Language Planning, cont'd. Handout for LING 540/SARS 543
Language Policy
Examples of (1.) Status and
(2.) Corpus planning:
Under (1 Status Planning) above, Martin Luther made choices for
standard German (
Hochdeutsch) by taking a dialect that was in wide use in all parts of
Germany
as a lingua franca/trade language, and translating the Bible into it. This
translation coincided with the discovery and implementation in the West of
moveable type
printing (Gutenberg) and was widely disseminated (because of the new Bible,
and other texts), eventually becoming the
basis for modern Standard German. Most standard languages are merely the
dialects of some capital city, some royal court, that have been elevated to
special (standard) use by its choice as language of the bible, of education,
law, royal courts, religious brotherhood, etc. Standard English is now based
on the dialect of London, at the Court of St. James. French is the dialect of
Paris (Ile de France); Italian was the dialect of Florence, standardized by
Dante, etc.
Under (2 Corpus Planning) above, Norwegians decided that they didn't
want the Dano-
Norwegian dialect of Oslo as their standard any more, so reformers began to
advocate changes.
Knud Knudsen wanted to revise written Danish in the
direction of Colloquial Standard educated Oslo dialect,
while Ivar Åsen
wanted to reestablish the actual folk dialects of (western) Norway, based
on an overall
pattern he had discovered.
Knudsen advocated Bokmål, Åsen pushed
Landsmål, now called Nynorsk. Two competing standards
developed, and are still competing, although the present goal is to merge
them into one Samnorsk.
Purism
: Other movements have tried
to
outlaw foreign words, and coin new words using ``native" roots. Also
known as ``closing" the language to one source, and ``opening" it to other
sources. Purism movements prefer native resources:
Literary Hindi prefers Sanskrit sources;
Literary Tamil allows only Tamil sources (or what are perceived or
believed to be pure Tamil sources.) Thus tolaipeeci (a calque of
`telephone') mintuukki `elevator,' etc.
German sought
to throw off the yoke of Latin and French loans and coin words (``loan
translation") based on German roots: abhängig for ``dependent";
Fernsprecher for ``telephone", etc. Since the end of WWII this has been
seen as tainted by Nazism, and German is now more open to foreign loans, esp.
from English.
Other movements: modernization e.g. Turkish
under Atatürk, closed the language to classical (Arabic etc.)
sources and opened it to others (European language.). Japanese opened itself
to loans from European languages after the Meiji restoration. Nowadays
``modernization" may also bring with it a strong emphasis on English
or another western language, for teaching science and technology (e.g.
problems in Malaysia).
Orthography (spelling) reform may change a language to reflect modern or
colloquial pronunciations; or change the writing system from one type to
another: Central Asian languages have gone from Arabic to Roman to Cyrillic
and back to Arabic (especially in the post-Soviet period) and in China
within some people's lifetimes.
Under (3) Revival movements etc.: Hebrew
managed to revive itself,
but
Irish has not succeeded; Esperanto and some other artificial languages have
been attempts to create ``totally regular" languages, etc.
While on the topic of Irish, see a discussion of attempts by the Irish Government
to legislate how the new currency term 'Euro' will be pronounced,
pluralized, and used in legal documents, even in English! Harold Schiffman last modified 10/21/03