DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

ENG 407: LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

TOPIC: LANGUAGE PLANNING AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Language is very important in human society and its development, and as such must be properly

planned for. It is not out of place to have a policy for language and to plan towards making the

policy work. Language policy is a government principle expressed on the languages available in

a nation as to their use. This leads to planning for them. Language planning, on the other hand, is

a conscious effort geared towards influencing the function, structure, acquisition and learning of

languages or a language variety within a speech community. It is usually associated with

government planning, but it is also used by a variety of non-governmental organizations such as

grassroots organizations and even individuals. According to Matthews (2005:199) language

planning is:

Any attempt by a government, etc, to favour one language, or one

form of a language, over another. This includes, e.g., the choice of an

official language for a country or province; the official development of

a standard form; the promotion by an academy or other body of native

terms to be used in place of loan words.

It is to be noted that government, legal and educational bodies in many countries have to plan

which varieties of the languages spoken in the country are to be used for official business.
Still on the concept of language planning, Akindele and Adegbite (1999:74) say it is “…a set of

deliberate activities systematically designed to select from, organize and develop the language

resources for national development”. In a way, language planning is any systematic activity by

government or any designed body to harness the linguistic resources available or the purpose of

unity required for sustainable national development.

There are many reasons why a nation’s government has to engage in language planning. The

following, therefore, are the goals of for language planning in any nation, according to Nahir

(2003):

a. Language purification: This is a prescriptive enterprise toput forward a usage so that

linguistic purity can be preserved to protect languages from foreign influences and guard

against linguistic deviation.

b. Language revival: This geared towards turning a language with few or no surviving

native speakers back into a normal means of communication.

c. Language reform: This is a conscious change in specific aspects of language, like

orthography, spelling, or grammar so that usage can be facilitated.

d. Language standardization: This is an attempt to garner prestige for a regional language or

dialect, so that it can be transformed into one that is acceptable as a major language, or

standard regional language.

e. Language spread/expansion: This I an attempt to increase the number of speakers of or

expand the scope of use of one language at the expense or even to the detriment of others.
 f. Lexical modernization: this is an aspect of language planning that relates to word creation

or adaptation to meet the requirements of the present.

g. Unification of terminology: This relates to development of unified terminologies,

especially in technical domains. This is done to ensure uniformity for comprehension.

h. Stylistic simplification: This has to do with simplification of language usage in the areas

of lexicon, grammar and style. This includes modifying the use of language in social and

formal contexts.

i. Interlingua communication: This helps to enhance facilitation of linguistic

communication among members of distinct speech communities. This is how a lingual

franca, i.e. a language which is used as a means of communication among people who do

not share the same language evolves.

j. Language maintenance: In this case, language planning helps to preserve the use of a

group’s native language as a first or second language where there are pressures

threatening or causing a decline in the status of the language. This is particularly the

reason for language planning in multilingual nations.

As an attempt to interfere deliberately with a language or one of its varieties, language planning

may focus on either its status with regard to some other language or variety or its internal

condition with a view to changing that condition, or on both of these since they are not mutually

exclusive. The first focus results in status planning; the second results in corpus planning.

From the above, it is obvious that there are different forms of language planning as indicated

below.
1. Status Planning: Language planning, which involves status planning is required in

counties that are faced with the problem of having to select a national language or

languages and, subsequently, of developing and standardizing it. Status planning occurs

in a situation where and when the functions of a language or variety of it changes thus

affecting the rights of people that use it. An example is a situation when speakers of a

minority language are denied the use of that language to educate their children, thereby

degrading the status of the language. Language status is a concept distinct from, but

nonetheless intertwined with language prestige and language function. Strictly speaking,

language statue is the position or standing of a language vis-à-vis other languages.

2. Corpus Planning: This involves a prescriptive intervention in the forms of a language or

a variety of it in which planning decisions to engineer changes in the structure of the

language are made. The essence of corpus planning is to develop a variety of a language

or a language with a view to standardizing it, that is, to provide it with the means for

serving every possible language function in the society.

Corpus planning which involves graphisation, standardization and modernization is

usually undertaken by planners with linguistic expertise, unlike status planning that is

undertaken by administrators and politicians. Thus, corpus planning may involve such

matters as the development of an orthography (graphisation), new sources of vocabulary,

dictionaries, and literature, together with the deliberate cultivation of new uses so that the

language may extend its use into such areas as government, education and trade.

It should be noted that the two types of planning often co-occur, because many planning

decisions involve some combination of a change in status with internal change. It is

other languages are affected, whether or not the effects are recognized officially.