Language Policy

Indices are commonly used in national and international comparisons. Governments or government organizations use them to collect and organize quantifiable information on important social and economic variables, and to monitor their development over time. Some well-known examples are the Human Development Index, created by Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen and published by the United Nations (UN), and the Gini Index of Income Inequality created by Corrado Gini and currently used by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the World Bank. Various international indices are produced by private bodies such as foundations, universities or non-governmental organizations, e.g. the Global Competitiveness Index, the Democratic Index and the World Press Freedom Index. No such index exists in the area of language policy. This is surprising, given the ubiquity of languages in almost any field of human activity. Language policy, however, is unavoidable, as public authorities at any level cannot carry out core government functions – e.g. publication and enforcement of laws, police services, justice, public administration, health care and education – simply in any language that individuals may request. Because society in every country in the world is multilingual, a situation of absolute linguistic equality is almost a dream. However, the level of inequality between languages and therefore between their speakers can be more or less great, and that level precisely depends on language policy. Language policy can in fact cause large distributional effects among various groups of people (defined according to their language skills), and therefore it can affect the well-being of individuals living in a country or region. An index of linguistic justice should make it possible to define such distributional effects across time and space, and to monitor their development”.