To count or not to count ‘francophones.’ Reading language planning and policy through the words of quantification

Abstract

This article uses the concepts of ‘language ideologies’ and ‘governmentality’ to examine how language quantification processes tightly intertwine with language policy and planning (LPP) issues. Comparing four ways of (not) counting ‘francophones’ across the contexts of France, Switzerland, Canada, and the International Organization of La Francophonie, this article focuses on words rather than numbers. It unpacks how scientific and political discourses intertwine across different ways of defining ‘francophones,’ finding data to count them, and producing knowledge on ‘francophones’ for converging or diverging LPP purposes involving French language. The analysis shows the potential of reading into the scientific and political discourses that make those statistics (im)possible, in order to understand what the variations in these processes tell us about unequal power relations among speakers in the politicized management of a language, its variations, and its speakers.

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