The Historical Sources of Language Policy

The designation of an official language or languages for administration is an essential institutional element of state rationalization, along with standard weights and measures and legal currency. Factors that determine this choice have not been fully accounted for. This paper provides a framework to explain official language policies for post-colonial states. The framework highlights two historical factors that are keys to predicting the use of indigenous languages in formal domains: the availability of a written tradition by a major group in the country in the era before missionary and/or colonial exposure, and the degree of linguistic fractionalization within the colonially-set borders. Statistical estimates test and a set of vignettes illustrate the workings of these historical factors in accounting for post-colonial language policies.