Language planning

For a number of reasons, intervention by the state in linguistic matters may be perceived to be necessary or desirable: this is called language planning. As we saw above, few societies are genuinely monolingual, and there is often a mismatch between national and linguistic boundaries. Deciding which language(s) should be recognized and accorded special status, i.e. status planning, can have important resource implications, particularly in highly multilingual countries such as Papua New Guinea, where over 800 languages are spoken, and can be fraught with practical and political difficulties. There may be good reasons why a vehicular language, i.e one which serves as a lingua franca, may not sit well as a national language. The perhaps surprising status planning solution adopted in Cameroon, a country of at least 200 languages, was to grant official status to the two former colonial languages, English and French, rather than choose from among 200 indigenous varieties.

Corpus planning involves decisions about what does and does not belong in a language which has been accorded special status; it may also involve decision-making with respect to a writing system, or correct spelling. In some cases, a language is regulated by an official body such as the Accademia della Crusca for Italian, or the Académie Française for French (even the Frisian language of the north-west Netherlands has had an academy since 1938), or by government itself. Demands for a regulatory body often reflect genuine fears that an uncontrolled language will change too rapidly, with the result that a document drafted today will be incomprehensible in a few decades. But corpus planning may also be a proxy for other political ends, as for example in the Nazis’ attempts to ‘purify’ the German language of French loan words. France has passed two laws in the post-war period aimed at limiting the use of franglais, or recent English loan words, but neither has been conspicuously successful.

Language planning

Language planning is intervention by the state or public bodies in linguistic matters.

• Status planning concerns the granting of favored or ‘official’ status to one or more varieties, e.g. as a national language for education purposes.

• Corpus planning involves selection of items for inclusion in the ‘official’ or ‘standard’ language, and the fixing or modernization of orthography.