Language Policy and Linguistic Culture

The notion of “linguistic culture ” and its applicability to language policy is one that seems to be something I must take credit and/or blame for, since I cannot escape responsibility for connecting the two ideas, or attribute it to anyone else. When I began to use the term “linguistic culture, ” I assumed it was a term already in use, a commonplace, i.e., something in need of no explanation. I thought of it as simply that part of culture (defined as “that which is learned”) that has anything to do with language, just as we tend to speak, in common layman’s parlance, of sports culture, business culture, and so on. The idea that there was that part of culture that had to do with language seemed to me uncontestable, since there were already in the literature of sociolinguistics many studies that referred to such things as “folk linguistics” (Hoenigswald, 1971) “folk etymologies, ” or “myths about language ” (Ferguson, 1959b/1968; Miller, 1982). Linguists and linguistic anthropologists had been writing about the connection between language and culture (Hymes, 1964) for decades, since Sapir (1949) at least, and I wanted a term that referred to all of the phenomena that could be subsumed under one rubric. It also seemed to me axiomatic that culture did not reside in language (more about this below), certainly not within language as most narrowly defined, i.e., in the code or the grammar of th