Language Planning

  1. Haugen: Language planning has to do with constructing a normative orthography, grammar and dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a non-homogeneous speech community." (Haugen LPMN, p. 673)

  2. Other foci: Distinguish between status planning vs. corpus planning:

    • planning for changes in status of some language or variety

    • vs. planning changes in the corpus of body of the language: its grammar, syntax, orthography, etc.

    • and educational planning.

  3. Neustupný: Language planning is language ``treatment "

  4. Others: call it language management.

  5. Eastman: ``The study of LANGUAGE PLANNING focuses on the

    • decision-making that goes into determining what language use is appropriate in particular speech communities.

    • LP is concerned with how language can be conducted and interpreted successfully in a speech community, given [its] goals ...

    • The study of LP looks at the choices available to a speech community and at possible recommendations of language policy for adoption by that community. ...

    • LP has to do with the way people's ideas about language are coordinated. ...

    • LP involves the gathering of data for making decisions about ... language [and] with developing the technical tools for choosing among alternative decisions. ...

    • LP is necessarily ``future-oriented."

  6. Other definitions: LP is the deliberate attempt to influence the development/standardization of a language by

    1. making choices in favor of one dialect or another of a language, in printing, education, legal status, religious usage, etc.

    2. legislating changes in the morphology, lexicon, orthography, phonology of a language

    3. inventing out of whole cloth a new language, or reviving a dead language, or mixing forms from various languages/dialects: Esperanto, Hebrew and Irish; Union Ibo.




Harold Schiffman
last modified Oct. 24, 2001