Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Chapter 6
Language Policy and Planning
JOSEPH LO BIANCO
Introduction
This section contains a brief overview of the fi eld of language planning
(LP). It begins by describing the origins of the term LP and some of the
goals of the activity. There is also a brief discussion of the relevance of LP
to teachers.
The term LP was probably fi rst invoked by the linguist Uriel Weinreich
in the early 1950s in New York. Weinreich was working in the context
of immigrant languages and dialects, in interaction with each other and
with English. His famous work, Languages in Contact (Weinreich, 1953),
discussed bilingual communication, including the mixing of a fading fi rst
language with a replacing second language. Linking anthropology and
theoretical linguistics sharpened Weinreich’s observations of ties between
social phenomena and aspects of language and communication. He noted
that speakers in bilingual communities do not keep their languages and
dialects separate, but instead produce a hybrid ‘interlanguage’ as a composite
single profi ciency that blends features of the available communication
forms.
Another sociolinguistics pioneer was the Norwegian American Einar
Haugen, who expanded the meaning of the term LP. He studied language
change in Norway and the use of Norwegian in America. He produced an
infl uential account of the Norwegian policy to eradicate the infl uence of
Danish on Norwegian. Norway had been united with Denmark and was
effectively under Danish control for centuries until 1814, when it was
transferred to Swedish control, eventually gaining independence in 1905.
As a result, both written and spoken Norwegian borrowed pronunciation
and spelling norms from Danish sources. Individual writers and nationalists
wanted to develop an indigenous variety modelled on rural Norwegian
dialects, which they regarded as ‘uncontaminated’. In the course of time,
this popular movement became a national policy to produce a distinctive
and locally sourced Norwegian mode of expression. Haugen’s account
(1966) used the term LP for processes of selecting new norms and for
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