Minorities’ Heritage Language Planning and National Multilingual Capacity Building

Abstract

As an important part of a nation’s soft power, national multilingual capacity refers to a nation’s ability to use a variety of languages acquired in dealing with domestic and international affairs in the development of a nation. The nation-security-oriented language planning in the post-9/11 America is closely related with the teaching, using and developing of the minorities’ heritage languages, which has to some extent facilitated the America’s national multilingual capacity. Taking National Security Language Initiative proposed by the American federal government as an example, this paper suggests that minorities’ heritage language planning be an endogenous shortcut to build the national multilingual capacity. Furthermore, the relationship between minorities’ heritage language planning and national multilingual capacity building is established by matching the five key parameters in heritage language planning with the five components of national multilingual capacity respectively, i.e., exploring the correlations between languages planning, talent planning, education planning, industry planning, policy planning and national multilingual resources capacity, individual’s multilingual capacity, national multilingual education capacity, national multilingual service capacity and national multilingual management capacity in detail by using an analytical method.