L23A: Sociology of Language Language Planning Page 1 of 3

LANGUAGE PLANNING

Why is language planning necessary?

Language planning options available to a nation or state:

  1. Internationalism – retaining an internationally used language – eg. English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Dutch.
  1. Vernacularization – promoting the language of the mass of the population. Eg. Greece
  1. Pluralism - developing a vernacular or use a regional variety to be used alongside either an official or post colonial language.

Eg. Canada: French used alongside English

  1. Assimilation - the society can decide that all citizens must use the dominant language and therefore be assimilated linguistically. Eg. immigrants in US (particularly Hispanic population).

Cost-Benefit-Analysis

(Thorburn, 1971:page 259 in Can Language Be Planned? )

What is involved in the planning process to arrive at this stage?

Haugen (chapter 26 in prescribed text)

(1)Selection of norm - the selection may be accepted or rejected.

Example: the selection of urban Haitian Creole for use in Haitian corpus planning.

(2)Codification of norm – setting up a writing system

(3)Implementation - the spread of the selected and codified norm through books, the media, educational material, etc.

(4)Elaboration of function

Continued monitoring of the selected and codified norm to see that it can fulfill all its functions – terminological development is a good example of this.

Two basic areas of language planning: Status Planning and Corpus Planning

  1. allocation of function (status)
  2. structural innovations (corpus)

STATUS PLANNING

Status planning – making of the necessary moves to change the function of a language variety and therefore the rights of the people who use it.

Language status planning can then (according to Cobarrubias) be:

(i)Moral & rational

(ii)Moral & irrational

(iii)Immoral & rational

(iv)Immoral & irrational

CASE STUDIES IN STATUS PLANNING

  • African nations – Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria
  • Others – Language revival – Irish, Hebrew
  • Caribbean nations – Curacao, Haiti

Readings: General – Wardhaugh: revival of Catalan, African nations (pg. 353-356)

Other readings: Holmes, J. Paraguay – pg. 95-97; Tanzania – pg. 103-104

Jernudd & Rubin – Revival of Irish (ch.4)

Devonish, H. – Language & Liberation

Valdman - Haiti

CORPUS PLANNING

Corpus planning – refers to the necessary changes in vocabulary, structure, spelling, orthography for the language variety to function as the society would like it to.

(1)Corpus planning of Lexicon/Phonology

(2)Corpus planning of Syntax

(3)Development of writing systems

CASE STUDIES IN CORPUS PLANNING

  • Turkey
  • Indonesia
  • Norway

Readings:

Wardhaugh: Turkey, Papua New Guinea (pg. 354, 361)

Holmes, J. Norway pg. 106-108

Jernudd & RubinHebrew–Corp. Plan.(ch. 5); Indonesia – (ch. 9)

Fishman, J. (1974) Sociology of Language

Devonish, H. Language & Liberation