DELIVERED AT THE CONFERENCE Debating Language Policies

The politics of language can be studied either from the standpoint of thespeaker or from that of the language. What is in the interest of the speakermay not be in the interest of the language and vice versa. Academics and politicians may want to preserve a language that its speakers consider to be a jail from which they want to escape. Inversely, leaders may want to see a language disappear that the speakers value to a greater or lesser extent. I shall answer the question regarding language strategies from the point of view of ‘language ’ that I reify in order to facilitate the analysis, as we reify religions, social classes, and nation states. Having thus made my task easier, the question becomes: In the age of globaliza-tion, at a time of expanding and increasingly dense communications that flow increas-ingly freely across space, what are the optimal strategies of a minority language that faces the intrusion, if not the invasion, of more powerful languages with which it is in closer and closer contact? I shall consider the Canadian case in the light of foreign examples