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Papers from a workshop on Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia held in Singapore, 2003.
The immediate concern of Multilingualism and Nation Building is to relate the phenomenon of multilingualism in West Africa to its historical, social and physical environment and to trace the development of the sociolinguistic situation from the Middle Ages to the colonial and post-colonial period. At a deeper, theoretical level the author attempts to show how the two types of communication -- monolingual and multilingual -- were associated with specific social formations in the course of socio-historical evolution. This perspective leads to a new evaluation of current sociolinguistic phenomena in independent African nations and examines their approach to the question of what role their native languages should play in national life. While concrete answers to this question have to be left to policy makers, it is the aim of this book to inquire into the linguistic, social and political issues which result in a variety of possible solutions. So far the decision to maintain a non-native official language and to exclude native languages from the public domain has been the preferred option in many newly independent countries. The author therefore analyses concrete examples of the two basic models of nation building -- the assimilationist (or monolingual) and the pluralist model -- and the conditions which made each of these solutions successful. What really is at stake is the fundamental question: what type of language policy for what type of nation?
Why do some countries remain poor and dysfunctional while others thrive and become affluent? The expert contributors to this volume seek to identify reasons why prosperity has increased rapidly in some countries but not others by constructing and comparing cases. The case studies focus on the processes of nation building, state building, and economic development in comparably situated countries over the past hundred years. Part I considers the colonial legacy of India, Algeria, the Philippines, and Manchuria. In Part II, the analysis shifts to the anticolonial development strategies of Soviet Russia, Ataturk's Turkey, Mao's China, and Nasser's Egypt. Part III is devoted to paired cases, in which ostensibly similar environments yielded very different outcomes: Haiti and the Dominican Republic; Jordan and Israel; the Republic of the Congo and neighboring Gabon; North Korea and South Korea; and, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. All the studies examine the combined constraints and opportunities facing policy makers, their policy objectives, and the effectiveness of their strategies. The concluding chapter distills what these cases can tell us about successful development - with findings that do not validate the conventional wisdom.
A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer’s theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states’ capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries.
This is the first Handbook to deal with language policy as a whole and is a complete 'state-of-the-field' survey, covering language practices, beliefs about language varieties, and methods and agencies for language management. It will be welcomed by students, researchers and language professionals in linguistics, education and politics.
This research addresses the questions, how, why, and when does language become a catalyst for intrastate conflict? I approach language not simply as one dimension of complex ethnic conflicts, but as a specific catalyst for those conflicts themselves. My research tells the stories of two states, Cameroon and Sri Lanka, in which language became central to fights for autonomy and secession. In each of these cases, language need not have become a contested issue but was constructed as such due to political choices by state actors. This thesis specifically isolates language as an aspect of ethnic identity apt to be a driving force of identity-based mobilization due to its unique role in both fomenting nation and facilitating state. I trace the outbreak of conflict in these two case studies – Sri Lanka and Cameroon – to locate critical junctures in which language became an activated grievance. I find that it is specific moments of political exclusion which serve as a catalyst for linguistic conflict. I root my analysis in the claim that language difference is not inherently a precondition to conflict, but becomes a potential grievance when language is used to mediate power and resources. I find that in both Sri Lanka and Cameroon, colonization played a large role in creating the language policy and state structures which breed linguistic conflict. I conclude by proposing a framework on the development of linguistic conflict which offers lessons on the outbreak of conflict on an axis of language difference.
This book is interdisciplinary, drawing on the sociology and politics of language, African linguistics, African history and social history in general. It focuses on the various issues related to multilingualism in West Africa, but is also relevant to multilingual situations in Third World countries generally. Although the book is aimed at the educated general reader, it should also be of interest to language specialists and students of Third World politics.
Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration.