Oakes, Leigh/Peled, Yael (2018): Normative Language Policy: Ethics, Politics, Principles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 190 p.

Abstract

Published at the beginning of 2018, Normative Language Policy addresses the ethics, politics and principles of language policy and planning by using the very complex case of Quebec, the predominantly French-speaking province of Canada, as a highlighting case study. In their book, Leigh Oakes (professor of French and Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London) and Yael Peled (postdoctoral research fellow in Language and Health at the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Faculty of Law at McGill University) analyse the ethics of language intervention in three different domains of Quebec’s language policy and planning: status planning, acquisition planning and corpus planning. They present ‘normative language policy’ as a new, integrated theoretical framework “that bridges the empirical literature on language policy and planning that has emanated especially from the fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics with the emerging normative work on language in political philosophy and political theory” (p. 2). With their interdisciplinary framework, they endorse Joseph Carens’ ‘justice as evenhandedness’ and his context-sensitive ethical approach. In contrast to John Rawls’ (1999) abstract methodological approach, Carens argues for a conception of justice that is “derived from the assumption that to treat people fairly we must regard them concretely, with as much knowledge as we can obtain about who they are and what they care about. This approach to justice requires immersion rather than abstraction” (Carens 2000: 8). The book’s main hypothesis is that there are good reasons, compatible with liberal and democratic thought, to justify state intervention in language policy and planning. In particular, the authors use Quebec as a case study in order to illustrate and discuss the different empirical and, especially, ethical and political challenges that political institutions face when interfering in the domain of language. The book consists of six chapters. In the introduction, Oakes and Peled explain their aims, provide arguments for choosing Quebec as a case study, discuss (changes in) the perception of normativity in language matters and their new interdisciplinary framework. The authors pursue three interrelated goals. First of all, they want to bridge descriptivist (or empirical) and normative approaches to Quebec’s politics of language in a new methodological framework called normative language policy. Secondly, they seek to ‘rehabilitate’ the notion of normativity in sociolinguistics and to show how this rehabilitation could benefit research on language policy and planning, moving beyond the simplistic critique of structures of power in language usually assumed by sociolinguists. The general idea here is to provide better ethical tools for those engaging in language policy research. Thirdly, they want to explore Quebec’s politics of language through the lens of normative language policy so as to provide “a more nuanced and systematic understanding of the challenges that it faces and the solutions that have been proposed” (p. 17).