LING 451/551Introduction to

Applied Linguistics

Topic 5
Language policy & planning

Dr Iryna Khodos
ikhodos@une.edu.au
Overview
 Language decisions

 Corpus planning, status planning, acquisition planning

 Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

 LP&P for access to healthcare, education, law and work

 LP&P in globalization: poverty and migration

 Linguistic landscapes (to map LP&P)

 LP&P as a form of conflict resolution

Language policy & planning

What is LP&P?
 ‘deliberate attempts to influence the behaviour of others with respect
to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their language
“code” (Cooper, 1989, p. 45)

 Language planning – target/goal vs means/tool

 Target/end:
 E.g., Chinese government mandate on Mandarin in education
 national language academies – orthography
 lexicographers
 applied linguists working on unwritten languages
Language policy & planning

Language as a means:
 provide access to opportunities to participate in public institutions,
and to receive services in legal, medical, work and religious
domains.
 Individual level – a (well-meaning) parent who tries to “shape the
child’s social aspirations, education attainment and economic
wellbeing” (p. 95) via language decisions
 non-specialists often take leading roles in decision-making processes
 Success of LP&P dependent on collaborating with key stakeholders
Language decisions

 P.96 starts by talking about processing, individual choices – an odd beginning.

 Focus instead on p.97-98 – we are all ‘language decision makers’
 “… conscious efforts to modify and regulate the way others use language,
including stipulations concerning the languages and varieties that are privileged,
permitted, discouraged and even forbidden in settings such as schools, courts of
law, hospitals, government offices and other institutions and workplaces”
 2nd level Includes teachers, translators, lexicographers, textbook writers.
 No traditional ‘language planners’ but arguably are ‘language planning in action’
 3rd level – professionals who explicitly work in LP&P
 3 levels of language decision makers – individuals, non- language planning professionals,
app lings working in language planning explicitly
Language planning
 Language policy – the legal or statutory measures intended to regulate
language use, while Language planning – the practical
implementation of these policies (Rubin 1983, cited p.98)
 E.g., Canadian language act
 Spolsky: “the real language policy of a community is more likely to be
found in its practices than in its management”.
 Hierarchy in which actors with diverse and sometimes competing
interests do language planning work at one or more of three levels
 Competing planning and practices – the case of anti-bilingual
referendum in California – users ignored the decision made by the
church to adhere to the ruling
Language planning

 Planning in action
 Why is this problematic?

 Deaf community – lack of alignment

between policy & practice
 Rights protected under UN convention on
Rights of Persons with Disabilities
 However, no mechanism to ensure
compliance. Lack of funding.
Language planning

Language planning orientations – very useful characterization by

Richard Ruiz (1984)
 Language as problem
 Language as right
 Language as resource
 Multiple languages in a community (e.g., Australia) can be viewed in
any of these ways.
 LWC – perceived as a ‘resource’ i.e., English globally
 Minority lgs – ‘problem’
Language planning

 Often what is regarded as impossible can be done and is done

elsewhere
 E.g., Swedish schools – Mother Tongue Instruction
 “since the Home Language Reform in 1977, the Swedish Education
Act has protected the right for children from pre-school … to grade
12 … who speak a language other than Swedish with a caregiver, to
study that language through the elective subject of MTI” (Reath
Warren, 2017)
 60 languages are currently taught in this way
Language planning

 Example of ‘language-as-problem: ProEnglish

 https://proenglish.org/

 Contrast with the views of Institute for Language and Education

Policy
 http://www.elladvocates.org/
Language planning

 Corpus, status and acquisition planning

 Corpus planning: modifying the code itself.
 E.g., Real Academia Española
 http://www.rae.es/la-institucion

 E.g., Académie Française

 Monitoring and ruling on neologisms and anglicisms
 https://www.academie-francaise.fr/linstitution/lorganisation
Language planning
Status planning: “efforts to increase or decrease the perceived status or
prestige of a language in a given sphere” (p.105)
 Refers to Phillipson’s 1992 Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford, OUP
 “Phillipson makes it clear that it has been deliberate government policy
in English-speaking countries to promote the worldwide use of English
for economic and political purposes (Pennycook, 1994, The cultural
politics of the English language, London, Longman p. 22)
 Codification of the ‘standard’ is central
 Singlish and the “zoo specimen” – perhaps linguists didn’t explain the
importance of the issue well enough?
 Covert prestige – ‘talking cock’
Language planning

Acquisition planning
 Describes efforts to promote the acquisition (learning) of additional
languages.
 Hebrew in Israel
 Forms of bilingual education – Welsh, Catalan
Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

Keeping languages alive

 Languages die when their speakers shift to a language of wider
communication (English, Chinese, Spanish etc.)
 Their community is disrupted by invasion or industrialization,
speakers die or disperse
 Browse this site:
 http://www.endangeredlanguages.com
 UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
 http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap.html
 Play with the map in areas that interest you
Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

 Measures of vitality of a language - Fishman’s Graded
Intergenerational Disruption Scale
 Intergenerational language transmission is the key to success
 Expanded version here
 https://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-status
 Language vitality can vary within a community - the iku language in
Colombian Caribbean
 Elders promoting literacy for unexpected reasons
Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

 Measures of vitality of a language - Fishman’s Graded
Intergenerational Disruption Scale
 Intergenerational language transmission is the key to success
 Expanded version here
 https://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-status
 Language vitality can vary within a community - the iku language in
Colombian Caribbean
 Elders promoting literacy for unexpected reasons
Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

Can language be ‘planned’?

 How to measure success of maintenance/revitalization etc.?
 The role of language ideologies in planning
 Case study: 65 indigenous Colombian languages – all official
 BUT – many don’t have orthographies
 No pedagogical materials
 Lack of plurilingual teachers
 Lack of interest in promoting plurilingualism in wider community
 And even within community
Planning for access to services

 Because Australia has a multicultural policy, health information is

available in a number of community languages. Find something of
interest in a language you speak!
 https://www.mhcs.health.nsw.gov.au/publications

 Quechua-speaking woman example in TB highlights terrible

consequences
Globalizing times and LP&P

 Critical language planning & critical applied linguistics – who

benefits from language-based decisions?
 Language and poverty
 Myth that lower SES = linguistic deficit
 The alleged ’30-million word gap
 May be related to non-standard language use
 Research in Francophone Canada (see p.115)
 English monolingualism correlated highly with higher incomes for
Anglophone men
 Why do you think this might be so?
Globalizing times and LP&P

Language and immigration - Ways of restricting entry to a country

 Immigration (who gets in) vs immigrant policy (how they’re treated)
1901 “Immigration restriction act” (White Australia Policy): The
 Dictation Test applied to all non-European people entering Australia
between 1901 and 1958. The applicant was required to write out 50
words in any European language (after 1905, any prescribed
language) dictated by an immigration officer. As the language used
was at the discretion of the officer, it was easy to ensure failure if an
applicant was thought to be 'undesirable’, either because of their
country of origin, criminal record, medical history or if they were
considered morally unfit. A person who failed the test was deemed a
Globalizing times and LP&P

 At the following link you can find the transcript of an interview with Prof. Tim
McNamara on Language testing asylum seekers
 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/linguafranca/language
-testing-asylum-seekers/3544864#transcript
 What's wrong with using language tests to establish the claims of asylum-
seekers?
 A person's nationality cannot always be determined by the language he or she
speaks
 A few key words and their pronunciation normally cannot reveal a person's
nationality or ethnicity
 Common perceptions about pronunciation differences among groups of people
cannot be relied upon
Linguistic landscape
Linguistic Landscape

 Can tell us something about how people are using languages in

multilingual / multicultural societies
 Bottom up – written by people
 Top down – by governments or other bodies
 Cf Pennycook and Otsuiji ‘metrolingualism’ – use of complex
language repertoires in cityscapes to describe ‘superdiverse’
(Vertovec) scenarios.
LP&P as a form of conflict resolution

 Read (in Topic 5 block)

 Lo Bianco, J. (2016) Conflict, language rights and education:
Building peace by solving language problems in South-East Asia.
Language Policy Research Network Brief, April 2016. Washington
D.C. Center for Applied Linguistics
 “language plans are fragile enterprises, and the ability to shape future
language use is an uncertain science” (p. 121)
This week …

 Read Topic 5 online materials and make notes.

 Join Tutorial 5 on Thursday.
 Share your observations/thoughts on one of the questions outlined in Discussion
Forum 5.
 Get in touch via Discussion Board or email if you have any questions.