Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

124 Language Planning and Education
that in democratic, non-autarkic societies LP is relatively powerless to reverse. That
said, his framework, as remarked earlier, is incomplete, and it may be useful therefore
to conclude this section with a brief discussion of some of its limitations.
Limitations of de Swaan’s framework
The first of these limitations is that, if Phillipson’s account is excessively top-down,
de Swaan’s is perhaps unduly bottom-up. That individual preferences between
second languages are influenced by perceptions of their relative communicative
value, and that spread, once initiated, has a self-accelerating propensity, are both
convincing. But we should not overlook initial conditions or, to use a theological
metaphor, a first cause. Thus, while not designed, the global language hierarchy
did not ‘just happen’ either: it emerged from, and continues to reflect, the past
imposition of British colonial rule on large areas of Africa and Asia and the present
economic, military and political dominance of the United States.
Second, de Swaan’s framework concentrates on, and explains, the demand for
languages in general and English in particular, a demand intensified by globalisation.
It has less to say, however, about supply; that is, decisions to expand or curtail school
provision for the teaching of English. Clearly, this is highly responsive to demand,
but such decisions are nevertheless at least partly autonomous and are taken by, or
channelled through, institutions and powerful individuals within them, typically
ministries of education. One thinks here of the Malaysian decision to curtail the role
of English by switching to Bahasa Malaysia medium at secondary school, a decision
partially retracted since, or the Tanzanian decision to continue with English as a
medium of instruction at secondary school rather than switch to Swahili, and so
forth.
The wider point here is that the linguistic market is not perfectly competitive,
or untrammelled, but hedged by the powers that nation states still have, despite
globalisation’s attenuation of their freedom of action, to protect the market for their
national languages through reserving certain public domains for their use. Thus, an
analysis of spread with individual preferences as a key unit of that analysis is certainly
illuminating, but one needs also to incorporate higher level units of decisionmaking,
that is, national institutions and not just aggregates of individuals.
A similar point can be made in relation to globalisation, whose effects on the
demand for English are analysable at the level of individual acquisition decisions.
A broader analysis, however, might also encompass transnational corporations and
their executives, who have played an agentive role in the diffusion of English. For
example, when the Nissan-Renault partnership was established in 1999, the chief
executive, Carlos Ghosn, decided to make English the working language of its
mainly Japanese and French workforce, thus increasing the likelihood of other
corporations doing likewise. The spread of lingua francas, then, is not only mediated
by individual acquisition decisions but by the actions and decisions of higher level
institutions such as transnational corporations and national governments.
A final limitation of de Swaan’s framework is that it gives much more emphasis
to language as an instrument of communication than to language as a marker of