Language as a political power and as an object of the impacting policy

A framework for and overview of the key elements of language policy and language planning and their functional aspect is featured in the article. Solving socioeconomic issues within polyethnic and multicultural nations under globalizing world order is also a sharp focus of the paper in question. It first addresses a common trend to apply multidiscipli-nary theoretical approaches of a wider spectrum of social and political studies to linguistics, sociology of language, philosophy and polity. The analysis then envisages general scientific, linguistic and sociolinguistic methods applied onto the language policy and planning covering the concept of the "soft power" as an influential instrument for providing principles of language policy both on the national and transnational levels. Within each of these areas, key articles outlining mainstreamed recent directions are discussed indicating the new found issues of the globalizing world. Modern political discourse of domesticated and international media contents reflect both common and culture-induced national factors that influence on the perception of the concept "soft power" in different countries. Insightful analysis of the lexical units determines a field of semantic associations of the concept "soft power' and its impacting consequences on globally emerging cultures and their axiological characteristics of the referring linguacultures. A "soft power" concept embraces two interpretations: 1) soft power as an appealing resource, featuring a greater impact of the culture-centred language concept sphere on the system of sociocultural language codes and 2) soft power as an impacting resource, containing a manipulative discursive potential, which together with media policy produces influential impacts on consciousness, standpoints and values of the speakers. Applied analytical material elicits trends illustrating interconnection of intra and extra linguistic factors of the specific language policy and planning implementation. Thus, the grounded point of view had been shaped within the frame of sociolinguistic study of diverse issues of modern multipolar world and the topical area "Language and Culture".

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