A corpus-driven exploration of U.S. language planning and language ideology from 2013 to 2018

Abstract

Abstract Language planning is influenced by ideological stances, and exports those ideologies through the policy making process. Residing beneath policy documents lies a language policy of the texts themselves, policing their structure and linguistic forms by which ideologies are managed. Thus, a careful collection of such documents should offer rich grounds for analysis, to leverage claims of ideology against empirically founded patterns, and offer rigorous comparison across actors, genres, and policy areas. We conducted a corpus-driven exploration of all bills from Congressional sessions 113 to 115 (33,968 documents, 85,612,752 words), and describe the collocational character of U.S. language policy, the semantic preferences of those collocations, and discuss the exposed ideological structure of these bills. By utilizing such a large corpus, this study responds to two issues in corpus-aided language policy analysis: (1) a paucity of very large corpora analyses; (2) further utilizes corpus-driven methods to naively investigate ideologies in status planning.