The Emergence of Language Policy as Practice in Transient Social Configurations

This chapter explores how language policies as practice emerge in two transient multilingual communities. Drawing on micro-longitudinal video data sets and theoretical insights and methods for analysis of social interaction originating in Conversation Analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and linguistic ethnography, the chapter studies and theorises how language choice practices emerge in an interplay between participants’ individual language identities, their engagement with one another, and language principles and ideologies in circulation in the sociocultural setting, beyond the groups themselves. Based on the analyses, we argue that in order to understand how language policy takes part in shaping the social worlds of transient social environments, it is crucial to recognise the interplay between different scales of social organisation and their joint role in the creation of social relationships and social meaning.