Language Planning and Microlinguistics: Introduction

Abstract

The term ‘language planning’ seems to have been first used by Einar Haugen when writing about the linguistic situation in modern Norway. He defined it as: ‘the activity of preparing a normative orthography, grammar, and dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a non-homogeneous speech community’ (1959, p. 8). Language planning was apparently restricted to a monolingual society and referred to ‘corpus planning’ only, that is, to decisions about the forms and structures of a language, specifically those involved in standardization (the distinction between status and corpus planning was introduced by Kloss, 1969). Over the years the term has broadened its scope and is nowadays probably associated more often with multilingual societies than with monolingual ones. According to Cooper (1989, p. 45), it describes ‘deliberate efforts to influence the behavior of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their codes’, whilst Spolsky (2009, p. 4) says it refers to ‘conscious and explicit efforts by language managers to control the choices [between languages, or between varieties of one language: WVD/EZ]’.¹ A related concept, which sometimes, but not always, appears to be used synonymously with language planning, is language policy. Shohamy (2006, p. 49) makes a clear distinction between language planning as an activity that involves ‘sweeping intervention and control of language behavior’ and language policy, which ‘attempts to be less interventionist and to refer mostly to principles with regard to language use’.