Developing nation-states, developing LPP
The emergence of LPP as a coherent field was closely tied to the fact that newly independent states in the postcolonial era (mainly Asian and African) were seen as in need of appropriate modernization and development programs. For these states, the concerns were multiple. There was often a desire to reclaim some essentialized national identity and a language that could be emblematic of this identity, as both were felt to have been lost (or least compromised) under colonial rule. The national identity and language, however mythical, usually had to be (re-) constructed in the context of an ethnolinguistically diverse populace.
Such a situation already carried the potential for inter-ethnic tensions as competing ethnic loyalties had to be measured against any proposed candidate for national language status. But since a significant legacy of the colonial rule was an educated elite class with affiliations towards the colonial language, this meant that in addition to the need to manage ethno-linguistic diversity, there was also the need to stem any potential conflict arising from class divisions. As a consequence, while it was essential that these states worked to forge some sense of national cohesion, it was equally imperative that they aimed to raise the general level of education and welfare amongst the citizenry.
The well-intentioned desire to contribute towards programs that could help cultivate national solidarity whilst also improving on standards of education and creating opportunities for economic growth led linguists to position themselves as expert consultants with the state as client. What this means is that LPP practitioners tended to see themselves as devising maximally rational and efficient âsolutionsâ to the language âproblemsâ faced by these states (Haugen 1966; Kloss 1969; Rubin and Jernudd 1971). Thus, LPP was described as (Das Gupta and Ferguson 1977: 4â6):
those planned activities which attend to the valuation of language resources, the assignment of preferences to one or more languages and their functional ordering, and developing the language resources and their use in a manner consistent with the declared objectives identified as planned targets ⌠successful language planning, or degrees of it, can be understood in terms of the efficacy of planned policy measures as well as the target populationsâ propensity to comply with the public policies pertaining to language planning.
As a result of this desire to design programs that could contribute to public policy objectives, a series of technical concepts and distinctions were constructed that aimed to provide linguists with the theoretical vocabulary to systematically approach and diagnose LPP-related issues. Examples include:
- The idea of a rational model (Jernudd 1973), where alternative ways of tackling a problem were carefully compared before settling on the optimal choice. This approach assumed that LPP issues could be approached in terms of a cost-benefit analysis.
- The distinction between status planning and corpus planning (Kloss 1969): the former was concerned with official decisions about the appropriate use of a language. The latter was concerned with developing the ânuts and boltsâ of language itself (its vocabulary, forms of pronunciation and syntax), so that a language could indeed serve its designated function.
- The distinction between processes of language selection, codification of the selected language as standard or correct, elaboration of the language form where necessary, and implementation to ensure that the standards were properly adopted (Haugen 1966). These processes were typically understood to apply sequentially, so that LPP would be pursued in a manner that was organized and systematic.
And understandably, the preferred method for data gathering during this period was the sociolinguistic survey. Given that LPP practitioners were mostly working at the level of the state, the scale of the envisaged changes made the choice of survey a practical one, as far as the tracking of language attitude and use amongst a large population were concerned. Information gathered via the survey was also more amenable to quantification, and relative rates of success could then be presented in a manner that was digestible to policy-makers.
There is no disputing the fact that these concepts and distinctions, even today, continue to serve as valuable tools when thinking about LPP. This is because, at bottom, LPP involves making decisions about the desirability (or not) of promoting some language practices over others. And all such decisions require some appreciation of the possible relationships between forms of language and their uses, and the ways in which these relationships might be influenced.
What was problematic in this period, however, was the absence of a critical orientation that might have otherwise prevented a number of assumptions from going unquestioned, such as the notion that each nation-state would be ideally served by having just one national language; the concomitant implication that multilingualism is potentially problematic and ought to be minimized; and the belief that a developmental model designed for one societal context could be applied to another despite significant differences in socio-cultural and historical specificities.
As a consequence, these assumptions often guided the enthusiastic articulation of solutions designed along technocratic lines, when it would perhaps have been more helpful to ask if the framing of what counts as an LPP problem was itself in need of interrogation. I say âperhapsâ because, to be fair to these early attempts at LPP, it is not clear what kind of impact such a critical orientation â had one been present â would have had on decision-makers involved in the management of state objectives. There was always the possibility that in challenging or deconstructing a state's framing of problems, linguists could simply have found themselves deemed largely irrelevant to the needs of these newly independent states.
Looking within
By the 1980s and part of the 1990s, however, it became difficult to deny that many of the state-level LPP projects were failures: either the desired outcomes were not achieved, or worse, social and ethnic unrest continued to rise in many states despite the careful implementation of programs. LPP practitioners were then more reticent about acting as advisors to the state. As Blommaert (1996: 203) puts it:
The grand projects in third world nations more or less disappeared during the 1980s, either because of manifest failure, or because of a lack of interest, resources, or political importance. Language planning experts reoriented their work away from the creation of policies and plans towards the implementation of experimental and mostly small-scale (nongovernmental) projects, and towards assessments of past experiments and current situations. The enthusiasm for language planning as an academic subject faded in the wake of the collapse of state systems and economies in the third world.
This withdrawal of LPP practitioners from the role of expert consultant was accompanied by an internal criticism of the field itself. In an incisive paper, Luke et al. (1990: 27) suggested that LPP had been overly concerned with maintaining a âverneer of scientific objectivityâ and had âtended to avoid directly addressing larger social and political matters within which language change, use and development, and indeed language planning itself are embeddedâ. Luke et al.âs point is that by viewing LPP as an essentially technocratic process of efficiently administering resources so as to achieve specific goals, little consideration had been given to questions of how such processes might help sustain dominance and dependency relations between groups. In other words, by not adequately attending to the socially and politically contested nature of language, LPP initiatives, rather than solving problems, may in fact have simply exacerbated old problems or even created new ones.
In a similar vein, Tollefson (1991) introduced a distinction to characterize what he saw as two major approaches to LPP: the neoclassical and the historical-structural. The major differences between the neoclassical and the historical-structural approaches are as follows (from Wiley 1996: 115):
- The unit of analysis employed: While the neoclassical approach focuses on individual choices, the historical-structural pays attention to relationships between groups.
- The role of the historical perspective: The neoclassical is more interested in the current language situation; the historical-structural, in contrast, emphasizes the role of socio-historical factors.
- Criteria for evaluating plans and policies: The neoclassical is primarily amoral in its outlook; policies are evaluated in terms of how efficiently they achieve their goals. The historical-structural is more sensitive to issue of domination, exploitation and oppression.
- The role of the social scientist: Consistent with its amoral out...
