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11 - Language planning: communication demands, public choice, utility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Florian Coulmas
Florian Coulmas
Affiliation:
German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo
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Summary

… once His Majesty has subdued people from various nations and languages, and being in need of transmitting the law of the conquerors in this language, I hereby present this Grammar to facilitate its learning …

Nebrija (1492)

In order to carry out language planning, one needs a language to plan for.

Peter Mühlhäusler (1994)

The Carolingian scholars did not merely become conscious that Romance and Latin were different … they invented the difference.

Roger Wright (1991)

Political choices

The world's languages outnumber its independent states by a factor of thirty. They are characterized by internal diversity; and they are marked by gross disparities in terms of number of speakers and functional range. Taken together, these factors make languages an inescapable object of political choices. Political agents taking decisions designed to shape the linguistic behaviour of groups usually act through committees or language academies. The basic assumption underlying the work of some 200 language-planning agencies around the world is that it is possible to change people's behaviour and to adapt the linguistic resources of speech communities to changing communication needs by premeditated planning. Consider some examples.

When, after a protracted and bloody war, East Timor attained independent statehood, the new government of the shattered country lost no time in making provisions concerning its languages.

Type
Chapter
Information
Sociolinguistics
The Study of Speakers' Choices
 , pp. 184 - 203
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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References

Ager, Dennis. 2001. Motivation in Language Planning and Language Policy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Cooper, Robert L. 1989. Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Coulmas, Florian. 1991. European integration and the idea of a national language. In Coulmas, F. (ed.), A Language Policy for the European Community. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.) 2001. Can Threatened Languages Be Saved?Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kaplan, Robert B. and Baldanf, Richard B.. 1997. Language Planning: from Practice to Theory. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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