Language Planning and Social Change by Robert L. Cooper
Overview
The book aims to "demonstrate that an understanding of language planning demands an understanding of the social changes which promote it".
Nine Chapters:
I. Four examples in search of a definition - four cases of language planning
II. Definitions: a baker's dozen - definition of language planning
III. The uses of frameworks - use of descriptive frameworks can enhance our understanding of language planning
IV. Some descriptive frameworks -four frameworks drawn from the study of the diffusion of innovation, marketing, power, and decision-making
V. Status planning - major type of language planning number 1
VI. Corpus planning - major type of language planning number 2
VII. Acquisition planning - major type of language planning number 3
VIII. Social change - language planning in terms of various theories of social change
IX. Summary and conclusions - some concluding observations
Chapter One: Four examples in search of a definition
A. Founding the Académie française
- The creation of the Académie française, unintelligible without reference to its social context, was a product of numerous confluent factors: (1) the rise of new clacissism and the usage of French for functions formerly served by Latin, (2) the centralisation of aristocratic and literary life in Paris, (3) the literary salon [ruelle of the Marquise de Rambouillet at her hôtel], and (4) Cardinal Richelieu's obsession with order, discipline, regulation and control [as he turned a private club of writers into an official language academy].
B. The promotion of Hebrew in Palestine
- There was a movement in Palestine to "revive" Hebrew as the Jewish lingua franca in order to promote unity among its speakers, as Jews were using more of Yiddish, Arabic, and Judezmo at home. Hebrew was still used in written language, prayers, even in legal, scientific and philosophical texts though not in the everyday sense.
- It was observed that more Jews (males) abroad, who would then come back to Palestine still know how to speak or write in Hebrew. As they came back to Palestine, in addition to the need of using a common language to symbolise the unity of the descendants who spoke it, Jews like Ben Yuheda had ideas of using Hebrew as medium of instruction in schools for generations to come.
C. Androcentric generics and the feminine mystique
- There was a feminist American campaign for non-sexist language. It showed that social movements (like the assertion of women's rights) have linguistic consequences, whether or not consequences influence nonlinguistic behaviour. It was also proven that written language is easier to change than to change practices and attitudes that subordinate women. There is also a hopeful assertion that the change in written usage of non-sexist language is contributing to a changed climate of opinion regarding women's rights, and to pressure society for behavioural change.
D. Mass literacy campaign
- Following the deposition of Haile Sillase, emperor of Ethiopia in 1974, the new governing committee in the country called Derg (committee in Amharic, the langugae in which Haile Sillase had ruled and promoted) had conducted a mass literacy campaign. Levi-Strauss had said that the "primary function of literacy is the enslavement of the masses", and in a positive context, the Derg was to establish power and social control through literacy. Within a few months, 50 000 students were sent to the countryside to teach most peasants in Ethiopia, whose population then was estimated to 26 to 30 million, how to write and read in the lingua franca they use, though Ethiopians use 70 to 80 different language. The program was a reversal of the Amharicization by their former leader. This was done because the Derg saw that the reversal of Amharicization -- the symbol of social inequality -- was supposed to create social stability through the better facilitation of public sevices such as education in the language that the people use, even in this extremely multilingual country. It would, nevertheless, prove to be inefficient as the Amharicization of Sillase, as outrageous policies implemented by the Derg, such as closing down their only university and compulsory commissioning of all university and secondary school students (on their last two years) to teach the illiterate peasantry of the provinces how to read and write. This, in turn, caused more radicalisation and discontent among the people, and Ethiopia, despite some changes, practically remained the same under the new leadership.
Chapter Two: Definitions: a baker's dozen
A. Language Planning definition
- There is no single, universally accepted definition of language planning.
- Haugen borrowed the term language planning from Uriel Weinreich for a seminar at Columbia University, but it was Haugen who introduced the term to literature. According to him, it is the "activity of preparing a normativeorthography, grammar, and dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a non-homogenous speech community", but he would later on see these as outcomes of language planning and not the actual planning, itself.
- There are twelve definitions of Language Planning after Haugen's article about the topic in 1959.
(A photocopied list is provided as Appendix A at the latter part of the hand-out.)
B. Definitions by treatment of terms in the question: Who plans what for whom and how?
WHO
- Language planning is restricted to governments, government-authorised agencies, or authoritative bodies (organisation with a public mandate for language regulation). This, in turn, disqualifies the movement which appears to have emerged from, more or less spontaneously at a grass-root level.
WHAT
- Language planning focuses quite generally on "language behaviour". This definition branches out to more specific parts, namely -- corpus planning, status planning, and acquisition planning.
1. Corpus Planning - activities such as coining new terms, reforming spelling, and adopting a new script
2. Status planning - the identification of a certain language to be recognised, used, or positioned to maintain, extend, or restrict the functional range of a language in particular settings
3. Acquisition planning - language teaching, being an objective of policy making, gives rise to acquisition planning, i.e. a certain language is put as a lingua franca and more users acquire the language as it becomes more useful
FOR WHOM
- Language planning is typically carried out for large aggregates not only at which cut across national boundaries but also on smaller aggregates, ethnic, religious, occupational, so on.
- There is a one way sequence from macro-level to micro-level language-use decision making, whereby decisions made at lower levels are decisions made only with respect to implementation of policies set at higher levels
Language planning as problem solving
- modifications in language or in the use of language were sought in order to attain non-linguistic ends
HOW
- Language planning is a special type of language correction -- planned and unplanned, conscious and unconscious language modification, whether by an individual or an organisation.
- Language correction implies the existence of a communicative problem which requires a solution.
- When a language problem is not confined to a single pair of speakers as it confronts a group, and the group in turn attempts to solve it , this phenomenon is called language treatment. It includes all organised forms of societal attention to language problems.
ROBERT L. COOPER's Definition
- Language planning refers to deliberate efforts to influence the behaviour of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, and functional allocation of their language codes.
Chapter Three: The uses of frameworks
Tasks language planning scholars face:
- to describe
- to predict
- explain language planning process
- to derive valid generalisations about processes and outcomes
Four criteria to rate the success of the said tasks:
1. Descriptive adequacy
- "...what actors attempted to influence what behaviours, of which people, for what ends, and by what means and with what results."
- What should be described? On what basis should the descriptions be evaluated?
- Descriptive adequacy can be assessed and evaluated through comprehensiveness and comprehensibility:
Comprehensiveness : extent of coverage
Comprehensibility: coherence of the coverage
2. Predictive adequacy
- ability to forecast event
3. Explanatory adequacy
- the ability to account for a particular outcome
- three levels of explanation: correlative (refers to the extent to which independent variables, taken together, are associated with variation in the dependent variable or criterion of interest), observational (the attempt to explain an outcome of interest by careful observation on an ongoing behaviour), and experimental (keeping all variables constant except one in order to chart its influence on another).
4. Theoretical adequacy
- a theory is a conceptual scheme which organises a relatively small number of prepositions which, taken, together, explain a relatively wide range of human behaviour
* "In language planning, we are still at the stage of discovering irregularrities."
Chapter Four: Some descriptive frameworks
- descriptive frameworks are moulds wherein "behaviour may be poured to cool and harden for analysis"; frameworks found in this chapter are drawn from the study of the diffusion of innovation, marketing, power and decision making
- use of summarising question: "who adopts what, when, where, why, and how?"
1. Language planning as the management if innovation
- Communicative innovations -- language use, language structure, or language acquisition
- use of summarising question: "who adopts what, when, where, why, and how?"
- Linguistic change was explained in terms of the internal structure of the language rather than in terms of the social structure in which the language operates.
- Language planning, other social planning, social, political, and economic change all influence one another as well as the direct agents of change, who in turn, influence potential adopters of a communicative innovation.
2. Language planning as marketing
- language planning as a set of marketing strategies for behavioural change
- "developing the right product backed by the right promotion and put in the right place at the right price"
3. Language planning as the pursuit and maintenance of power
- Since language planning attempts to influence behaviour, the categories employed by political scientists are relevant to students of language planning, an assertion supported by the interest in language planning displayed by some political scientists
- "politics has no values of its own at all... Nothing is valued in politics unless it is believed to be useful as a means of keeping a stronger group in power or of embarrassing or defeating one's opponents."
4. Language planning as decision making
- study of public decisions is frequently seen as the core of political science
- a decision making approach is relevant to an understanding not only of political processes but also of economic and cognitive processes
- decision theory -- attempt to describe in an orderly way what variables influence choices
- leverage -- "a person, institution, issue, or subsystem...that has the capacity to effect a substantial influence on the output of the system"
Chapter Five: Status planning
- the identification of a certain language to be recognised, used, or positioned to maintain, extend, or restrict the functional range of a language in particular settings
- language planning is most likely to succeed when it is invoked for the pursuit and maintenance of power
- "most powerful individuals and groups within a community are those which exert the most influence over the distribution of scarce resources or values. Elites attempt to maintain and extend their influence over this process; the mass, to the extent that it is mobilised, seeks a more equitable process; and counterelites, speaking in the name of the mass or in the name of new ideology, seek to displace the elite and to seize control of the process themselves."
- Elites influence both the evaluation and the distribution of language varieties within the community through status planning and distribution through acquisition planning.
Chapter Six: Corpus planning
- activities such as coining new terms, reforming spelling, and adopting a new script
- Form follows function in at least two senses: (1) corpus planner designs or selects structures on the assumption that a given function, overt or covert, can be served by a modification or treatment of the corpus; (2) in the sense that the desired communicative function precedes the designed or selected structure.
- issues -- standardisation, graphization (establishing or standardising writing systems), modernisation (e.g. instituting new lexical items for scientific concepts) and renovation, (changing an already developed code in the name of efficiency, aesthetics, political or national ideology).
Chapter Seven: Acquisition planning
- organised efforts to promote the learning of language
- Acquisition planning can be a distinguished in two bases: (1) the overt language planning goal, and (2) the method employed to attain the goal.
- There is a need to provide or improve an opportunity for people to learn the language, be given the right incentive to learn the language, and maintenance programs of language acquisition in order for a language plan to succeed.
Chapter Eight: Social Change
- language planning in terms of various theories of social change; theories that would enable one to explain language-planning activities/initiatives, the means needed to effect the goals, and the outcomes of the implementation
1. Sources of Social Change
- the physical environment
- population
- discovery and invention
- cultural diffusion
- ideas
- decision-making
2. The mechanisms of social change - five theoretical schools that deal with social change and indicate their relevance for language planning
Evolutionary Theories
- the idea that every society develops through a fixed series of stages, in a predetermined order, from simple origins to increasing complexity until it reaches a final stage of perfection
- Comte's three stages -- theological, metaphysical, positive
- Spencer -- applied Darwinian notions of evolution to human society; "survival of the fittest"-- western-European societies
- Marx's sequence of fixed stages -- one by one, subordinate classes rise to overthrow their oppressors as the lowest and most wretched class (proletariat) overthrows the system
- Modernisation school -- confined to economic development; Rostow's five stages of economic growth that a society needs to pass in order to attain modernisation
* modernisation theory as something useful to language planning as both a theoretical and a practical pursuit; two questions -- To what extent are certain preconditions necessary for successful language planning? To what extent is language planning a precondition for self-sustained economic growth?
Cyclical Theories
- social change is inevitable, and the end of it is not perfection but decay
- Latin and Greek languages in formal education -- "The great prestige coupled with antiquity, led, perhaps, to the conclusion that modern European languages, not taught in school, were inferior, decadent remnants of a glorious past.
Functionalism
- the view of society as normally in equilibrium
- Durkheim tried to determine the consequences of social phenomena for the society in which they are embedded
- Weber placed the locus of change in individual action
- Parsons emphasised the role of values in regulating the society, and argued that to understand a social system one must examine the motivations of social actors.
*Functionalism can be applied in language planning via the conception of values and controlling mechanism, the consideration of language planners of the target population's values when promoting a policy, and the notion of stability in the society so that language continues to be recognisable as itself.
Conflict Theory
- the view of society as a process of ceaseless competition and conflict; concentrates on tensions that pull the society apart
- Marx -- conflict is generated tension between competing economic interests, "All history is the history of class conflict."
- Dahrendorf -- conflict is not limited to competition between classes but can arise between social groups, as well (racial, ethnic, religious, and national) and social change can arise between any two groups with conflicting interest
- Mills -- the modern society as dominated by a political, economic, and military elite (a power elite) that creates, maintains, via manipulation, mass acceptance of its rule.
* language is a primary actor in these said conflicts in the society, or a way for people to "bargain" power from the elite
Dependency Theories
- focuses on the economic development of the third world
- views developing countries as moving along a dead- end road, a road to nowhere
- underdevelopment is a result of the satellite's (developing country) subordinate position in the world system
- The promotion of English usage as the language of education, science, administration, trade, and intranational communication in Third- world countries is a manifestation of dependency being fostered the language-use.