The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Language policy and planning (LPP) is broadly concerned with understanding the language practices of a group or community, the bases for these practices, and where relevant, the ways in which such practices might be sustained or modified. Scholars working in LPP in the 1960s and 1970s were primarily focused on adopting a highly technocratic approach. The goal of the discipline at the time was construed as one of helping to deal with language “problems,” particularly the challenges faced by newly independent nation-states, by identifying “rational solutions.” The field of LPP then revolved mainly around the processes of language selection, codification, and elaboration and how these could be implemented (Haugen, 1966). Consequently, from this technocratic perspective, “successful language planning, or degrees of it, can be understood in terms of the efficacy of planned policy measures as well as the target populations’ propensity to comply with the public policies pertaining to language planning” (Das Gupta and Ferguson, 1977, p. 6). In other words, the main steps involved in LPP were 1) identify a language problem, 2) arrive rationally at a solution, and 3) get the target populations to comply with the prescribed solution.