提 要 受20世纪60年代美国“向贫困宣战”运动的影响，国外学者开始探讨语言与贫困的关系，分别从语言能力与贫困、语言地位与贫困、语言权利与贫困、语言多样性与贫困4个方面分析了语言与贫困的相关性，并从语言地位规划、母语教育、语言资源开发、语言多样性保护等方面提出了一些有益的建议和对策。相关研究促进了语言政策与规划学科的发展，推动了社会公平正义，但仍存在“惜语不惜人”（如为保护语言多样性而牺牲讲话人的权益）、“重母语轻通用语”（过于强调母语教育在减贫中的作用）、理念缺乏可行性（如试图通过将土著人的语言提升为官方语言而解决其贫困问题），以及未能区分绝对贫困和相对贫困（未考虑可感知的贫困对母语人口流失的作用）等方面的问题。
关键词 相对贫困;语言能力;语言地位;语言权利;语言多样性;母语教育
中图分类号 H002 文献标识码 A 文章编号 2096-1014（2019）01-0022-12
DOI 10.19689/j.cnki.cn10-1361/h.20190102
Overseas Studies on Language and Poverty： Origin， Core and Some Reflections
Fang Xiaobing
Abstract This paper is a review of studies of language and poverty conducted by international scholars. Influenced by the US “War on Poverty” movement in the 1960s， international scholars began to explore the relevance between language and poverty. The focus of the studies are generally placed on four aspects： language capacity and poverty， language status and poverty， language rights and poverty， and language diversity and poverty. Some useful suggestions and countermeasures have been put forward for language diversity protection， language status planning， mother tongue education， language resource development and language diversity conservation. However， despite their promotion of Language Policy and Planning （LPP） as an academic discipline and their encouragement of social equity and justice， such studies also feature some problems in their argumentations. Among them， issues that are prominent and deserve attention include outweighing languages over human beings （e.g. sacrificing the rights of the speakers for the protection of linguistic diversity）; advocating mother language while despising common language （e.g. overemphasizing the role of mother-tongue education in poverty alleviation）; infeasibility in proposals （e.g. proposing to reduce indigenous poverty by means of upgrading their languages to official status）， and failure to distinguish absolute poverty from relative poverty （e.g. attaching little importance to the effect of perceptible poverty on the loss of native speakers）. This review will inform LPP studies in China and provide a reference for policymaking regarding language and poverty.
Key words relative poverty; language capacity; language status; language rights; language diversity; mother-tongue education
2018年1月5日，教育部、國务院扶贫开发领导小组办公室和国家语言文字工作委员会共同制定了《推普脱贫攻坚行动计划（2018～2020年）》，提出了“语言扶贫”的重要举措。近一年来，国内学界，尤其是从事语言政策与规划研究的学者，开始关注“脱贫与推普”话题，提出了一些颇有价值的观点。例如，语言可以扶贫，源自语言与教育、信息、互联网，以及与人的能力和机会之间存在的密切关系（李宇明 2018）;在精准脱贫中应该重视语言因素的基础性作用，因为语言作为资本，有助于改观落后地区的就业和经济劣势（王春辉 2018）;语言和贫困之间枝附叶连，不可分割，语言扶贫是新时期普通话推广的重要使命（史维国，杜广慧 2018）。