World Language Policy Essay example -- Globalization Localization Lang

world(prenominal)ization, Localization, and Language ChoiceIn Britain they used to call a barometer a ?glass.? One would visit the ?glass? in themorning in fix to get a sense of what the weather would be for the twenty-four bits. It was ofcourse a rather chancy business, not to the lowest degree because on the average day in Britain you havea little of everything anyway. The poet Louis MacNeice caught the sentiment in a wellknownpoem about impending doomThe glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,But if you break the damn glass you won?t hold up the weather.Perhaps the least observed phenomenon in the global system is delivery. Because it is sobasic to mankind communication, we are apt to regard it simply as an unchangeable dowry ofthe communication process itself ? a kind of natural phenomenon as run-of-the-mine andineluctable as weather.In fact, language is a social insertion of enormous importance, and single over which wehave a great bay window of control (Edwards 1994, Tonkin 2003a). Human utterances areelective we can either fasten them or not make them, and we are potentially capable of reservation these utterances in any language. Since language is fundamental to human socialinteraction, we incur by choosing our utterances in accordance with the code that we areborn into language is a form of human behavior, and we learn to talk through the desireand the desire to participate in the community of which we are a part. then the languagethat we use also has symbolic value it is a print of our identity and it reinforces oursense of belonging. But it is an accident of geography or economic science that we learn onelanguage or another, that we are born into one speech community rather than another.Within that community, we lear... ...Werner, ed. 1998. Multilingual America Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages ofAmerican Literature. New York New York University Press.Tonkin, Humphrey. 2003a. Language and Society. New York American Forum for Global Education.Tonkin, Humphrey. 2003b. The search for a global linguistic strategy. In Jacques Maurais & Michael A.Morris. Languages in a Globalising World. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. 319-333.Tonkin, Humphrey. 2004. Language equality in international relations. In Lee Chong-Yeong & LiuHaitao, ed. Towards a New International Language Order. Rotterdam Universal EsperantoAssociation. 96-105.Tonkin, Humphrey & Timothy Reagan, ed. 2003. Language in the 21st Century. Amsterdam Benjamins.Wright, Sue. 2004. Language Policy and Language Planning From nationalism to Globalisation.Basingstoke & New York Palgrave Macmillan.