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ABSTRACT
In which domains and for which language types does language legislation occur and how easy is it to identify it? The United Kingdom (UK) affords a good test bed to answer these questions since it is often considered to be lacking in strong public language policy due to, amongst other things, a lack of a coherent language policy across the UK and its devolved administrations and a perceived societal disinterest in languages. Through analysis of a corpus of primary and secondary legislation from the UK and its constituent jurisdictions that contain stipulations about language(s), this article shows that UK language legislation spans multiple domains, including public health and safety, law and crime, transport and the media. Whilst some of the legislation, such as the Welsh Language Acts, explicitly deals with language(s), the vast majority of the UK's legislation which contains provisions concerning language(s) is hidden in legislation which primarily concerns another domain. Although hidden, at times these language stipulations mark important landmarks in the status of languages. All this has consequences for the UK language policy landscape, potentially diminishing the perceived importance of languages in and to government and affecting policymakers' ability to collaborate across government in a coherent way.
Acknowledgements
This study was generously funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, Promoting Language Policy (AH/V004182/1). We would also like to thank the Legislative Codes Office within the Office of the Legislative Counsel (Welsh Government), Louise Glen (Education Scotland) and Linsey Farrell (NI Department of Education) for their help in compiling the corpus and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful feedback. All errors and omissions remain our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1993/38/enacted/data.pdf. All online resources were last accessed 18/1/2022.
4 Education (School Performance Information) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2009: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2009/646/pdfs/uksi_20090646_en.pdf.
10 On Welsh devolution, see https://senedd.wales/how-we-work/history-of-devolution/.
12 For details, see https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/senedd-cymru-why-has-the-national-assembly-for-wales-changed-its-name/.
13 In this section we refer to language education policy more broadly, whereas the corpus used for our analysis as described in the following sections is restricted to policy enshrined in primary and secondary legislation.
14 On NI education, see https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/irishhistorylive/IrishHistoryResources/Shortarticlesandencyclopaediaentries/Encyclopaedia/LengthyEntries/Education/.
15 These are GCSEs taken in England, NI and Wales at the end of KS4 and A Levels taken at the end of KS5. The system differs in Scotland (see https://scqf.org.uk/about-the-framework/interactive-framework/).
16 Examination entries have similarly fallen dramatically in England and NI (Tinsley & Doležal, Citation2018; Henderson & Carruthers, Citation2021).
21 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/. For more information, see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/understanding-legislation#Whatlegislationisheldonlegislationgovuk.
28 In our categorization, ML is understood in the narrow sense of ML educational policy, typically in the UK the teaching of French, German, Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, etc.
30 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1993/45/pdfs/ukpga_19930045_en.pdf. Throughout we use Art. for Article, Para. for Paragraph and S. for Schedule.
31 132 pieces of legislation relate to multiple jurisdictions.
32 All percentages are rounded to 1dp.
34 See, e.g., Ofcom’s scheme: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/10481/welsh-language-scheme.pdf.
38 See, e.g., the Scottish Parliament’s plan: https://archive2021.parliament.scot/Gaelic/GLP201818English.pdf.
40 In the 2011 census, c.57,000 people identified as Gaelic speakers: https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/census-results/at-a-glance/languages/.
41 Note that there are several difficulties surrounding the collection of language data in the 2011 census (Sebba, Citation2017; Sebba & Ayres-Bennett, Citation2021).
42 In 2020, Scottish association Oor Voyce launched a campaign for the legal recognition of Scots via a Scots Language Act and the establishment of a board comparable to Bòrd na Gàidhlig. Creative Scotland, a non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government, published an advisory Scots Language Policy in 2015 which aimed to promote the use and learning of Scots and enhance its status.
45 As we shall see in the next section, more restrictive legislation provides some legal protections for BSL users in the UK.
46 Cornish does feature in secondary legislation concerning the taxation of cultural products (see hidden legislation section).
49 https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=09000016805a8c52.
50 ‘Interpretation assistance’ is defined in the legislation as follows: ‘in relation to a person who does not speak or understand English, an oral translation of—(i) the police proceedings or criminal proceedings into the person’s native language or any other language which the person speaks or understands’: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ssi/2014/95/made/data.pdf.
52 For a list of those languages termed ‘unconditionally specified as foundation subjects’ (S.1) as well as those which may be considered foundation subjects (S.2) providing the school also offers one or more of the languages in S.1, see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1989/825/made/data.pdf.
57 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1169/made/data.pdf. Further provision for Gaelic is found in secondary legislation concerning Education (e.g. the Grants for Gaelic Language Education (Scotland) Regulations 1986: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1986/410/pdfs/uksi_19860410_en.pdf).
61 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1991/32/enacted/data.pdf. There is similar legislation 1992-1999.
68 The Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 cites the same languages; this adds that a candidate for naturalization must have ‘sufficient knowledge about life in the United Kingdom’ (Art.40): https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/11/enacted/data.pdf.
88 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2010/1997/made/data.pdf. There is an interesting shift in the wording, from asking for ‘the pupil’s first language’, implying an interest in knowing the language(s) spoken by pupils, to ‘whether English is not the child’s first language’, focusing more on knowledge of English.
99 For the full list, see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4.
102 Similar conclusions concerning health and safety are reached by Sharma (Citation2018, p. 66).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Emma Humphries
This research was conducted whilst Emma Humphries was the Research Project Manager of the AHRC-funded Promoting Language Policy project. She completed her PhD in French sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham in January 2021 and she is currently a Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded project ‘Foreign, indigenous and community languages in the devolved regions of the UK: policy and practice for growth’, led by Professor Janice Carruthers at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests include language attitudes and ideologies, language policy and computer-mediated communication.
Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Wendy Ayres-Bennett is Emerita Professor of French Philology and Linguistics, University of Cambridge, and was PI on the Promoting Language Policy research project, funded by the AHRC (2020-2022). She has published widely on the history of French and the history of linguistic thought. Her current research interests include language policy, standardization, codification and ideologies. Between 2016 and 2021, she was Principal Investigator on the multi-disciplinary, multi-institution research project, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, funded by the AHRC under its Open World Research Initiative (www.meits.org). The project worked closely with policymakers and practitioners to promote the value of languages for key issues of our time and the benefits of language learning for individuals and societies.