[lg policy] bibitem: Science of Language Policy and Planning

[Harold Schiffman]

Carol A. Chapelle (ed.)The Encyclopedia of Applied LinguisticsLondon:
Wiley-Blackwell 2012The Science of Language Policy and Planning

David Bradley, La Trobe University

Language policy and planning has a long history, but an explicit
theoretical framework hasonly developed in the last fifty years.
Usually the process is regarded in a unitary way, andcalled language
planning, while the specific decisions involved are said to
constitutelanguage policy.An early approach was that of Kloss (1969),
which divides this into Status planningand Corpus planning. Status
planning or language policy relates to decisions about the statusand
use that languages should have within a community. Corpus Planning or
language planning relates to the form and structure of languages:
Graphisation of a written variety,Standardisation of its grammar and
Modernisation of lexicon. Status planning is often therole of
governments and educational authorities; their decisions are often
based on nation- building and other political and social agendas.
Corpus planning may also be carried out bycentral authorities, though
ideally this work is done by linguistically-sophisticated expertsand
mainly based on established norms.Another four-stage framework was
devised by Haugen (1966): Selection,Codification, Elaboration and
Dissemination. Selection and Dissemination correspond toStatus
Planning, while Codification and Elaboration are part of Corpus
Planning. Selection isthe choice of languages and their standard
varieties. Codification is the Graphisation of thewritten form and
Standardisation of grammar and vocabulary. This may involve
creation,modification or replacement of orthographies, similar
decisions about grammar andvocabulary, preparation of standard
grammars and authoritative monolingual and bilingualdictionaries.
Elaboration is the expansion of use of the language and Modernisation
throughadditional areas of new vocabulary or new genres of literary
and other use. Dissemination isthe educational, social and other
implementation of the codified and elaborated varieties, alsosometimes
called Acquisition Planning.Both these models lack an essential
component: Evaluation; that is, the assessment of the success of
policy and planning decisions, and if necessary changes in their form
or implementation. They also do not explicitly mention linguistic
human rights, such as the rightof minorities to mother-tongue
education and access to government and national life.A language policy
is inherent in any political entity or institution, whether it
isexplicit or not. That is, every such entity has some official
language or languages, even if thishas not been proclaimed or legally
instituted. These languages also have a standard form.Sometimes the
form changes gradually through time, but more often the written and
formalspoken variety becomes fixed for a longer or shorter period, and
thus gradually becomesarchaic and less representative of current
speech usage. This may sometimes lead to reform
of the written variety, though such reforms are often contentious and
tend to occur mainlyafter political changes. For much of recorded
history, language policy has been a major toolof nationalism and
building national identity, and language planning has often worked
tounify nations around a single standard language, often at the
expense of regional varieties andother local languages.Sometimes the
basis of policy decisions is explicit, as in the case of the former
SovietUnion or the Peoples’ Republic of China, where non-Russian and
non-Han Chinesenationalities were recognised based in part on their
language, and standard varieties of eachlanguage were selected based
on being central, spoken by a large group, intelligible to other
varieties and having an established sociocultural status, then
codified in ways reflectingcurrent political criteria. This meant use
of romanisation in the Central Asian part of theSoviet Union in the
1920s and its replacement by Cyrillic in the mid-1930s, and in China
inthe 1950s the use of a romanisation based on that codified for
Chinese, then its replacement by Arabic-based scripts in the 1970s.
Languages like Tajik and Uzbek had a 1920sromanisation and a 1930s
Cyrillic script in the Soviet Union and a 1950s
Chinese-basedromanisation and a 1970s Arabic script in China; of
course in Afghanistan they continued to be written in Arabic script.We
lack explicit records for the political basis of early language policy
and planningdecisions, but the development of a standardised
orthography, grammatical conventions andvocabulary is a component of
language policy; thus one might say that people like theSanskrit
grammarian Panini, the Alexandrine grammarians for Greek or Priscian
for Latinwere language planners who codified existing language norms
and made them explicit.Similarly, the use and spread of Latin and
Greek across the Mediterranean world twomillennia ago was a Status
planning process, as is the use and spread of Arabic in the
Islamicworld and the use and spread of English in the modern
world.Language policy decisions are constant and dynamic, made every
time one chooses tosocialise children in a particular language, every
time a teacher chooses a particular linguisticform, every time a
government bureaucrat selects a language to address a member of the
public, every time a government makes a proclamation, and so on.
Political change may leadto linguistic policy changes, as in Greece
where the diglossic high Katharevousa becameassociated with the
military government and was eliminated from most official uses with
itsloss of power in 1974. Another example is the shift away from Latin
in the Catholic church,started in the mid-1960s but not yet
complete.In some countries, official or unofficial bodies have been
created whose sole or  primary purpose is to codify and standardise a
national language. Their creation is directlyrelated to other kinds of
nation-building processes; many focus on lexicon. One earlyunofficial
example was the Accademia della Crusca, established to maintain the
purity of theItalian language in 1582. An early official example is
the Académie Française, established by Richelieu in 1635, which
continues to make linguistic decisions for French. For example,it
recently coined a new word for email, courriel , a contraction of
courrier éléctronique, toreplace the English loan mél. Many other
countries have more recently established similar  bodies, for example
the Royal Institute in Thailand, established in 1933, or the
DewanBahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature) in
Malaysia, established in 1956.(Bradley 1985). Some, like the Académie
Française and the Royal Institute in Thailand, havedeveloped into
elite institutions whose membership is a recognition of status within
theeducated stratum of a society, not just for those working to
standardise a national language.Others remain closer to their language
policy and planning roots, and some remaingovernment
bodies.Institutions formulating policy may develop gradually, as in
China where theAssociation for Writing Reform of the Communist Party
established in 1949 became thegovernment Research Committee for
Chinese Writing Reform in 1952, the Committee for Chinese Writing
Reform in 1954 and finally the ministry-level State Language
Commissionin 1985. Policy bodies may also have their status and powers
weakened, as in China wherethe State Language Commission merged into
the State Education Commission in 2000.Official language policy bodies
usually make extensive Corpus decisions, often piecemeal: orthography
reform such as the elimination by the Académie Française of
thecircumflex accent from French (without consulting the rest of
Francophonie), coining newwords, fulmination against loanwords like le
weekend, and so on. In some countries, the decisions of the
policy-forming body are widely respected, implemented and used, while
inothers they are a source of amusement and are largely ignored.One
outcome of competing language policy decisions in different political
entities isthat a single language may become pluricentric (Clyne
1992), having more than one norm indifferent countries. An extreme
example of this is Chinese, where the 1956 character reformsimplified
nearly 40% of all characters, leaving Taiwan and Hong Kong using the
traditionalcharacters, with Singapore eventually changing sides in
1979 to the simplified characters(Bradley 1992). We now recognise
distinct Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian languages, as aresult of
political separation; they were formerly all regarded as varieties of
a single Serbo-Croatian language. Jespersen’s aphorism, that a
language is a dialect with an army and anavy, perhaps applies here.In
countries with or without an official language policy body, this role
is also fulfilled by other government institutions: ministries of
education, defense, interior, welfare, minorityaffairs and so on. ‘No
policy’ really just means no explicit legally-codified policy
withofficial status. The lack of an explicit policy may facilitate
movements promoting a singlenational language, such as Official
English in the United States from the 1980s (Crawford1992).Linguists
have contributed extensively to formulating and implementing
nationallanguage policies in recent years, most notably the Australian
Joseph Lo Bianco, who drafteda language policy for Australia (Lo
Bianco 1987), the first explicit language policy for
anyEnglish-speaking country, led its implementation, and has also
helped to draft policies for many other countries.A major current
issue for language policy and planning is linguistic human rights,such
as early education through the mother tongue for minority groups,
transitional to anational language (Tollefson 1991, Hornberger 2008).
UNICEF and UNESCO have taken aleading role here. Another issue is the
encroachment of covert Status planning on Corpus planning (Fishman
2006).
References
Bradley, David (ed.) 1985.
 Language Policy, Language Planning and Sociolinguistics inSouth-East Asia
. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics A-67. _____ 1992. Chinese as a
pluricentric language. In Clyne (ed.), 305-324.Clyne, Michael G. 1992.
 Pluricentric Languages: Differing norms in different nations.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Crawford, James (ed.) 1992.
 Language Loyalties: A source book on the Official English controversy.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Fishman, Joshua. 2006.
 Do Not Leave Your Language Alone: The hidden status agendas within
corpus planning in language policy.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Haugen, Einar. 1966.
 Language Conflict and Language Planning: The case of modern Norwegian.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Hornberger, Nancy H. (ed.) 2008.
Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages: Policy and  practice on four continents.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Kloss, Heinz. 1969.
 Research Possibilities on Group Bilingualism.
Quebec: InternationalCenter for Research on Bilingualism.Lo Bianco,
Joseph. 1987.
 National Policy on Languages.
Canberra: Australian GovernmentPublishing Service.Tollefson, James W.
(ed.) 1991.
 Planning Language, Planning Inequality: Language policyin the community.
Harlow: Longman

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