Language Policy and Planning

Key concepts in language planning and policy

A) Status planning:
In a situation where there are seen to be two or more languages available, any attempt to set up norms or rules when to use each is called status planning.
A decision to make one language official, or to ban another from use in school, or to conduct church services in a third, are cases of status planning. For example, the situation of Malay as the official language for Malaysia after the independence. (Spolsky 1998).

Status planning concerns itself with the choice of the varieties that will become the official language(s) of a state, in particular the medium of its institutions. Indonesian language was stated to be one of the key means of achieving the national unity. Other languages of Indonesia were guaranteed respect. (Wright 2004).

Status planning can be defined as those aspects of language planning which reflect primarily social issues and concerns and hence are external to the language(s) being planned. Language selection and language implementation are the two status issues. The attempts to modify the environment in which a language is used are related to status planning (Kaplan 1997).

B) Corpus planning:
It refers to any effort to fix or modify the structure of an official language. The coining of new terminology for languages coping with modernization, or the Young Turk policy to remove Arabic words from Turkish, or the French efforts to rid the language of English words, or the Dutch Decisions to change spelling, are all cases of corpus planning (Spolsky 1998).

Wright (2004) states that corpus planning has a number of overlapping aims: to differentiate the national language from the other national groups to make group boundaries, and to minimize variations in form and function or to minimize misunderstanding and maximizing efficiency.

Corpus planning can be defined as those aspects of language planning which are primarily linguistic and hence internal to language. Some of the aspects related to language are: orthographic innovation, pronunciation, changes in language structure, vocabulary expansion, simplification of registers, styles, and the preparation of language material. The attempts to modify language itself are related to corpus planning. (Kaplan 1997).

C) Prestige planning:
Prestige language Franca refers to a language acquired because it permits access to new ideas, to prestigious culture and to useful invention (Wright 2004).

Haarmann (1990) argues that prestige planning represents a separate range of activities. Whereas corpus and status planning are productive activities, prestige planning is a receptive or value function which influences how corpus and status planning activities are acted upon by actors and received by people.
Haarmann 1990 Language Planning Model
An Ideal typology of language cultivation and language planning (Haarmann 1990). Four prestige levels; that are individual promotion, pressure group promotion, institutional promotion, and official promotion. (cited in Kaplan 1997)

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