The Norwegian Language Policy in Higher Education: An Evaluation of Policy Design

This article evaluates the design of the official language policy of the Norwegian government in the field of higher education set out in two white papers in 2008 and 2020. The aim of the language policy is to avoid domain loss of the Norwegian language and thus keep it 'complete' and able to function as unifying factor in society. In the two white papers, however, the logic of collective action in language policy is not explicit. We adopt a language policy approach based on public policy evaluation to reconstruct language policy's internal logic of action (i.e. its 'programme theory' or 'theory of change'). Secondly, we assess the validity of the assumptions underlying the two programme theories in light of the criteria of plausibility, feasibility and testability. The results show that the majority of the measures included in the 2008 language policy are not supported by a valid programme theory. By contrast the majority of the measures in the 2020 language policy are based on a valid theory of change, although several weaknesses persist. This article contributes to the growing research on the evaluation of language policies by focusing on a hitherto relatively unexplored aspect, namely the evaluation of the validity of policy design. This study can be relevant and significant for policy makers involved in language planning. The methodology here applied ex post to evaluate the policy design can be employed ex ante too, whereby assisting policy makers to better structure the programme theory of a language policy during the policy design phase.