An early example
The Ottoman Empire was initially founded
in 1299 in northern Anatolia by Turkish
tribes under Osman Bay. With the conquest
of Constantinople by Mehmed II, the
Ottoman state became the Ottoman Empire.
The Empire (covering parts of Asia, Europe
and Africa) reached its peak at 1590. The
long-lived Ottoman dynasty lasted for more
than 600 years, until 1922, when the
monarchy was abolished. Ottoman Turkish
(a Turkic language heavily influenced by
Persian) was the official language of the
Empire. The Empire recognized three
influential languages: Turkish (spoken by
the majority of Muslims except in Albania
and Bosnia); Persian (only spoken by the
educated); and Arabic (spoken mainly in
Arabia, North Africa, Iraq, Kuwait and the
Levant). In the last two centuries, usage of
these languages became limited -- Persian
served mainly as a literary language for the
elite; the low rate of public literacy (about
2–3% until the early 19th century; only
about 15% by the end of 19th century)
ordinary people had to hire special scribes to
communicate with the government. The
ethnic groups (Armenians, Greeks, Jews)
continued to speak their own languages
within their families and in their
neighborhoods. In villages where two or
more communities speaking mutually
unintelligible languages lived together, the
inhabitants often spoke each other's
language. In cosmopolitan cities, many non-ethnic Turks spoke Turkish as a second
language (see, Encyclopedia of the Middle
East: www.mideastweb.org/Middle-East
Encyclopedia [retrieved December 2012]).
Language planning in the present
Of course, this situation does not represent
language planning as the term is used at
present. The field is a relatively new
addition to the anatomy of academia, having
come into existence in the years
immediately following World War II -- a
period marked by the beginning of the
break-up of European colonial empires and
the emergence of new nations, particularly
in Africa and Asia. Initially called language
engineering, the discipline emerged as an
approach to creating programs for solving
“language problems” in newly independent
“developing nations.” Language planning
was perceived as being done using a broadly
based team approach from an objective,
ideologically and politically neutral
technological perspective in which the
identity of the planners mattered little as
long as they possessed the required range of
technical skills. The intellectual link
between language planning and
modernization/development insured that the
implicit assumptions in language planning
reflected assumptions in the social sciences
that have subsequently been subject to re-evaluation and revision. Especially striking
in hindsight is the optimism of early
language planers; they demonstrated an
underlying ideological faith in development
and modernization. In early language-planning research, practitioners were seen as
having the expertise to specify ways in
which changes in the linguistic situation
would lead to desired social and political
transformations (i.e., supporting the
development of unity in the socio-cultural
system, reducing economic inequalities and
providing access to education). The belief in
economic and social progress was perhaps
best expressed in Eastman’s introduction to
language planning (1983) in which language
planners are depicted as being at the
forefront of fundamental shifts in the
organization of global society:
Modernization and preservation efforts are
seemingly happening everywhere, to provide all
people with access to the modern world through
technologically sophisticated languages and also
to lend a sense of identity through encouraged
use of their first languages (Eastman, 1983, p.
31).
Consider terminology
The terms language planning and language
policy are frequently used, in both the
technical and the popular literature, either
interchangeably or in tandem. However,
they actually represent two quite distinct
aspects of the systemised language change
process.
Language planning is an activity, most
visibly undertaken by government (simply
because it potentially involves such massive
changes in a society), intended to promote
systematic linguistic change in some
community of speakers. The reasons for
such change lie in a reticulated pattern of
structures developed by government and
intended to maintain civil order and
communication, and to move the entire
society in some direction deemed "good" or
"useful" by government. The exercise of
language planning leads to, or is directed
by, the promulgation of a language policy
by government (or some other authoritative
body or person).
A language policy is a body of ideas, laws,
regulations, rules and practices intended to
achieve the planned language change in the
society, group or system. Only when such
policy exists can any sort of serious
evaluation of planning occur (Rubin, 1971);
i.e., in the absence of a policy there cannot
be a plan to be adjusted. Language policy
may be realised at a number of levels, from
very formal language planning documents
and pronouncements to informal statements
of intent (i.e., the discourse of language,
politics and society) that may not at first
glance seem like language policies at all.
Indeed, as Peddie (1991) observed, policy
statements commonly fall into two types:
symbolic and substantive. The first
articulates good feelings toward change (or
perhaps ends up being so nebulous that it is
difficult to understand what language-specific concepts may be involved), while
the latter articulates specific steps to be
taken. This brief paper concerns itself
primarily with language planning. Complex
motives and approaches, and large
populations, are involved in modern states,
and language planners have, up to the
present time, most often worked in such
macro situations.
The early practitioners
During the early or classical period of
language-planning development, emerging
specialists believed that their new
understanding of language in society could
be implemented in practical programs of
modernization and development having
important benefits for developing societies.
This early period was characterized by an
extensive growth in research by a small
number of authors (e.g., Fishman, 1968;
1971; 1972; 1974; Rubin & Jernudd, 1971;
Rubin & Shuy, 1973) because the field was
perceived to have practical significance for
the newly independent post-colonial states
(particularly in Africa) as well as theoretical
value in providing “…new opportunities to
tackle a host of…novel theoretical
concerns…” (Fishman, Ferguson & Das
Gupta, 1968: x) in sociology and political
science since “…few areas are more fruitful
or urgent with respect to interdisciplinary
attention…” (1968, pp. x-xi). Early
practitioners believed that language planning
could play a major role in achieving the
goals of political/administrative integration
and sociocultural unity (Das Gupta, 1970, p.
3).
Thus, a major focus of this early research
involved analysis of the language-planning
needs specific to newly independent states.
It appeared that:
1) language choice and literacy were
significant in the processes
involving ‘nationism,’ and
2) language maintenance, codification
and elaboration were significant in
processes of ‘nationalism’
(Fishman, 1968).
This linkage of language planning with
development and modernization – essential
for the early emergence of the field – was
influenced by modernization theory (e.g.,
Rostow, 1960); consequently, early research
focused primarily on the role of language
planning in developing societies.
Consideration of the question of exactly who
the planners were and what impact their
views might have on the goals set to solve
language problems has been raised only
much more recently (by, among others,
Baldauf 1982; Baldauf & Kaplan, 2003;
Zhao, 2011). By the 1970s, it had become
apparent that language problems were not
unique only to developing nations, but that
they also occurred as “macro” (i.e., state-level) language problems and situations in
polities worldwide. Despite the early
optimism, in less than twenty years, by the
mid 1980s, disillusionment with language
planning – due to several factors – was
widespread (Blommaert, 1996; Williams,
1992). Since the late 1990s, language policy
and planning principles have also been
increasingly applied in “micro” situations
(for example, in relation to language
problems in communities, schools,
organizations and companies; see, for
instance, Canagarajah, 2005; Chua &
Baldauf, 2011).
Ricento (2000, p. 196) has suggested that
research in language policy and planning
can be divided into three historical phases:
• decolonization, structuralism and
pragmatism (1950s, 1960s);
• the failure of modernization,
critical sociolinguistics (1980s,
1990s);
• a new world order,
postmodernism, linguistic human
rights (21st century).
An important change in language planning
since the 1980s lies in the recognition that
language planning is not necessarily an
aspect of development but rather that it
implicates a broad range of social processes
including at least migration and the rise of
nationalism in Europe and Central Asia.
Migration constitutes one reason for the
increases in the numbers of people
worldwide who are learning languages and –
consequently – for a significant increase in
concern with language-in-education
planning.
As a consequence of the recent
developments in language planning, two
immediate issues arose:
1) How should the discipline of
language planning be taught in
academic institutions? and
2) How can language planning be
undertaken without recognizing the
inherently political nature of the
enterprise?
These concerns raise the question of what
one can one do when trying to explicate the
social forces that influence language change,
and the kinds of language change motivated
by social forces. These questions, in turn,
reveal that the basic concerns are really all
about political preference; language
planning – a subset of sociolinguistics -- is
actually constrained and defined by politics,
since language policy invariably implicates
someone’s social and/or political choice.
Much language planning – past and present
– has been undertaken by government and
has been conceived primarily as a top-down
activity espousing “a set of views, beliefs,
ideas and so forth, subscribed to by a
specific dominant social group (class,
language, gender, race or ethnicity...) to
maintain the existing social order...” (Webb,
2006, pp. 147-148; see also, e.g.,
Pennycook, 2000; Phillipson, 1992;
Tolefson, 2002). If politics were to be
excluded from sociolinguistics, there would
be nothing to teach (Webb & Du Plessis,
2006). Indeed, the issue lies largely in the
metaphors used to define the values; but
metaphors over time accrue a coating of
popular opinion often creating
counterproductive effects (Larson, 2011).
Thus, it appears that language planning is
essentially a political activity; given that
perspective, the practice of politics is an
inherent part of the development and
eventual implementation of any language
plan. Language Planners cannot be
absolutely neutral individuals, separating
their planning self from any practical
activity. Rather than separating one’s
scholarly self from one’s partisan self – an
activity akin to becoming partially pregnant
or partly virginal – would it be possible
instead to examine political behavior as a
part of the human makeup and then to study
that political behavior without necessarily
instantiating a line of action? Students of
language planning should be free to select a
course of action appropriate to the given
situation and the given population. In doing
so, however, those students should be made
aware of the probable consequence of the
path chosen as well as the probable
consequences of choosing a different path or
of opting for the status quo by choosing no
path at all. The basic principles of doing so
were explored and articulated by the Prague
School linguists in the early years of the
20th century. While the principles were
clearly articulated, application was not well
developed; however, contemporary
exercises do exist -- see, e.g., Neustupný &
Nekvapil, 2006.
A language plan in the absence of an
implementation plan is a useless bit of
academic research – truly an exercise for the
Ivory Tower. And a language plan in the
absence of the recognition of the political
implications of such a plan may resemble
the proverbial road to hell, paved with good
intentions. In brief, it is impossible to
remove politics from the classroom or from
the implementation of any language plan;
whether those politics are captured in a
partisan stance is another matter, but once
the camel’s nose is in the tent it may be
virtually impossible to recover any space.
Doing language planning involves the
interaction of three groups of actors: people
with expertise (e.g. linguists and applied
linguists), people with influence (e.g. people
with high social standing) and people with
power (e.g., national leaders and high placed
officials). Furthermore, they show that the
success or failure of a particular language
planning initiative may hinge on political
decisions; this is an important lesson for all
those involved with language planning to
understand. Given the normal complexity of
any language-based problem, the members
of any group organized to undertake a
language planning activity (or even to
undertake a language-planning activity as a
purely academic exercise) are obliged to
inform their funding sources, whether
governmental or not, of their individual and
collective biases. The funding sources,
especially governmental funding sources
(since governmental funding inevitable
derives from public monies), are entitled to
know the planners’ views of language in
general and of the language(s) implicated in
the planning activity. In addition,
unexpected 'political' complications can
arise that can undermine the basis for a
language planning project. In short,
language planning is a profoundly political
activity, and ‘politics’ cannot simply be
omitted from such studies. That being so,
there appear to be at least five basic reasons
why language planning, in its political guise,
is likely to fail:
1. In the normal context, languages are
commonly disseminated primarily
through educational systems, but
educational systems often suffer
from several constraints:
a) Education is commonly funded
through the annual national budget;
consequently, the education sector
competes with all other government
departments for a share of available
national funds. In many polities,
education falls significantly below
other departments in the order of
priority allocations – e.g., compared
with those concerned with defense,
with the legal system, with
international affairs, with business
and industry, and so on –
consequently receiving a more
limited fund allocation, since
education in general does not often
attract high priority budgetary
attention.
b) Education is often subject to a slow
decision-making process, of
necessity operating through many
levels of bureaucracy and through a
large segment of the population and
consequently through an extremely
large number of potential pressure
groups.
i. collective teachers who rarely
represent a coherent focus but rather,
in reality, belong to different cadres
trained at different times through
different educational philosophies
and representing different economic
realities,
ii. deeply layered school
administrations (and consequently
administrators) also differing in
experience, training, and needs,
iii. local governmental bureaucracies
also differing in experience, biases,
training, and economic conditions,
iv. different economic functions in
society that may be seen to depend
on supplies of workers needed to
meet pragmatic needs now and in the
future and to reflect rapidly changing
markets,
v. parents focus on their expectations
for their children and their views of
what aspects of education are most
important, and ultimately
vi. the children to be taught --
commonly perceived to constitute a
homogeneous group requiring a
standardized educational content
delivered over a standardized time in
a standardized format, but in fact
differing widely in attitudes toward
specific languages, in attitudes
toward education, in economic
realities and in personality types.
2. Language planning strives to make
choices among languages and – with
each language selected – planning
must consider:
a) popular attitudes toward each
language, as well as popular attitudes
toward literacy in general and
literacy in any particular language
(i.e., the national language, local
vernaculars).
b) its suitability for wide-spread usage
(i.e., whether it is judged to be a
standard or a sub-standard variety
[e.g., a Creole, a pidgin]),
c) its “value” in the eyes of users (i.e.,
whether its users are deemed to be
superior, equal, or inferior to the
most powerful group),
d) its range determined by:
i. location of large clusters of users
(i.e., within the polity or elsewhere
[in neighboring polities or in distant
ones; e.g., Standard French in
African or Asian dependencies]),
ii. biases toward the language, toward
its lexicon, toward the perceived
relative complexity of its syntax (i.e.,
the aversion to tone languages by
speakers of non-tone languages).
The relative bias may be further
complicated by the fact that
colonizers and missionaries created
new languages by applying
translation practices to existing
languages and by reworking
indigenous languages – through
translation and standardization – into
the colonizers’/missionaries’ models
derived from languages the
colonizers/missionaries knew.
3. The logistics of the situation,
considering the real distance from
the legislative seat to the places
where implementation is likely to
occur, the relative cost and the
relative ease or difficulty of
movement between the legislative
seat and the distant implementation
loci, and any differences between
attitudes at the urban center versus
those in the outlying and/or rural
areas.
a) The real logistic issues in
transporting standardized textbooks
and other teaching supplies from the
site of production (at or near the
urban center or even outside the
polity) to the distant and/or rural
periphery.
b) Similarly, the feasibility of the
movement back and forth of
inspectors, other agent of the
national interest, and agents
responsible for assessing success or
failure and for instituting
remediation in program structure,
syllabus, or personnel.
4. Whether the national language is
indeed the language of students,
teachers and administrators in the
periphery.
a) Determining whether the language(s)
recognized at the periphery (as
opposed to the standard language
recognized at the urban center)
possess an orthography, whether that
orthography is the same as that of the
standard language, and whether
literacy is as well developed at the
periphery as it is for the standard
language at the urban center, or for
that matter for any language other
than the national language.
b) Determining whether differences
from the standard exist in local
dialects of the national language or
in minority language(s) used by the
student-population and the parent-populations and their attitudes
toward the official language, the
official governmental structure and
its language habits.
c) Determining whether the teachers at
the implementation loci are native
speakers or L2 speakers of the
standard national language that
constitutes the medium of instruction
(i.e., determining whether their
fluency in the medium of instruction
is adequate to teaching that language
to children for whom it may be an L2
or an Ln).
5. More purely political matters; e.g.,
the attitudes of the dominant political
party to the language and its users in
comparison to the attitudes of the
minority party (or minority parties)
to the language and its users – in
short, the probability that a
legislative proposal is likely to
survive, likely to be funded, and
likely to be allowed to continue
uninterrupted for a sufficient trial
period.
No known extant language plan actually
considers the large and complex set of
variables summarized here. However, there
is yet another matter that needs to be
considered – whether the proposers of the
plan can expect to find a consensus of
opinion across the polity in support of the
proposed language plan/modification -- in
short, has anyone asked the speakers in the
community what they think about the plan?
Any political structure may be divided into
two quite different camps, each determined
to show that the opposition’s approach is
seriously flawed while their approach is the
correct one, since there are likely to be
broad differences of opinion on whether to
tax, what to tax, whom to tax, for what to
tax in order to develop the resources
necessary to fund the activities essential to
allow any plan to be implemented.
In many countries, language-in-education
planning has become central in efforts to
deal with this massive movement of people
(Tollefson, 1989), resulting in a range of
new questions, which are in need of
attention:
• What should be the role of
migrants’ languages in education
and in other official domains of
use?
• How are local languages affected
by migrants?
• What should be the status of new
varieties of various linguae
franche?
• How can acquisition planning be
most effectively carried out?
• What factors constrain
acquisition planning?
A second concern in language planning has
emerged from the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the realignment of political
boundaries in Eastern Europe and Central
Asia – a phenomenon giving rise to the
emergence of new states in which language
issues are intimately linked with ideological
and political conflicts. Also, these issues are
central to the efforts of such new (or re-emerging) states to establish effective local
institutions (see, e.g., Hogan-Brun, et al.,
2007). The language planning choices made
by state planners, legislative bodies, and
citizens are likely to play an important role
in the management of political conflict in
these new or re-emerging states for decades
to come.
A third area of current research lies in the
movement to deconstruct the ideology of
monolingualism that has pervaded much
language planning research (Williams,
1992), exactly because the focus has been on
the monolingual state – one polity/one
language/one culture. Emerging research
involves a re-examination of traditional
assumptions about the costs of
multilingualism and the benefits of
monolingualism. The linking of multilingual
policies and democratization (Deprez & du
Plessis, 2000) has also become an important
part of political debates elsewhere.
The movement for linguistic human rights
offers another significant point of view.
While some language planning scholars
have advocated mother tongue-promotion
policies (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000),
others have linked language rights to
political theory and to efforts to develop a
theory of language planning (e.g., Cooper,
1989; Dua, 1994; May, 2001). Calls for
expansion and implementation of language
rights can be expected to continue, with
language planning research heavily involved
in the development of a better understanding
of the role of language rights in state
formation, in international organizations, in
political conflict, and in a variety of other
social processes. Similarly, recent research
on the links between language planning and
social theory, long advocated by Fishman
(1992) and Williams (1992), can contribute
to deeper understandings of language rights
and to new research methods (Ricento,
2006). Current research examines the ways
in which language planning processes are
constrained by constitutional and statutory
law (Liddicoat, 2008).
The failure of early or classical language
planning activities to achieve their goals in
many contexts and the intimate connection
between early language planning and
modernization theory meant that language
planning was subject to the same criticisms
as was modernization theory generally,
including at least:
• the fact that economic models
appropriate for one place may be
ineffective in any other places;
• the fact that national economic
development will not necessarily
benefit all sectors of any given
society, especially the poor
(Steinberg, 2001);
• the fact that development
generally fails to consider local
contexts and the conflicting
needs and desires of diverse
communities; and
• the fact that development has a
homogenizing effect on social
and cultural diversity (Foster-Carter, 1985; Worsley, 1987).
A second assumption underlying the work in
the early period of language planning was an
emphasis on cost-benefit analysis, efficiency
and rationality as criteria for evaluating
plans and policies. An emphasis on the
technical aspect of language planning led
Jernudd and Das Gupta (1971) to argue that
planners may be better able than political
authorities to apply rational decision-making
in the solution of language problems. Such
attempts to separate language planning from
politics reflected not only a belief in the
skills of technical specialists, but also a
broader failure to link language planning
with political analysis – the failure to
acknowledge that language planning is
fundamentally political is central to
subsequent critiques of language planning.
A third assumption was that the nation-state
is the appropriate focus for language
planning research and practice, since
language planning is a tool for political/
administrative and socio-cultural integration
of the nation-state, a view that had two
important consequences:
1) the main actors in language planning
were assumed to be government
agencies, and thus most research
examined the work of such agencies;
2) many researchers adopted a top-down perspective, limiting their
interests to national plans and
policies rather than to local language
practices.
Another problem in early language planning
was its failure adequately to analyze the
impact of local contexts on national policies,
partially the consequence of an emphasis on
technical rather than political evaluation of
policies as well as a general separation of
language planning from political analysis.
As Blommaert (1996, p. 217) argues,
language planning "…can no longer stand
exclusively for practical issues of
standardization, graphization, terminological
elaboration, and so on. The link between
language planning and sociopolitical
developments is obviously of paramount
importance…." Failing to link language
planning to politics resulted in a situation in
which planners could not predict the impact
of their plans and policies. Language
planning specialists in the early period
believed that unexpected outcomes could be
avoided as long as adequate information was
available, but more recent scholarship
assumes that unexpected outcomes are a
normal feature of highly complex social
systems:
• where linear cause-effect
relationships between language
and society do not apply and
• where social groups may have
covert goals for language
planning (Ammon, 1997).
The more one examines the language
planning situations with which one is
familiar (or that one reads about in the
literature), the more apparent it becomes that
policy aspects of such planning (as opposed
to the cultivation or the implementation
aspect) are only secondarily a language
planning activity; primarily, they are a
political activity (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2007).
Language planning is often perceived as
some sort of monolithic activity, designed
specifically to manage one particular kind of
linguistic modification in a community at a
particular moment in time. Language
planning has tended to concern itself with
the modification of one language only,
having largely ignored the interaction of
multiple languages in a community as well
as multiple non-linguistic factors — that is,
the total ecology of the linguistic
environment. Language planning is really
about power distribution and political
expediency; it is about economic issues, and
it is about the distribution of time and effort
of administrators, scholars, teachers and
students. Although a concern with theory
suggests that such policy decisions should
be based on data about learners and
community language needs (see, e.g.,
Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; van Els, 2005), in
fact policy decisions are not about the needs
of any given community, nor are they about
the needs of learners. They are, rather, about
the perceptions of language(s) held in the
Ministry of Education and to some extent in
the generally perceptions of the society at
large. Policy decisions rarely take into
account such matters as learners’ age,
aptitude, attitude or motivation. They tend to
be top-down in structure, reflecting the
opinions and attitudes valued at the highest
levels in the planning process; they are
rarely about the linguistic needs or desires of
any given society or community. Indeed, the
least important factor in such planning
decisions may well be the needs and desires
of the target population (Kaplan, 2004).
