IS LANGUAGE POLICY APPLIED LINGUISTICS?

What is Applied Linguistics?

Linguists are mainly interested in the nature and structure of language. It is

completely autonomous and connected to the outside world only because it is
located inside the brain of human beings. The field of language teaching presents
much the same picture. The approaches to language teaching emphasis on
grammar and reveal the direct influence of changes in grammatical theory, the
relationship is generally more indirect.

Language learners have suffered through lessons in formal, structural, or

transformational grammar without any way improving their competence in
language use. Language might benefit from applying theories and knowledge
derived from the scientific study of language, namely linguistics.

A major gap in international communication could be met by machine

translation, it was natural to draw on current theories of language to attempt to
build translation devices. The developments in machine translation have included
using human assistance, building tools to help human translators, training people
to write translatable texts and building programs that allow correction of and
learning from erroneous output.

The case of machine translation models the relationship between linguistics and
its applied fields. Knowledge developed by the scientific study of language turns
out to be useful and relevant to the applied field, but direct application is rare, and
limited to specific areas.

Language Policy: Beginnings

Language policy as a field of study grew in a similar way. Early on, linguistics
had been shown to be relevant to language management activities such as
orthography development and language standardization: Panini with Sanskrit
grammar and the medieval Arabic grammarians applied their linguistic knowledge
to the preservation of classical sacred texts.
Language education policies are commonly inconsistent with national language
policies and they regularly exist in the absence of an explicit national policy.
Perhaps one of the principal tasks of language policy scholars is to clarify the lack
of fit between language education and language policy.

Language Policy

Language policy is a paradigmatic example of applied linguistics, it must draw on

a range of academic fields to develop practical plans to modify language practices
and beliefs. The case in this analysis, it is possible to recognize a number of stages
in the historical progression.

Language Guardians And Reformers

The general sphere of language policy was probably linguists and grammarians
turned language reformers. Cultivation is a term coined in English to translate the
term Sprachkultur. Cultivation deals with establishing and modifying the norms of
a literary or standard language. The main problems concerning the norms of the
literary language are ‘flexible stability’ and ‘functional differentiation.

Language Planning Experts

Cultivation might do for European languages with literary traditions, but the
problems faced by the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. The
second category of linguists, labeled the language planning experts, consisted of
an international cluster of young scholars who developed the American School of
language planning. Task as understanding the nature of language policy, a concern
that led them to be among the founders of the field of sociolinguistics.

Language Rights Activists

There has a new group that might be labeled language policy experts or language
rights activists. Among these are scholars who started by describing some of the
complex and damaging effects on minority and indigenous groups of what they
labeled imperialist language policies, went on to develop arguments based on
theories of linguistic and human rights, and the need to preserve linguistic
diversity.
Protectors Of Endangered Languages

People may be satisfied with developing a grammar and a dictionary of the

threatened language to preserve knowledge for linguistic science. It often become
involved in other management activities, such as the development of a writing
system, the teaching of the language to children and other members of the ethnic
group, and the collection of cultural materials written in the language.

Missionary Linguists

Missionaries had a major influence on the diffusion of writing systems and the
standardization of countless languages. In the largest number of cases, these
activities included the development of alphabets, the translation of the Bible and
other religious texts, and the teaching of literacy, with the Summer Institute of
Linguistics being a major force in this area.

Government Language Managers

The linguists working in various official national or supranational language

agencies and responsible for a range of language management activities: preparing
and implementing laws and regulations, developing and publishing terminological
innovations, studying and improving language maintenance programs, or
publicizing and supporting language revival activities.

Language Policy Scholars

The final category consists of those fundamental interest is in the nature and
process of language policy, spending their time collecting and publishing
empirical evidence that characterizes the field and developing theoretical models
to account for what appears to happen in it. They are starting to build on the work
of scholars in the other categories to create an emerging model of the complexity
of language policy.
 LANGUAGE POLICY AND PLANNING

Language Decision-Makers

Informal sense of language decisionmaking with more conscious efforts to modify

and regulate the way others use language, including stipulations concerning the
languages and varieties that are privileged, permitted, discouraged and even
forbidden in settings such as schools, courts of law, hospitals, government offices
and other institutions and workplaces.

Language decision-makers include teachers, textbook writers and material

developers, language therapists, lexicographers and translators. Language
professionals may not consider themselves language planners, we argue that their
decisions about language and the actions, take based upon such decisions are
examples of language planning in action. The language decision-making considers
the work of applied linguists whose work is explicitly aimed at formulating and
implementing language policy and at monitoring the outcomes of language plans
and policies.

Language Policy, Language Planning And Language Practices

The real language policy of a community is more likely to be found in its

practices than in its management. A hierarchy in which actors with diverse and
sometimes competing interests do language planning work at one or more of three
different levels. A significant challenge for language policy and planning efforts is
that policy, planning and practices are seldom in neat alignment.

Language Planning Orientations

Language orientations refers to the idea that language planning efforts of all types
can be characterized as approaching language from one or more of three primary
stances: language as problem, language as right and language as resource.
Conflicts in orientation can explain why language policy and plans are so difficult
to implement.

The Chinese language planners who made Mandarin Chinese and Putonghua
script obligatory in school presumably viewed both the spoken language and the
written script as useful resources for all students. In contrast, as Ruiz and many
others have since noted, while dominant languages of wider communication
(LWC) tend to be viewed, including by many speakers of minority languages, as
resources, minority languages are often regarded as problems.

Language of wider communication (LWC) refers to a language or variety that is

used across communities and regions. The term is completely relative and context
dependent, of course; Kiswahili is an LWC in East Africa, but not in Asia or
Europe. Similar to lingua franca.

Implicit And Explicit Language Policies

Policy decisions to support Tigrinya as the language of instruction from primary

school have unplanned consequence of reducing teaching in other regional
languages. An example of an explicit language policy in a professional sphere
comes from a statement by the International Association of Schools of Social
Work.

IASSW is a member organisation which is open to all social work educational

programmes from all over the world. Therefore its aim is to practise an inclusive
language policy, and refrain from becoming an elite organisation dominated by
member institutions from the Western world. The language policy and practise is
an important factor for deciding whether this is an attractive organisation for a
global target.

In practice, IASSW’s language policy supports four languages of publication and

presentation, English, French, Spanish and Japanese. The Association’s language
policy continues:

To make sure a real exchange is taking place and that people from various
cultures and language groups have fair opportunities, we need to organise our
congresses and meetings in ways so that not the same people are always in an
inferior position. Thus, sometimes minority languages might even become
dominant ones. People from the dominating languages may have to realise that
international communication is a challenge for all of us.
Corpus, Status And Acquisition Planning

Corpus planning is the attempt to modify the code itself, including the
development of terms for new technologies, processes and services. Technology is
not the only engine driving the generation of new words.

Status planning refers to efforts to increase or decrease the perceived status or

prestige of a language in a given sphere, for non-linguistic purposes. In the case of
the larger languages, status planning is generally conducted by government
agencies.

Covert prestige is a term describing instances in which language pride goes

underground due to social pressures.

An example of status planning on a more local scale is the decision by a bilingual

school to conduct its business in both languages or to privilege the minority
language in ways that are not normally seen outside school.

Acquisition Planning

Acquisition planning involves direct instruction, independent language study and

other efforts to motivate people to acquire or learn a particular language or
variety. Language acquisition planning (LAP) describes efforts to promote the
acquisition of additional languages. Cooper (1989) describes the careful planning
and extensive financial and human resources devoted to the delivery of Hebrew
language classes for new immigrants in Israel.

The term language-in-education planning is sometimes used to describe

language decisions that take place in educational settings but are not primarily
aimed at language acquisition. Regardless of the language of instruction, the
decision to base assessment of student learning on student writing vs performance
on multiple-choice tests is one example of language-in-education planning.
Keeping Languages Alive

Language vitality, maintenance and revitalization

Language vitality is a construct used by language planners to gauge the long-term

health of a language or variety. Although there are many ways to operationalize
this construct, the central feature concerns the transmission of a language from
one generation to the next.

Language maintenance implies a focus on keeping a language vital within a given

speech community or region. This term is sometimes used to describe bilingual
education programmes that aim for learners to retain or further develop their home
language.

Evaluating Language Maintenance Efforts

Language shift refers to the process in which speakers, individually or

collectively, abandon one language in favour of another. Language planning
efforts have been critiqued for assuming a rational model of language decision-
making. It is for projecting language policy outcomes on the assumption that
people would make language choices and support policies that were in their own
economic and other interests.

PLANNING FOR ACCESS TO SERVICES

This brings us to another vital aspect of planning for access to services: translation
and interpreting. The importance of translation in the European Parliament and the
limited role professional translators are allowed to play in the translation process.
Translators often work through translations rather than from original documents in
the source language.

LANGUAGE POLICY AND PLANNING IN GLOBALIZING TIMES

Critical language planning involves questioning the social causes and

ramifications of language plans and policies and their implementation. Critical
applied linguistics generally, language planning from a critical perspective means
asking why and in whose interests decisions about language are made.
Language Planning And Poverty

Conditions of poverty can indeed truncate or otherwise limit our exposure to

certain experiences and discourses, making it more difficult to develop academic
literacy. It’s an oversimplification to see economic status as inevitably associated
with linguistic deficit. Linguistic deficit is a fictional creature that has been the
subject of much discussion and lament by nonlinguists, particularly when applied
to the language abilities of children from marginalized groups.

Language Planning And Immigration

Immigration policy are the use of language analysis to determine national origin
and language testing to manage immigrant numbers. Immigrant policy, which
includes language classes, access to services and naturalization is the site of more
applied linguistic work. Linguistic landscapes are visual representations of
language use in a community. The concept of linguistic landscape (LL) as an
emerging methodological and conceptual approach for understanding how
migrants contribute to language use in their adopted communities.