Sociolinguistics Seven

My notes here, again, seem to mainly consist of the words “who?” and “whose?” over and over. We’re well into power politics here once more, and I’m surprised the Law of Unintended Consequences hasn’t had a bit more of a run out.

Also interesting to note that, pace the claim that, “if one group benefits from a particular language policy it is likely that another group will be disadvantaged,” LPP appears to be a zero-sum game. Or at least it is conceptualized as such, and so we’re back to power politics again. Particularly notable in the Gill reading which characterizes the bartering of Malayan citizenship for Chinese residents as a “language battle” (p247) when to all intents and purposes it appears to be nothing short of a massacre.