Approaches to language planning and policy
Written by Abduljalil on Saturday, August 02, 2008The top-down and bottom-up approaches to language planning and policy.
Top-down language planning is related to people with power and authority who make language related decisions for groups.
Buldauf (1982) was the first to point out explicitly that who planners were was potentially an important variable in language planning and language policy.
Most of the traditional participants in language policy and planning have come from what Kaplan (1989) refers to as top-down language planning and policy. In general, language planning has been portrayed as being done from within an objective, ideologically neutral.
Example: An overview of language-in-education planning in Malaysia. Omer 1982, 1995), Malaysian language was unplanned. Malay spoke different dialects in different geographical region while Koranic Arabic was used for religious purposes.
Before and during the colonial period, there was no clear language policy in Malaysia. Language planners were mainly individuals of communities making their language decision. After independence in 1957, Malay increasingly being promoted. In 1967 there was a strict and rapid implementation of a national language policy.
Indonesian independent language planning built on the top-down language planning, and the national language council was set up in 1947. Indonesian corpus planning was a classic top-down operation, typical of the technocratic 1960s and 1970s ( cited in Wright 2004).
As language policy development and planning implementation is complex, it is often the case that a large number of people are involved.
Examples of class (the British colonial policy), state (National language act), agency power (Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka), migrant language rights (Chinese and Tamil)..
The monolingual policy was done by bureaucrats, consultants, community learners and politicians.
Once the hard political decisions were made, language, language planning became mainly the responsibility of the linguists and bureaucrats in the national language planning agency, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, and the planners and administrators in the educational system.
References
Gill 2002, International communication: English language challenges for Malaysia.
Kaplan 1997, language planning from practice to theory.
Poon 2004, Language policy of Hong Kong: Its impact on language education and language use in post-handover Hong Kong
Spolsky 1998, Sociolinguistics
Wright 2004, language policy and language Planning
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