Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

148 Part 2: Language and Society
systems to make them more phonetic, or codifying expressions to reduce
variation. All languages change to absorb new information and changed
meanings, making corpus change, planned and unplanned, universal and
constant. Governments drive corpus change to pursue goals of national
re-construction or reclamation for endangered languages but so do social
movements with political ambitions who want to change the world
through words, what is said as well as how it is said. English examples
include University campus speech codes to promote anti-racism and
counter-sexism, making corpus planning a tool of ideology to change
political belief via discourse. This kind of activity is motivated by a performative
view of language; the principle that language as discourse enacts
social identities and helps to form our subjective idea of ourselves and the
groups we belong to (Butler, 1997). Neustupny’s idea that personal language
use can be seen as LP, combined with performative views of discourse,
takes LP activity well beyond status and corpus planning. This is
discussed below as discourse planning, after a brief review of three other
common LP activities.
Acquisition planning typically describes language teaching policies
(Cooper, 1989). Foreign/second-language instruction can be motivated by
humanistic rationales, responses to the needs and rights of minorities, calculations
about economic interest, or assessments about security and geopolitical
anxieties (Lo Bianco, 2008a). International comparisons of literacy
standards have also infl uenced literacy teaching policies in many
countries.
Usage planning involves increasing the domains in which a language is
used. Usage planning occurs mostly in opposition to a dominant language
after political change or is done to regenerate dying languages. Ireland is
engaged in usage planning to expand the domains of Irish beyond school
and university classrooms into all workplaces, digital media, government
administration and sports and recreation (Ó Flatharta et al., 2008).
Prestige planning (Haarmann, 1990) focuses on aesthetic or intellectual
regard of a linguistic code. Many of today’s major languages have benefi
ted from prestige planning by poets, philosophers and religious fi gures.
Esteem is conferred on a language in proportion to the quality and extent
of its important works of literature. Italy’s national poet, Dante Alighieri,
combined corpus and status planning, in a cultivation approach to prestige
planning. Between 1303 and 1305 he wrote the Latin text De Vulgari
Eloquentia, putting forward a theory about how to invent a new language
and arguing that an independent nation needs a distinctive vernacular for
political unity. He interrupted this theorising and wrote his great epic
poem, the Divine Comedy in Italian, helping to produce both the vernacular
and the nation he had advocated (Lo Bianco, 2005).
Many dialects of standardised languages have benefi ted by a change in
esteem (informal status) because of authoritative works by poets, novelists