Language politics
As such, this page serves as a central resource for multiple articles relating to the topic of language and politics.
Corpus planning often involves linguistic prescription as decisions are made in graphization, standardization and modernization of a language.
In some countries, mainstream education is offered in one language: English in the United States, Italian in Italy, Russian in Russia, just to name a few.
It can be observed with regard to spoken language, where speakers may be discriminated against based on their regional dialect, their sociolect, their accent, or their vocabulary.
In the United States, speakers of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) often experience linguistic discrimination.
[10] One social worker observed that these AAVE-speaking students faced a significant linguistic barrier to academic achievement and success in the predominantly White American society at that time.
[13] In postcolonial states like India, it was observed that the difference in language education had widened the socioeconomic class divide.
[14] Thus, access to education, social mobility, and economic opportunities were deprived of the locals who had not learnt the colonial language of before.
[22] This form of discrimination works in ways similar to racism, sexism, and classism, on a national administrative scale.
Toponymy is the study of place names (from Ancient Greek: τόπος / tópos, 'place', and ὄνομα / onoma, 'name').
According to Lawrence D. Berg and Jani Vuolteenaho, traditional research into place names has focused more on describing their origins in an empirical way.
[25]: 9 Their book, Critical Toponymies, is, according to them, the 'first interdisciplinary collection published in English that tackles explicitly place naming as "a political practice par excellence of power over space"', and gathers research from various scholars about the politics inherent in the naming of places.
With reference to New Zealand, Robin Kearns and Lawrence Berg note that how a place name is pronounced also has a political meaning.
Letters to the editors of New Zealand newspapers sometimes complain about newscasters' choice to pronounce place names in a more Māori-like way.
[27]: 164 Even so, their utterance of the name becomes situated in a wider political context of 'a resurgence of Maori cultural forms, and increasing calls for self-determination', which 'presents a threatening and uncertain environment for members of the status quo'.
According to Naftalie Kadmon, the Greek government was worried that '[c]laims of the South Yugoslavians to the name Macedonia might in time lead to political demands towards Greece, and finally to military aggression.'
'[32] The rejection of the exonym 'Iroqouis' (which is still the name used in, for example, the Wikipedia page) is inherent in the statement that the confederacy (and the people) are properly called 'Haudenosaunee'.
