Chair

Linda Cardinal, University of Ottawa
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School of Political Studies
55, avenue Laurier Est
University of Ottawa
Ottawa (Ontario)
K1N 6N5
Canada

William Safran, University of Colorado
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Department of Political Science
University of Colorado at Boulder
Ketchum 106
Boulder
CO 80309-0333
USA

Officers

Jean Laponce, Secretary
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Department of Political Science
University of British Columbia
Vancouver V6T 1Z1
Canada

Background

Granted research committee status in 2000; committee created in January 2001.

Objectives

Very generally, the purpose of the committee is to study the effects of language on politics and vice versa; more specifically to study :

1) Language planning by political authorities, planning intended to regulate either the corpus or the status of a language;
2) The political consequences of contact and competition among different languages at the institutional, local, national, regional, or global level.

Both states and languages are territorial 'animals'; both tend, for different reasons, to give themselves spatial boundaries. When these boundaries do not coincide (that is the most frequent case) tensions are likely to occur between culture and politics. These are the tensions to which we give most of our attention by studying the kinds of communication, competition, cooperation, and conflict that result from and are affected by the making and unmaking of language and political hierarchies.

Website

http://www.politics.ubc.ca/laponce/language/