Language Policies as Virtual Reality: Two Australian Examples

In 1991, language policy in Australia turned from a commitment to pluralism to a divisive prioritisation of literacy and selected Asian languages. This article explores that shift in the context of the general question of how to approach language policy analysis. Cooper's (1989) descriptive framework claims to offer a method for studying language policies, which I argue has serious flaws. I then consider some insights from the wider social science literature. With something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or speedy work. George Eliot, Middlemarch I have been working against an enemy that I was also part of, to discover how it worked so that I could discover how I was, and am, tied in to the relations of ruling in my practices of thinking about and speaking about people…Renouncing such methods of speaking and writing is not just a matter of a personal transformation. Dorothy Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge