Abstract:
Agents of language governance at the national level are usually composed of statesmen, linguists and policy experts and so on, among which statesmen are in most cases considered to be the most important figures in governing language.Using an ethnographical approach, and taking Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, as an example, this paper seeks to find out the interplay between the statesmen’s language life and language governance.The study shows that statesmen’s lingustic lives are the sources of their language ideologies, which are the basis of their decisions in language policies.Finally, the author argues that statesmen’s lingustic lives are closely tied with their language governance, the former indirectly affects the latter via language ideologies and the latter gives a direct impact on the former.
