ARTICLE ABOUT NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE PLANNING

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE PLANNING

"National language" and "official language" are best understood as two concepts or legal categories with ranges of meaning that may coincide, or may be intentionally separate. Stateless nations are not in the position to legislate an official language, but their languages may be sufficiently distinct and well-preserved to be national languages. Some languages may be recognized popularly as "national languages," while others may enjoy official recognition in use or promotion.

In many African countries, some or all indigenous African languages are officially used, promoted, or expressly allowed to be promoted (usually taught in schools and written in important publications) as semi-official languages whether by long-term legislation or short-term, case-by-case executive (government) measures. To be official, spoken and written languages may enjoy government or federalized use, major tax-funded promotion or at least full tolerance as to their teaching and employers' recognition in public education, standing on equal footing with the official language(s). Further, they may enjoy recognition as a language used in compulsory schooling and treasury money may be spent to teach or encourage adults in learning a language which is a minority language in a particular area to restore its understanding and spread its moral stories, rhymes, poems, phrases, songs, and other literary heritage which will promote social cohesion (where other languages remain) or will promote nationalist differentiation where another, non-indigenous language is deprecated.

Official status and minority languages 

Because of its colonial history, as well as its value as a world language and international lingua franca, English is an official language in many countries throughout the world, such as Pakistan, Fiji, Vanuatu, Jamaica and the Bahamas. Often it shares this official status with an indigenous language, such as Malay in Malaysia, Swahili in Tanzania and Gilbertese in Kiribati. But, interestingly, English is not legally an official language of England, the USA, or New Zealand. In these countries it has not been considered necessary to legislate that the language of the majority is an official language. In New Zealand, ironically, although English is  de facto  (in fact or actuality) the official language of government and education, Maori and New Zealand Sign Language are the two languages which have legal or  de jure  status as official languages.

Elsewhere there have been riots over language issues. Linguistic minorities in India have rioted when their demands have fallen on deaf ears. In Belgium, French and Flemish have had legal equality since 1963, but language riots in 1968 caused the fall of the government when they proposed to extend the French-speaking section of the University of Louvain (or, in Flemish, Leuven). Though the 1968–69 Official Languages Act declared both French and English official languages in Canada, and gave them equal status in all aspects of federal administration, the Quebec government has been far from satisfied with the reality of English domination, and has threatened to secede over language-related issues. And throughout the decades since 1969, there has been friction between the French-speaking and English speaking communities, reflected in actions such as the trampling of the Quebec flag and public petitions in Ontario against bilingual highway signs. In the former Soviet Union,  glasnost  and  perestroika  brought in their wake a desire for increased independence among minority language groups. But Russian speakers have also felt concerned about their language rights.

Many minorities would like to gain official status for their languages, but the costs in terms |of providing services and information in all official languages are considerable, and most governments count them carefully. In Canada, for instance, as well as French speakers and the indigenous Canadian peoples, such as the Cree and Mohawk, there are many other Canadian minorities – Italians, Portuguese, Chinese and Ukrainians, for instance. Together they make up about 27 per cent of the total Canadian population. Many resent the special status of the French, who make up only 23 per cent of the population. Providing services, information, legal representation and, in some places, education in just two official languages is an expensive business. It seems unlikely other minorities will earn such rights easily.

PLANNING FOR A NATIONAL OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

Form, functions and attitudes

What is involved in developing a code or variety (whether dialect or language) so that is suitable for official use? Addressing this challenge involves issues relating to the form of the variety, the functions it serves, and the attitudes that people hold towards it.  There are generally four interrelated steps:

1.    Selection :   choosing the variety or code to be developed.   

2.    Codification :   standardizing its structural or linguistic features. This kind of ‘linguistic processing’ is known as  corpus planning.    

3.    Elaboration :   extending its functions for use in new domains. This involves developing the necessary linguistic resources for handling new concepts and contexts.

4.    Securing its acceptance.  The status of the new variety is important, and so people’s attitudes to the variety being developed must be considered. Steps may be needed to enhance its prestige, for instance, and to encourage people to develop pride in the language, or loyalty towards it. This is known as  status planning  or  prestige planning.  

LANGUAGE PLANNING IN THEORY

One way of distinguishing "language policy" from "language planning" is to consider "language policy" as the expression of the ideological orientations and views, and "language planning" as the actual proposal that makes up their implementation. In this session, I will introduce some of the most important concepts relevant to the issue.

In the literature concerned with "language planning", the American-Norwegian sociolinguist Einar Haugen is often mentioned as the person who gave birth to the concept. In the article "Language planning in Modern Norway", which was widely acknowledged after its second edition in 1968, Haugen introduced and attempted to define the concept in this way "...an activity of preparing a normative orthography, grammar, and dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a non-homogeneous speech community" (Haugen 1968(1959):673). And this activity, in the specific case of modern Norway, was closely linked to the country´s separation from Denmark. What follows from this definition is that language policy was seen as "corpus planning only", meaning restricted to the standardization of a language. This would in most cases refer to the one and only national language.

In the late sixties and early seventies, the scientific interest in language planning mainly applied to a third world context where the establishment of one standardized national language was regarded - from a Western European perspective - as a prerequisite for modernization, if not as the main tool for uniting and building up a nation. From this follows a tendency to consider language planning as an activity which has as its main goal to solve problems and to provoke changes in the society concerned. Two decades - and quite a lot of attempts to define - after Haugen introduced his definition of "language planning" the sociolinguist Robert L. Cooper proposed another one which was somewhat more modern: "language planning refers to deliberate efforts to influence the behavior of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their codes" (Cooper 1989:45). Before ending up with this broad definition, Cooper goes through 12 earlier definitions of the term by relating them all to the question: "...who plans what for whom and why". This is how the question of what functions are attributed to what languages is touched upon, a question which has prevailed ever since the birth of the discipline. Cooper´s definition differs from former ones (such as for instance Fishman 1968, Rubin and Jernudd 1971) in as far as it does not consider language planning to be necessarily oriented towards problem-solving (a goal that in many third-world countries has failed so far) and in as far as it does not necessarily have "progress" as its main end. Accordingly, it restricts neither the planners, nor those who will be affected by the planning. Thus, Cooper is on the one hand questioning the western European philosophy of "evolution and modernization" and on the other hand the monopole of a state to do language planning. And he is deliberately not referring to one (national) language, but to language or languages as such, and hereby opening the door to another understanding of what "the natural state of things" is: adopting a multilingual perspective rather than a monolingual one. Einar Haugen himself has indeed contributed to this development, he was the one to introduce in the 70´s the concept of "language ecology" which certainly reflects a multilingual perspective (Haugen 1972).

In order to be able to understand, describe and analyze "linguistic situations", Cooper operationalizes "language planning" by dividing it into three sub-dimensions, which are nevertheless closely interrelated and interdependent: Corpus planning which refers to intervention in the forms of a language, status planning which concerns choices in terms of status of a language vis-a-vis other languages (official, national etc.) - and acquisition planning which concerns the teaching and learning of languages - national as well as second and foreign languages.

Whereas status planning can serve to turn a language into a prestigious one, corpus planning elaborates on the potential functions in ensuring that the language dealt with has the necessary terminology to function as the medium of administration, education, etc. Acquisition planning can be - and often is - regarded as a subordinate dimension of status planning. Referring to the analytical tripartition of Cooper, and thus placing acquisition planning on the same level as status and corpus planning can be seen as a way of stressing its importance. In the rich scientific literature concerned with these matters, there is a general tendency to regard status planning as "the most interesting dimension" today.

I wish to stress a need to look into corpus and acquisition planning also. It is the contention of my paper that knowledge in all parts of language planning and maybe especially in the interrelations of the three dimensions is of great importance: is there any logic, any underlying rationale that binds together the status, the corpus and the acquisition planning of western European nation-states today? For instance, it would make sense to presume that it will have an influence on planning which foreign languages to teach in school whether the national language is of wider or minor international spread. Just as it would make sense to consider that it influences the way corpus planning is brought out whether the language in question is or is not national language in other states in other parts of the world.

SUMMARY

NATIONAL AND OFICIAL LANGUAGE

A national language is the language of a political, cultural and social unit. It is generally developed and used as a symbol of national unity. A national language may for instance represent the national identity of a nation or country. National language may alternatively be a designation given to one or more languages spoken as first languages in the territory of a country. Its function are to identify the nation and unite the people of the nation.

An official language, by contrast, is simply a language which may be used for government business. Over the official language in the nation is not indigenous language of that nation, but the language from the colonial. Its function is primarily utilitarian rather than symbolic. From 193 countries recognized, 178 countries have the official languages in national level. In the meanwhile official languages, English is the most recognize as a official language.

LANGUAGE PLANNING IN THEORY

One way of distinguishing "language policy" from "language planning" is to consider "language policy" as the expression of the ideological orientations and views, and "language planning" as the actual proposal that makes up their implementation.