Language Planning, cont'd.
Handout for LING 540/SARS 543
Language Policy

Examples of (1.) Status and (2.) Corpus planning:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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).

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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