Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

150 Part 2: Language and Society
Development of the Field
Reviewing the intellectual history of LP, Ricento (2000) suggested three
phases of post-war LP. An initial technocratic and confi dent period with
modernist assumptions was followed by criticism and re-appraisal following
failure of LP to produce economic ‘take-off’ in developing countries.
The third phase, he argues, features ‘alarm’ about issues such as
linguistic imperialism and language extinction and is accompanied by
transformed ideas about what language, literacy and culture actually are;
instead of bounded categories these are now seen as variable, hybrid and
contested social practices. There is value in this analysis, but the picture of
LP today, both the practice ‘on the ground’ and the theory and analysis, is
highly diverse. Some is unchanged from the earliest thinking and practice
but there are also instances of critical, innovative and experimental practices.
If the initial decades of LP (1950s–1960s) were characterised by fi eld
defi nition and concept building and the middle decades (1970s–1980s) by
professionalisation, technical skills and managerial procedures, the 1990s
saw a highly critical reaction against claims that an autonomous, politically
neutral, ethical and technically grounded LP had emerged.
Policy as a ‘science’
During the same years in which LP was an emerging academic discipline,
political scientists were engaged in a process of attempting to professionalise
government in Western industrialised democracies. The main
way this was done was to link economics with politics and the result was
the new discipline of policy analysis. Some language planners incorporated
ideas from the emergent ‘policy sciences’, which promised to make
public policy more technical and systematic, beginning a move away from
strictly sociolinguistic approaches to LP. LP began to resemble the ‘rational
choice matrix’ of public policy analysis, in which a specialist applies
techniques of cost–benefi t calculations, to generate compared alternatives
for action to recommend to decision makers.
Discussing such links from several angles, Rubin (1977, 1986) defi ned
the emerging LP science either as solutions to language problems that are
obtained through discussion about various alternative goals and means or
as how alternatives are formulated and evaluated in considering how to
solve language problems. In this work, Rubin distinguished between
‘tame’ problems, which are relatively amenable to policy attention and
‘wicked’ problems, which defy easy solution, with most language problems
being seen as ‘wicked’. Overall, Rubin’s approach was to describe LP
as a normative practice and to work towards a theory of LP as public intervention.
Perhaps the most ambitious version of the scientifi c aspiration
was by Fishman, while introducing the fi eld of sociolinguistics to new
readers: ‘Language planning as a rational and technical process informed