Theoretical Approaches to Language Regimes

The concept of language regime emerged in political science in the late 1980s. Due to the rise of ethnic conflicts and migration many European states faced, new challenges to language diversity management emerged while at international level a discussion about linguistic rights started. All these trends once again highlighted the political importance of language issues and an urgent need to investigate them by bringing together the approaches from different fields of science. Many researchers have made a significant contribution to interdisciplinary language policy studies over the last 20 years by applying methods from political science, sociolinguistics, law and economics. However, such a wide range of approaches has inevitably led to methodological problems, mostly concerned with different interpretations of notions that are grounded in more than one research field, e.g. ideology. As for language regimes, the debate lies in the separate use of this term that should not be considered equivalent to language policy regime or language policy. The article discusses the key approaches to language regimes in both political science and sociolinguistics and justifies the separate use of this notion for language policy research.