Ethnography in Language Planning and Policy Research

Abstract

People can think of ethnography in two senses: as a process of conducting research framed within a particular disciplinary tradition, and as a product. As process and product, ethnography has its roots in anthropology. This chapter explores all three facets of ethnography - seeing, looking, and being - applied to research in language planning and policy (LPP). As a way of seeing, ethnography finds its orienting purpose in a “concern with cultural interpretation”. For ethnographers of LPP, this entails a view of policy as a situated sociocultural process: the practices, ideologies, attitudes, and mechanisms that influence people's language choices in pervasive everyday ways. Sometimes these processes involve cultural artifacts conventionally associated with policy but ethnographers are equally concerned with implicit policy processes. Ethnographic studies of LPP seek to describe and understand these complex processes and in particular, the power relations through which they are constructed.

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