The present volume grew out of the 30th International LAUD Symposium held on April 19-22 2004
at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau Germany. The conference Empowerment through
Language was centrally concerned with the concept of power and or empowerment as observed in
the status and use of language(s) and their speakers in bilingual and multilingual communities.
The book discusses the theoretical issues inherent in the relation between language and power
the empowerment strategies involved in language policy and language planning situations and
the issue of language endangerment in Africa i.e. the fate of minority languages and their
speakers and the sociopolitical factors perpetuating their exclusion from access to knowledge
and skills.The volume constitutes a collection of papers by prominent linguists from many
countries who explore the exciting interdisciplinary area of language power and linguistic
empowerment. Broadly speaking the papers focus on the theoretical and sociolinguistic problems
related to the role of power in language policy and language planning situations in
multilingual settings language choices code switches and associated topics. Thus the aim of
the volume is to open up language policy and language planning issues as observed in
multilingual contexts (nations institutions other settings and domains) to the wider
community of critical sociolinguistics by concentrating on the relationship between language
and power. More particularly it offers a decidedly sociolinguistic perspective to the study of
language and power which likewise has been tackled from other perspectives in the areas of
sociology and political science. This interdisciplinary relationship is important both for
linguistics and for the sociology of language. In this way the book is an important
contribution to general linguistics sociolinguistics minority issues in multilingual settings
as well as the social sciences. In honor of his upcoming 80th birthday (2006) Fishman's
colleagues and former students are preparing five volumes by him or about him this being one
of them.
