Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

14 Language Planning and Education
construction projects; only that it is a less central concern than previously, and that
space has opened up, therefore, for the reappraisal of the value of linguistic diversity
within these political units.
Alongside change, meanwhile, there are continuities. As ever, the language problems
addressed by LP are not just, or only, problems of language and communication
but typically arise from, and can only be fully understood against, a background of
political, economic, social and cultural struggle. And, for this very reason, the study
of LP cannot help but remain an interdisciplinary enterprise.
NOTES
1. Tanganyika gained independence in 1961, and was renamed Tanzania following union
with Zanzibar in 1964. In 1967 Swahili was declared the national official language. In the
same year it was made the medium of primary education.
2. The choice of a prestigious variety of written Malay as the national language of Indonesia
following independence from the Dutch in 1949 was in fact neither surprising nor controversial.
It had been the language of administration and education during the Japanese
occupation (1942–5), and had been identified as a suitable national language by nationalists
as early as 1928. At independence, Javanese speakers were easily the largest ethno-linguistic
group, comprising around 48 per cent of the total Indonesian population.
3. Linguistic diversity in Africa is not typically experienced as a significant problem at the
grassroots level. Most Africans are individually plurilingual, but this is somewhat less remarkable
or exotic than Europeans sometimes perceive it to be. In Central, East and southern
Africa, many ‘languages’ are closely related, sharing a high proportion of lexis and grammatical
structures. Furthermore, Africans tend to be socialised into multilingual practices from an
early age. As Fardon and Furniss (1994b: 4) point out:
multilingualism is the African lingua franca. Any African national or ethnographer will
testify to a transcontinental genius for facilitating communication by drawing on language
competences, however partially these might be held in common. The African lingua franca
might best be envisaged not as a single language but as a multilayered and partially
connected language chain that offers a choice of varieties and registers in the speaker’s
immediate environment.
4. Under apartheid, South Africa had many of the features of old settlement colonies, and is
therefore assimilated here to the colonial category.
5. These eleven languages are: isiZulu, isiNdebele, siSwati, isiXhosa, Xitsonga, Tshivenda,
Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Afrikaans and English.
6. This appears to be the case thus far in Scotland. Devolution (following a referendum in
1997) and the establishment of a Scottish parliament has not thus far led to an increase in
votes for the Scottish National Party (SNP).
7. Language planners in Catalonia have been concerned, for example, to maintain the
distinctiveness of Catalan from Castilian Spanish, to which it is closely related linguistically.
In the Basque country, meanwhile, effort has been invested in diffusing, and gaining
acceptance for, a common standard variety.