Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

28 Language Planning and Education
focus of these newer agencies has been the development of the national language,
principally through codification, publication and elaboration of vocabulary. The
latter, always a more iterative undertaking than either graphisation or codification
(see Fishman 1974: 23), has been a particularly energetic area of activity: by the
1980s, for example, up to 500,000 new terms had been created for Bahasa Indonesia
(Alisjahbana 1984), and a significant, though lesser, number for Kiswahili (Ohly and
Gibbe 1982), the majority in the fields of science, technology and education. That
these were the domains predominantly targeted for lexical elaboration indicates that
the dominant motive was not the reinforcement of good taste or refinement – as with
some of the older academies – but modernisation; that is, the expansion of the
lexicon to facilitate scientific/technical discourse and to provide for ‘intertranslatability
with other languages in a range of topics and forms of discourse’ (Ferguson
1968: 28).
Recent decades have seen the establishment of a further wave of LP agencies, but
these operate in a quite different socio-political and intellectual context, one that is
more suspicious of ‘linguistic streamlining’. Compared to their predecessors, they
also tend to have a wider remit, reflected in a greater degree of engagement in status
planning. One of the main tasks of the recently established Welsh Language Board
(Bwrdd yr Iaith Gymraeg), 7 for example, is the supervision of measures intended
to bring Welsh to a position of equality with English in Wales (see Chapter 3).
Similarly, the (Catalan) General Directorate for Language Policy (DGPL), established
in 1980 following the enactment of the 1979 Catalan Statute of Autonomy, is
involved in implementing and overseeing legislation aimed at ‘normalising’ Catalan;
that is, elevating it to functional equality with Spanish (castellano). In South Africa,
meanwhile, the Pan South African Language Board (PANSALB), formally inaugurated
in 1996 as an independent statutory body and a key South African language
planning agency, is charged – among other things – with working to promote the
use of previously marginalised languages now awarded official status – languages
such as Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiNdebele and siSwati – and with investigating alleged
violations of language rights provisions (see Marivate 2000).
We can conclude, then, that formal institutions backed by the state continue to
play an important role in LP. With the passage of time, though, their functions have
diversified into status planning, and their ideological biases have altered – at least
in some cases. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified by PANSALB, which, far
from standardising and promoting a single hegemonic national language within the
borders of the state, as might once have been the case, today promotes an officially
sanctioned multilingualism.
2.2.3.2 Lexical elaboration
Turning now to examine in a little more detail the operations involved in lexical
elaboration, we find that they too have an ideological as well as a technical dimension
in that developers of new terminology confront a set of choices, each of which carries
a political or ideological charge. One choice, for example, and sometimes the