Language Planning as a Discourse on Language and Society

Abstract

Language planning is a tradition which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, but waned in the 1980s. The 1990s, however, have witnessed a resurgence of attention to language planning, probably as a result of the new developments in South Africa. In this article, I want to initiate an evaluation of the past performances of the tradition of language planning, in view of a theoretical, conceptual and methodological improvement of future language planning studies. I first sketch the historical development of language planning studies, and next discuss some ideological features present in much traditional language planning work. I raise the issues whether language planning had no theoretical background; the intuitive limitations of language planning; organic views of language and society, oligolingualism and the efficiency and integration assumptions. Next, I summarize the critiques of Glyn Williams and Andrew Apter, who both advocate a more political approach to language planning in which language is one variable on a par with a number of others. In concluding, I advocate an approach to language planning based on a combination of historiographic and ethnographic approaches.

Professional development programmes for teachers moving from majority to minoritised language medium education: lessons from a comparative study

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Migration, language diversity and education policy: A contextualized analysis of inequality, risk and state effects

“…has an apparently obvious answer: Official languages and policies presuppose state-like bodies (Blommaert 1996;Haugen 1966;Hornberger 2000). But studying how states operate in relation to the rest of society is not a clear-cut field of research, especially in an era in which stable, self-determining nation-states are increasingly compromised by transnational processes such as mass labor migrations and global investment flows (Harvey 2005;Steger 2003).…”

Italian Language in Istria: Status Planning, Corpus Planning and Acquisition Planning

“…Language planning deals with the discursive creation of a language policy (Antia, 2000;Blommaert, 1996;Fishman, 1974;Haarmann, 1990;Haugen, 1966;Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997;Rubin, 1983). Language planning is subdivided in three main interrelated and complementary focuses: status planning, corpus planning and acquisition planning.…”