Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

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The practice of language planning 25 ment of new registers and the creation of new lexical items – especially in the fields of science, technology and economy, an activity that has led some writers (e.g. Ferguson 1968) to prefer the term ‘modernisation’ and others to equate elaboration with language modernisation. If codification lies firmly in the domain of corpus planning, and elaboration is a combination of corpus and status planning, the final element in Haugen’s (1966c) model – acceptance – can reasonably be placed in the category of status planning in that it involves conscious dissemination of the standard and orchestrated efforts to persuade the community to accept the norm. That this is necessary, and often difficult, is amply illustrated in the numerous instances where the standard, as developed by committees, academies or individuals, is rejected, or resisted, by the community. One example of this, discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, is the ambivalent and sometimes hostile attitude of many native Breton speakers toward the standardised, literary variety of Breton developed in the twentieth century, a form they feel is somewhat artificial and strained. Not altogether dissimilar is the situation in the Biskaia province of the Basque country, where the new unified written Basque, Euskara batua, has yet to gain full acceptance, principally because it tends to reflect more closely the Gipuzkoa variety (Fishman 1991; Gardner, Serralvo, Williams 2000: 330). Illustrated here, and a quite general phenomenon, 5 is the reluctance speakers may experience in accepting a standard based on a dialect quite different from their own, and one that they feel does not, therefore, adequately acknowledge their particular identity. Estrangement from the standard may also occur, however, for other reasons. If, for example, the path to standardisation is an archaising one in which the written standard is constructed from some older, more classical and therefore putatively more authentic variety, then a diglossic situation may develop in which the standard is used in high (H) functions (e.g. education and administration) and a more demotic, everyday variety in low (L) functions (e.g. home, informal interaction). Over time, however, resistance to the written standard, the high form, may set in, simply because it comes to be perceived as remote from everyday life, as an unwelcome artifice and as an impediment to education Such, one might argue, has been the situation in Greece, where, as we remarked earlier, the contrast between Katharevousa, a purified, artificial variety harking back to a classical Greek past, and Dhimotiki, a popular, vernacular variety, was a focus of political contestation for much of the twentieth century up to 1974, when – with the overthrow of the ruling military junta – the former lost all official and popular support (see Trudgill 2000: 248). Gaining acceptance of the standard is, then, a potentially fraught business, but – recalling Romaine’s (2002: 19) point that LP interventions tend to be more effective to the extent that they work with rather than against prevailing social currents – it is possible to identify, at a very general level, circumstances that are conducive to success. Thus, where a standard emerges gradually out of the speech of the elite and steadily accrues prestige, where there are material and social incentives for acquisition
26 Language Planning and Education and access is relatively easy, or where there are clear and widely understood ideological reasons for adoption – nationalist reasons for example – acceptance of a dominant standard language is more likely; this, almost paradoxically, rendering conscious LP intervention less necessary. Conversely, where standardisation proceeds relatively swiftly and is more obviously orchestrated, and the standard consequently has less time to accrue prestige to itself, where it is seen as an artificial construction imposed from above, where regional identities remain strong, or where material incentives and ideological motives are relatively weaker, acceptance will be correspondingly more difficult, rendering conscious promotion simultaneously more necessary and less likely to succeed. One might add here that the prestige of the standard, a factor crucial to its successful dissemination, is widely acknowledged to be significantly enhanced by the literary output of creative writers, translators, and other literary figures. An example would be William Morgan’s 1588 translation of the Bible into Welsh, which is recognised (see Chapter 4) as laying the foundation for a prestigious and eventually widely accepted standard written Welsh. Similarly, Yannis Psicharis’s (1854–1929) celebrated novel To Taxidhi Mou (‘My Journey’), the first literary work published in Dhimotiki (Trudgill 2000: 247), is recognised as immeasurably enhancing the credibility of Dhimotiki as a potential alternative standard to Katharevousa. With this mention of individuals who have had a significant impact on language standardisation, we arrive at a juncture where it is convenient to introduce other agencies active in LP. In the next section, accordingly, we turn attention to language academies and their role, specifically, in elaboration and language purification. 2.2.3 Elaboration, purism and the role of language academies Individual writers, philologists and linguists – such as Johnson, Webster, Aasen and Psicharis – have, as we have seen, been significant players in LP, but ranking alongside them in historical importance are formal institutions, the academies, to whose activities we now turn. 2.2.3.1 Language academies The earliest of these were the Accademia della Crusca of Florence founded in 1572 and, more eminent still, the Académie Française, which started out as a literary grouping led by Valentine Conrart before it was converted into an official state organisation by Cardinal Richelieu in 1634. Operating at a time when France was beginning to emerge from a period of civil disorder and religious wars, and when the French vernacular was beginning to displace Latin in literary and administrative functions, Richelieu’s aim was to pull the literary elite into the orbit of his influence and harness it to his objective of consolidating civil order and the power of the monarchy. The particular function of the new Academy, however, as set out in the statutes of foundation, was to purify the vernacular, expand its functions and regulate the language so as to ‘render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and
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