Language policies set by governments and institutions create massive impacts on people and communities. Human communications and social functions can be significantly affected by language policies, making alterations in relationships of individuals and groups, social connections and daily life actions and activities. Serious concerns might arise from enacting and enforcing language policies which marginalize or ignore indigenous and local communities, minority groups or speakers of nearextinction or endangered languages. When language policies engender managerial regulations, administrative processes, bureaucratic routines and institutional plans which negate or ignore the needs and rights of linguistic minorities or disrupt the effective communication flow between institutions or authorities and communities or groups; violation of the entitlements of minority groups and undermining of potentials of indigenous communities may ensue. Most, if not all, sustainable development goals are related to effective language-based communication and are only achievable if individuals and institutions engage in constructive dialogues building the foundations and paths for productive cooperation. Recent trends, approaches and attempts seeking to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and decades-long quest for elimination of discriminations and maximization of inclusiveness could provide bases and patterns for developing fairer communication and language policies which give local and indigenous communities more voice and space, assure the rights and potentials of minorities and preserve the indigenous vernaculars and local languages as facilitators of social functions and frameworks of social and community bonds. We suggest development of such indigenous-friendly and DEI-compatible language policies through establishing and creating high-engagement workgroups consisting of indigenous individuals, language and communication specialists, sociologists, anthropologists, public policy experts, government officials and authorities, representatives of education sector, media and NGOs, spiritual or religious leaders, heads of workers’ unions and employers’ organizations, IT and AI professionals and people from arts sector, who can build mutual understanding and collaborate on prerequisites and underlying grounds for inclusive language policies. These workgroups can help legislature and governing bodies reach comprehensive understanding and systematically and dynamically envision the challenges and solutions of language policymaking. Constant surveillance and regular evaluation of policy outcomes should be conducted by the workgroups using data, insight and views from large samples of stakeholders’ populations as input for analysis, in order to verify the language policies are effective and constructive, and to consider and suggest possible revisions if necessary.
