LANGUAGE PLANNING (SOCIOLINGUISTIC)

(LANGUAGE PLANNING)

By

1.      Moh Syaifullah (090401090477)

2.      Misdian (090401090)

3.      Mohammad Bahum (090401090474)

Kelas J-R2

 

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

KANJURUHAN UNIVERSITY MALANG

2013

CHAPTER 15

(LANGUAGE PLANNING)

A.  Some Basic Issues

Language planning is an attempt to interfere deliberately with a language or one its varieties.

Status planning change the function of a language or a variety of a language and the rights of those who use it.

Corpus planning seeks to develop a variety of a language or a language, usually to standardize it, that is, to provide it with the means for serving every possible language function in society.

Cobbarrubias (1983) has described four typical ideologies that may motivate actual decision-making  in language planning in a particular society : these are linguistic assimilation, linguistic pluralism , vernacularization, and internationalism.

As a result of planning decision a language can achieve one of a variety of statuses (kloss, 1968). A language may be recognized as the sole official language, as french is in france or english in the united kingdom or the United Status.

Planning decisions will obviously play a very large role in determining what happens to any minority language or languages in a country (cobbarrubias, 1983, pp. 71-30).

Two other issues are worthy of comment.

-          The first has to do with what language rights immigrants to a country should have an era of widespread immigration motivated by a variety of concerns but within a system of states which often equates statehood or nationhood with language and sometimes  with ethnicity.

-          The second issues concerns the problem of identifying the right kinds of data that must go into planning dicisions. Planning must be based on the good information, but the kinds of information that often go into planning decisions are not always completely reliable.

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B.  Variety Of Situations

A variety of linguistic situations in the world to see some instances of planning.

-          Franceserves as a good example of a country which has a single national language and does little or nothing for any other language. Most French simply assume that French is the language of France. Consequently they virtually ignore other languages so that there is little national interest in any to try to ascertain exactly how many people speak Provencal or Breton or to do anything for, or againts, Basque.

-          In spain the recent revival of Catalan is of interest. The Catalans have had a long and proud history, traditionally regarding themselves as more prosperous and progressive than the Castilians and constantly having to assert themselves to see that they were not exploited.

-          Yugoslaviais a country which three official language: Serbo-Croation, Slovenian, and Macedonian.

-          Macedonianis recognized as one of Yugoslavia’s three official languages because such recognition gives the Macedonians a status in Yugoslavia that they do not have in either Greece or Bulgaria.

-          Turkeyprovedes a good example of very deliberate language planning designed to achieve certain national objectives and to do this very quickly. When Ataturk (ata ’father’), the ‘father of the Turks’, established the modern republic  of  Turkey, he was confronted with the task of modernizing the language.

In the 1930s Ataturk promoted further move a way from Arabic and Persian in the development of the new vocabulary that the language required in order to meet the need of science and technology.

In addition, the Cyrillic script has been extended to nearly all the language of the Soviet Union. This orthography has helped further to cut off the Muslim peoples of central Asia from contact with Arabic, Turkish, and Persian influences.

-          Finlandis a very close, and sometimes uncomfortable, neightbor of both the Soviet Union (previously Imperial Russia) and Sweden.

One important consequence is that the new state of Africa and Asia are often multilingual but, as the result of their histories; have elites who speak an European language such as English and French. This language not only serves many as an internal working language but is also still regarded as the language of mobility.

An attempt is sometimes made to find a ‘neutral’ language, that is, a language which is not English and which gives no group an advantage. In 1974 President Kenyatta of Kenya decreed that swahili was to become the language of the country.

-          Indianis another country which has had to face similar problems. In this case the solution has been to promote Hindi in Devanagari script as the official language that unites the state, but more than a dozen other language, including sanskrit, are recognized in various ways in the nation’s constitution.

Fishman (1981) has pointed out that Americans have adopted a purely pragmatic approach to English ; it is something to be used rather than something to take pride in.

As Fishman observes (p. s17), The greatest Americanlinguistic investment by far has been in the Anglification of its millions of immigrant and indigenous speskers of other language. The Bilingual Education Act, he insists, was primarily an act for the Anglification  of non-English spekers and not an act for bilingualism.

Bilingulism is seen as potentialiy divisive in the United States, as Quebecization’ or ‘Balkanization’, in fishman’s words. Billingual education , therefore, is expediency.

C. Some Further Examples

a). The firs example is Papua New Guinea, a nation of 700 or more indigenous some, possibly more than athird, with fewer than 500 speakers, and this in a total population of approximately 2 million. Papua New Guenia has three official languages which are all second languages to the wast majority of its people, Hiri Motu, Neo-Melanisean, and English.

Noe-Melanisian is a pidgin-based language; conseguently, it mist be developed to meet the various new needs it must serve. Such growth is not without its difficulties. One particular development that has met with negative reaction from a number of linguists is that, for pragmatic reasons, vocabulary expansion has taken place through large-scale borrowing from English, rather than through the exploitation  of native resourcses.

Neo-Malanisian  has also developed a number of-sub-varietiies, particularly in urban arcas, so that it is now not as uniform as it once was. There is some risk that, with cut a deliberate effort to standardize the language, it will not remain as efficient a lingua franca as it has been. Deliberate language planning rather than id hoe developments seem increasingly necessary.

Hiri Motu is the other pidgin-based official language of Papua New Gulnea. It is identified with papua. Marry people there take great pride in using Hirl Motu, the descendant of Police Mutu, a native-based, pidgin language of the area, rather than Neo-Malanesian to show local loyalties.

b).Second example is Singapore, an independent republic of over 2 million people (see Kue,1977). It si also a small island, situated at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula with another large Malay-speaking nation, Indonesia, to its south. Its population is approximately  76 percent other, e.g., Eurasian, Europeans, and Arabs. Five major language spoken in Singapore (Malay, English, Mandarin, Tamil and Hokkien).

The four official language, Malay is also the national language because of the Singapore’s position in the Malay world, not because more people in Singapore speak or understand Malay better than any other language.

This multilingualism is particularly prevalent in the younger generation, and, since Singapore is also a country with a large proportion of young people in its population, it is likely  to be a change that will accelerate. A survey of 15 to 20-year-olds in 1975 showed them able to understand the major languages as follows: English (87.3 percen), Malay (50.3 percent), Mandarin (72.5 percent), Hokkien (74.0 percent), and Tamil (5.8 percent). A comparison across age-groups showed that young people had a much better knowledge (i.e., understanding) of English and Mandarin than old people, but only a slightly better knowledge of Hokkien, and much less knowledge of Malay and Tamil.

The language policies pursued by government of Singapore are not without certain difficulties because they are allied to a policy.

c). The third example is also that of a small country, this time one with a population of about 4 million people who are faced with the problem of reconciling an internal linguistic split. Modern Norway with its two varicties of one language, or its two language in some views, ha some particularly interesting problems so far as planning is concerned.

We can see the similarities in the two language from the following sentence (and their gloss) taken from Haugen (1968, pp. 686-7):

Nynorsk : Det rette heimlege mal I landet er det som landets folk har arva ifra forfedrence, ira den eine retta til den andre, og som no om stunder, trass I all fortrengsle og  vanverned, enna har grunnlag og emne tile it bokmal, like sa godtsom nook av grannfolk-mala.

Bokmal:Det rette heimlege mal I landet er det som landets folk har aevet ifra forfedrence, ira den ene aett til den andre, og som na om stunder, trass I all fortrengsle og vanvonad, ena gar grunnlag og emne til et bokmal, like sa godt som noe av nabo-malene.

d).The fourth of example of language planning is Canada, a country of more than 24 million people (1981 consus figure), which is now, by its new constitution of 1982, a constitutionally bilingual country.

In 1867 the French in Canada seemed assured of opportunities to spread their language and culture throughout the country.

The Canadian government appointed a Royal  Commision on Billingualism and Bilculturaliam in 1963 to look into the resulting situation. The commision’s report led so the Official Language Act of 1969, which guaranteed the French in Canada certain right to language everywhere in the country in order to preserve the nation as a billingul one.

e). Our final example is China, a nation with over a billion inhabitants. Fight different varities  of Chinese, Hanyu (the ‘Han’ language) are spoken. Linguists call these eight different  varieties ‘language’, but Chinese themselves prefer to call them different dialects (fang yang) because of the writing aystem they share. Among those who speak Hanyu, the following percentages are said to speak these varieties: Mandarin 71 percent, Southern Min (fukienese) 3 percent, Xiang 5 percent, Cantonese 5 percent, Hakka 4 percent, Southern Min (fukienese) 3 percent, Gan 2 percent, and Northern Min (fukienese) 1 percent. At present there are plants to change Chinese in there ways:

- The first is to simplify Chinese characters.

- The second is to popularize the Beijing variety of Mandarin.

- The third is to develop a phonetic alphabet.

The simplification of the estimated 7.000-8.000 Chinese characters has been given top priority. The goal is to simplify about half of the character.

The phoneticization of Chinese writing is concerned, that is, the development of an alphabetic writing system, the current use of Pinyin is merely the latest in series of attempts to restructure Chinese writing in this way: there was a proposal for a National Phonetic Alphabet in 1913.Pinying is now used as an aid in learning Chinese characters, in certain dictionaries, and in the orthographies for several previously unwritten minority language.