Language and Politics
Research Committee 50 of the IPSA

Very generally, the purpose of the committee, created in January 2001, 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.