The Socioeconomic Power of Language Policies

My latest work on the field of socioeconomic linguistics has now appeared in the International Journal for the Sociology of Languages. The empirical study is entitled “On the correlation between socioeconomics and policies of languages in official contexts”. The article deals with the question of how the socioeconomic performance of countries is correlated with the kind and number of languages for official contexts. The study classifies the 197 countries of the world (as acknowledged at the time of gathering the underlying statistical socioeconomic data) into 12 types of language policies for official contexts. It is then analyzed how many times these 12 types occur among the Top Ten countries of 72 selected socioeconomic parameters. A statistical test (the chi-square test) reveals that the differences are extremely statistically significant. The policy most clearly correlated with a positive socioeconomic picture is having one or two supraregional/state-wide official languages plus several regional official languages.

 

Joachim Grzega