Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

144 Part 2: Language and Society
cultivating and spreading language change throughout society, from radio
weather announcers to elementary school teachers.
Haugen’s other major works described Norwegian as an immigrant
language and gradually developed the idea that communication was like
a natural ecology (Haugen, 1953, 1972). In this he helped pioneer an ‘ecological
approach’ to the general study of language in society. In recent
years, a new version of ‘eco-linguistics’ has become popular. Today ecolinguistics
is also a political project, arguing that healthy multilingual and
multidialectal ecologies must be preserved to support natural biological
diversity among plants and animals (http://www.terralingua.org/).
Haugen expanded the understanding of LP to encompass all intervention
by a society to infl uence language.
The main categories of LP were consolidated with the addition of the
term ‘status planning’ in the work of the German linguist Heinz Kloss
(1969). Status planning describes how societies allocate roles and functions
(e.g. medium of instruction and offi cial language) to languages
through laws and regulations. Kloss distinguished this from corpus planning,
in which the focus is directed away from social phenomena towards
the internal features of languages, refl ecting also the internal standpoint of
linguistics at the expense of the practices and procedures of communication.
A focus on corpus planning only has become problematical for
approaches to LP more interested in social context than linguistic code. In
addition, new theories of communication (Hanks, 1996; Mühlhäusler,
1995) challenge the very existence of ‘language’ as an autonomous entity
(see Pennycook, this volume). Some deny the possibility that language
can ever be separated from social context (LePage & Tabouret-Keller, 1985)
and pose a radical challenge to the possibility of LP.
The combined ideas of Haugen and Kloss remain important for many
professional language planners today. In essence this is a typology for
classifying the choices government authorities make regarding language
and social life. Classically these choices involve identifi cation of a language
or communication problem, the formulation of alternative ways of
resolving this problem, deciding the norm to be promoted, and implementing
it via the education system: a language problem leads to a
language policy, which leads to LP.
LP and sociolinguistics expanded rapidly over the following decades
absorbing infl uences from individuals and institutions from across the
world. Two institutions in particular made notable contributions: The East
West Center at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu, tasked with fostering
dialogue and a role for American interests across the Asia-Pacifi c, and the
Central Indian Institute of Languages in Mysore, set up to facilitate internal
communication and cohesion after national independence. Individuals
such as Joshua A. Fishman, Charles A. Ferguson, Bjorn H. Jernudd, Joan M.
Rubin and J.V. Neustupny were particularly important in setting new