Policy maker, policy maker, make me a policy!

My graduate program in linguistics focused a lot more on theoretical and computational linguistics than it did on more applied stuff like language policy. I did take a bunch of sociolinguistics, because you don't go to Penn and not take sociolinguistics, but the socio program there emphasizes formal and empirical techniques as much as it's concerned with social factors; I'd say it's even primarily about applying formal and empirical techniques to social factors. In this respect it's different from many other sociolinguistics programs. There were a few more purely applied courses offered on language policy, a couple in my department and more in the ed school, but I never took them.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because the work I'm doing relies on language policy stuff in a way I should have anticipated but really didn't. One of the exciting/scary/humbling/empowering things about working for a company like Microsoft is that decisions I make at work have an actual impact on language policy at the level of government and standards.

Some of the stuff I've been thinking about posting would really be more appropriate on a work blog, so I'm going to get off my butt and start one sometime this week. Stay tuned.