The Political Power of LanguageRegimes: Evidence from South Africa.

When language barriers prevent distinct language groups within a country’s population from meaningfully communicating with one another or with agents in a government purported to serve their interests, it can be difficult to understand how an open public realm of debate, contestation and democratic competition can be sustained. For scholars in sociolinguistics, the answer to the puzzle has by and large been “language planning.” The idea governing language planning is the notion that government policies directed at altering or shaping the linguistic behavior of its citizenry can also indirectly achieve other desirable social outcomes. This paper builds on work a theoretical framework advanced by Jonathan Pool (1990), who argued that political and language regimes mutually constrained one another – to empirically assess the manner and extent to which language regimes – the configuration of linguistic diversity in a given political environment – observably affect the practice of democratic politics. These claims have largely rested on assumptions about the negative consequences of linguistic diversity for social, political, and economic life. Empirical study assessing the effects of different language regimes on the political opinions and behaviors of different language groups is severely lacking. In South Africa, however, a natural laboratory has emerged; opportunities to rectify this shortage of empirical research now exist. The new post-apartheid South Africa is a multilingual country with a Constitution that embraces linguistic diversity. It is a democratic society with decisions made at all levels of government about language and language usage in the public realm; hence, it is characterized by high levels of intra-country variation in terms of the distribution of language groups and language regimes. Finally, it is characterized by a research infrastructure that has produced, since 1996, a great deal of survey data on individual political behaviors and attitudes throughout the country. Language barriers that might stand in the way of a single researcher gathering data on individuals in any of eleven official languages can be overcome. The paper proposed for MPSA presentation uses survey data generated by South African researchers to make inferences about the effect of different language environments on political competition in a new democracy. The first hypothesis tested is that the extent to which a language groups are linguistically included or “enfranchised” by a language regime is positively related to the quality and quantity of that groups democratic participation. The second hypothesis is that language groups linguistically included or “enfranchised” by a language regime are less likely to view ethno-linguistic cleavages salient political boundaries and more likely to exhibit political tolerance. Qualified support is found for both propositions, and “next steps” are outlined in terms of a plan for field research that will provide the basis of a Ph.D. dissertation. The results of the work presented and proposed in this paper have important implications not only for South Africa but for all democratizing countries struggling with an answer to the “language question.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]