From Mouth to Mind

This book explores how a state uses language policy to impact public political mindset and attitudes. Based on a comprehensive examination through survey analyses, experiments, and computer-assisted text analyses, this book demonstrates that the state can use language policy as a political tool to influence how citizens think and feel about politics and governments. The influences are comprehensively delivered through listening, speaking, and reading/writing the official, dialect, and foreign languages. This book contributes to political science, and even the entire social science by justifying the important role of language in human social and political lives and turning the research focus from language content to language context.