19 OER and the Language Problem (Part 2): The Status and Function Rationale
19 OER and the Language Problem (Part 2): The Status and Function Rationale
Tannis Morgan
Critical scholarship ought to analyse the strong forces that are at pains to create the impression that English serves all the world’s citizens equally well, or those who uncritically assume this is so, when this is manifestly not the case. (Phillipson, 2001)
In my first post on this topic I put forward some high level statements on why I think OER has a language problem. The “problem” may largely be one of awareness and as the movement evolves into its adolescence I think it will be increasingly important to surface the intersection of language, OER, and social justice.
My specific concern is with the uni-directional nature of OER from English to other languages. English as a language holds considerable economic and social power, which has obviously facilitated its emergence as a global language. This emergence is perhaps neither good nor evil, but carries with it some consequences that are worthy of consideration and have been documented for some time. The positions on this topic range from moderate to extreme, with scholars like Tove Skuttnab-Kangas dedicating decades to topics such as language rights, linguicide and the consequences of colonialism to more functional perspectives such as WF Mackey’s framework for understanding prestige, function, and status of language in relation to language vitality.
I was a grad student of Mackey’s at Université Laval in the 90s when he was already well into his seventies. Mackey ran a internationally well known centre on research in language planning but also had been an advisor to many nations on language planning and policy, and as the story goes, had played an important role in shifting Quebec from English to French in the areas of education, government and the workplace in the 60s and 70s. What was interesting about Mackey was that he was very academic about his approach, adopting a neutral stance that leaned on the science of language planning, and thus avoiding the inevitably polarizing debates that occur when language planning or revitalization is a topic.
This seems like a good place to start in attempting to be critical about the uni-directional nature of OERs.
Language Vitality = Prestige, Function and Status
In Mackey’s framework, the vitality of a language can be thought of in terms of three buckets – prestige, status and function. As he describes it “the essential difference between prestige, function, and status is the difference between past, present and future”.
Prestige: depends on its record , or what people think its record to have been. In some cases this is largely symbolic.
Function: what people can actually do with the language
Status: the potential for people do do something with the language, eg. legally, culturally, economically, politically and demographically.
“The functions of a language, as defined as what one in fact does with it, can be directly observed in the language behaviour of the