals to such charters have rarely been successful in law. The capsule presents the Mexican Indigenous Language Promotion and Advocacy project (MILPA), a model of community-based language maintenance and advocacy work creating programs that foster language maintenance, multi-literacy, social justice, and Indígena pride.

The chapter sets out to critique and contextualise the largely monolingual language policies of universities in South Africa against the backdrop of transformation. The language question at higher education institutions in South Africa is explored with reference to the constitutional and legislative frameworks. The chapter argues that the trend towards enacting monolingual language policies at universities is mimicking the 2017 monolingual language of record directive for courts in South Africa. The chapter advances recent judgements, which serve as evidence that the judiciary, by finding that monolingual language policies are both constitutionally sound and ironically foster transformation based on access for all, is in fact pursuing an agenda that marginalises many people who do not have a functional knowledge of English. The authors grapple with the legal, sociopolitical and sociolinguistic complexities facing universities and how English is being portrayed as a language for all, yet the majority of the people speak an African language as their mother tongue. In conclusion, the authors propose recommendations for both the higher education institutions and the judiciary in South Africa.

This chapter addresses the current political climate in Canada with respect to language politics through an examination of historical settler-colonial and Indigenous relations. The focus is the interplay, and the inherent contradictions, between the state and Indigenous language interests. This includes a consideration of language and education rights, policies, and moves to reconciliation on behalf of state and Indigenous actors. The diverse goals and outcomes of Indigenous educational policies and practices will be examined with a focus on the Canadian Arctic, the role of Indigenous land-based pedagogies, and the necessary conceptualization and reaffirmation of languages as unbounded, action-oriented practices that resist objectification and enumeration.

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.