Media, multilingualism and language policing: an introduction

313) describes how, in the seventeenth century, the term ''police'' was used to describe the rational management of the state, ''the set of means by which the state's forces can be increased while preserving the state in good order''. This rational management would be effected through the collection and production of knowledge about the people, so as to strengthen the state. Such knowledge would be infinitely detailed, stretching into the smallest corners of human conduct. And the product of policing would be ''order''. The state, as we know, is just one actor among many regulating language behaviours in contemporary globalised societies. Building on recent critiques of the modernist tradition in language policy (e.g. Shohamy 2006; Ricento 2006; Wright 2004), we argue that Foucault's notion of ''police'' and ''policing'' can be fruitfully extended to cover the activities of a wide range of actors, from the state to individuals, over civil society and corporate actors. We propose to use the notion of ''policing'' in the domain of language in this sense: as the production of ''order''-normatively organised and policed conduct-which is infinitely detailed and regulated by a variety of actors.