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The practice of language planning 19 designed to emphasise, and deepen, any relatively small differences between varieties as may already exist, as the cases of Norwegian (see below) in the nineteenth century and Serbian and Croatian in the twentieth century illustrate. The general point here, now a sociolinguistics commonplace, is not just that national standard languages are constructs but that they are often delimited as much, or more, on political as on linguistic grounds. Indeed, as Barbour (2000a: 13) suggests, the emergence of nation states and national standard languages are profoundly implicated in each other: standard languages, he remarks, can be seen ‘as products of modern nations, and nations partly as products of modern communications that allow the effective functioning of states’. This is not to say that political borders necessarily demarcate separate languages. For instance, despite repeated efforts to evolve a distinct standard, speakers of Vlaams (Flemish) in Belgium acknowledge the same official standard, Algemeen Nederlands (Standard Dutch), as Dutch speakers across the border in the Netherlands (see Howell 2000), this example illustrating the complex, variable and contingent nature of the relationship between language and nation. If national standard languages are constructions, the same – in the view of many contemporary scholars – may be said of nations. One part of the construction process of nations is often the forgetting, or psychological denial of just this, and the assertion of exactly the opposite: namely, that the nation’s roots lie in antiquity and that it is an entity ‘so “natural” as to require no definition other than self-assertion’ (Hobsbawm 1983, in Hutchinson and Smith 1994: 76). Among the exponents of these constructivist analyses of nations and national identity are Hobsbawm (1983), cited above, who stresses the role of ‘invented traditions’, national rituals and symbols (e.g. the mass production of statuary) in the production of feelings of solidarity and belonging, and Anderson (1991: 6), whose notion of the nation as an imagined community is much cited: It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. For Anderson, print language and the products it gives rise to – newspapers and novels – are especially instrumental in the forging of national consciousness. Billig (1995), meanwhile, in an extension of Anderson’s ideas, draws attention to a phenomenon he calls ‘banal nationalism’, meaning the daily deployment of national symbols – flags, coins, anthems, airline livery, sporting uniforms, botanic emblems (e.g. the thistle) and the like – all of which function to continually reproduce and reinforce national sentiments in the populace. It would be wrong, however, to suppose that there is any unanimity of interpretation. Gellner (1983), for instance, another influential commentator, conceives nationalism somewhat differently. He does not deny that nationalism, with its selective exploitation of rural folk elements, constructs nations (rather than the reverse), but does insist that it should not on that account be taken to be solely an ideological invention of particular intellectuals. It emerges, rather, out of specific social con-
20 Language Planning and Education ditions, and has, moreover, a camouflaged sociological content he characterises as follows: The basic deception and self-deception practised by nationalism is this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of high culture on society. It means that generalised diffusion of a school-based, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind in place of a previously complex structures of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves. (Gellner 1983: 57) Different again is Carmichael (2000: 282), who criticises Hobsbawm and Anderson’s emphasis on the constructedness of national cultures for failing ‘to take nationalism seriously as a phenomenon’, for failing to empathise with the ‘real emotional need’ that the invention of traditions can fulfil. In an echo of Edwards (1994: 133), she makes the further point that even if national identities are constructed, they are not constructed out of nothing, but derive from some ‘actual’, non-fictive past solidarity. Illustrated here, one might conclude, is the continuing elusiveness of agreed definitions of nations and nationalism, including the balance of subjective and objective elements in the former’s constitution (see Hutchinson and Smith 1994: 4). To pursue this issue further, however, would take us too far beyond our central focus, which is the role of LP in the processes of construction outlined above – a topic to which we now turn. 2.2 THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE PLANNING IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL LANGUAGES AND NATIONS In this section we review – with suitable exemplification – the processes of standardisation, differentiation, codification, elaboration and purification that are central to the language planning tradition, especially as it relates to nation-building. First, however, we locate these processes with respect to the influential distinction between corpus and status language planning 2.2.1 Corpus and status language planning The conscious, organised interventions that make up LP are customarily divided, following Kloss (1969), into two categories: status and corpus planning. Status planning addresses the functions of language(s) in society, and typically involves the allocation of languages to official roles in different domains – government and education, for instance. Inevitably, these allocative decisions enhance, or detract from, the status of these languages – hence status planning. Corpus planning, by
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