LANGUAGE PLANNING

Language policy: linguistic perspective

The planning of resources to language is but one of many instances of organized and intervention into areas of social change. Although the discussion here will be restricted to governmental policy, language policies are implemented by nongovernmental organizations and interest groups and even by individuals. Language policies are of two major types(a) status policies and (b) corpus policies.

Language status policy

Language status policies are either prohibitory or permissive, or facilitative. If policies are prohibitory they oppose and penalize the public use of particular language for particular societal functions. Thus, the ̀English Only ́ movement in the US opposes the use of any language other than English in the discharge of their governmental functions. The communist regime of the Soviet Union prohibited the publication in, or the teaching of Hebrew due to the fact that Hebrew was perceived as theological and bourgeois (i.e. antirevolutionary).

Permissive language policies are presumably neutral. While they permit nongovernmental efforts on behalf, or in opposition to, particular languages, they neither obligate the government positively nor negatively with respect to such languages. During most of its history, the US has a permissive language policy allowing citizens of non-English mother tongue to seek for their languages functions such as in print or non print media or such as becoming the medium of instruction in the public education of their young. However, the absence of supportive policies has meant that when the mother-tongue speakers of non-English finally learn English, the government has permitted these languages to fade away in public as in private life.

Supportive policies are either multifunctional or functionally specific in their focus. Canada supports cultural programs publications, creative artists and curricular materials preparation for the immigrant languages (termed ̀heritage languages ́ to differentiate them from founding languages). During most of the 1980s and 1990s, Australia’s language policy with respect to immigrant languages has gone beyond that of Canada by also providing funds for teaching training and certification with ethnic community supplementary schools for LOTEs (languages other than English)

Revising Language Shift

One of the most demanding areas of language status policy-efforts deals with the attitudinal, demographic, and functional recovery of languages that have become weakened by neighbours. When the lost or weakened functions are narrowly specific (esp. press, media), similarly specific efforts can be undertaken to balance the social forces that are at play. However, if intergeneration mother-tongue continuity is in question, it is difficult for authoritative polices to rationally determine either their acquisition or their retention through the period from the generation’s mother-tongue acquisition and the time some 20 years off when the next intergenerational transition occurs (Fishman).

The difficulties encountered in the long term planning intimate and informal interaction has resulted in very few successes along the lines of reversing language shift. The more recent partial successes along such lines are in efforts on behalf of French in Quebec, Catalan in Spain, and the clearly unusual case of Hebrew in Palatine/Israel. In order to achieve the desired results, the realm of intimacy-and-infancy must be successfully ideologized as to its consequences for language transmission, but even the institutions that are not normally effective within the infancy/intimacy realm (school, media, work sphere, and government) must be focused upon language interaction with home, family, neighbourhood processes and the threatened language must be explicitly related to the reward these institutions can lead.

All in all, whether in connection with reversing language shift or the authoritative recognition of particular languages in particular societal functions, language issues policies corresponds to the policy culture that local authorities begin with open policy debate. After that comes policy adoption, codification and elaboration of the decision reached, and finally comes the iteration of language policy debate in subsequent areas highlighted for attention.

Language Corpus Policy
Policies which government usually call upon to devise writing systems, establish spelling norm, promulgate standardized grammatical conventions are entrusted by academies of linguistic specialists. Sometimes illustrious leaders and exemplary writers are instrumental in propelling corpus planning in particular directions closely allied to their own preferred usage and those planning efforts often precede those undertaken by the government.

Corpus planning is exposed to two different sources of influence. The first is acceptability among the target group and the second is the ideological interpretation given to such efforts by the public authorities. Accordingly corpus policy is regulated in accord with bipolar considerations such as uniqueness authenticity and purity on the one hand, and modernization, regionalization, and internalization on the other hand. The need to maximize linguistically both the interactive advantages and the independent challenges of modern life provide language policy with a built-intention which can often be very anguished in those language policy settings where the rejection of foreign influences come to be of primary concern.

The authenticity pressure upon late modernizing languages that are faced either by confrontation with genetically related Big Brothers or by genetically similar recent arrivals at the gates of modernity have ling been studied. Language in interaction and ethnicities in interaction are both subject to planning interventions. Such planning efforts have been termed Ausban (i.e. the building away of a language from another by emphasising the real, imagined or preferred differences between them). Sources of such differences may be found in archaic periods of a language, in varieties of a rural countryside, or in a favoured classical language. Ausban efforts have been engaged in as part of the corpus policy of many interrelated languages as Hindi and Urdu, relative to one another of Macedonian vis-à-vis Bulgarian and so on. More general ̀Purification ́ exist e.g. for French vis-à-vis English, for Catalan vis-à-vis Castian, for Czech vis-à-vis German etc.

Of course, all languages whose communities are engaged in interactive modernization with the Western world are exposed to linguistic influences as a result thereof. Corpus policies that limit the interaction with and exposure to the west are faced by a dilemma from which there is no easy escape. Indeed, the ̀Prague school ́ explicitly recognizes this tension but regards the national language to be the supradialectal and generally written variety of the local linguistic repertoire.

Language culture
Obviously, status planning and corpus planning policies are also pragmatically closely interdependent. When one policy emphasis (whether status or corpus) is too far in advance of the other, then this lack of synchronization is itself a major policy problem. Accordingly, all language policy efforts require both linguistic expertise and political expertise in order to move ahead productively in connection with their language goals. In any case, the goals and means employed in conjunction with linguistic policy reflect the historically deeply ingrained linguistic culture of its sponsoring power base. Language policies are expressions of a long-lasting linguistic culture.

Language Policy: Public Policy
Perspectives
Language policy involves the governance of diversity from historical configurations or recent immigration. Language differences are a source of political instability and social conflict. To reduce the actual diversity encountered among the population states design policies. Consequently, most world countries’ governments are officially monolingual; but half of them contain linguistic minorities of 10 percent or more; and in about one third of the cases, a majority of the inhabitants do not use the official language as their everyday speech.

The development of language especially in written form has been closely interrelated with state formulation. For example, Chinese ideographic writing which elaborated over 4000 years ago contributed to the unique resiliency of China and still serves as an instrument of communication between groups whose spoken languages are not mutually intelligible. By contrast, the European pattern (Athenian and Roman) did not receive the same success. In the 15th century, in both France and the UK, state expansion by way of the advent of mass armies, democratization, and industrialization rendered linguistic unification ever more urgent. Both states adopted analogous language policies in their colonies.

Issues of language policy have recently achieved unprecedented prominence as a concomitant of the expansion of governmental activity and of citizen participation. Among other multilingual countries (Belgium, Switzerland) historical arrangements reflecting earlier power relationships between groups have been called into question. Concurrently, the decolonization of imperial possessions is Asia and Africa has resulted in the emergence of a large number of new states with both indigenous and imperial languages. Previously established arrangements have been called into question also among the new states of the post-communist world. Beyond the state level, established new language questions are being raised by the formation of international organizations engaged in governance (the EU).

A basic policy choice is whether or not to declare one or more languages ̀official ́. Certain states in which one language was clearly dominant didn’t specify their official language at the of their founding. As they knew the importance of the specification of an official language in the face of perceived challenges, almost half the states of the US adopted laws declaring English their official language. Among multilingual states ̀officialization ́ signifies he establishment of a language regime providing general rules for policy making.

Whether or not a regime has been formally established, language policy involves at the minimum a determination of the language(s) in which public services are provided; language in which citizens can exercise their rights or are expected to exercise their obligations. Beyond this, language might extend to the private sector notably to monitor the appropriateness of requirements for various types of employment. It might extend to the regulation of language use in printed and electronic media and even in private speech.

In all types of states language policy is often controversial because of the uneven distribution of costs to the individuals affected. The costs are both economic and psychological because language is intimately linked to the formation of personal and collective identities. Overall, language institutions reflect prevailing class and majority-minority relations. The development of policy in this as in other spheres tends to be path-dependent.

The agenda of language policy arises in the first instance from a population’s special distribution (territorially concentrated vs. dispersed), their socio-political power (languages that have achieved written form and are widely used vs. others) and whether the relevant groups are native or immigrant. Other significant elements include the language groups’ location in relation to the poles of political and economic development.

Another weighty factor is linguistic culture, the set of behaviours and beliefs a speech community has about its own language. The culture or ideology of the dominant group(s) naturally carries extensive weight in the determination of policy. In the early 20th c , British psychologist reported that bilingualism interfered with the development of intelligence and thus Celtic speech suppressed on behalf of the emersion of English. Harmfulness of bilingualism was subsequently confirmed by American psychologists investigating Japanese and European children in the US. In the 1960s, a Canadian research suggested that bilingualism produced beneficial effects. In the third world , cultural loading of the colonial language is on the one hand resented as a language subjection, but on the other admired as a language of prestige.

1 One-Language Dominant ̀First World ́ Democracies
1.1. The United States
Despite the absence of formal national policy, English reigned unchallenged at the federal level and was imposed as a matter of course on non-English-speaking dependencies. However, in the course of the nineteenth century, states diverged from this norm in response to local conditions (Spanish in New Mexico, bilingual public education to immigrants, and the use of foreign languages in the press). Nevertheless, hostility to the ̀New Immigration ́ of the late 19th c triggered demands to Americanize the new comers forcefully. An English-only regime prevailed throughout the country for the next half century.

Policy changes, amounting to the mildly multilingual regime, were brought about by distinct development in the post-World Ware II era : the civil rights movement; the massive importation of Mexican workers; the enhancement of less restrictive immigration law; and the adoption of a generous policy towards refugees from the Communist world. In the wake of these actions, as well as the continued flow of federal funding, bilingual educational programs proliferated in a variety of forms mostly designed to facilitate transition to English instruction. In addition, federal programs were launched in the 1960s to overcome the deficiencies of earlier ones.

Concurrently, a lobbying campaign worked on the Young Rights Act of 1965 and succeeded in the addition of title II and title III requiring that registration forms, ballots, and other election materials be improved in a language other English if more than five percent of the voters in a given district spoke the same non-English language. Applicable to American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan natives, and citizens of Spanish heritage, the legislation covered 384 counties.

However, research indicates that recent newcomers rapidly learn English and that the use of the country of origin’s language declines sharply in second generation and almost disappears in the third.

Notwithstandingly, the dawning regime change provoked widespread opposition and triggered moves to counteract the trend by officializing English at the state and national levels, as well as eliminating bilingual education. As against this, rapid transformation of immigrants into electoral clienteles fostered support for new regime. However, the future of bilingual education is less certain as of 1997; the US had approximately 3.5 million students with limited English proficiency, a 57 percent increase since the beginning of the decade.

1.2 France

Unlike American concerns, the French language policy focus was on the changing role of regional languages, the protection of the national hegemony of French against the intrusion of English; and the promotion of the national language abroad. Nevertheless, successive republics have embraced a domesticated version of regionalism in the form of folklore often expressed in the regional languages. However, in reaction to this, in 1992 a Gaullist government enacted a constitutional amendment declaring French the natural language. Language policy was made into an electoral issue the following year when socialist leader Lionel Juspin expressed support for linguistic and cultural pluralism.

The francophone policy which encompasses France’s former colonies, Belgium, Switzerland, and overseas communities notably Canada and the US was endowed with a permanent administrative apparatus. Protection of French within France was institutionalized in 1975 by way of a law requiring its use throughout the public and private sectors. However, although these actions have evoked considerable attention in France and abroad, English has continued to gain ground in many spheres of society, notably within the scientific and financial communities

2. Multilingual ̀First World ́ Democracies with Large Spatially Concentrated Groups
2.1 Belgium

Around the time of the state’s founding in 1830, Belgian Austrian Habsburg rulers introduced French as a language of state and annexed Belgian provinces by revolutionary France. Subsequently, the traditional elite of Flemish speaking north and Wallon speaking south adopted French as their usual language. Hence, Flemings striving for upward mobility had no choice but to learn French, and in time many of them abandoned their ancestral language altogether.

Demands of change arose I the second half of the 19th century. Some Flemish figures sought the establishment of bilingualism of the regional as well as at the national level. Nevertheless, Flemish retained in effect second class status. At the turn of the 20th c, a radical wing of Flemish movement demanded the establishment of a federal system otherwise they would secede and reunite to Netherlands. However, Flemish naturalism was tarnished by its association with German occupation. In the mid 1930s a language settlement was achieved whereby the country was divided into two main monolingual regions with a bilingual capital district and national administration. However, language conflict returned to the fore in the post World War II period due to Flemish increasing economic power. As a result, Belgium finally achieved federalism, with language regime founded on dual monolingualism rather than bilingualism.

2.2 Canada
The conquered French Canadians fared better under Protestant British imperial authorities. As part of the post-conquest settlement, an attempt to secure French Canadian loyalties in the impeding conflict with the unruly American colonies, the British granted the Roman Catholic Church and the Province of Quebec a considerable degree of autonomy. This enacted French Canadians to create institutions of secondary and higher education.

Around the turn of the 20th c French Canada possessed many more of the elements of a distinct society. Nevertheless, lingering insecurity concerning the survival of Quebec’s distinctive culture stimulated a movement of outright independence. This propted in turn reforms to implement full linguistic parity at he federal level.

1. Multilingualism: Diaglossia; Bilingualism
Sociolinguistic research is the area of multilingualism is concerned with identifying the relationship between social factors and the choice of language or ̀code ́. In Zaire, people often use five or six languages (more accurately ̀codes ́ or ̀varieties ́). The terms ̀codes ́ and ̀varietieś refer to any set of linguistic forms which are socially patterned, including different accents, different linguistic styles, different dialects, and different languages. The use of one code rather than the another in any specific situation tends to reflects such factors as the relationship between speakers and addressee(s), the formality of the context, and the function of the interaction. In Paraguay, for example, the indigenous language Guarani, is used in interactions with friends in the pub, while Spanish is the appropriate language to use with your doctor and the bureaucrats.

Diaglossia is a term used to describe a particular kind of societal bilingualism. Ferguson defined diaglossia as a situation where two varieties of the same language, a High and a Low one are used for complementary functions. The High variety is restricted to formal, religious, symbolic, and literary functions. The low variety is used for everyday conversations and in all informal contexts. The term ̀polyglossia ́ was coined to take account of communities such as Singapore with more than one High language as well as several Low varieties and even some Mid varieties.

1.1 Code-switching
Situational code switching have been Defined as responses to changes to observable features of the context, such as the participants or the setting. Recent research has increasingly focused on interpreting the social meaning of conversational code switching. In Kenya, for example, sophisticated affective messages conveyed through complex and rapid alternations between codes. So, fore instance, through subtle switching of codes, rather than any explicit refusal, a store-keeper politely rejects his sister’s attempts to obtain cut-price goods from him, thus preserving their relationship. Code switching is one means by which bilinguals and multilinguals make creative use of their linguistic repertoires to convey social meaning.

2. Language Maintenance and Shift; Language Endangerment / Revival
Individual bilingualism is often a transitional phase for new immigrants in a society as they shift from the ethnic to the dominant language of the wider society. Relative survival rates of different ethnic languages in different countries, including measures of ̀ethnolinguistic vitality ́ , and a scale describing the steps involved in taking a language from near language death through to language revival. An endangered language is one that is spoken only in a restricted geographical area and which is under threat from a colonial or world language. Research on a number of users, social contexts of use, and linguistic attitudes has been undertaken with some disagreement between experts on the crucial conditions for preventing language death.

3. Language contact: Pidgins and Creoles
Pidgins typically develop in situation where a lingua franca is needed for communication between groups who speak different languages (e.g. workers from different tribes on a crop plantation). Creoles develop from pidgin when they begin to be used as first languages and therefore expand functionally and structurally into adequate means of communications for the group using them. Languages such as Swahili Afrikaans, and Tok Pisin had Creole origins. Do they develop according to universal linguistic constraints, or are the remarkable similarities between creoles due to the fact that they share sources of input from European languages such as English and Portuguese? These are the questions that Croelists are still thinking about

4. Social dialectology
Social dialectologists are concerned with tracing the relationship between linguistic variation and social factors. William Labov, in his survey of the New York East Side, demonstrated that linguistic variation was not random or free but rather patterned systematically according to factors such as social class, gender, age, and ethnicity of the speakers, and the formality of the style of speech they were using. The basic patterns which Labov identified in New York were replicated in many other urban communities. In New Zealand, for example, women are leading the rapid spread of the high rising terminal, as well as the merging of the vowels in words such as EAR and AIR. Labov formalized the idea of that linguistic change could be studied in progress. Le also used quantitative methods to collect people’s subjective evaluations of different social accents. Furthermore, Labov demonstrated that, despite wide variations in their linguistic production, there was a startling uniformity of evaluating norms and attitudes to language among members of the same speech community. The new York accent for example was universally disparaged, a pattern replicated in many other urban speech communities.

5. Social Constructionist approaches
Instead of regarding social categories, such as social class, ethnicity, and gender, as primary, with linguistic behavior reflecting membership, a social constructionist approach shift of emphasis to language as a dynamic resource used to construct particular aspects of social identity at different points in an interaction. So a woman may select linguistic forms which contribute to the construction of a more feminine identity, while in a Board meeting shi is chairing she may linguistically construct a stateful and powerful identity.

6. Discourse and Style
6.1 Style
The influence of social constructionism is also evident in recent research on the sociolinguistics of style. Labov elicited a range of styles within the interview context by varying the interviewee’s task. Subsequent research focused on the influence of the addressee. The Communication Accommodation Theory focuses on the mutual influence of participants on a wide range of aspects of communication. Divergence occurs when interlocutors wish to differentiate themselves.

currently, many sociolinguists argue that style is not so much a matter of self-monitoring (as Labov suggested) or of responding to others as CAT theorists argue, but rather a matter of the way an individual chooses to present herself in everyday interaction. American adolescents stylistic performance in the school , for instance, demonstrates that style is not just a matter of speech, but also involves dress, attitude and action. Their choice of linguistic variables, however, affects every utterance. They are constantly manifesting a particular style (e.g. flamboyant or conservative).