1. Formulation: setting the goals of the policy. (domains, timetables, territorial extent, etc.)

2. Codification: setting out strategies for the practical achievement of the goals; setting up a legal mechanism to embody the changes and goals in the legal records.

3. Elaboration: seeing that the language(s) involved may be extended into the arenas specified by the policy goals. In many cases this may mean that it is necessary to develop new registers where none previously existed.

4. Implementation: providing the authorative backbone (including financial rewards and resources ) to achieve the goals, and the motivation for the use of the language of the policy by the people affected. (``Carrot and Stick") May be dependent on funding, always a sticky issue. (My own feeling [HS] is that implementation is always the 'Achilles' Heel' of language planning--the weakest link, the area where it is most likely to fail.)

Both status changes and corpus changes are necessary; making an L-variety language fit for use in higher education etc. may not happen overnight. Simply changing the status does not equip it for H domains. It lacks a register (set of specialized vocabulary and preferred rhetorical/syntactic patterns) for that domain. (Some polities may simply opt to keep English, French, or another ex=colonial language for higher education, esp. technological, scientific, medical etc. registers.)

1. Sometimes domain change can be introduced gradually: use the L variety for first two years of elementary ed.; or change over from exogenous language to indigenous language one grade/year at a time. Or introduce the language in lower courts (municipal etc.) and move up gradually.

2. Set a timetable: fifteen years (whatever) from the promulgation of the policy will be the deadline for complete switching to another language.

3. Establish commissions to devise vocabulary;

4. Enlist the educated elite to help elaborate an indigenous register and make it clear that this goes beyond mere vocabulary, but also involves certain rhetorical devices, syntactic patterns, etc.

5. Award prizes for best suggestions of new words, etc.

6. Award annual prizes for best creative writing.
7. Other incentives?

Problems with Modernization: Implementing the Policy

1. Ignoring true creative forces in the linguistic culture. The best indigenous source for new vocabulary may be the spoken (L) variety, but desire for purism may override this source and close itself to it, preferring ``pure' roots from an ancient past.

2. Classical sources (e.g. Greco-Roman in English, Sanskrit in India, Chinese in Japan) may be nice for some purposes, but other sources and devices may be more ``efficient": in a rapidly-developing field like computer science (in English), the vocabulary is developed by users on the job, not from lists handed down by a commission.

3. Other Resources and Devices:
   1. Acronyms: using the first initials of terms to form a ``word": DOS from ``disc operating system"; WYSIWYG from ``what you see is what you get", ROM for ``read-only memory", RAM for ``random-access memory", ASAP, SNAFU, etc.

   2. Blends: syllables from different words are joined: mo-dem from ``modulator-demodulator", maglev from ``magnetic levitation", hazmat(s) from "haz(ardous) mat(erials)", prion from pro(teinaceous) in(fectious particles), etc. (Very common in Soviet Russian terminology formation: sovkhoz, samizdat, etc.; also in the American military: SECNAV, HAZMAT, NORAD, TOPSEC, AWACS, etc.)

   3. Loan translations (calques), loan innovations, etc.: ``translate" the foreign word into the local language: television becomes Fernsehen in German, doordarshan in Sanskrit, tolainookki in Tamil. landscape in English is a loan from German Landschaft but has now become productive, with ``moonscape, seascape, urbanscape, netscape, " etc.

   4. Rely on productive processes of the language: derivation, other above devices. Computer science has taken ``hardware" and gone on to ``software, shareware, dreamware, vaporware, liveware". This is a natural process, not relying on overt planning, terminology commissions, or language academies.

   5. Any of the above processes that are allowed to develop naturally will lead to more efficiency and are more likely to be adopted by the population; artificial creations may be rejected and lead to even further diglossia, or to a covert rejection of the new forms. (Tamil tolainookki ``distant-vision" (for television) instead of spoken paDa-poTTi ``picture box".)

   6. Precision may call for a term that has a special meaning, even if other resources are available. Police reports:

      ``I apprehended the suspect in his vehicle, travelling at a speed of 80 m.p.h., detained him, and cited him."

      (instead of)

      ``I clocked the guy doin' 80, so I hooked 'im and booked 'im"

      The first version may be required for a court report in a jury trial, where any other language (colloquial) would be considered prejudicial to the rights of the ``suspect".

   7. Too much fiddling with things may undercut success. Changing scripts too many times is counterproductive (Soviet Central Asia); constantly ``improving" things may lead to burnout (Tamil ``bookstore/library" first was pustaka-nilayam, then nuul-nilayam, then nuul-akam.) Each change may seem justified, but cumulatively the effect may be bad.

   8. Lack of coordination: In India, all languages borrow from English, and uniformly, but when forced to borrow from Sanskrit, they do so inconsistently, with resultant chaos. Tamil in India and Sri Lanka resort to different sources, so result is incomprehensible. Norway had too many norms to choose from, different goals of different groups (urban/rural).

   9. Despite all efforts, there may be (covert? structural?) resistance to language planning, so stable diglossia or bilingualism may result.

      • In Switzerland the German Swiss are more numerous, but French is more prestigious internationally (and Swiss German is in a diglossic relationship to written German). So standardization of Swiss German has not happened.

      • The Finns use Finnish domestically but encourage Swedish as a link to western Scandinavia. Swedish as a mother tongue in Finland is dying, but attempts are made to keep it alive as the link.

      • Scientists want to be in touch with an international community of experts in their field, and want to publish results in the widest possible network. Thus even French scientists publish in English in French journals (to the chagrin of French planners). In many third-world countries science, technology and medicine are taught either overtly or covertly in a western language, and attempts to change this may lead to resistance, emigration, protests, etc.
   
   Some Bibliography

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   Harold Schiffman
   last modified 11/1/05