Institutionalisation of Language Use

Abstract

The membership of any language group, viewed as a social group, revolves around the use of the language as social practice within the group’s activities. Unlike state language groups, this is not possible across the range of contexts within the autochthonous territory. The relationship between state, minority and international languages rarely permits the institutionalisation of more than one language across all contexts, largely because not everyone is bi- or multilingual. Language use is segmented as a feature of the normative context. The struggle over language is a struggle to institutionalise language use across as many possible contexts as possible, making use normative for the speakers of that language.