291 55 7MB
English Pages 296 Year 1977
Language Planning Processes
Contributions to the Sociology of Language
21
Editor
Joshua A. Fishman
MOUTON PUBLISHERS • THE H A G U E · PARIS · NEW YORK
Language Planning Processes
Edited by
Joan Rubin Björn H. Jernudd Jyotirindra Das Gupta Joshua A. Fishman and Charles A. Ferguson
MOUTON PUBLISHERS · THE H A G U E · PARIS · NEW YORK
ISBN 90 279 7714 3 © 1977, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands Jacket design by Jurriaan Schrofer Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge
To a new generation of language planners and language planning researchers, many of whose members were of inestimable help to us in the preparation of this volume.
Contents
PART ONE: L A N G U A G E PLANNING: AND APPROACH
CONTEXT
1
Problems of Language Planning J. Das Gupta and C. A. Ferguson
2
Sociolinguistic Settings of Language Planning C. A. Ferguson
3
Comparative Study of Language Planning: Introducing a Survey J. A. Fishman
4
Prerequisites for a Model of Language Treatment Β. H. Jernudd
PART TWO: L A N G U A G E P L A N N I N G AND ORGANIZATIONS
SYSTEMS
5
Language Planning in India : Authority and Organization J. Das Gupta
6
Language Planning in Israel: Solving Terminological Problems J. Fellman and J. A. Fishman
7
The Hebrew Academy : Orientation and Operation J. Fellman
8
Indonesian Language Planning and Education J. Rubin
9
Agency Man Β. H. Jernudd
vin
Contents
PART THREE: PRODUCTS, PUBLICS AND PLANNING 10 Three Language Planning Agencies and Three Swedish Newspapers B. H. Jernudd
143
11 Hebrew Language Planning and the Public J. Fellman
151
12 Language Standardization in Indonesia J. Rubin
157
13 Language Associations in India J. Das Gupta
181
PART FOUR: COMPARATIVE DIMENSIONS 14 Selected Dimensions of Language Planning: A Comparative Analysis J. A. Fishman
195
15 Linguistic Sources for Terminological Innovation: Policy and Opinion B. H. Jernudd
215
16 Textbook Writers and Language Planning J. Rubin
237
17 National Language Planning in China D. Barnes
255
A cknowledgments
Y1S
Index
279
PART I
Language Planning : Context and Approach
JYOTIRINDRA DAS GUPTA and CHARLES A. FERGUSON
1
Problems of Language Planning
The use of planning for developing a nation's income and welfare has become almost a matter of necessity in the case of the new states. The recognition of this necessity for planned development of national resources is not limited to the internal leadership alone. International organizations and scholars have gradually come to recognize the need for planned development to such an extent that the old liberal suspicion of planning has often given way to a technocratic confidence in the promise of rational planning. Paradoxically, interest in planning keeps growing while the international evaluation of the experience of the two developmental decades indicates a rather dismal record. It is now apparent that the developmental dialogue has shifted from the debate on the case for planning to a consideration of the quality, coverage and social effectiveness of planning. As planning gains wide acceptance, and as it is increasingly used in areas ranging from the conventional areas of material resources to the non-conventional areas of human resources, including communication and culture, problems of planning become more complex. The increasing order of this complexity will be more apparent if we draw a distinction between plan-making and planning, and then relate these two categories to the specified activities involved in each. Making a plan may mean either the setting of targets or analyzing the optimality of the targets set forth in earlier declarations, investigating the possibility of realizing the targets and evaluating the effectiveness of the programs and projects contained in the plan. Evidently, one part of the business of planning is intellectual, and the controversies concerning each of these steps will be more resolvable as the area of planning consists of materials which are readily identifiable, quantifiable and subject to agreed principles of accounting. Economic planning, whether national, sectoral, regional or corporate, would appear to be the area of planning closest to this call, though the internal disagreement in the literature tends to considerably discount the consensus that outsiders bestow on the field. Recent literature on
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planning for national economic development suggests that the elegance of economic planning models tends to wear off as planning is addressed to the welfare, equity and ecological objectives in addition to the income variables. If this is the situation with respect to plan-making, one can imagine the order of problems of economic planning in practice when one considers the much wider perspective which includes the pre-plan politics of target setting, the political premises incorporated in the plan and the organizational processes which make a plan work. This is a way of saying that plan-making must be distinguished from planning, and to do so is to realize that even the most rigorous literature on planning is addressed more to the intellectual task of plan-making than to the problems involved in the processes of planning. Language planning is a latecomer to the family of national development planning. Although deliberate attempts to change or preserve languages and their use may be as old as economic policy making efforts in human societies, and thus long antedate the modern concept of planning, it is only very recently that these activities in the language area have been recognized as an aspect of national planning which can be investigated with the same conceptual tools that are appropriate for general development planning. Experience tells us that national planning involving language has been a part of general development planning, and the interdependency between the programs of developing language, education, communication and the economy needs to be considered in a systematic way. And yet, language planning can be identified separately, if we direct our attention to those planned activities which attend to the valuation of language resources, the assignment of preferences to one or more languages and their functional ordering, and developing the language resources and their use in a manner consistent with the declared objectives identified as planned targets. Just as economic planning is merely one among many measures by which an economy develops, language planning too does not exhaustively account for the developments recorded in the language situation. As in other spheres of planning, the span of planned intervention, control and effectiveness depends on the type of planning envisaged and practiced, and it is important to distinguish between the output of planned development, its secondary effects and the effects generated by other sources. Planning for national development, in practice, may be limited to indicative or inducive varieties or may be extended to comprehensive command systems. In any case, the responsibility for planning is normally assumed by national political authorities who then decide the particular type of planning which is likely to serve the needs of specific policy areas. It is conceivable that a political authority may opt for a compre-
Problems of Language Planning
5
hensive, command-oriented, centralized planning for industrialization and yet settle for a softer course in language planning. On the other hand, planning in a competitive economy may be partial, inducement-oriented and decentralized in many sectors but may follow a hard line in, for example, the national defense sector. In other words, multiple modes of planning are possible within the same society under the overall guidance of the same national political authority. Studies of planning in specific policy areas, language planning for example, thus need a careful elaboration of the area concerned, its place in the overall system of national planning, and its distinguishing features compared to those pursued in other policy areas. Abstract discussions of language planning may contend about norms, authorities, proprieties and ideal mechanisms but these will not settle questions regarding how languages are actually planned, producing what outcomes, using which instruments, in which domains of practice. A beginning has been made in this direction by the international research project on language planning which forms the basis of the present volume. The project surveyed selected aspects of the authorities, processes and products, and the reception of these products by various target populations in Indonesia, Israel, India and Sweden. For the purposes of this project, we chose to limit our attention to national level planning conducted under governmental auspices where planning includes indicative, regulative, productive and promotional functions. The indicative aspect of language planning consists of assessing the language situation in terms of social developmental requirements and prescribing certain courses of change. The regulative aspect calls for authoritative action in the form of public measures accompanied by sanctions for encouraging specific uses of selected languages for defined domains. The productive aspect attends to the task of developing the capacity of a language to cope with the increasing demands likely to be made on it from the defined domains. In order to make sure that the planned investments for developing and regulating language produce the intended results, planning authorities are likely to engage in active promotion of the products and standards among the potential user publics, including the administrative, educational, news media and other modes of language use. These four aspects of language planning merely indicate the outlines of functions intended and performed which can be readily identified in empirical cases. Once the planning functions are identified, one can search for the variation in the sociolinguistic settings, planning objectives, policy systems and processes, strategies of implementation directed to the increment of product and its use, and the orientation of the policy-publics, to account for the variation in the outcome of planning.
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This is a tall order. More so, because, unlike the field of economic or regional planning, neither the pre-theoretic formulations nor the empirical information inventories in the field of language planning can offer a confident point of departure for such a complicated research enterprise. When we made our move to study language planning in different settings, we were aware of these difficulties. We realized that we were about to explore processes of planning which required bold charting of steps unassisted by research precedence. Given the novelty of the enterprise, it was not easy to make a confident assessment of the boundaries of strict relevance in advance and yet we had to go by certain assumptions without which research could not proceed at all. How we made our moves in different stages of our inquiry is reported in Joshua Fishman's paper in this section (Chapter 3). It is important to note here that we assumed that language planning at the national level can best be studied by limiting the initial research attention to the authoritative measures taken by the public policy makers addressed to one officially designated language in each country. Our second assumption was that it is possible to identify selectively a set of target populations defined in terms of their expected active role in using the products of planning in such specified sectors as administration, education and general communication which can serve as indicators of the effectiveness of language planning. We also assumed that successful language planning, or degrees of it, can be understood in terms of the efficacy of planned policy measures as well as the target populations' propensity to comply with the public policies pertaining to language planning. These two aspects are obviously related, for how a governing mechanism generates adequate support and compliance for its policies is a measure of what it can get done in an authoritative manner. However, we did not assume that the public is a mere receiver of the products of policies. The active involvement of various segments of publics, whether organized or not, was investigated through our survey instruments and documentary research. The papers presented in this volume mainly contain selected reports of our research in the four countries, Indonesia, Israel, India and Sweden. A common research design was used in our survey of the first three countries while a selective collection of data was used for Sweden as a partial test case. A paper on language planning in China, which shares most of the concerns of our project, was added to enrich our understanding of a highly interesting planning experiment conducted in a significantly different setting. The volume as such should be read as a partial account of our findings and we expect to present further reports in other publications.
Problems of Language Planning
7
This volume is divided into four parts. The objective of the first part is to place the concept of language planning in the general context of planned development, to provide an analysis of the sociolinguistic settings of language planning of the countries surveyed, and to present the basic outline of the design of our research project and how the study developed from phase to phase. The second part contains studies of planning systems and organizations, their functions in specific settings and their operational processes and problems. How the products of planning reach the publics, the relation of the publics and planning, problems of standardization and the role of voluntary associations in the process of planning are analyzed in the third part. The fourth part presents comparative analyses of the survey data and a case study of Chinese language planning. Comparative studies of language planning using empirical evidence based on field research need considerable extension beyond what our exploratory study has achieved. Extended research over more cases in point of space and time will offer more reliable knowledge concerning the conditions of successful language planning. While such a contribution to knowledge will have its place of pride in the intellectual disciplines converging to study language planning, it will also serve significantly to improve the actual practice of planning. Planning involves much more than coordinated direction and control. It is a continuous process of learning both from internal experience and external examples of relevance. This is where scholarly studies can be of immense practical value in addition to theoretical usefulness at general levels. On our part, we hope that what we have found in our initial exploration of language planning in four cases will be useful both for comparative analysis at a more general level and also for particular levels of policy practice.
CHARLES A. FERGUSON
2
Sociolinguistic Settings of Language Planning
All language planning activities take place in particular sociolinguistic settings, and the nature and scope of the planning can only be fully understood in relation to the settings. This paper will offer a discussion of the settings of the three languages and nations in which the international study of language planning processes was carried out: the Indonesian language in Indonesia, the Hindi language in India and the Hebrew language in Israel. Also, the study of language planning processes rests on a number of assumptions about the structure and use of languages in human societies ; before the sociolinguistic settings are discussed, two of these assumptions will be made explicit. First, all languages change in the course of time, and all speech communities change through time in respect to the functional allocations of the varieties of language used in them. Second, all users of language in all speech communities - speakers, hearers, readers, writers - evaluate the forms of the language(s) they use, in that they regard some forms as 'better' or 'more correct' or 'more appropriate' than others either in an absolute sense or for certain purposes or by particular people or in certain settings. Most of the change which takes place in languages and in the allocation of language functions in speech communities is apparently by unconscious processes, i.e., it takes place gradually and out of awareness of the language users themselves. Much of the change is, however, related to the users' evaluations, and in some instances conscious, deliberate attempts to affect the course of language change, either to foster innovation or to preserve the existing state, contribute to the processes of change, sometimes crucially. It is in this last realm of deliberate attempts to influence the course of change that the notion 'language planning' becomes a useful concept for the analysis and understanding of language change. The two assumptions of change and evaluation are so basic to the study of language planning that they merit some further clarification and exemplification.
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CHANGE
The two most obvious kinds of language change are changes in orthography, i.e., the accepted means of written representation of language in a community, and changes in lexicon, i.e., the stock of words and their meanings in a particular language or language variety. Changes in orthography may be relatively trivial ones such as the gradual shift from spelling -ogue to -og (e.g., dialogue > dialog) in American English or more systematic and pervasive changes such as the dropping of several letters and changing of spelling conventions carried out in Russian after the Revolution. Still more visible are changes in whole type styles or fonts such as the nineteenth and twentieth century replacement of the 'Gothic' or 'Fraktur' letter shapes by the roman shapes in German and Scandinavian languages. The most impressive of all is the creation or adoption of a totally different writing system, as when Turkey in the late 1920s exchanged Arabic script for the Latin alphabet and devised a totally new spelling system for Turkish. Changes in lexicon also range from isolated shifts of meaning in particular words all the way to massive replacement or additions in lexicon. For example, the word into in current American English of the last decade has had a new meaning added to it, something like 'interested in, concerned about, having some knowledge of or experience in' as in she's into ecology or he's into yoga. While this new meaning has spread rapidly and widely throughout the American English speech community, it seems to be linguistically isolated. On the other hand the great infusion of French- and Latin-based vocabulary into the English language which began in the eleventh century transformed the whole structure of the English lexicon. Changes in orthography and lexicon, as the most obvious types of language change and the most accessible to awareness and explicit discussion, have often been the focus of language planning, and in all the nations reported on in this book (Indonesia, India, Israel, Sweden, China) both orthography and lexicon have been the object of deliberate (governmental and non-governmental) efforts to affect the course of language change. Languages also change in pronunciation and grammar. These changes are on the whole less obvious and less accessible to the consciousness of language users, but they have traditionally been of greater interest for linguistic researchers who want to understand the 'natural' processes of language change and the 'universal' characteristics of human language. Correspondingly they have less often been the object of language planning, although some of the best known efforts at national language planning have specifically included these aspects of language.
Socialinguistic Settings of Language Planning
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American English shows many examples of ongoing changes in pronunciation (Labov 1972: 260-325). For example, the distinction between the vowel sounds of cot and caught is disappearing, i.e., more and more people are pronouncing the two words identically. It is not just a matter of these two words but dozens of similar pairs (hock: hawk; tot'.taught, taut) and hundreds of words which contain one or the other of the two vowels even though there is no exact pair (e.g., hot, cob, locker, bottle, Tommie as opposed to gawk, raucous, talker, McCawley). This change is taking place largely out of awareness and has relatively little evaluation associated with it. Two ongoing changes in pronunciation which have powerful evaluative associations are the dropping and adding of r after vowels (e.g., 'kahd' vs. card) and the use of d instead of the th sound in words such as the, this, then, etc. The dropping and reinserting of r are changes which occur in many parts of the English-speaking world, and almost always with social identification and evaluation, although not everywhere in the same direction (i.e., positive or negative). The change of th sounds to t or d has happened repeatedly in the Germanic languages (as well as in other languages in other parts of the world) and it is likely that English will eventually make this change; at the present time, however, the strong social evaluation against the change seems to be an important retarding factor. Such details of pronunciation may become the object of language planning, and among the most interesting questions of language planning research are under what conditions and to what extent such planning can be successful. The most obvious kind of change in the functional allocation of language^) in a speech community is that in which whole languages replace other languages for very general purposes, in the extreme case that of a monolingual community shifting its mother tongue. As a familiar example we can cite the changes in language allocations in England in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The distribution at the middle of the fourteenth century was, in general terms, English as the home speech, French as the language of parliament and the courts and Latin as the language of church, education and science. By the middle of the sixteenth century English had taken over most of the functions of the other two except for an important residue of Latin use in education and science (Jones 1953). In description of language change linguists are often able to base their work on descriptive grammars of a particular language at different periods of time. Also, linguists have accumulated enough information about processes of change that they may call on their theoretical principles for guidance in interpreting new data. In description of change in language
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allocation in speech communities the sociolinguist rarely has descriptions of the language situation of particular communities at particular periods of time (e.g., Clark 1956). Furthermore, so little systematic work has been done on the processes of change in language function that the investigator must draw chiefly on general social science principles or his own intuitions for guidance. Historical studies of change in language which focus on a community or an area rather than a language are rare (e.g., Pulgram 1958). At the present time the functional change which is most often the focus of political pressure and governmental policy making at the national level is probably the choice of medium of instruction in the educational system, and there can be little doubt that shifts in this allocation can have far-reaching consequences in the structure of the languages involved, in the patterns of communication in the nation, and in the broader political processes within which language policy decisions take place. In nations such as Indonesia and Tanzania where a minority language has become in many respects the dominant national language, an important factor in the shift was the use of Indonesian and Swahili respectively as the medium of education in the schools in the period preceding formal independence and the new official language policy. The importance of the school context must not be overestimated, however, since major shifts in language use may take place without support from the schools or even in opposition to educational policy. The spread of Swahili in Kenya and Hausa as a lingua franca in large areas of West Africa came about largely without benefit of national policies to use them in the schools. On the other hand, the school context is probably of crucial importance in the spread and acceptance of new technical vocabulary, and the studies reported in this volume are directed to the use of approved vocabulary by students and teachers and their attitudes towards the words and the approving authorities.
EVALUATION
The whole area of users' evaluations of language is of great importance for identifying language change but it has only rarely been treated in general terms, although some small pieces of the picture have been studied (Labov 1972: 308-17). A few of the main issues will be touched on here as background for discussion of language planning. 1 1. The term evaluation is used here in the informal linguistic sense in which Labov and others use it, not in the sense in which Rubin (1966) discusses it as a part of language planning processes.
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First, there is the general consideration that evaluation - like the processes of language change to which it contributes - may be either conscious or unconscious. A listener may rate speakers unconsciously by details of pronunciation and choice of words which he could not specify, or he may consciously listen for or comment on a particular form, construction or pronunciation of which he strongly approves or disapproves. Further, the relation between evaluation and actual behavior is complex. For example, the language user may strongly favor one variant although in his own speech he normally uses a different one. In the discussion which follows, these differences between unconscious and conscious evaluation and between conscious evaluation and actual behavior must be borne in mind. Evaluation may reflect such different realities as idealizations, stereotypes, completely unconscious, shared values or individual attitudes. One common type of evaluation consists of a unidimensional scale of linguistic phenomena, one end of which reflects the most careful use of language and the highest status in social stratification while the other end represents the most casual, unthinking use of language and the lowest strata in the system. The linguistic variation which is the object of the evaluation is typically also to be found in regional dialect variation, so that charting the path of change throughout the speech community will involve purely linguistic parameters (such as universal phonetic and semantic tendencies) as well as more sociological parameters such as group identification, social stratification, communication networks, and even the conditions of appropriateness for more and less careful speech. The attitudes toward the pronunciation of short a in American English provide an example of this kind of evaluation. The vowel of can't and similar words ranges along a continuum from the pronunciation represented as 'cahnt' to that of 'caint\ Linguists customarily recognize at least five common variants 2 and the variation correlates with geographical regions, social status, and degree of carefulness in speech. Pronunciations above what the listener regards as appropriate for the occasion are heard as affected, overcorrected, pedantic, or at best regionally marked; pronunciations below on the scale are heard as uneducated, substandard, backward, sloppy or at best as regionally marked. The details of the pronunciation are not explicitly understood by phonetically untrained 2. The variants are [kant, kant, ksnt,keant, kaeynt]. These broad transcriptions do not provide for variation in the degree of nasality (and corresponding weakening of the n), the duration of the vowel, or the alternate branching of the lower end which raises the vowel toward [kisnt]. For detailed discussion see Labov (1972: 73-5), Ferguson (1973), Labov, Yaeger and Steiner (1972).
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speakers, but the reality of the variation and the evaluation attached to it, in part consciously, is a fact of American English, and scales of this kind occur in many speech communities. Parallel to this kind of evaluation of variation within a single language is a pattern of evaluation of the use of a particular language variety or distinct language in a community. To take a very simple example, of the four languages used in the Gede Settlement Scheme area on the coast of Kenya, the scale runs English, Swahili, Giriama, Waata. In given situations, any member of the speech community tends to rate unfavorably the use of a language 'higher' or 'lower' on the scale than he finds appropriate for the occasion (Sedlak 1974). Needless to say, patterns of evaluation are often much more complicated than this simple unidimensional one, and in fact the examples cited here are presented in an oversimplified way in order to make the pattern clear. Patterns of evaluation in a particular speech community tend to be reflected in the goals and activities of its language planners. Instead of attempting to examine other patterns in this brief discussion, however, it is of greater interest to note the existence offoregrounding patterns which give an explicit social value to a particular characteristic or set of characteristics. In all speech communities, it may safely be assumed, the language users sometimes explicitly call attention to particular features of language structure or use as signals of group identity, disapproved behavior, objects of correction or other social values. Such foregrounded social markers in language are only a small fraction of the total amount of evaluation which pervades the whole use of language, but they may have special importance as indicators of trends and values, and they constitute the primitive source from which institutional language planning activities ultimately are derived. The best known example of a foregrounded social marker in language is probably the story of shibboleth in the Bible. The people of Gilead and the people of Ephraim spoke the same language, but their pronunciation of certain sibilants differed, and the Gileadites were able to make explicit use of this difference by the diagnostic word 'ear of corn' which they asked the Ephraimites to pronounce. According to the story (Judges 12: 4-6) thousands of fugitive Ephraimites were identified by their pronunciation of shibboleth and were killed. In this case the community's view of the social marker presumably reflected the facts of language behavior, and the consequences for the group identified were catastrophic. Often, however, social markers are not used with such drastic intentions, and also the belief about the markers may correspond only partially with the facts. Nevertheless, the potency of such markers in cueing attitudes and actions is great, and they not only contribute to the total picture of the processes
Sociolinguistic Settings of Language Planning
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of language change in the community, but they may become political issues or serve as symbols of deeper political ¿ssues. Some language evaluation is explained by members of the speech community in terms of particular reasons: e.g., such-and-such a form is better because it is consistent with other related forms, or is the original form, or just 'sounds better'. Such evaluation may be called rationalized evaluation. It is of importance here because most language planning involves such rationalized evaluation of language, and some theories of language planning are based entirely on it (e.g., Ray 1963, Tauli 1968; cf. Haugen 1966 for discussion). Three of the principal types of rationalized evaluation are the following, which may overlap or be at odds in particular instances : purity, beauty, efficiency. Purity Many evaluations of language are in the nature of valuing purity, much in the sense that ritual purity is valued in non-language aspects of human life. The language itself is felt to be somehow defiled if, for example, a foreign loanword is used instead of an expression from the language's own stock of words and means of word formation, and users of the language often express this kind of evaluation in such terms as 'preserve the purity of the language'. This kind of evaluation is, however, not limited to the issue of native vs. foreign, but may be applied to old vs. new regardless of origin, or to one foreign source vs. another. The language reform in Turkey offers a good example of the latter : the reformers were anxious to get rid of the Perso-Arabic vocabulary in favor of pure Turkish formations, but they had little objection to new French loanwords, which did not seem to affect the purity of the language in quite the same way. As an example of a highly sophisticated form of purity evaluation we may cite the concern of some language planners to keep the origins of parts of the same word consistent, e.g., a Latin-origin stem ideally should have a Latinate prefix, not a Greek one. The purity dimension is essentially independent of other dimensions of rationalized evaluation, since a form which is felt to be purer may be acknowledged as less beautiful or less efficient than the corresponding less pure one. Language planners who emphasize purity either do not examine the basis of their assumption of purity as a value or tend to justify it in terms of national identity (as opposed to mongrelization or absorption by other nations). Purity evaluations are at issue in Indonesian, Israeli and Indian (as well as Swedish and Chinese) lexical language planning, manifested in native vs. foreign, one classical source vs. another, and consistency of word parts.
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Beauty Much of the informal evaluation of language structure and language use is in terms of 'sounding better' or being more expressive, and it is somewhat surprising that there has been so little systematic investigation of this dimension either for particular speech communities or on a comparative basis. Doubtless these esthetic judgments of language offer the same problems of analysis as esthetic judgments in other areas, and it is likely that the productive issues will not be universals of preference in sounds or construction but the sociolinguistic conditions under which esthetic rather than other rationalizations will be given for language preferences. If some users of Hindi assert that the Braj dialect is more expressive in poetry or some Swedes feel that the archaic language of the church's worship is more solemn and spiritually satisfying, these judgments reflect not direct natural response to linguistic features but feelings of appropriateness due to customary use of these varieties for their respective purposes. Among language planners, evaluations in terms of beauty are probably less often argued than purity or efficiency. A good example, however, is found in the often-expressed high evaluation of the vivid language of the peasants and workers in China, and the official planners make specific efforts to collect and introduce into the standard language expressions and turns of phrase which reflect this evaluation.
Efficiency Although the efficiency dimension may be relatively unimportant in the total range of language evaluation, it seems to be of central importance in most contemporary theorizing about language planning and in a large proportion of language planning activities. The measurement of efficiency must always be in terms of particular goals; if these are left inexplicit, the whole definition of efficiency becomes problematic. If a goal is to transmit messages with minimum redundancy then certain means of measurement can be invoked. If on the other hand the goal is to transmit messages with optimum redundancy so that certain kinds of 'noise' or interference in the system will not prevent the message from arriving, somewhat different means of measurement will be invoked. Or, if the goal is to facilitate linguistic understanding with a neighboring nation one kind of orthography may be highly efficient, while if the goal is to have a nationally distinctive language or to inhibit communication with the other nation then a different kind of orthography would be more efficient. These relatively simple examples suggest the broad range of issues which the effi-
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ciency dimension may touch. The examples are, however, typical of the linguistic orientation of most discussions of language planning. Only relatively recently have considerations of a less linguistic nature been recognized as important so that efficiency judgments may involve measurement of attitudes, costs of publication or teacher training, tests of mutual intelligibility or any of a number of factors which some theorists once dismissed as 'mere implementation' (cf. Jernudd and Das Gupta 1966, which discusses a theory of language planning based on a broad framework of choice in use of the nation's language resources). A particularly interesting instance of efficiency evaluation is the desire for international consistency in usage. This is of two major types: the goal of universal, world-wide consistency which is illustrated by the highly systematic international planning which sets standards in chemical and biological nomenclature, and the more limited goal of consistency among nations using the same language or closely related languages or the same writing system, which may be illustrated by the efforts for consistency among Arabic-speaking, among English-speaking, or among Spanishspeaking nations. Most of the nations and speech communities reported on in this book have paid considerable attention to the international factor in their lexical planning. For example, Indonesian planners are concerned about the lexical development in closely related Malay, Hindi planners consider the problem of consistency in new coinages among the Indo-Aryan languages and Sweden has fully institutionalized cooperative efforts with language planners in other Scandinavian countries. Such goals and the estimation of efficiency in attaining them thus constitute still another part of the language planning processes in the nations studied.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC SETTINGS
Since all speech communities are continually undergoing changes both in the structure of the language varieties in use and in the functional allocation of the varieties, and since the evaluation processes vary from community to community, it follows that language planning activities in any nation for any language will take place in a particular sociolinguistic setting which will in part determine their nature and scope. The three languages and nations whose planning was studied in the international project offer particular settings characterized by features of language structure and use, and processes of change and evaluation which differ significantly from one another and yet have enough features in common to make cross-national study feasible and worthwhile.
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At the onset of modern planning activities, each of these languages had a great gap in its lexicon : it had only a very few of the technical terms required for communication in fields relating to modern science and technology. Related to this lack was the fact that none of these languages was in regular use as the accepted medium of instruction at the primary and secondary level of education in a duly constituted political entity which gave official recognition to it. At the time the international research project was undertaken, however, the facts of language use had changed, in that each language had become the normal medium of instruction prescribed by the legitimate government of the state. Also, in the intervening period the technical lexicon of each language had been greatly expanded and language planning activities had had some role in this development. It is this initial similarity of the lexical gap among the languages, the fact of subsequent lexical changes and related planning activities, and the continued operation of language planning and lexical change which made the comparative study a reasonable undertaking. Elsewhere in this volume there are discussions of the nature of the language planning agencies in these countries and their personnel and operations as well as analysis of the data on word use and language attitudes in the respective school and non-school populations. In the remainder of this paper a few salient characteristics of the structure of each language and the history of its uses in relevant speech communities will be provided insofar as this information about the sociolinguistic setting seems relevant to the language planning processes relating to technical lexicon.
Linguistic classification and basic structure Indonesian is one of the hundreds of Austronesian languages which are spoken on the islands of the Pacific and some of the adjacent mainland of Southeast Asia. It is based on the Malay language and has only been generally called the Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia) since 1928 when the participants in the Second Indonesian Youth Congress, meeting in Jakarta, solemnly declared it their language of unity. Indonesian, like many other Austronesian languages, is characterized by a strong preference for syllables ending in a vowel, considerable use of reduplication and word repetition, and a host of prefixes and suffixes used to express grammatical relationships and to form new words. Indonesian is written in the roman alphabet although in earlier periods Malay was most often written by means of the Arabic writing system. Hindi is one of the modern Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia
Sociolinguistic Settings of Language Planning
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(including Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.) and as such it belongs to the extensive Indo-European family of languages which includes most of the languages of Europe. The Indo-Aryan languages contrast with the other major family in South Asia, the Dravidian languages (including Tamil, Telugu, etc.) spoken principally in South India. Like most other IndoAryan languages, Hindi's pronunciation is characterized by the use of 'aspirated' consonants in addition to the unaspirated p b t d c h j k g ; the distinction between a t d r series articulated forward in the mouth and one articulated further back ('retroflex') ; and the use of nasal vowels similar to those of French and Portuguese. Also like other Indo-Aryan languages it has a pronoun system with several levels of politeness, makes considerable use of 'compound verbs' with auxiliaries like 'give', 'do', 'rise' and the like expressing a wide range of semantic modifications, and it has postpositions corresponding to the prepositions of most European languages. Hindi is written with the devanagari writing system, which consists of a large number of letters representing essentially consonants and consonant combinations, the vowels generally being added as diacritics to the consonantal letters. The letters are written down from the line and run from left to right. The closely-related Urdu is, however, written in the highly cursive Arabic script which runs from right to left and leaves many of the vowels unrepresented. Hebrew is a Semitic language related to Arabic, ancient languages of the Middle East (e.g., Phoenician, Aramaic and Babylonian/Assyrian) and some of the languages of Ethiopia. Like other Semitic languages, Hebrew uses vowel change for grammatical purposes and the coining of new words, and has severe limitations on the creation of compound words. Hebrew is unique among the Semitic languages, and indeed among the world's languages, in that it was revived from being a 'dead' language which was no longer anyone's mother tongue to being the principal language of a modern speech community. Hebrew is written in its own alphabet, which consists of 22 letters, runs from right to left, and normally leaves most of the vowels unwritten. Thus it may be seen that even in basic linguistic characteristics the three languages whose planning was studied in the Project differ widely from one another. Even from these brief paragraphs it is apparent that language planning questions of orthography and the formation of new words must operate in different ways in the three languages.
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Historical background of language use At our present stage of understanding language functions in a community it is not possible to offer a well-motivated taxonomy of uses or even satisfactory principles for rating them, but certain uses have assumed salience in general discussions of national language situations and these may serve as a framework for characterizing the uses of the three project languages (Stewart 1968; Ferguson 1966). For each language we may examine the locus and extent of its use as a mother tongue, its use in governmental administration and its use as a lingua franca. Also we may examine the role of the language as the vehicle for written literature, its religious uses and its use as the medium of instruction in schools above the first two years. All these functions are identified by Stewart. Finally we touch on two other uses : in the technical prose of science and technology and in the so-called mass media, particularly the press. The Malay language is first known from seventh-century inscriptions in Eastern Sumatra, and this area has retained its Malay mother tongue to the present, but Malay speakers have settled in many places and other peoples have also shifted to Malay as mother tongue. For several centuries the principal areas of Malay speech have been mainland Malaya, the Malay part of Sumatra, and the metropolitan area of Jakarta. In the present nation of Indonesia the number of native speakers of Indonesian is of the order of only 3 or 4 percent of the total population; as a primary speech community it is exceeded by several languages, especially by Javanese, which is spoken by over 50 percent of Indonesians. It is important, however, that the nation has a substantial (though small minority) population of native speakers of Malay/Indonesian which is of longstanding. From the period of the earliest inscriptions Malay served as the official language of kingdoms and colonies. Although it was often overshadowed by Sanskrit, Arabic, European languages or other local languages, when Malay spread in the nineteenth century as the administrative language of the Dutch East Indies it was in part expanding an ancient role which it had never completely lost. The widespread use of Malay as a lingua franca was doubtless the single most important factor in the emergence of Indonesian as a national language and it also provided some of the problems for planners. Already by the beginning of the sixteenth century Malay in some form or other was used in political and commercial lingua franca functions in almost every region of the Indies, being documented as far east as the island of Timor, and already from that time there is evidence of simplification or pidginization and local modification in the structure of the language.
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Malay literature began in the sixteenth century in central Malacca and included poems, stories, translations of Hindu epics, and Islamic works. The stream of Malay literature has been relatively small but literary manuscripts have circulated for centuries. The form of Malay used in the classical literature remained essentially the same until new forms of literary production began in the nineteenth century, and even now this literary Malay exerts an influence on the development of Indonesian. The 'modern' stream of Indonesian literature, which has reached substantial proportions in the twentieth century, includes many translations of European works and a significant number of novels on contemporary themes. Malay has served as the proselytizing language for Muslim and Christian missionaries. The Muslim use goes back to the twelfth century, while the Christian use is later - the first translation of the Bible into Malay was in the eighteenth century. Although both religions made use of the local languages, the wider usefulness of Malay led to its very general religious use; the association of Malay with Islam has had the effect of adding a heavy Arabic element to its vocabulary and has led to the introduction of the Arabic writing system in place of the early scripts of Indian origin. Schools on the European model were started for indigenous East Indians in the nineteenth century both as missionary enterprises and as government schools for the training of lower level civil servants. The present day varieties of Hindi spoken and written language covered by the terms Hindi and Urdu, together with earlier varieties of language ancestral to them, constitute such a complex array of dialects and literary standards, used by so many people for such different purposes, that it is very difficult to give a brief characterization of the Hindi language which will not be seriously misleading. The modern situation is sometimes summarized by saying that there is a basic conversational variety, formerly called Hindustani, which has two corresponding literary languages: Hindi, predominantly used by Hindus, which draws on Sanskrit as a principal source of specialized vocabulary and is written in the devanagari alphabet, and Urdu, predominantly used by Muslims, which calls on Perso-Arabic sources for specialized vocabulary and is written in a modified form of Arabic script. This summary is accurate as far as it goes but it gives no hint of the great variety of local dialects or the kinds of fluctuation in the two standard languages. In some areas the local dialects are so divergent from standard Hindi or Urdu that most linguists regard them as separate languages, and some of them have even been used as vehicles of literature. Where the local varieties are so divergent, often a version of standard Hindi serves as the language of writing, formal speech and interlingual communication, and the local speech and
22
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standard Hindi are both called Hindi without differentiation. Also, Hindus and Moslems who are speaking essentially the identical variety of language may regard themselves as speaking Hindi and Urdu respectively, rather than the same language. Speakers may alter their pronunciation or choice of vocabulary in a more Hindi or Urdu direction or in a more standard or local dialect direction depending on the addressee and the occasion. Finally, simplified or pidginized varieties, sometimes called Bazaar Hindustani, are also used as informal lingua francas in many places in South Asia. In trying to summarize the historical facts, we may first note that 'Hindi' in a fairly narrow sense (i.e., excluding the Bihari languages on the East and Rajasthani on the West) consists of two sets of dialects which linguists call Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi and sometimes regard as separate languages. One variety of Western Hindi, Braj, has been used for centuries as a literary language, and a variety of Eastern Hindi, Avadhi, has also been the medium of literature. For both types the period of greatest flourishing was the latter part of the sixteenth century, roughly corresponding to the Elizabethan period in English literature. Braj poetry was largely Vaishnavite devotional poetry and Avadhi poetry that of traditional epics. Both bodies of literature are to some extent known by the people: many expressions derived from them have their place in modern Hindi, and Braj is still used as a language of poetry. The variety of Western Hindi spoken around Delhi, called Khari-boli, served as an informal lingua franca and administrative language around the Moghul court, whose official language was Persian, and a Persianized form of this lingua franca was the basis of the early Urdu literature which flourished especially in the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century standard Hindi, also based on Khari-boli, came into existence, and the extensive use of both Hindi and Urdu in literary and non-literary prose really began. Thus Khari-boli is the basis of three important varieties, the colloquial lingua franca, standard Hindi and standard Urdu, but a myriad of dialects, regional standards and intermediate varieties differ to a greater or lesser extent from these basic norms. It is worth noting as one additional complicating factor that although Urdu is the dominant language of Pakistan, it has more native speakers in India, where there are great traditional centers of Urdu learning, even though Urdu is not the dominant official language of any state. The history of Hindi from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present time has been one of steadily extending the use of Hindi to new spheres : the development of prose, already mentioned, the writing of grammars and textbooks, the appearance of newspapers and magazines (the first newspaper in 1845), use as medium of instruction in schools,
Sociolinguistic Settings of Language Planning
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official language of examinations, the medium of instruction in university courses, use in legislative bodies and on the radio. An additional dimension of the development of Hindi was the possibility of its serving as the national language of all of India. As early as 1918 there was a public resolution proposing Hindi as the national language and devanagari as the national script. One of the most important tactics in the development and spread of Hindi was the activity of voluntary associations, committees and academies dedicated to the furtherance of Hindi language and literature. (Das Gupta 1970 follows this activity and its place in political processes, especially after independence.) In the development of Hindi as a standard language it has had the complications of dialect variation and rival literary forms as well as opposed writing systems and sources of technical lexicon tied to differing religious heritages. In the development of Hindi as the national language, it has had the competition of English on the one hand and the regional languages of India on the other, some of the latter having more impressive bodies of literature and more clearcut standardization than Hindi and strong regional loyalty as well. (Friedrich 1961 gives a convenient summary of the language situation in India; Barannikov 1972 gives a balanced up-to-date treatment of the whole Hindi language question.) The history of the Hebrew language and its use in various speech communities is in many respects unique among the world's languages. It has been in continuous use for some 3,000 years as a written language and for special oral purposes, but its use as the mother tongue of a speech community has been in two separate periods, one ending somewhere around the beginning of the Christian era (opinions differ on the exact dating) and the other beginning in the late nineteenth century and gaining real momentum in the second quarter of the twentieth century. During the long history of Hebrew when it was not a mother tongue but a language of special purposes the pronunciation and vocabulary of the language changed, the pronunciation largely under the influence of different mother tongues, the vocabulary chiefly from Aramaic at first, from Arabic in medieval times, and most recently from European languages. The classical Hebrew of the Biblical literature (1200-500 B.C.) has in many respects provided the norms for modern Hebrew although the later Mishnaic Hebrew as well as the Hebrew of medieval and more recent periods of literature have also been drawn upon. The literature which immediately preceded - and in fact led into - the revival of spoken Hebrew dates from the end of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century. During this period the use of the language was extended to new kinds of literature until at the time of the revival there was a very broad range of prose and poetry genres although the development of technical
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prose works did not really come until the expanded use of Hebrew as medium of education and administrative language during the British mandate period in Palestine. At the present time Hebrew is clearly the dominant language in Israel, with a large number of native speakers, and its use covers the whole spectrum of language functions in a modern, secularizing, industrial nation. Minor competing norms of Biblical Hebrew and a model 'Semitic' pronunciation still exist but basically the structure of the language has stabilized and is now undergoing change at a more 'normal' rate and with kinds of evaluation found in other speech communities. The period of greatest influence from Yiddish and other Eastern European languages seems to be over and although some of the grammatical innovations from these sources are now available for word formation processes the chief external sources for lexical expansion are now international terminology (usually in its English form) and to a lesser degree Semitic-style formations suggested by Arabic models.
PROCESSES OF WORD FORMATION
In any language the creation of new technical vocabulary exhibits a distinctive pattern of word compounding, native-language derivational processes and foreign-language sources. Indonesian makes use of a large array of derivational affixes, as is characteristic of Austronesian languages in general. The affixes include prefixes, suffixes and infixes expressing a wide variety of semantic values and serving also to transfer words from one grammatical class to another. Most of these affixes may readily be attached to stems of foreign origin as well as to indigenous stems. The joining of two stems to make a compound is very frequent and the range of semantic values for such compounds is quite broad. In many instances, however, the phonological and orthographic distinction between a compound and a sequence of two words is slight or nonexistent. Consequently when a user of Indonesian encounters a newly formed compound he may not recognize it as such. In any case, indigenous affixation and compounding have been a principal source of new lexicon. Malay/ Indonesian has also borrowed words from many languages, the principal foreign sources of new stems and new words in the creation of technical vocabulary being Sanskrit/Javanese, Arabic, Dutch and English. Items of Sanskrit/Javanese origin are mostly innovations coming from Javanese speakers of Indonesian, who are thus using formations of learned vocabulary from their own language. Arabic items, which continue long-standing patterns of word formation in Malay, may agree with similar Arabic-
Sociolinguistic Settings of Language Planning
25
origin vocabulary elsewhere in the Islamic world, and often they are perceived as Islamic in flavor.3 Dutch as a source is being replaced by English, but both kinds of formation exist and in some cases international doublets result. Hindi processes of word formation have been considerably extended in recent years as the language is becoming used for technical and general cultural purposes outside its traditional scope. New technical words are usually formed from Sanskrit, Perso-Arabic or English sources. The evaluations of words from the three sources tend to differ, and could be characterized roughly as follows. New words from Sanskrit sources have the 'feel' of the new standard language and are relatively neutral in evaluation. English-origin words have a somewhat colloquial effect in that they usually reflect the actual conversational usage of Hindi speakers in technical contexts, and Perso-Arabic neologisms generally have some kind of 'expressive' function. Sanskrit compounds and derived forms are of two general types, one following the traditional phonetic rules of combination (sandhi) and the other in which the components are juxtaposed without modification. Some of the Sanskrit affixes and stems are equated to modern international formations (in their English usage), and thus patterns of loan-translations emerge. Hindi, like Indonesian, has many doublets and synonyms, reflecting the rapid lexical change, incomplete standardization and multiple sources of new vocabulary (cf. Barkhudarov 1963 for a thorough analysis of contemporary word formation in Hindi). Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, has two basic means of word formation, internal vowel change (and strengthening of root consonants) and a very limited number of prefixes and suffixes. The two means tend to constitute a single system since a given affix typically combines with certain vowel patterns to constitute particular types of derivative. Noun compounding is non-existent except for a few marginal cases, but a twonoun construction which is somewhere between a compound and a phrase is very productive and fulfills some of the functions of compound nouns in other languages. In modern Hebrew a number of additional affixes have come into the language through loanwords and neologisms, 3. In a number of Asian and African languages used by Islamic populations and written in Arabic script there are hundreds of Perso-Arabic words which have the same spelling and meaning but differ in pronunciation depending on the particular language. This lexical link among Arabic-alphabet 'Islamic' languages is comparable to the similar phenomenon in roman-alphabet 'Christian' languages by which, for example, words like nation, national or oxygen, oxide appear in many languages with similar meaning but different pronunciations. In languages which shift from Arabic to roman writing (e.g., Turkish, Malay, Swahili) this connection tends to be lost because of the tendency to spell the words in accordance with their actual pronunciation in each language. 2 MLP
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and some of them have become productive. Also, the two-noun construction, often called the 'construct state' after the first member, has become more flexible both in having more modifiers and allowing more derivatives than in the older usage. One other way of extending the system of vowel changes and affixes has been the creation of new patterns, sometimes on the model of Aramaic or Arabic formations. International vocabulary entered first through Eastern European languages and a number of suffixes of this origin stabilized, such as -atsia for -ation, although more recent loans tend to be somewhat more from English models.
LEXICAL PLANNING IN DIFFERENT SETTINGS
The creation of new terms and new patterns of word formation in scientific, technical, and educational fields is a major component of the developmental process of 'modernization' (Ferguson 1966) which is the focus of much language planning activity. A large part of this lexical planning in the less developed nations and languages is concerned with the creation of terms and word formations as counterparts or translation equivalents to terminology already in use in nations and languages technologically more advanced. (In these 'advanced' nations lexical planning is often more concerned with terminology for new objects and concepts arising from current research and development, rather than translation equivalents of vocabulary in other languages.) Since the bulk of the basic modernizing terminology to be created is the same for all nations and languages the problem would seem to be essentially the same everywhere. In fact, however, differences in sociopolitical organization, commitment to national planning, local traditions of language authority and a host of other variables often result in quite different lexical planning processes. Other chapters in this volume discuss a number of the relevant variables; in this paper the focus is on the sociolinguistic settings, i.e., factors related to language structure and use in the nation. The question of patterns of word formation, both compounding and derivation by affixes, is one which differs from one language to another because of differences in structure. Current international terminology in science, technology and education makes great use of compound nouns as well as adjectives and other derivatives formed from such compounds. Likewise, current international terminology makes extensive use of derivational prefixes and suffixes. Of the three object languages of the international project, Hindi is structurally the closest to this in that it has well-established patterns of stem compounding and a large stock of deri-
Sociolinguistic Settings of Language Planning
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vational prefixes and suffixes. The word formation problems of language planners for Hindi will be the choice of stems, combining forms of stems and affixes to be the semantic equivalents of elements of the international lexicon. There is no real problem of structural change. Hebrew is the farthest structurally from the requisite pattern, having only very limited compounding and a small set of derivational affixes. Also, the commonest form of compounding, the so-called 'construct case', does not readily lend itself to further derivation. Thus the problem in Hebrew is how to extend the linguistic means available without doing damage to the planners' feelings of how the language should operate. The response has been to extend the pattern of compounding to constructions and formations previously unacceptable or awkward and to create new affixes borrowed from other languages or modeled on previously unproductive formations. It is of interest to note that two other languages treated in this volume, Swedish and Chinese, are at opposite poles on this question. Swedish is of the type of European language from which the present international pattern arose, and Chinese, although it has relatively free compounding (which is now steadily increasing the number of polysyllabic nouns in that heavily monosyllabic language), has no derivational affixes at all, necessitating extreme adaptations in such fields as chemical terminology (Alleton and Alleton 1966). Another question in lexical modernization which differs in important ways from one language to another depending on features of linguistic structure and users' evaluations is the source of new lexical items. Every language has favorite sources for neologisms such as historical 'classical' languages in the community's literary and/or religious heritage; or special dialects, registers or styles in the contemporary language; or foreign languages with which the community is in contact. When a speech community draws on several sources for new lexicon it tends to prefer one or another for particular domains or to make differential evaluations among them. Hindi, Indonesian and Hebrew all draw increasingly on English as the immediate source of international vocabulary, and in each case - as explained in the preceding section - there are several possible alternative sources. Each language situation is different. Indonesian and Hebrew have used European languages other than English as source for international vocabulary; whereas Hindi has used only English. Hindi and Indonesian draw upon both Sanskritic and Perso-Arabic lexicon but the users' evaluations of the two sources are quite different in the two languages. Hebrew and Indonesian have new lexical items from closely related languages but in different ways : Indonesian's new Austronesian vocabulary comes chiefly from the first language of Indonesians who speak Indonesian as a second language while Hebrew's new Semitic vocabulary
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is usually created from a scholarly tradition of knowledge of Aramaic and Arabic. Some of this welter of alternative sources and evaluations in the three languages was tapped by the questionnaires and interviews of the international project. The Indonesian language in Indonesia, the Hindi language in India and the Hebrew language in Israel - like all other languages in whatever countries they are used - are changing in structure and patterns of use. Much of the change taking place is related to the speakers' evaluations of varying or competing forms and uses, and some small though highly significant part of the change is affected by, or even results directly from, the explicit evaluations and decisions of language planners. This paper has noted some of the common problems of language planning, particularly in the modernization of vocabulary, among these languages and nations and several others. The main purpose of the paper, however, was to call attention to some of the differences in sociolinguistic settings among the three and to indicate a few of the differences in the nature and scope of language planning which depend on such differences in settings. The material presented here is intended to provide useful background information and a helpful perspective on the studies reported in the volume and at the same time to suggest dimensions of variability which merit investigation in future comparative studies of language planning processes.
REFERENCES
Alleton, V. and Alleton, J. C. 1966 Terminologie de la chimie en chinois moderne. Paris, Mouton. Barannikov, P. S. 1972 Problemy khindi kak nacional'nogo jazyka [Problems of Hindi as a national language]. Leningrad. Barkhudarov, A. S. 1963 Slovoobrazovanie ν khindi [Word formation in Hindi], Moscow, Izd. Vostochnoj Literarury. Clark, T. W. 1956 'The Languages of Calcutta, 1760-1840', BSOAS 18: 453-74. Das Gupta, J. 1970 Language Conflict and National Development. Berkeley, University of California Press. Ferguson, C. A. 1966 'National Sociolinguistic Profile Formulas', pp. 304-24 in Sociolinguistics, ed. by W. Bright. The Hague, Mouton. 1968 'Language Development', in Language Problems of Developing Nations, ed. by J. A. Fishman, C. A. Ferguson and J. Das Gupta. New York : Wiley.
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Ferguson, C.A. 1973 '"Short a" in Philadelphia English', in Studies in Linguistics in Honor of G. Trager, ed. by E. Smith. The Hague, Mouton. Friedrich, P. 1961 'Language and Politics in India', Daedalus 91: 543-59. Haugen, E. 1966 'Instrumentalist» in Language Planning', in Can Language be Planned?, ed. by J. Rubin and B. H. Jernudd. Honolulu. Jernudd, B. H. and Das Gupta, J. 1966 'Towards a Theory of Language Planning', in Can Language be Planned?, ed. by J. Rubin and B. H. Jernudd. Honolulu. Jones, H. F. 1953 The Triumph of the English Language. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press. Labov, W. 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. , Yaeger, M. and Steiner, R. 1972 Ά Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress', Volumes 1 and 2. NSF GS-3287. Philadelphia, U.S. Regional Survey. Pulgram, E. 1958 The Tongues of Italy: Prehistory and History. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Ray, P. S. 1963 Language Standardization: Studies in Prescriptive Linguistics. The Hague, Mouton. Rubin, J. 1966 'Evaluation and Language Planning', in Can Language be Planned?, ed. by J. Rubin and Β. H. Jernudd. Honolulu. and Jernudd, Β. H. (eds.) 1966 Can Language be Planned? Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice for Developing Nations. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press. Sedlak, P. 1974 'Socioculturai Determinants of Language Maintenance and Language Shift in a Rural Coastal Kenyan Community', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Stewart, W. A. 1968 Ά Sociolinguistic Typology for Describing Multilingualism', in Readings in the Sociology of Language, ed. by J. A. Fishman. The Hague, Mouton. Tauli, V. 1968 Introduction to a Theory of Language Planning (= Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Philologica Scandinavia Upsaliensia 6). Uppsala.
JOSHUA A. FISHMAN
3
Comparative Study of Language Planning : Introducing a Survey
THE BEGINNINGS
The very beginnings of the International Research Project on Language Planning Processes are to be found in a conference on Language Problems of Developing Nations sponsored by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Sociolinguistics at Airlie House, Warrenton, Virginia, in 1966. It was at this conference that all five of the subsequent country coordinators of the IRPLPP first met and located a set of relatable interests as well as relatable approaches to the empirical social science study of national language problems, more generally, and of national language planning as an approach to the solution of such problems, more specifically. As the record of that conference revealed (Fishman, Ferguson and Das Gupta 1968), language planning processes were among the least studied and least evaluated of all the myriad topics subsumed under the broad rubric of national language problems. Indeed, neither in the U.S.A. nor elsewhere was there a group of specialists, no matter how small, who were particularly oriented toward the gathering of data and the development of theory pertaining to the processes whereby language planning proceeded and was differentially successful. The first goal of the IRPLPP, therefore, was to remedy, in part, the absence of trained social science personnel specializing in language planning. Its second goal was to provide examples of data, analyses and interpretations pertaining to the complex and numerous processes and interactions that together constitute language planning. As a result of work made possible by the International Division of the Ford Foundation from 1968 to 1972 both of these goals seem far more realizable today than they did when the IRPLPP began. The IRPLPP's first concrete steps came in 1968-69 when four of its five subsequent country coordinators were enabled to spend a study-year at the Institute of Advanced Projects of the East West Center, University of Hawaii. That year resulted in two volumes of empirical and theoretical
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publications related to language planning (Rubin and Jernudd 1971; Fishman 1972), a preliminary design of the IRPLPP itself (Das Gupta, Jernudd, Fishman and Rubin 1971), and, not least of all, an intensive and fruitful consultative meeting with researchers and theoreticians interested in language planning in various parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. It was only after this consultative meeting in Honolulu and subsequent follow up visits by Hawaii team members to various possible research field sites that the IRPLPP proper was launched in the fall of 1969.
PROCEDURAL GUIDELINES
Every human endeavor transpires within certain self-imposed as well as outside-imposed reality formulations, and the IRPLPP sought to recognize as many of these as possible at the earliest feasible date.
Study sites
The Project itself could not be conducted without vigorous local support and cooperation, not only from local colleagues and assistants but also from Foundation and national/regional governmental authorities. As a result of this realization a number of potentially stimulating study sites had to be abandoned - most recently and painfully the one already set up in East Bengal before hostilities broke out there - although, very fortunately, it did prove possible to establish the necessary cooperative relations in four countries which reveal a wide and interesting gamut of developmental statuses and language planning experiences.
Relations with hosts
Constant efforts were made to involve local personnel in all of the operations of the IRPLPP. In each case, local scholars and students were depended upon for data collection, and, in many cases, local personnel were trained by the country coordinators in order to conduct the data collection and data processing required by the Project. The country coordinators sought not only to increase their own expertise in the study of language planning processes, but also, insofar as possible, to stimulate local interest and competence in this topic and in sociolinguistic research more generally. As part of this studied approach, all data collected in any particular study site has been deposited there with a local agency or
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institution, in order to facilitate further analyses and subsequent comparative or trend studies by local scholars and students. Furthermore, local versions of the current report, including many additional studies of specifically local interest and published in the local national language, are being prepared in several of the IRPLPP study sites under the full or partial editorship and direction of local scholars and with the express purpose of reaching those scholarly and educated lay audiences who would not be as readily reached by a report available only in English and primarily oriented toward the international social science and professional sociolinguistic communities.
STUDY DESIGN AND OVERALL GOALS
The major thrust of the IRPLPP was comparative and substantive rather than methodological and theoretical. As the first major study of its kind it was formulated more as a demonstration of the feasibility of studying language planning processes comparatively and empirically than as an attempt to test or advance specific hypotheses (although to some extent, of course, the latter was also done). Thus, much data was collected in most field sites via rather standardized questionnaires and testing procedures. These were modified, where necessary, in accord with local usage and sensitivities, as well as liberally supplemented, or even replaced, via interviews, archival and library searches, and a wealth of more ethnographic participant observation insight. The impossible was clearly not attained, namely, to maximize both strict comparability and local uniqueness, but it was, quite frankly, compromised with, aimed at and, hopefully, approximated to a reasonable and honorable degree. Two major aims guided all of our efforts: to shed light upon the actual processes of language planning, and to explore some approaches to evaluating the success of these processes. In groping toward the first, we tried to focus attention upon the people who do language planning and their activities when attempting to reach goals they recognize. In this connection we attended to participants in the total language planning drama, such as members and staff of centrally authorized language planning agencies, ministries of education entrusted with implementing language planning products (modern terminologies, revised spelling systems, etc.) and textbook writers. Toward our second goal, mentioned above, we pursued relevant attitudinal, informational and usage criteria among secondary school and university teachers, secondary school and university students, and a sample of semi-professional adults with secondary school education.
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We make no pretense that our measures of process or of success are either exhaustive or exceptionally reliable and valid. Certainly, other, better and additional measures will be developed in the future. Nevertheless, our measures are reasonable first approximations where none have existed before, and the internal consistencies as well as the inter-method agreements that they have yielded are quite creditable when viewed in the perspective of current social science attainments in other comparable, cross-national undertakings. Whatever shortcomings of our procedures and findings may be revealed by hindsight, and there are such, we clearly aimed at difficult targets and did not seek easy escape hatches from the substantive, methodological and procedural problems that confronted us.
PROBLEMS ANTICIPATED AND ENCOUNTERED
Substantively we sought to avoid the obvious. A s a result, we steered away from comparisons between obviously informed and uninformed samples (e.g., between educated and uneducated, between rural and urban, between mobilized, unmobilized and anti-mobilized vis-à-vis central symbols and authorities) and, rather, focused upon differentials within those populations most clearly involved if language planning is to succeed. Thus, given the universe of planners per se, we tried to find out which are the more informed, the more successful, the more positive and sanguine vis-à-vis the future of language planning in their setting. Given the better educated populations in the administrative and cultural capitals of the countries studied, how informed are they?; to what extent are they positively oriented vis-à-vis language planning?; how fully do they utilize the (lexical) products of such planning?; what differentials in all of these respects exist across substantive fields as well as across generational and educational subgroups ? D o roughly similar findings obtain across countries or is between-country variance (for populations such as those we have selected for study) greater than the within-country variance that is also likely to obtain ? If we cannot now, after three years of study, claim to have fully answered all of the foregoing questions then it is all the more clear that we did not try in advance to lighten our burden by selecting questions whose answers we already knew. Methodologically, we sought to balance comparability and local validity or insightfulness. Our instruments were, therefore, only substantially standardized from country to country and from population to population, but not entirely so. We avoided asking questions in ways that made no sense locally and of populations that could be predicted not to understand them or to be susbtantially embarrassed by them. The result
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is that we do not always have fully comparable data - either because certain data could not be collected in all settings or because certain questions were not equivalently askable or answerable in all settings. When faced with such considerations we usually opted in favor of local significance rather than strict comparability. Since this tends to be a case of Hobson's choice, and one is just as likely to be damned if one does and damned if one doesn't, it is only possible to explain what we did and why, rather than to pretend that it was not and is not a conflicted issue. In retrospect it seems that a well-balanced approach was adopted and that it yielded data that is reasonably valid and integrated as well as consistently interesting and revealing. Procedurally, we were not able to avoid the endless variety and inexhaustible supply of petty and serious delays, mistakes, conflicts, misunderstandings and doubts that plague all large scale, tightly scheduled, cross-cultural research projects, particularly when they involve individuals of various disciplinary and experimental backgrounds. Fortunately, regardless of how vexing these may have seemed at the time, we can now look back upon them with waxing degrees of humor, all the more so since in every case our local connections remain not only friendly on an interpersonal level, but decidedly receptive to the possibility of future research along related or tangential lines. Country coordinators and local colleagues have all come through the research experience somewhat wiser, somewhat sadder, somewhat older, and yet eager for another try as soon as possible. It will obviously be a long time before a fully adequate picture of language planning processes is forthcoming. If, however, we continue to pursue this goal, its attainment will be approximated, the number and qualifications of its experienced pursuers will steadily increase, and its practical value in terms of guiding language planning per se will slowly grow.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH CONCEPTS
A project such as this was and is, of necessity, grounded in general substantive and methodological considerations within the sociology of language in particular and within the social sciences more generally. Those fully immersed in a particular culture at times lose sight of the basic assumptions, concepts and terms of operation, and their novelty or strangeness to 'outsiders' or 'newcomers' is not fully appreciated. Whenever we have remembered to do so, we have paused to explain to others some of the things which we have long since stopped explaining to ourselves.
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However, it is quite likely that we have not always remembered, or not done so sufficiently frequently. Therefore, it might not be amiss to introduce some of these specialized concepts here and now so that the reader may be all the more forewarned and forearmed as he proceeds into the thickets ahead. The term language planning, as we have used it in our work, covers a variety of activities roughly subdivisible into two broad categories: language status planning and language corpus planning. The former subdivision (status planning) encompasses governmental policy decisions concerning which language should be assigned or recognized for which purposes within a country or region, as well as the various implementation (enforcing, motivating, influencing) steps taken to support the policy that has been adopted. The latter subdivision (corpus planning) encompasses efforts to alter and improve the language per se whose status is the object of policy decisions and implementation attempts. When corpus planning is undertaken the exact nature of this planning is then also subject to policy decisions and to implementation efforts. The entire realm of language planning, but, most particularly, the realm of corpus planning the populations and processes actually involved in doing it, and the initial and ultimate populations at whom it is aimed, and their affective, cognitive and usage reactions to the products of corpus planning - all of these were of interest to the current Project. In a field of inquiry as new as this one, a degree of terminological and conceptual uncertainty is still bound to exist. Even the descriptive labels attached to languages are somewhat unsettled among students of language problems in various parts of the world. In our own usage we have utilized the designation official language only to indicate a language that is employed by a governmental body for specific purposes. Such a language need not be indigenous to the country or area, and, indeed, may be a language of wider communication that has considerable international, rather than merely regional, communicational value. The designation national language has been reserved for an indigenous language which is usually viewed as official, and/or co-official with others, for certain important symbolic purposes. Just as there may be several official languages in a polity, there also may be several national languages. The difference between the two designations, therefore, depends on perceived indigenization and on the accompanying view that national languages are uniquely related to the history, culture and mission of their speakers. Clearly, where there are several national languages in a polity, individual languages may tend to be viewed differently by those who know and use them and by those who do not. National languages may not be nationwide in their appeal ; indeed, they may be quite regional
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at the same time that official languages of Western origin may be the only ones that serve nationwide communication functions. Because national languages need not have nationwide status and because they may or may not have local rivals within their own regions as well as from region to region, the term national language often has a substantial degree of ambiguity attached to it. As a result, although our Project attended to the planning of four different languages viewed as national languages by many, we have often referred to them as scheduled languages. In doing so we hoped to indicate that we wanted only to study the planning of these languages and were taking no sides with respect to the status rivalries in which some of them were still involved. Governmentally sponsored language corpus planning initially indicates that a language has been moved into functions for which it was not previously accepted or employed. As a result, it becomes necessary to be able to say and write in this language all of those things that had been sayable and writable in whatever language had previously been employed locally for the functions in question ; or to be able to say and write in this language all of those things that are currently sayable and writable in other languages elsewhere that have such functions. Thus, language corpus planning most frequently reveals a contrastive awareness - both with respect to language status and language corpus - and seeks to overcome the modernization handicap of a particular language at a particular time vis-à-vis other languages of reference. Once such a handicap is overcome, or, at least, delimited, language corpus planning may well continue in a more low key and less centralized fashion in order to make sure that the handicap does not recur or that its impact is as restricted as possible. As implied, language corpus planning deals largely with meeting the needs of higher and technical education connected with the activities of governmental and technological operations. It seeks to establish a model of 'good language' characteristics to guide its work (codification), to elaborate the 'products' that are lacking (nomenclatures, spellers, type fonts, etc.), and to establish the arbiters and gatekeepers that will keep both the model and the products relatively stable (standard dictionaries, grammars). Although the processes involved in corpus planning have been variously differentiated, and although the terms employed in describing these processes have, therefore, also differed, our overall concerns are quite clear: 1. To investigate the links between status planning and corpus planning and to do so with respect to languages that vary in the length of time and in the unanimity with which they have been employed for a variety of modern functions. 2. To describe differentials in the processes of corpus planning per se.
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3. To trace differentials in the implementation of corpus planning, with respect to intended target populations. 4. To determine differentials in the extent to which target populations utilize the corpus planning products prepared for them. 5. To relate the differentials in (4) not only to characteristics of the populations but to characteristics of (2) and (3), above. 6. To seek to determine the extent to which the findings obtained in connection with all of the above are similar or dissimilar across language communities of differing modernization status.
FEEDBACK AND FOLLOW-THROUGH
The preparation of this report did not proceed in a vacuum. In part it was prepared in situ, in the very settings in which the data itself was collected. In part it was prepared at Stanford University, where the core staff of country coordinators congregated during the summer of 1972 in order to interact more fully in the writing stage. In part it was revised the following year, as the core staff and a small group of associates and colleagues, both in the Project's field sites as well as elsewhere, proceeded to read through and comment upon the summer 1972 first draft. At the 'Hawaii Two' consultative meeting held in Sweden in the autumn of 1973 the revised draft itself was fully discussed by scholars and practitioners in the language planning field from various countries. It is only after that meeting that a final report of the IRPLPP has been prepared and submitted for publication. As mentioned earlier, somewhat parallel versions (including substantial local and non-comparable material) will also be published in various of the field sites and in the national languages obtaining there. Reports on the IRPLPP will be given at various linguistic and social science conferences and congresses throughout the world and published in a variety of professional journals and books. For the first time, graduate courses in language planning have already been given and others are being contemplated at universities in several countries as a direct consequence of this Project. Language planning agencies have begun to examine or reexamine their procedures as a result of participating in the Project, and a variety of governmental authorities are more than mildly interested in the findings and interpretations that have been suggested. The IRPLPP is obviously not the last word that will be heard on the topic of language planning processes and their description, measurement and evaluation. Perhaps, it has done no more than 'get the ball rolling' more vigorously, but that too is no little thing.
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REFERENCES
Das Gupta, J., Jernudd, B., Fishman, J. A. and Rubin, J. 1971 'Research Outline for Comparative Study of Language Planning', pp. 293-305, in Can Language be Planned?, ed. by J. Rubin and B. Jernudd. Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii. Fishman, J. A. 1972 Language and Nationalism. Rowley, Newbury House. Fishman, J. Α., Ferguson, C. A. and Das Gupta, J. (eds.) 1968 Language Problems of Developing Nations. New York, Wiley and Sons. Rubin, J. and Jernudd, B. (eds.) 1971 Can Language be Planned? Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii.
BJÖRN H. J E R N U D D
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Prerequisites for a Model of Language Treatment
It is a commonplace of our time and our society to divide nations into categories of 'developing' and 'developed'. Writings on language tend to follow this division and discuss language development within them, as though they were polar types, the one leading into the other. The so-called 'developing' nations may not have institutions that are materially the same as those of the 'developed' nations, nor possess language problems of mass education, technology, newspaper production, etc. But if we would judge them not from the Western standpoint and what is of value to a 'technological' or 'socially mobilized' society but by native values, then it may well be the case that we find with them fully appropriate institutions for treating their language problems. The 'developing' nations may not yet have established a treatment pattern for language that meets expressive needs of Western-derived technology and politics but they may well have established a system that meets other communicative needs. Nevertheless it seems to be true that scholarly work now focuses on meeting the needs of establishing links between technologizing and mobilizing aims on the one hand, and communicative resources on the other, for nations that do or do not as yet share in the material values of the haves, or actively support the latters' forecast plans for the world. Kjolseth (1972: 8) voices a related concern: '. . . with the development of new supra-national forms of economic organization, the whole question of "development" has arisen, and there appears to be a well-developed awareness that many of the problems involved are related to language.... Furthermore, all the world powers appear to be in a form of competition in this regard, each seeking to find more effective ways for its language to gain hegemony as the dominant language of wider communication in different "development" areas of the world.' Kjolseth frankly states that 'the sociology of language is becoming a "policy science" ' and points to the 'many difficult questions of both an ethical and political nature' that follow from this development. I do not
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wish to deny the importance of contemporary scholarly focus, nor deny the feasibility of supporting it. But my concern here is with the language resources as a component of communicative resources of a society, and the ways in which these resources are taken care of, under any circumstance - be they anachronistically conservative, contemporaneously democratic or, simply, natively self-supportive. I intend to explore the relationships between a speech community's language treatment pattern and verbal repertoire. The notion of speech community is simply the societal unit of study and discussion for which it makes sense to posit native concern with communicative resources. By verbal repertoire I mean the set of speech varieties, with their respective social meanings, that is found in a speech community (cf. Gumperz 1968). By language treatment I mean native, conscious, deliberate concern with the speech community's language resources (cf. Neustupny 1970, 1973). I do not a priori assume that what is commonly understood as 'development' properties enter into relationships with language that necessarily are different from relationships that 'non-development' properties enter into. Yet there are undoubtedly unique links between communication 'needs', language and treatment, and properties of 'technological' or 'mobilized' societies, but the order and kind must be empirically established before we build models on the assumption that they are unique and inevitable. Neustupny (1965) has explored the relationship between development and language starting out with an acceptance of 'development' as one of 'the most important issues of our time'. He says 'We believe that the distinction in the general social structure which may become a motivation for a class of languages closest to what is generally called "Oriental languages", is the dichotomy of developed and developing (underdeveloped) societies. Thus in the course of further explanations we shall first try to discuss the possibility of defining the class of "developing languages" . . .' (p. 84). An assumption of his is that 'only those relations that connect a linguistic fact with a developing feature of the social structure are relevant for the sociological classification of languages' (p. 87). What I will focus on here, however, is language treatment rather than the classification of features of the verbal repertoire. Also, while technological characterization of societies is useful, I want to build a model of language treatment on 'structural' relationships, rather than on a grouping of societies according to which features of substance they share. An indispensable necessity in constructing a model is to understand what constitutes treatment activities, separately from a classification of
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different degrees of societal development, and separately from a classification of degrees of development of verbal repertoires and their constituents. (We must also consistently separate 'approaches' to language problems by a speech community from other students' - e.g., international sociolinguistic discussion, internationally funded research - 'approaches' to equivalent language problems. While the link between the speech community's own perception of its situation and the attention it receives from surrounding interests is extremely important, I will assume that each speech community can be discussed without constant reference to how 'outside' interests see it.) This brings me to yet another problem: the gross labels 'policy' and 'cultivation'. In Neustupny's subdivision of language treatment, the cultivation approach pertains to 'problems of individual inadequacy' of language while the policy approach pertains to 'the inadequacy of whole varieties' (1973), or the policy approach 'covers such problems as selection of the national language, standardization, literacy, orthographies, problems of stratification of language (repertoire of code varieties), etc.' The emphasis is on linguistic varieties and their distribution. This approach is combined with notions of language policy and planning, whereas the cultivation approach 'is characterized by interest in questions of correctness, efficiency, linguistic levels fulfilling specialized functions, problems of style, constraints on communicative capacity etc.' (1970). Either these notions are simple taxonomic devices, including sets of arbitrarily compiled but often co-occurring features of treatment; or they imply theoretical findings of necessary co-occurrence and opposition of features of language treatment, in which case they can be tested to verify that the labels always or consistently have the same content in different speech communities and at different times. I would therefore keep in mind their composite nature, and investigate each test case by features (components) of treatment. Contradictions to this terminological opposition can be constructed on grounds that one has to know which language to cultivate if one wants to cultivate ! As a matter of fact, this contradiction raises the issue of whether 'policy' concern is not predictable if a speech community wishes to approach its language(s) deliberately for any purpose. 'Cultivation' would embody 'policy', and an emerging concern with language problems of the 'cultivation' type would necessitate determining which language(s) to cultivate, or at least challenge users of languages whose languages were not selected for cultivation. I prefer to raise the question of what in observed cases was logically necessary and therefore fully predictable and what was attended to but could have been dispensed with. Only on this basis can I foresee a genuinely interesting case of
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generalizable and independent occurrence in time, and thus 'development', of 'policy' before or after 'cultivation', to support the opposition between the two concepts. India is an interesting case. Policy and cultivation, the types, appear to coexist there and cyclically share the limelight. Das Gupta and Gumperz (1968) suggest, 'a limited set of discrete subdomains, each set off from the others by sharp grammatical and sometimes even script distinctions, as well as by lexical and phonological features. The barriers of ethnic origin, caste and occupation characterizing Indian society were thus reflected by compartmentalization of verbal interaction into distinct communicative spheres' (p. 155). 'The system thus favored the formation of a large number of mediating groups whose literary skills were their main stock in trade.' Das Gupta and Gumperz go on to describe how access to these verbal skills was limited and guarded by self-interest which 'led them to make every attempt to preserve these assets for their own kind' and 'it could by manipulation of standards of correctness erect almost insurmountable access barriers to the technical skills it controlled'. What we witness here is a highly elaborate treatment pattern, within which manipulation of language plays a very important role and has a long standing. The Indian linguists S. K. Chatterji and D. C. Sen amplify and support my assertion that speech varieties in India have come and gone as a result of an extraordinary willingness to deliberately treat language (Chatterji 1926 contains references to treatment, e.g., in paragraphs 38, 50-51, 61-62 and 69; Sen's book, e.g., in chapter VII, section III). This pattern of language treatment, which supported an intricate segmentation of Indian speech communities by features of verbal repertoires, continued to operate as English was introduced into India: there was 'evidence of certain dominant caste groups' attempts to capitalize on their control of English much as their ancestors had controlled previous literary languages.' People outside the old system who acquired English applied rules of language treatment, too: 'Under the influence of these new groups, new vernacular prose styles modeled on English were developed . . . they began to gain more general acceptance and to displace previous literary language and special craft idioms. In what is now known as the Hindi area there were two such developing vernaculars, Hindi and Urdu' (1968: 156). Codes had to be established, and both Hindi and Urdu relied on the 'bazaar language' Hindustani which was vernacularly available. The new varieties were derived from a 'Low' variety by deliberate elaboration and extension of use. We have witnessed how subsequently Hindi and Urdu have been meticulously belabored : 'these new idioms needed to be changed so as to more
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closely reflect the genius of the nation - the native literary traditions - and to become the intellectual equal of English' (p. 157) ; 'the Hindi interest associations and generally the Hindi literary elite emphasized the genius of Hindi, which they identified with classical Sanskritic language and tradition' and 'In implementing its task of developing Hindi almost every ministry at the state and national level has set up official committees charged with the task of creating legal and technical terminologies suitable for the new functions the language is filling' (pp. 160 and 161). Thus, a tradition of language treatment - incorporating willingness to see new speech varieties born as well as providing resources to develop and foster them - which had its place clearly defined in relation to social and professional groupings, applied itself to new circumstances imposed on Indian society. This Indian genius for language manipulation and adaptation has led to severe political tension from time to time; such tension, however, seems secondary to or a result of the linguistic recreation that the Indian language treatment system makes possible, whether the source is a 'modernizing' one or not. In Sweden today we find a routinized, officially recognized language treatment subsystem linking Svenska Spräknämnden (Board for the Cultivation of Swedish), Tekniska Nomenklaturcentralen and Svenska Akademien with the universities, industry, business and government. These language organizations and their customers assume Swedish as a given, that Swedish exists together with 'foreign languages' which are used for communication abroad or in some very special contexts at home, and that there is a code for Swedish which constrains choices of creating new or judging current terminology, of evaluating stylistic variants, etc. At their side exists at least one language association, Sprâkvârdssamfundet i Uppsala, acting as a kind of interest organization to counteract excessive differentiation of Swedish and misuse of foreign borrowings into Swedish (cf. Dunâs 1970). This subsystem of sprâkvârd (the Swedish term which translates as 'language cultivation'), linking Swedish concern with Swedish to a common European concern with national languages, Sprachkultur - kul'tura jazyka - and embodying what Neustupny seems to have in mind with his notion 'cultivation approach', has a history which is ages old: it would not be anomalous for Svenska Spräknämnden to sponsor and publish a study of, for example, legal language in Sweden which would cover a timespan from the dark ages to the present. The existence of a 'cultivation' subsystem does not exclude the simultaneous debate of the value of Swedish in Sweden : should not English be preferred? (see Helander 1971). It does not exclude an even more intensive debate of what should be the appropriate solution to immigrants'
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communication needs : which policy of language distribution and support (in the context of a wider discussion of which cultural policy should be followed, and how productivity is to be kept high) should be followed ? Immigrants are new to Swedish society in this phase of history and have caused a new language problem, namely that of 'bilingualism'. Previously, Swedes may have known several 'foreign languages' but they definitely were not 'bilingual' (cf. Aracil 1966). Yet, native concern with the permanency of Swedish supremacy in Sweden, or immigrants' pressure for recognition of their imported languages, is only one side of the problem of distribution and prestigiousness of speech varieties in Sweden. There are indigenous 'ethnic' groups who have been putting language demands through Parliament and in the news media. One group which seems to be receiving a somewhat stronger hearing which might indicate a marginal success is the Same group (the 'Lapps'). Furthermore, language determination and development issues concern the Same community internally, with regard to choosing among and unifying the various 'dialects' of the Same language, which are quite distinct, separate speech varieties, and with regard to encouraging stylistic refinement, etc., of each one. Finnish native speakers in the northern part of Sweden are also having their language situation investigated, partly as the indirect result of the inflow of Finnish immigrants and the special attention the latter were given by the school system, partly as a result of academic interest in 'bilingualism' and sociolinguistics. This group of Finnish-speaking people appears less interested in supporting political action themselves to have their non-Swedish vernacular introduced into the schools. The Jewish and Estonian communities have had practically no positive response to their pleas for consideration (Schwartz 1971). It also should be noted that Swedish dialects have caused school authorities and local government officials some embarrassment by being pitched against standard Swedish in school (Dagens Nyheter 1971 ; ö s t m a n 1971). Language determination issues may not have found as firm a place in Swedish organizational life as have issues pertaining to svensk sprákvárd (Swedish language cultivation), but considering their minor strength they certainly have made themselves heard. Sweden obviously does not present a very 'clean' case for assigning it to a 'cultivation' or a 'policy' approach. Papua New Guinea is a community which is striving to remedy a gap a deficiency - of an aggregately problematic nature. In general, English will not be available to a sufficient number of people, given the educational resources to meet projected communication needs. Pidgin is gaining increasing importance as a native as well as a domestically dominating language but it has not yet been brought beyond its popularly growing vernacular stage - and hardly even that, since the majority of Pidgin
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speakers acquire it as a 'second language'. Government agencies employ translators for spreading information on politics, agriculture, etc., in Pidgin and encourage highly ranked officials to work with Pidgin also, for example, in the House of Assembly on legal documents. A Christian missionary publishing house (Kristen Press), together with missionary personnel, devotes explicit attention to training writers in Pidgin and to making people recognize the need for institutions for Pidgin treatment and materials for and in Pidgin. The pioneering newspaper, Wantok, is edited by the scholar Reverend F. Mihalic, S.V.D., who recently produced a second edition of his acknowledged Pidgin grammar and dictionary in addition to his many other services to Pidgin (The Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin, 1971). If we add to this the many individual efforts, the work of the Rintebbe teachers' training college, the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (primarily through literacy campaigns), and the constantly supporting work by S. Wurm, D. Laycock and others at the Australian National University, then we can forecast that eventually we will find an established and recognized network of people and institutions providing the necessary guidance for Pidgin usage and recreation without which Pidgin would not grow to dominant domestic stature. Concurrent discussion (1972) questions the place of Pidgin in independent Papua New Guinea, and the distribution of English (and Motu) vis-à-vis Pidgin. Here is an example of an emerging speech community based on Pidgin, but coexistent with many small, domestic speech communities which are based on vernaculars that partly share the use of Pidgin through its function as a language of wider communication or through individual adoption of Pidgin, and all integrated into a larger speech network through the use of English for domestic and wider communication. Inherent in Neustupny's thinking is the notion of a developed speech community with a language treatment pattern and a verbal repertoire in harmonious balance. But the use of the developed-developing opposition is value-laden and unacceptable if it purports to contain all nations; there is also a third possibility : a nation not wanting or managing to reach the realm of the technologically developed and socially mobilized. In addition, 'nation' is not coterminous with 'speech community', and need not be. In fact, one of the many value-assumptions in contemporary discussion is attached to blurring the distinction between nation and speech community, implying that a nation has one dominant language. This may be practical but it still requires explanation. A 'developed' speech community, if we accept the notion, could be found in any nation, developed ('modernized') or not.
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A simple substitution of terms, of developing into emerging and of developed into stable speech community might help clarify the possibilities (cf. Koestler 1940). Papua New Guinea is not yet 'modern' but it is a political entity; it contains many stable speech communities, and is presently coping with the growth of Pidgin into a dominant vernacular and official language by simultaneous attention to issues of language determination and of language development. The latter is accomplished both by building a treatment system and by caring for Pidgin directly. Some parts of Papua New Guinea are completely traditional and a communication superstructure which increasingly relies on Pidgin is being created. Papua New Guinea is an emerging speech community. Nationhood may bring about language conflicts, if the relative distribution of English, Motu, Pidgin, and some vernaculars is politically uneven. But the prime language concern right now is the emergence of a Pidgin-dominated verbal repertoire and a treatment system to support it. Neustupny's own example of the Soviet Union (1970: 11) would also suggest that the 'developed' (now renamed 'stable') speech community can be found within the same political entity as one that is not. This example also establishes that there is no simple link between the development of a nation and the degree of development of its constituent speech communities. Part of a definition of a stable speech community could therefore be: relative to people's desire to communicate and verbally perform, there is a speech variety (set offeatures of a speech variety) available for them in their speech community's verbal repertoire to do so, or a treatment system available to routinely provide them with such a speech variety (or features of a speech variety). We have now broken the unique link of language 'development' to 'modern' phenomena, but retained the idea of links between language, treatment and society in a more general form. Also, we have left open the possibility of continued use of the words 'developing-developed' by employing the terms 'emerging' and 'stable' as auxiliary constructs for the more general discourse. Also, we have separated 'nation' from speech community, the latter being the group of people with which we are primarily concerned. We have also implicitly accepted the optimistic philosophy that whenever there is an attempt at order it is in the direction of something positive - for example, from 'emerging' into 'stable' - and that when there is disorder, we simply note the fact, and remember that any labels are purely auxiliary and metaphoric! We do not know how to characterize speech communities that are unstable but not emerging, and we leave
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open the possibility of transcending the simplistic notion of stable speech community once we understand better the interaction of verbal repertoire and language treatment pattern in speech communities of differing social, political and economic orders. Society can anticipate future events, by forecast or by routinely based expectation. If we recall economic theory, some societies wish to anticipate a pattern of economic growth. As long as their wishes are selffulfilling, as long as their goals are met, the economy is said to be healthy and under control, or, stable (Hansen 1966/67). I will apply this thought to the notion of stability of speech communities: as long as a speech community can anticipate, through its treatment system and with selfperceived success, most of the language problems they have recognized and will recognize, then it is stable. An economy, as well as a speech community, may find itself in a situation of unanticipated crisis, or of failure, from the point of view of forecast or goal. If this situation exists for a long period of time and blocks further formulation of self-fulfilling goals, then the speech community would no longer qualify as stable, nor would it be 'emerging'. Incidentally, this view of speech communities and the interaction between their language treatment systems and verbal repertoires allows different interpretations of what constitutes a language problem, etc., by 'inside' (native) participants and by 'outside' (expert, so-called, or scholarly) observers, as well as allows for both parties being wrong. My attempt at a systematization of terminology therefore accommodates Neustupny's distinction between a 'deep' and a 'surface' recognition of what really troubles a community. One of Neustupny's examples is the Japanese situation in which there is a surface belief that all language problems are script problems, when, according to the scholars, the problems are phonological, lexical, stylistic, etc. (1970: 2). In Aboriginal speech communities in Australia, language treatment is directed primarily toward the source of social ritual (religion), and is primarily concerned with propagating or preserving this ritual across generations so as to preserve social order. To the extent that social order is maintained, Aboriginal speech communities are stable. Aboriginal language treatment does not appear to pay much attention to the determination or development of speech varieties. Instead, it concentrates on the implementation of inherited verbal ritual and on the upbringing of children into the convenience of vernacular daily intercourse. Ritual, with its important verbal acts of dreamings, etc., is the source of social order, and language treatment provides a link in maintaining it by providing the mechanisms for teaching and explaining ritual language. 'The Walbiri attach an enormous importance to ritual matters.
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Because of the functional significance of patrilinee and patrimoieties in ritual life, my discussion of these units has necessarily been detailed. The patrilines provide the personnel for the lodges that cooperate to support the totemic system, and the patrimoieties classify the dreamings included in the system. As the dreamtime is ultimately the source of the social groups and their titles to the country, the patrilines and lodges indirectly sustain themselves jurally, politically and religiously by their own activities' (Meggitt 1965: 232). The economic, political, material, religious, etc., base for Aboriginaldom is radically different from what could be considered a viable base for any society that would aspire to 'development'. Consequently, the Australian government is trying to reorganize Aboriginal life. Yet, study of their languages has not required modification of linguistic theory, and, for purposes of arriving at a correct understanding of verbal repertoire and treatment systems, Aboriginal society offers a case for analysis. Literature abounds with general mention of the need for young men and women to acquire ritual knowledge, and of the need to participate in or avoid religiously significant territory, artefacts, and discourse. Thus, taboos on language use have to be rationalized and maintained if this life-form is to continue unscathed, and the language of ritual acts and meaning have to be transmitted to new performers. Strehlow pleads: 'It must be emphasized, however, that the Aranda used by skilful native storytellers and in the difficult, intricate, and archaic language of the chants is an instrument of great strength and beauty, which can rise to great heights of feeling.' And he explains: '. . . no uninitiated person can readily understand a verse that he has not had explained to him by his elders' (Strehlow 1964: 79-82). Learning continues throughout a person's life: 'although a man has seen all the ceremonies and ritual objects by the age of about 30, he does not as a rule understand the religious significance of all of them : and he continues to acquire this knowledge slowly from seniors, until he is an old man and is competent to teach others' (Meggitt 1965: 335). Language treatment among the Aborigines thus concentrates on instilling an understanding of language in ritual for the purposes of maintaining the ritual system. This is quite a complicated and necessary undertaking as ritual language has lost much of its links with the vernacular. As a matter of fact, the vernacular appears subordinate to other varieties of the Aboriginal language system, in any domain other than that of daily convenience. Berndt, discussing West Australia desert tribes, says: 'cult-totem affiliations would resolve the most outstanding difficulties' in 'face-to-face contacts' when people meet who nevertheless 'are sharing a common culture and speaking the same language' (1966: 52).
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The cult-totem affiliations even partly regulate, albeit indirectly, interaction between local groups which move 'across the country in search of sustenance within an undefined radius of the respective cult sites'. The availability of food also regulates interaction ritually: 'When food and water were relatively plentiful a number of hordes would come together, thus forming an aggregate of local groups plus their wives...it was during such periods that the major rituals and ceremonies were held' (p. 53). Whereas intensity of interaction and kin ties are explained in numerous anthropological articles, contributing to an understanding of the mechanics of transmission of vernacular language and of language change through interaction and exchange of people, e.g., women for wives, very little information is available about the mechanics of language treatment with regard to the vernacular. Meggitt's notes on intrafamiliar relationships report that the mother 'keeps up a flow of "baby-talk" ' with her son, 'provides some of his education, including practical hints on food gathering and the elucidation of kinship terminology'. The flow of baby-talk is hardly surprising, yet it constitutes a specific feature of a speech community's language treatment system (see Ferguson 1964). The Berndts (1952: 56) note that 'in many places there are traditional children's songs, happy little snatches of rhythm about spirits or animals, or the birds and other creatures he sees about him. These songs are only a preliminary, a starting point in the long process of learning and growing . . .'. There are undoubtedly many more ways of instilling correct use and understanding of vernacular language in Aboriginal speech communities. Regretfully, here as well as for other societies, very little information is available. The inculcation of correct verbal-ritual behavior can be illustrated briefly by the following quotations : 'Ordinarily, even for children, there is little room for doubt concerning the appropriate modes of behavior to be followed in any situation which may arise, or in the modes of address which may be used to persons, or in references to their activities. When children are having their first experience of important tribal events the conventions of speech and behavior are always explained to them. A great deal of the instruction which children undergo at initiations concerns the way in which they are to speak to and comport themselves towards others' (Stanner 1937: 301). 'From the point of view of the tribe, the novice, through a complicated system of discipline and teaching (often symbolically expressed), is being made a full member of the society. He does not learn everything at his initiation. A man, like a woman, is adding all through his life to his knowledge of sacred ritual : and he may
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be quite old before the final revelations are disclosed to him' (Berndt and Berndt 1952: 60). Aboriginal speech communities, however, have not been able to cope with the transformation of Aboriginaldom to suit an imposed white society. Aboriginal languages are vanishing. Instead of Aboriginaldom supplying new means for maintaining and adapting inherited speech varieties, as well as other social institutions, it is the white Australian government that institutes a research institute (the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies) in the national capital to salvage (!) what can be salvaged. I need not belabor this point of societal disintegration, nor do I wish to criticize the research activities of AIAS-sponsored scholars since they do what they can, and their work should be regarded as a highly valued contribution, independent of Aboriginaldom's inherent illness. On the other hand, if such research instills hopelessness into Aboriginal revival, then it clearly conflicts with Aboriginal interest. (Cf. Kjolseth 1972: 8 from Darnell - '. . . in the United States, the government was the primary source of financial support for research on Indian languages and Indian beliefs. . . . As soon as they were pacified and relocated the support dried up.') Although the verbal repertoire in traditional Aboriginal speech communities was substantially different from, for example, engineers' language for engineers or kings' language for kings, it did display comparable language diversity: it had kin vocabulary, ritual language, careful management of speaking depending on social setting, etc. This verbal repertoire was perpetuated by a treatment system which once was adequate for its purposes. Aboriginal speech communities were as stable in their way as today's Western communities appear to be. Transmission and explanation of verbal behavior was the raison d'être of their treatment system, and resulted in maintenance of social order. Analysis of language treatment cannot be based on a division of substance, of matter, in speech communities. Rather, I see stability of speech communities as a successful accommodation, through a system of language treatment, of language problems. Substance may differ but parallel relationships will remain, as we compare societies with regard to stability. Speech communities can possess adequate means for solving their language problems regardless of whether their concerns focus on communication around witchcraft, herbal medicine, acupuncture or penicillin. While men in the non-Western world may be unable to divert a course of events set by the pressures of the materially and politically powerful, they may yet have a deep understanding and control of their language. While I cannot deny the necessity of much technological advance, I can deny the
Prerequisites for a Model of Language
Treatment
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necessity of direct or indirect evaluation of speech communities on that basis.
REFERENCES
Aracil, L. V. 1966 'Bilingualism as a Myth', translated by the author and L. P. Harvey, Valencia, May, manuscript. Berndt, R. M. 1966 'The Concept of "The Tribe" in the Western Desert of Australia', in Readings in Australian and Pacific Anthropology, ed. by I. Hogben and L. R. Hiatt. Melbourne, University Press. and Berndt, C. H. 1952 The First Australians. Sydney. Chatterji, S. K. 1926 The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. Calcutta. Reprinted London, 1970. Das Gupta, J. and Gumperz, J. J. 1968 'Language, Communication and Control in North India', in language Problems of Developing Nations, ed. by J. A. Fishman, C. A. Ferguson and J. Das Gupta. Dagens Nyheter 1971 Article on 4 April. Dunâs, R. 1970 Battre svenska, Ord och Stil, Sprâkvârdssamfundets skrifter 2. Studentlitteratur. Ferguson, C. A. 1964 'Baby Talk in Six Languages', American Anthropologist 66/6. Gumperz, J. J. 1968 'The Speech Community', in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Reprinted 1971 in Language in Social Groups. Hansen, B. 1966/67 Lectures in Economic Theory. Studentlitteratur. Heiander, G. 1971 Article in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 22 March 1971. Kjolseth, R. 1972 Sociolinguistics Newsletter, 3/1. Koestler, A. 1940 Darkness at Noon (The Third Hearing: 1). Meggitt, M. J. 1965 Desert People. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press. Mihalic, F. 1971 The Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin, Brisbane. Neustupny, J. V. 1965 'First Steps towards the Conception of "Oriental Languages'", Archiv Orientálni 33. 1970 'Basic Types of Treatment of Language Problems', Linguistic Communications 1.
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Neustupny, J. V. 1973 'Preliminary Remarks on Language Problems in Australia', Linguistic Communications 10. Östman, P. 1971 Article in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjôfartstidning, 5 May. Schwartz, D. 1971 Svensk invandrar- och minoritetspolitik 1945-68. Prisma. Sen, S. C. 1954 History of Bengali Language and Literature, 2nd ed. Calcutta. Stannner, W. E. H. 1937 'Aboriginal Modes of Address and Reference in the North-west of the Northern Territory', Oceania 7/3. Strehlow, T. G. H. 1964 'On Aranda Traditions', in Language in Culture and Society. A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology, ed. by D. Hymes. New York.
PART II
Language Planning Systems and Organizations
5
JYOTIRINDRA DAS GUPTA
Language Planning in India : Authority and Organization
Language planning in India refers to both federal and state activities which are systematically addressed to the development and promotion of officially recognized languages. Our project, however, was limited to the study of Hindi language planning conducted primarily by the federal government and secondarily by Uttar Pradesh, one of the prominent Hindi states. Our sample of language planners was composed of the most prominent members of the language planning organizations set up by these two governments. We pursued this strategy of including two levels of the political system because Hindi planning is a matter of common concern between the federal government and the Hindi states. However, due to considerably larger resources and the national responsibility of the federal government, the conduct of language planning at the national level clearly deserves greater attention.
AGENCIES AND MINISTRIES
We selected thirty-nine leading members of the most important language planning agencies listed in official directories, of whom thirty-six generously gave several interviews totalling six to eight hours. 1 Twentyfour members belonged to federal organizations; twelve were part of the state-level organizations. At the federal level, language planning is conducted by several organizations spread over different ministerial jurisdictions, including 1. The interviews reported here were conducted in 1970-71 in Delhi and Lucknow by a team of Indian researchers led by Sant Saran working under Dr. Ramashray Roy. The generous help of Dr. Roy and the staff of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, is gratefully acknowledged. The author is also grateful to the Ministry of Education and all the agencies studied here for their excellent cooperation. A second round of field work was conducted in Delhi in 1973 to up-date information. 3
MLP
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Education, Home (interior) and Law. 2 In terms of the basic and general functions of language planning, the organizations working under the auspices of the Ministry of Education are of greater importance. Until 1971, the Central Hindi Directorate and the Commission of Scientific and Technical Terminology (later joined together as one administrative unit) performed the most important functions subsumed under the responsibility of promotion and development of Hindi. At the same time, the Official Language Commission of the Ministry of Law and the Hindi Training Scheme of the Home Ministry performed specialized functions. The organizations of the Ministry of Education were coordinated by the Language Division, while the combined language planning operations of all the ministry agencies were coordinated at the cabinet level. This organizational structure and management of language planning obviously reflects the cabinet-type government which characterizes the Indian parliamentary system where the federal constitution consigns the ultimate authority to parliament. Unlike the language planning systems in Indonesia and Israel, in India many organizations are tied together in a complex pattern. All of them are responsible to legislative authority representing many language groups, and they are generally guided by official language policies which reflect a balance of interests among contending language groups. In short, the politics of a multilingual society, organized in a parliamentary democratic framework in a country of India's size and complexity, provided a unique context for our study of language planning and its organizational evolution over two decades.
EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZATIONS
Most of our respondents (22 out of 36) indicated that the basic reason for creating their organizations was to take care of an intensified need for language planning. 3 A significant minority (12), however, emphasized not so much the general factor of need but rather the maturation of proper political support for organized planning as the reason for founding the agencies. These perceptions concerning foundation were related to the 2. Ministerial jurisdictions are defined in Government of India, Secretariat Training School, Organizational Set-up and Functions of the Ministries!Departments of the Government of India (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1969). 3. Due to multiple responses, numbers in parentheses cited in the text refer to frequency of response coded in one category rather than the number of respondents. The sum of all responses may be greater than the number of respondents whenever the freedom of multiple response was exercised.
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majority's view that these agencies were formally created by the executive branch of the government. There was also a preponderant agreement on the question of continued authorizing source of the planning agencies. Twenty-six of our respondents attributed this source to the executive authority, including a variety of extra-governmental sources. Possibly, this difference of views refers to a distinction between formal and informal authorization, and it is interesting that at least some members interpreted this mandate in wider terms than would be normally invoked by members of conventional administrative agencies. In specifying the need which these agencies were expected to meet, the highest rank was accorded to the function of elaboration (for education, 20; for other dimensions, 7), followed by preparation of educational materials for school use (17), language teaching and learning materials (17), and meeting the need for linguistic and literary research (10). The above variation in emphasis is partly explainable by the fact that there is a division of function among the four organizations to which our respondents belong. Despite the general agreement on the importance of Hindi elaboration for education, codification was emphasized by only three respondents for education, and six for other clienteles. This stands in sharp contrast to the responses of the Israeli language planning agency, which emphasized both codification and elaboration. The linguistic authority of the Hebrew Academy, however, is derived from a rich fund of historical experience, community consensus and recognized expertise, while the Central Hindi Directorate or the Commission of Scientific and Technical Terminology derive their authorization from the governmental structure and are expected to operate like administrative departments rather than academies. This is not to deny the academy-like functions they perform; our comparison simply indicates the differential emphasis on planning functions that may be associated with differences in organizational inheritance, context and authorization. In the Indian language planners' view, increased output of lexical stock and energetic dissemination and use appear to deserve the highest ranks of priority. In addition to emphasizing elaboration, the majority of our respondents also stressed an initial responsibility for dissemination (24) and promotion (18) of products. For a minority of respondents this initial responsibility was to produce evaluation (11) and implementation of sanctions (10). Both evaluation and sanction involve political and intellectual risk, and it is no wonder that the majority of the planning officials chose to play it safe. Apparently fear of political opposition from rival language groups did not dictate the choice of the path of minimum risk, for most responses (24) indicated that there were few noticeable forces opposing the operation
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of their organizations. This perception of lack of serious opposition may surprise those observers who tend to exaggerate the intensity and extension of conflict over Hindi policy. For the Hindi planning organizations, however, the infrequent spurts of anti-Hindi politics offer little threat to their daily order of business. If anything, the general indifference of anti-Hindi politicians and groups to the routine activities of the Hindi planning agencies actually aids them. Their choice of a strategy of minimum risk, then, appears to be derived from the general administrative culture which puts a premium on mechanical performance rather than on innovative development. In sum, most of the language planning officials in India traced the origin and authorization of their organizations from decisions taken by executive authorities responsible to legislature. They explained the rationale of language planning generally in terms of elaborative, promotional and training functions. The terms of reference recalled by the officials emphasized planning objectives, operational methods and interagency linkages. Greater attention was directed towards production and dissemination than toward systematic evaluation of the products and their use. Fear of external opposition was minimal. Most of the responses (28) indicated that there were few intra- or inter-organizational points of conflict concerning the specified functions of planning. In fact, most of them indicated that, with the exception of operating and distributional methods, the original pattern of Hindi planning did not need any major change or revision. Probably these responses understated the elements of dissent, discontent and conflict within the world of Indian language planning. After all, as government officials, the Indian language planners were more likely to discount their difficulties than express them openly.
PATTERNS OF ORGANIZATION
The Central Hindi Directorate was established in 1960 as a 'subordinate office' under the Ministry of Education. The Ministry set up the Standing Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology in 1961.4 In the same year, the Ministry of Law created the Official Language (Legislative) 4. For accounts of early history see Government of India, Ministry of Education, Administrative Report of the Central Hindi Directorate, 1960-61 and 1961-62 (Delhi, Manager of Publications, 1964, pp. 1-3) and Report 1968-69 (Including a survey of Activities from 1965-66 to 1967-68) (New Delhi, Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology, 1969, pp. 1-5). The names of the Ministries change from time to time, and we have used the generally familiar names that persist in common reference despite periodic changes.
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Commission. The Home Ministry organized the Hindi Teaching Scheme in 1955, originally started by the Ministry of Education in 1952, which was expanded in 1960. A variety of Hindi planning work was initiated in the Hindi states after Independence under respective state administrations, e.g., in Uttar Pradesh the departments of education, language, law, information, and in particular officially controlled units like the Hindi Samiti and the Granth Academy participate in Hindi planning. For policy coordination at the federal, federal-state and interstate levels different committees were set up. The entire structure is complicated, but the crucial importance of the federal level organizations, especially those controlled by the Ministry of Education, is generally recognized. Accordingly, in our analysis we will concentrate on selected federal organizations, although our survey data will reflect the aggregation specified above. If agencies were set up by executive authority, were educational leaders and personnel consulted or involved during their establishment? Less than half of the responses (16) suggested that such consultation with leaders took place, ten denied, eight had no answer at all ; only two indicated that the leaders were also involved in the process. Four responses suggested that teaching personnel were either consulted or involved at the time of initiating the agencies. When asked if the educational hierarchy or lower ranks are currently involved in the agency operations and control, less than one third of the responses (operations 10; control 12) were positive with reference to hierarchy; two mentioned teachers, while close to half (16) denied any such involvement at all. If these responses were reliable indicators, the agencies' lack of direct linkage with the educational sector might be interpreted as due to either deliberate neglect or unimaginative lapse. Though observers of Indian administration will not find it hard to agree with these interpretations, we must point out that the involvement of the educational sector was somewhat underestimated, partly because of our emphasis on formal involvement. Also, particular agencies, such as the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology, had greater use for educational involvement than others, just as specialized intragovernmental agencies, such as the Hindi teaching scheme of the Home Ministry, did not need much help from the educational hierarchy. We will have occasion to comment on this aspect later in our analysis.
CONTROL AND LINKAGE
Language planning agencies at the federal level are organizationally controlled by the respective Ministries. The pattern of control is broadly
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determined by the official status assigned to these agencies by the Ministries. Similarly, the structure of control within each agency is generally defined by standard administrative procedure; for example, the Central Hindi Directorate began as a subordinate office within the Ministry of Education (previously called Ministry of Education and Youth Services, later (1974) Ministry of Education and Social Welfare; we use here simply Ministry of Education). In formal terms, this implies that the agency was responsible for the detailed execution of particular decisions of the Government. For Hindi planning, the basic 'decisions of the Government' were phrased in broad terms, and the agencies translated various goals into plans of action. The scale of the function was, of course, limited by several factors : the agency's size, its administrative status, its funding for programs and personnel and the nature of personnel recruited to operate it. In practice, all these agencies were small initially, confined to relatively low administrative importance and generally overshadowed by the size of the respective ministries. It is not surprising that the stamp of ministerial control was deeply impressed on the organizational pattern of the agencies. The agencies' executive committees were appointed by and responsible to the higher officials of the respective ministries. The relation of the Ministry of Law with the Official Language Commission (Legislative) was different, partly because the Commission's terms were advisory and partly because of the fact that the main functions of the Ministry of Law were advisory. Currently, this ministry is called the Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs. When the Central Hindi Directorate was established in 1960 as a successor to the Hindi Division, it comprised forty-six officers of various ranks, including nineteen on transfer or deputation from other jobs in the Ministry of Education. The senior position at that time was equivalent to a Deputy Secretary, which, in the Indian administrative hierarchy, is considered a relatively junior rank. In addition, most of the officers were new to their jobs, just as the jobs were new for the Ministry. Given these factors, it was not difficult for the administrative hierarchy to control the Directorate by conventional means, despite the fact that the functions of this agency were of a different order than those of the other units of the ministry. The internal structure of the agency also followed a conventional pattern with one director aided by several deputy directors, assistant directors, a hierarchy of editors and junior officers. Below them in elaborate rank order was a staff of 143 persons, including 79 research assistants and 34 clerks. Though some of the senior officers came with an academic background in Hindi language or literature, the agency itself conjured up an image of a bureaucracy more than an academy.
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With this context in mind, it is not surprising that many years after these agencies were founded, their members, with one exception, indicated that they had no hand in selecting their own controlling board or committee. Only one half of the responses indicated that there is a statutory representation of various intellectual groups involved in language policy in the control system, citing the educational hierarchy (11), language or linguistics scholars (7), writers or journalists (6). Only one response referred to representation of the rank-and-file educational personnel in the controlling mechanism of the Hindi planning agencies. Basically, the members believed that their organizations had the authority to initiate and continue projects and to implement programs. At the same time, few (6) responses indicated that they had any control over the budget allocations which permit these functions. In sum, the predominant feeling was that major decisions concerning general objectives, funding, scale of operation and regulating mechanism were beyond their control. Our respondents were rather uncomfortable when questions were asked regarding access to and participation in the controlling body of their agencies. About half the responses denied knowledge on this score. The other half indicated that representatives of the public media and client groups had no access to the board meetings; the agency administration was allowed to have some participation, and the agency staff enjoyed some access. Were the reports of the board meetings publicly circulated ? Again, only one half of the respondents claimed to know : these were of limited circulation and were made available upon special request and review. In fact, like so many other offices of the Indian government, officials are extremely reluctant to report official proceedings, and even the annual general reports of the agencies are rarely circulated among the public. Given the nature of language politics and the preference for democratic language planning in a country of India's size, it is interesting to note that the print order for agency reports published in Hindi or English does not exceed 3,000 copies.5 Of these, few copies find their way outside of legislative and executive circles. According to our respondents, the most important forms of communication between the ministries and agency leaders are comprised of administrative directives, requests and consultative meetings. They were divided in their assessment of the value of informal communication between the two levels : ten of them thought this was more important than the most useful formal channels, seven granted this relative importance, 5. For example, the Hindi version of the consolidated report of the central Hindi Directorate for 1965-68 had a print order for 3,000, the Ministry of Education Report titled Propagation and Development of Hindi 1952-1967,2,400, and the Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Assessment Report 1970-71, 2,500.
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thirteen believed they were unimportant, while six failed to answer. Were they satisfied with these channels of communication ? Most of the members interviewed were reluctant to answer questions in this regard, perhaps because it might be interpreted as judgment on the sanctified procedures followed by the administrative hierarchy. How did they view the state of linkage between their activities and the world of writers and journalists operating outside the administrative arena? A significant number of responses indicated that the respondents' organizations had no substantial contact either with writers and journalists (13) or with the broadcasting world (19); while some (press, 10; radio, 6) felt that the opinions and requests of the media were channeled through official reports transmitted to the agencies by the higher administration. As for formal contact, most responses (18) denied any organizational link with writers and journalists; some (12) suggested that they were represented in the agencies in various ways; whereas others (11) distributed their responses in a wide range of speculation. The denial of formal link with the broadcasting media evoked greater agreement, with 24 denials and 6 responses recording a variety of opinions suggesting the existence of some linkage on a formal basis. The question of the agencies' lack of link with the field of broadcasting is especially interesting because both radio and television broadcasting constitute a federal monopoly administered by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting which is supposed to actively promote and develop Hindi. In fact, the All India Radio does take an active interest in this matter.® Judging by our interview responses and by other accounts, it appears that interministry coordination was not properly developed. As for the relative indifference to writers and journalists, it is likely that certain procedural difficulties inhibited the agencies. Some of these difficulties stemmed from the Indian administrative convention of staying away from public and political controversies. The operational style of these agencies seemed to follow this convention, even when the nature of their novel function possibly required a relaxation of the procedural routine. However, as a result of this propensity to avoid public scrutiny and media cultivation, the public's knowledge of and involvement in the process of language planning has been remarkably low. Since the educational sector of the public is expected to be vitally concerned with the course of language planning, one would normally expect to find strong linkages between the agencies and this sector. Two levels of 6. For a recent listing of activities indicating the participation of the All India Radio in programs to develop and promote Hindi see Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Report, 1972-73 (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1973, pp. 6, 27).
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the educational sector were clearly distinguished in the questions administered to our respondents: rank-and-file educational associations comprising educational personnel at the lower ranks of hierarchy, and higher order associations composed of personnel belonging to the educational establishment. We recognized that some language planning agencies were more relevant for the general educational sector than others. Thus, for example, we placed the Central Hindi Directorate and the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology in the first category, and the Home and the Law Ministry agencies in the second. Accordingly, we sought to disaggregate the responses in two clusters, paying greater attention to the two agencies of the first category belonging to the Ministry of Education. With respect to the lower order educational associations, the aggregate response indicated an indifferent relation and thin linkages. Considering exclusively respondents from the education-related agencies at the federal and state levels (n = 19), we found that only a few responses indicated either educational rank-and-file associations' representation at control level (2) or their inclusion in various task forces and committees (4). The weakness of organizational relation was indirectly admitted when most of these respondents stated that they normally ascertained the views of those associations through their official reports and requests transmitted directly or in the course of specially arranged meetings. On their part, the agencies sought to communicate with the education sector in general through special mailing, meetings, workshops and conferences. From our interviews and other available evidence, it was apparent that greater importance was assigned to communication with the higher echelons of the educational sector than was the case with the lower ranks, and the least importance was attached to systems of communication with the student population. The wide variation of clientele of different agencies makes it difficult to devise a common strategy of linkage, interaction and processing of information feedback, on behalf of all the agencies in a unified manner. The spatial dispersal of the clientele poses a relatively greater problem for some agencies than others, though given India's size and diversity this is a general problem for all agencies. The variation in organizational strength of different clientele groups has an important bearing on their efficacy in terms of capacity to put pressure on the respective agencies. Also, one has to take into consideration the fact that due to different functions, agencies tend to vary in terms of the nature of the leading personnel guiding their activities. Thus, for example, the Home Ministry Agency is led by bureaucrats, the Law Ministry agency is dominated by legal experts, while within the Ministry of Education, language scholars
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appear to command preponderant influence. Because of these interagency variations, different strategies have been evolved in the course of each organization's life designed to meet the needs of particular types of clientele. However, in spite of these differences, one can notice a common core of characteristics which include an obvious deference for hierarchy, rigid adherence to administrative procedure, propensity to avoid political risk, and possibly a preference for highly influential clientele. Some of these aspects will be discussed later.
OF RIVALS AND OPPOSITION
We have mentioned before that the Hindi planning agencies consistently believed that, during their initial establishment and continued operation, they faced no serious organized opposition. Now that we have examined the agencies' relation with various client groups, it is interesting to note how the agencies perceived the reactions of these groups in terms of probable or actual threat, counter-influence or counter-programs. It is remarkable that out of 36 respondents, 28 perceived no threat from pressure groups, clientele groups or even rival agencies. Their responses (28) implied that none of these groups either opposed their activities or sought to change the direction of their programs or projects. Four respondents indicated the presence of some opposition or counter-influence, and another four did not answer. Those who indicated the existence of opposition also emphasized that such opposition was expressed through critical comments in meetings and publications rather than in the form of demonstrative movements. It is possible that some of our respondents deliberately underreported their perception of opposition in order to stress the degree of consensus supporting their function. Be that as it may, information from other sources also suggests a low salience of opposition to the activities of the agencies. This may seem surprising in view of the history of language rivalry in India. But it is important to note that once Hindi was accorded a legitimate officiai role and domain the anti-Hindi forces could afford to tolerate its development. Within the domain of Hindi, potential opposition was lessened by a combination of diverse factors, such as lack of knowledge, indifference, expectation of gain from government patronage and a sense of pride in sharing the elevated status of Hindi.
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CONVERGING ORGANIZATIONS
Hindi planners are aware of the fact that the function of Hindi planning is distributed among a number of agencies. Besides the official agencies, there are other organizations whose activities substantially contribute to the successful working of the planning process. The contribution of these organizations appears to be particularly useful for Hindi planning precisely in those sectors of activity where the direct use of government personnel may be politically sensitive. The issue of promoting Hindi as a language of wider communication or 'link language' for India constitutes such a sensitive area. Political battles fought over the relative allocation of deference, domain and function between Hindi and English have not resulted in a clear, unitary and sovereign claim of Hindi as the language of wider communication. By legal enactment, and more importantly in actual use, English continues to be a vital medium of official communication. If a dual language policy has been affirmed in the field of federal official language, the continued importance of English in the fields of higher education, research, interstate economic transactions and news networks is an indisputable fact of national life. To be sure, efforts have been made to reduce the importance of English in nonofficial nationwide communication and to expand the use of Hindi as a link language. These efforts, in scale and effect, have been too limited either to displace English or to enable Hindi to break new ground in the linkage function. It is in this context that the political sensitivity pertaining to the question of Hindi's linkage function can be appreciated. The federal government's capacity to change the language of higher education, modern business and sophisticated communication is limited, just as its political mandate concerning the desirable extent of change remains uncertain. For the Hindi planning agencies, all this creates a cloud of ambiguity that cannot be easily dispelled. Most of the members of these agencies naturally favor the expansion of Hindi's domain as far as possible; but, at the same time as members of government administrative systems, they are not expected to openly assume a campaigner's role in this sensitive area. Fortunately for them, the advocacy function is performed by several voluntary associations whose activities are indirectly influenced by the agencies through financial subsidy and other means. In fact, most of our respondents (21) mentioned at least two voluntary associations engaged in promoting Hindi as a language of wider communication, while seven mentioned one such organization (3 mentioned none, and 5 abstained). All these associations were well known for their contribution to the development of Hindi and its national dissemination. They received substantial financial subsidy from the federal government
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and maintained close links with the Hindi planning agencies (Das Gupta 1970). Our respondents recognized that these associations performed a valuable promotional function and felt that a greater coordination was needed both among the associations and between the latter and the agencies. In addition to the promotional functions, these associations also were engaged in a variety of Hindi development and educational activities. According to our respondents, these activities included preparation of school and advanced level educational materials, publication of specialized periodicals, organizing teaching programs for Hindi- and non-Hindispeaking population. Given the extensive involvement of these largescale associations in activities that are substantially complementary to the official agencies, and the fact that these associations predate them, we were rather surprised to find that most of our respondents abstained from commenting on possible attempts on the part of the associations to influence the agencies. In part, the reluctance to discuss this question could be attributed to a general desire to avoid politically sensitive issues. But we must also recognize that influencing Hindi policy does not necessarily mean influencing the Hindi planning agencies. At the agency level of operation, voluntary associations may choose to be content in playing the role of clientele and auxiliary groups, though they may seek to influence Hindi policy more effectively through legislative, committee and other political means. There is no reason to believe that our respondents were unaware of these possible avenues of influence, and our evidence from other sources indicates that those avenues were freely used by the major voluntary associations. When we asked the respondents to rank various language planning agencies and to comment on inter-agency relations, we noticed a distinct sense of hesitation bordering on reluctance to discuss matters involving evaluation of other agencies. If we may piece together the views expressed in the course of the interviews, the following picture emerges : the relative importance of the roles of the Central Hindi Directorate and the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology were generally recognized. The other agencies were regarded as more specialized; one served basically an intra-administrative language training function ; another was limited to serving the legal system. Being more general in scope, the first two agencies were also regarded as functionally crucial sources from which all the other agencies at federal and state levels could draw. The most important intellectual responsibilities assumed by these two agencies included the production, coordination and promotion of Hindi terminology, grammar, translation, dictionaries, new literature, etc. The general feeling among the respondents was that by and large the work of the
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basic agencies was successful, but coordination among various agencies evoked some criticism. In sum, the division of functions was clearly recognized, and members of one agency respected the work and contribution of the other agencies. No drastic improvements were either suggested or predicted. The dominant feeling was one of guarded optimism regarding the foreseeable future of the agencies' role in Hindi planning.
THE EXTERNAL WORLD
A relatively small proportion (one third) of our respondents was familiar with the organization of language planning in other countries. With few exceptions, knowledge concerning specific experiments was rather general. Most responses cited instances from the general history of language policy in the U.S.S.R., Canada and Malaysia, and some work of the UNESCO. When asked about the specific relevance of individual experiments to the work done by particular agencies, only a few members chose to discuss particular project designs or evaluation systems. Most of them agreed that there was no linkage with any foreign organization except for a few intermittent contacts. However, they also stated that there was much to learn from other language planning systems, and that future efforts should be made to build more external contacts and linkages. One thing was clear: they had very few opportunities either to observe directly or to work out effective links with their counterparts in other countries. What kind of books, journals or papers did they find stimulating for their work concerning language planning? Here, too, most of the responses were of a rather general nature and indicated a general interest covering a wide range. Because of the division of functions among various agencies as discussed before, we did not expect a highly professional or keen academic interest among many members. Indeed, the more academic responses came from the Ministry of Education agencies. Taking the aggregate response, we found that a relatively large number indicated general readings in philosophy, history, politics, etc., followed by interest in language and linguistics. Only a few indicated reading specialized works on language planning or language-related research. In all these categories of readings, more responses indicated reading Indian than foreign books; though in the categories of language, linguistics and language planning, the relative proportion of foreign publications was fairly high. As we had expected, language-related reading was more characteristic of the members of the planning agencies belonging to the Ministry of Education, and many of these members were familiar with some of the professional publications related to their field of work. On the other hand,
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with one exception, there was no indication of systematic efforts on the part of our respondents to keep up with the recent products of research on sociolinguistics or language planning. None of the agencies surveyed by us indicated any organized and systematic interest in sophisticated contemporary international research relevant to their work. We had a feeling that our respondents neither appreciated the need to be in touch with this kind of work, nor did their routine leave much time and opportunity to do so. In part, the establishment of the Central Institute of Indian Languages in 1969 to bridge the gap between basic linguistic research and developmental activities pertaining to Indian languages sought to remedy this situation (Pattanaik 1971: 4 - 5 ; Vartavaha 1969-). Although the Institute was sponsored by the Ministry of Education, its structure was designed to permit greater attention to research and freedom from administrative demands. The record of the Institute also indicates that it has facilitated a closer contact with the world of international scholarship than was previously possible.
PROJECTS AND PRODUCTS
Most of the agencies were engaged in relatively long term projects. When we conducted our interviews (in 1970-71), the leading projects carried on by most agencies were already under way for more than three years. Most of our respondents (29) believed that their leading projects were of direct educational relevance. When asked about their perception of the nature of target population, most responses identified government personnel (22) and college and university students (18) as the most important prospective users of their products. Next in order followed school students (16), school and college teachers (14 each), general public (11), adult education (7), and others. While describing the primary purpose of their projects, 13 stressed education, 7 language planning, 5 national integration, while 8 chose a variety of other categories, and 3 abstained. Only a few believed that their agencies were responsible for initially proposing the projects they were engaged in. The initial moves were generally believed to have been sponsored by either the higher echelons of the administration or by the appropriate legislatures. Many believed that they were consulted before the final approval of the project which, again, was mainly regarded as a matter of ministerial responsibility. They chose to inform and periodically consult with knowledgeable individuals, the respective Ministry staff, and clientele groups through oral and written contacts. Did they submit these or previous projects to any systematic evaluation concerning effectiveness ? Only a few indicated the existence of
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either formal (4) or informal (4) systems of evaluation; most respondents gave no answer; two denied their existence. Our respondents were not overly concerned with the relevance of language planning projects carried on in other countries for their specific projects. Some of them (13) vaguely conceded their relevance, while an equal number denied it, and the rest (10) abstained. Of those who admitted the relevance of projects in other countries, the majority (9 out of 13) confessed that they did not establish any contact with the organizers of those projects; three claimed to have only intermittent contacts. Similarly, only a few of our respondents (5) felt that language planners of other countries might benefit from a knowledge of the work carried out in India, while many felt otherwise; most refrained from giving any answer. It is worth noting that none referred to a single case where an agency in another country was in touch with his agency in connection with any aspect of its projects. Did the Indian agencies plan to publish scholarly reports emerging from their projects in order to communicate with the academic and professional circles concerned with language planning, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics? Some respondents (11) suggested that there were such plans, although they did not agree on the specific nature of the publication plans; many of them (14) felt there were no such plans, and a substantial number (11) did not answer. Evidently, neither external contacts nor scholarly communication appeared to excite our respondents who considered their agencies more as administrative organizations implementing public policy than as august academicians striving for excellence. We have discussed in this section how our respondents reported on different aspects of their agencies' projects. In order to appreciate this discussion it is necessary to describe the nature of the basic programs undertaken by the agencies, the projects arising out of these programs, and the agencies' performance. Our brief account here will be limited to the federal level agencies and their major activities. When the Central Hindi Directorate was set up in 1960, it was entrusted with a wide range of responsibilities. Gradually some of its important functions were transferred to other specialized organizations. The programs of the CHD, as adopted in its earlier years of operation, could be described as follows: (1) preparation and publication of language materials, (2) promotion of Hindi through educational and other means, and (3) coordination of various Hindi-related operations within the Ministry of Education. The first program included specific projects on Hindi terminology, but from 1965 these projects were exclusively carried on by the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT), when the latter was separated from the Directorate. Since 1971, these two organizations have
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been joined together again. The CHD, however, initiated and continued under its auspices several glossary and dictionary projects, including bilingual glossaries with Hindi base, translation of academic books and administrative manuals. 7 The project on administrative manuals, however, was transferred to a separate organization in 1971. One of the major projects included in the second program involved the organization of correspondence courses for teaching Hindi to the non-Hindi-speaking population. 8 The functions of the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology included (1) formulation of principles relating to coordination and evolution of scientific and technical terminology as well as humanities and social sciences terminology, (2) preparation and approval of terminology and its incorporation in standard textbooks and dictionaries, and (3) coordination of work relating to terminology in various states in India. By 1969 twenty-three expert advisory committees were working to finalize terminology evolved in different units in the CSTT concerned with various subjects. A number of committees were appointed for production of books in these subject areas. A specialized journal of terminology was initiated in 1968 which was later continued as a review journal of broader scope. A recent annual report of the CSTT provided a characteristic summary statement of projected activities of the agency. Thus, it was stated in a 1971-72 official report that during fiscal 1972-73, 15,000 terms relating to engineering and other areas will be evolved. Also, 'glossaries in respect of 300,000 terms . . . already finalized will be printed.' The CSTT by now was riding high with a sense of imminent fulfillment of a crucial part of its mission. It declared that by the end of 1973 at least 300 books be published which would take care of the need at the graduate level in humanities and undergraduate level in science subjects. 9 The Official Language (Legislative) Commission (OLLC) was set up in 1961 to (1) prepare a standard legal terminology primarily in Hindi and secondarily, 'as far as possible', in all Indian languages, (2) prepare authoritative texts in Hindi of all statutes, rules, orders, etc., and (3) to make arrangements for translation of Central enactments in the official 7. These projects are described in its reports, for example, the reports cited above in notes 4 and 5. See also the annual reports of the Ministry of Education, Report 1972-73, pp. 249-266. 8. The scale of the operation of this program is indicated by the fact that four years after its establishment, during 1972-73, the number of students enrolled was 4,080 including 163 from abroad (Ibid., p. 259). 9. For details see the Report, 1968-69 cited before and Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Assessment Report, 1970-71 (Delhi, Government of India Press, 1972, p. 36). A mimeographed edition of 1973 of the assessment report provides further listing of the projects of the CSTT on pp. 23-24.
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languages of the states. One can turn to a recent official statement of the Ministry of Law for an indication of the OLLC's activities.10 A report of 1972-73 stated that, during that year, the OLLC finalized and published the Hindi texts of 38 Acts and 4 Ordinances. Hindi translation of 45 Acts was finalized and made ready for publication. Hindi texts of 105 Acts were already published in diglot form (English and Hindi). In addition, the OLLC carried on its regular share of Hindi translation of rules, regulations and orders, and supervised translation of Central Acts into regional languages. The official reports on the activities of the OLLC: described the volume of work undertaken and completed by it. These reports did not offer any systematic evaluation of the quality or the extent of use of the Hindi versions or translations of the legal texts. The progress and projects described so far were mainly concerned with the development and promotion of Hindi for the existing and the prospective users of Hindi, including the Hindi-speaking and the non-Hindi population. Another part of Hindi planning in practice consisted of organized Hindi teaching and training programs conducted and coordinated by the Indian administration. The function of Hindi teaching and training was mainly divided into two streams, one directed towards the educational sector and the other serving government employees. The Ministry of Education was in charge of the first while the Ministry of Home Affairs controlled the second. The Ministry of Education sponsored in 1951 the Hindi Shiksha Samiti, composed of federal and state representatives, which periodically 'suggested measures for . . . acceleration, expansion and implementation of existing programs regarding teaching, teacher training, production of literature and several other aspects of the work'. 11 In operational terms, the most significant effort of this ministry in planning Hindi teaching was represented by the Kendriya Hindi Shikshan Mandai, Agra. This organization, created in 1960, organized teacher training courses and sought to develop methodology of teaching Hindi for different language areas of the country. In addition, a number of Hindi Teacher Training Colleges were established in different states and more than five thousand Hindi teachers were subsidized in various levels of schools throughout the country. The fact that all these projects were administered by the Ministry which also sponsored the most important language planning agencies made it easier to forge appropriate links between planning and teaching Hindi. These links are all the more significant because the federal government does not have a direct control over the educational sector of the country. 10. See Government of India, Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs, Report, 1972-73 (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1973, pp. 32-38). 11. Propagation and Development of Hindi, 1952-1967 (op. cit., p. 7).
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The Hindi teaching program of the Home Ministry began in 1955. The present form of the Hindi Teaching Scheme, introduced in 1960, derived its authority from the Presidential order of the same year which made inservice training in Hindi obligatory for most categories of federal employees. The purpose of the Hindi Teaching Scheme was to enable Central Government employees to acquire enough Hindi to conduct official work in the language whenever they were required to do so.12 By 1972, about 200 centers of training were spread throughout the country. Five regional offices supervised these centers, and the federal office of the Hindi Teaching Scheme coordinated the national network of training and examination. Three levels of instruction were specified : elementary (Prabodh), intermediate (Praveen) and advanced (Pragya) which approximated high school level of proficiency in Hindi. Attendance was treated as a regular part of the employee's work. Textbooks were supplied free, and various financial incentives were offered to generate enthusiasm. By 1972, approximately 300,000 employees had passed one or more examinations, but official reports conceded that an equal number were yet to take these examinations. The corresponding numbers of employees passing Hindi typewriting and stenography examinations were 12,389 and 2,994. The same reports also indicated a lack of enthusiasm among employees regarding learning and using Hindi. Evidently, some of the problems faced by the officials of the Hindi Teaching Scheme were related to the employees' motivation to learn Hindi and the Government's capacity to define precisely the appropriate areas of work for using Hindi. The officials of the Hindi Teaching Scheme concentrated on improving and extending instruction, but the responsibility for assuring the extent, frequency and standard of use belonged to other organizations. It was not surprising that these officials used the number of employees passing one or more examinations as the indicator of success of their program. If, in practice, the language learned was either rarely or indifferently used, some other units of the Home Ministry were supposed to be responsible for overseeing the use factor. In fact, the task of coordinating instruction, the actual use in official work and the channeling of feedback for instructional improvement appeared to invite little systematic attention. The efforts to formally coordinate these aspects seemed to improve in the early seventies but no substantial difference has been evident in the organizational performance regarding the promotion of Hindi for official use. However, since 1972, the Prime Minister has been involved in the Kendriya Hindi Samiti 12. Our data on the activities of the H.T.S. are based on interview information gathered in 1973 and mimeographed progress reports covering activities through July 15, 1972. The Annual Assessment Reports cited earlier also provide some details.
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(Central Hindi Committee), which serves the purpose of general coordination, and the Hindi Salahkar Samiti (Hindi Advisory Committee of the Home Ministry), and Official Languages Implementation Committees have been set up in each ministry which have made Hindi planners more confident regarding prospects of coordination. Time alone can tell whether this organizational proliferation will eventually help or hurt coordination.
CONCLUSION
When the political authorities assumed the responsibility to develop and promote Hindi as the official language, they were guided by two considerations : nationalist pride and an intellectual faith in public planning to realize the national objectives. Several problems emerged in the process of translating these considerations into specific steps of Hindi planning. By gradual political negotiation, Hindi was accepted as a prospectively preeminent official language for federal communication, with English serving as an associate language. Consequently, the objective of planning was primarily to prepare Hindi for official communication and secondarily to equip it for other functions, including eventually that of a 'link language' for the nation. Political enthusiasm regarding Hindi planning was less than national, and even among the enthusiasts there was probably less agreement on the value, scope and function of Hindi than was the case with Hebrew in Israel. Organizationally, the beginning of Hindi planning in the public sector was far more modest than one expected from the strident public rhetoric concerning language pride of the new nation. If we ignore the preliminary stage of groping, we may identify 1960 as the beginning of the national government's serious organized efforts to systematically develop, promote and prepare Hindi for the new role. This was a full decade after nationwide economic planning began, and, even at this stage, Hindi planning consisted basically of programs distributed among several agencies, dispersed in a variety of ministries, guided by financial allocation reflecting national priorities and coordinated by a central committee. Gradually, as the agencies' work progressed, experts from the fields of language, literature, science and technology were either directly recruited into or became associated with these organizations. But these agencies functioned as units of the administrative system, scrupulously following its conventions, rules, regulations, hierarchic deference pattern and non-political appearance. In the course of our interviews, we repeatedly noted that even the
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leading members of the Hindi planning agencies felt that their organization had subordinate rank in the ministerial status structure. Considering the official ranks of the highest officers of these agencies and their influence on the senior levels of ministry, plus the relative financial allocation to the agencies, language planning's rank was not as high as one would infer from the nationalist rhetoric. It was not surprising that so many respondents indicated dependence on the higher levels of their particular ministry. This sense of dependence may not be resented in those policy areas where conventional subjects are handled. Language planning, however, is something novel for a career administration that is known more for its ability to handle routine management matters than for its creative developmental initiative. Senior administrative officials in India, including most of the Hindi-speaking officers, do not exhibit an eagerness to use Hindi instead of English in official communication. The Hindi agencies have had to depend on these officers for many decisions because of their superior rank, and, in many cases, the agencies perceived such dependency as a retarding factor. On the other hand, if the senior administration did in fact slow the pace preferred by the Hindi planners, they could always count on the support of the nonHindi component of Indian politics. The administrative context of Hindi planning explains to a large extent why public involvement in Hindi planning has been remarkably low. While the Hindi planners recognized this fact, they also felt more secure with a low profile before the general public. If wide exposure and involvement were likely to generate political controversy, then the prevailing norm of administrative culture generally induced the planners to favor the path of organizational security over public participation. What mattered more was how much they produced according to schedule than the quality of the output or its acceptance by the user. In this respect, they shared the general orientation of the organizations involved in national, including economic, planning. As a result, neither product nor project evaluation, in terms of efficiency or efficacy, has been given much attention in language planning. The success of programs has been measured mainly by the magnitude of investment and output; the allocation of expenditure for projects, the number of dictionaries and glossaries produced, the annual turnover of terms, translations, textbooks, the number of students passing Hindi examinations, etc. These accounts contain few statements concerning the actual impact of these products on the official or general language situation. A crude, output-centered orientation appears to characterize the initial stages of planning in less developed countries. In India, the political leaders believed that public expenditure managed by bureaucratic
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organizations could realize most of the nationalist objectives. If this was simplistic in terms of efficiency and efficacy of planning in general and language planning in particular, one can appreciate why political leaders preferred this way. Language planning, besides satisfying a sense of nationalist pride, created a lever of control over national and regional languages that considerably expanded political authority over national affairs. This expansion of authority enlarged the Scope of patronage and consequently drew clientele from intellectuals, educationists, textbook producers, publishers, language associations and language patriots. Continuous subsidy, especially in a shortage economy, helped tie these groups to the ruling authority through a system of mutual benefit. This is not to imply that language planning, by serving both, failed to serve itself; in fact, Hindi planning has achieved a record that has evoked admiration from both Hindi and other language speakers. In this study we have analyzed the organizational dimensions of Hindi planning with special reference to the origin of the agencies, their structure and interrelation, their place in the broader system and their selected performance. What emerges from our interviews and other sources of evidence is a system of language planning that was politically conceived, bureaucratically conducted, organizationally dispersed, loosely coordinated and scarcely evaluated in terms of linguistic, economic and communicational criteria. We have shown how the political context and pattern of authorization of planning, the political objectives of planning and the choice of the administrative form have affected the course of planning. The agencies put a high premium on quantity of output and gave less attention to quality, user-acceptance and public reaction. They were under pressure to formally equip Hindi with terms, texts and translations, in order to displace English. Given this objective, it was not surprising that they had little time to look back, review, interact with the public or benefit from international experience. They had a demand to meet and they knew that this demand primarily emerged from political prescription rather than from the expressed need of a specific user population. The organization of Hindi planning can be appreciated better if this political factor is taken into account. Whether the organizational process devoted to mechanically equip Hindi and to enable it to assume its prescribed role is consistent with long-range norms of effective language planning is a matter which is beyond the scope of this study.
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REFERENCES Das Gupta, J. 1970 Language Conflict and National Development. Berkeley, University of California Press. 1976 'Practice and Theory of Language Planning,' in M. O'Barr and J. O'Barr, eds., Language and Politics. The Hague, Mouton, pp. 195-212. Pattanaik, D. P. 1971 Language Policy and Programs. Delhi: Ministry of Education and Youth Services, Government of India. Vartavaha 1969- Bulletin of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore.
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Language Planning in Israel: Solving Terminological Problems
INTRODUCTION
At the present time we know very little about the actual workings of the terminological committees so commonly set up by agencies concerned with language modernization. Alisjahbana alone (1960, 1971) devotes a few paragraphs to describing the work procedures of the Bahasa Indonesia terminology committees set up during the Japanese occupation of the former Dutch East Indies. Most other major reports of actual language planning or language modernization efforts - e.g., Haugen's re Norway (1966a, b), Heyd's re Turkey (1954), Kurman's re Estonian (1968), Al Toma's re Arabic (1969), Hamzaoui's re Arabic (1965), Guitare and Quintero's re Spanish in Latin America (1968), Castil's re Persian (1959), Whiteley's re Swahili (1969), Kirk-Greene's re Hausa (1964), Minn Latt's re Burmese (1966) - attend to the socio-politicalcultural context of terminological innovation at best, and to a detailed examination of the finished product alone, at worst. This study, therefore, focuses on the functioning of two terminological committees, in the hope that an examination of their procedures will not only be of direct interest but, also, will assist other scholars in formulating general questions concerning the operations of such committees. Hopefully, the time is not far off when the composition and procedures of such committees can be studied as variables that are themselves related to the nature of the products and, therefore, to the ultimate acceptability of the products that such committees produce.
CONSTITUTION AND COMPOSITION OF A COMMITTEE
Committee on the terminology of librarianship The Hebrew Language Academy's Committee on the Terminology of Librarianship came into being as a result of a request from the Librarians'
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Association of Israel. The Association had appointed a small group of interested Librarians to provide Hebrew equivalents for the terms appearing in UNESCO's Terminology of Librarianship (Vocabularium Bibliothecarii). After working at this task for a time, the group requested that the Association approach the Academy for assistance in completing the task. The Academy then delegated three of its staff members to serve on the Committee with the Association's representatives. The Academy also delegated one of its senior members to act as chairman of the joint committee. This procedure, although not an unusuäl one, was the reverse of the Academy's formalized procedure of purportedly taking the initiative in forming terminological Committees and then rounding out its own representation on such Committees with the most qualified specialists in the subject matter field under consideration. In the present case the Academy was quite willing to work with the individuals who had been designated previously by the Librarians' Association, since these were among the most knowledgeable and important librarians of the country. Presumably the Academy could have insisted that other specialists of its choosing be added to the Committee had it not been perfectly satisfied with those already designated by the Librarians' Association. The Academy's representatives on the Committee consisted of one of its members who was a senior professor of Talmud at the Hebrew University and had already accumulated many years of experience on Committees of this kind, its two scientific secretaries and one of its junior members who served as the secretary to the Committee. Had the field under discussion been a more multifaceted one, the Committee's total membership, and particularly its specialized membership, would have been much larger. As it was the Committee consisted of nine people in all, five representing the Academy.
Committee on terminology for inorganic chemistry Twenty-some years ago the Hebrew Language Council dealt with the problem of coining Hebrew terminology for inorganic chemistry. The results of its deliberations were published in the Council's specialized journal Leshonenu and in due course entered suitable chemistry texts. However, the field of chemistry developed to such an extent in the ensuing 20 years that a new way of looking at chemical compounds had arisen, which demanded a new way of coining terms for various substances. Thus the Hebrew Language Council, now renamed Academy, felt it necessary to convene a Committee to discuss again matters of terminology in inorganic chemistry, not so much because the previous terminology
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had not been accepted in itself, but rather because it had been superseded. The Committee consisted of 11 members, of whom six represented the Academy. The chairman of the Committee was, as usual, an Academy representative. Once again he was a professor at the Hebrew University, but, this time, in chemistry rather than in a field more distant from the Committee's immediate task.
GENERAL WORK CYCLE
The Librarianship Committee met approximately 50 times over a threeyear period. Initially it met every other week, but toward the end of its labors it met somewhat less frequently. After completing a preliminary translation of the UNESCO list of librarianship terms, the Committee distributed its first draft of recommended terms to a large list of librarians, members of the Academy and other interested parties. The comments received were reviewed by the Committee and a revised set of recommendations was prepared. This set, which included several split decisions, i.e., majority-backed and minority-backed recommendations, was then sent to all those who had responded with recommendations to the first draft, and further comments were requested. These were reviewed by the Committee and a full set of the Committee's recommendations was sent to the General Meeting (Plenum) of the Academy for its approval. The General Meeting in turn passed upon each term recommended by the Committee and in a very few instances asked the Committee to reconsider its recommendations. The Committee then prepared its final recommendations and the General Meeting accepted them after brief discussion. Once accepted by the General Meeting the terminology was printed up in the customary small book or brochure format of Academy terminologies and distributed to all public libraries. Its recommendations were theoretically binding upon government libraries, once published in the government journal, since the Academy is recognized in law as the arbiter in language matters for all public, official purposes. Moreover, since the main librarians in the country served on the Committee and took an active role in the Committee's decisions it was assumed by all concerned that, even without the Academy's legal jurisdiction, its terminology as a whole would be accepted and used by the librarians of Israel. Depending on the rapidity of change within the field of librarianship itself, then, the terminology just completed will stand for a longer or shorter time, e.g., 5-20 years or more. In part, the functioning of the Inorganic Chemistry Committee came
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under the regulation of a more recently instituted set of procedural regulations. Instead of bringing the Committee's recommendations directly to the General Meeting, where a terminological committee's work stood the chance of being criticized by Academy members who were not sufficiently familiar either with the technical field under consideration or with the compromises reached after months of painstaking work by the Committee members, these recommendations were brought to a General Committee on Terminology. This Committee consisted of three Academy members and three Academy staff, all individuals with long experience and very intense interest in problems of terminology. After a specific terminology was cleared by the General Committee on Terminology, a process which might well require more than one 'goaround' between the specific Committee and the General Committee, its subsequent final clearance by the General Meeting was considered to be a pro forma matter.
RECOLLECTED DIFFICULTIES
The difficulties recollected by the Committees' chairmen, after three years of work, were as follows.
Exhaustiveness The UNESCO list is very long and includes many terms rarely used or required even by specialized librarians or chemists. An early difficulty, therefore, was to decide whether all or only some of the listed terms needed to be translated. It was finally decided that even if only one person needed an absolutely complete Hebrew terminology in librarianship or chemistry that was reason enough for preparing such a list. It was a matter of pride and conviction that the Hebrew list be fully intertranslatable with the UNESCO list (in English, French, German and Russian), but this added greatly to the Committee's burdens.
Vintage The choice between practice and perfection was another difficulty encountered by the Committees. Many terms were already well established in the usage of librarians and chemists. However, some of these terms were no longer fashionable among younger specialists. Others were felt
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not to be optimally good translations of corresponding UNESCO terms, particularly words in the list of definitions given to the latter in a standard handbook of librarianship terms {The American Library Association Glossary of Library Terms, prepared by Elizabeth H. Thompson, Chicago, 1943). Wherever possible the Librarianship Committee tried to go along with established usage among librarians but in a few cases it reluctantly decided against practice and opted for perfection instead.
Generation gap Related to the foregoing problem were the differences that often obtained between older and younger specialists, both among the Committees' own memberships as well as among the critics to whom their preliminary lists were distributed for comment. Older specialists were sometimes particularly loathe to set aside terms to which they were attached and accustomed. Thus, in the Chemistry Committee some wanted to keep terms they had learned in their youth, terms often modeled on French patterns. However, not only had chemistry changed but its use was now being modeled especially on English patterns. Status differences also contributed to the difficulty sometimes experienced in accepting suggestions of younger members. No similar age-related differences were believed to obtain among the Academydelegated members or Academy-related critics. The latter were recollected as having more unified views, this being attributed largely to their more unified linguistic orientations. Sometimes the Academy-delegated Committee members would help the Committee pass beyond an impasse between its older and younger specialist members by suggesting that a more final decision between two alternatives be left up to the General Meeting or the General Terminology Committee.
Academy tradition One of the major tasks of the Academy-delegated members was to keep in mind prior Academy terminologies as well as formal and informal policies and preference of the Academy or of its members who were likely to show up at a General Meeting. Academy-delegated members attempted to achieve consistency between the librarianship terminology and other terminologies approved by the Academy in recent years. They also tried to keep in mind the fact that some Academy members did not like certain morphemes, because they had been overused, and similar
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preferential tendencies that might cause difficulties when the Committee's recommendations came up for approval. In the case of the Inorganic Chemistry Committee, it was decided at the very outset to fashion the terminology after the internationally accepted terms of the ICA (International Chemical Association), and, whenever problems arose, to follow the compounding pattern of the English-language term. Thus word order, for example, was to follow international order, which is not necessarily strictly Hebrew word order. Also, abbreviations, virtually lacking in Standard Hebrew, were to be adopted following international custom, for example, platin instead of platinum. A recurring problem in the Committee was the question of whether international chemistry roots, such as cobalt, phosphide, oxyOXO-, were to be used in creating Hebrew terms. There were serious and continuing differences of opinion on this matter, not only within the Committee itself but within the General Terminology Committee as well.
Thank God The Librarianship Committee chairman drew upon his experience with other Academy terminology committees in expressing his feeling of relief that librarianship was not marked by many highly specialized sub-fields with terminologies of their own, as is the case in chemistry. He was also grateful that librarianship was not in a rapid state of flux and that it was not polarized into different theoretical or applied camps. Finally, he considered it a blessing that librarianship was not a field in which some members were trained abroad, and, therefore, were accustomed to a high proportion of foreign lexical items in their personal usage, which was another problem in chemistry. On the other hand, he felt that the specific UNESCO list was not a particularly good one. Its French and German equivalents had been prepared by Swiss librarians whose usage was not like that of 'real' French or 'real' German librarians. This often led the Hebrew Committee into fruitless byways and necessitated a great deal of checking with other references. The Chemistry Committee had far less trouble with word meanings, but far more difficulty with the coinage of new Hebrew equivalents for accepted international designations.
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Specific difficulties After three years of work, certain terms remained unforgettably etched in the chairmen's minds because of the difficulty they had caused and the time they had consumed. Many of the most difficult terms were ones that existed in a complex conceptual relationship to others, so that shades of differences existed between them or they encompassed a number of different referents or operations in the source languages. One such word in Librarianship was 'entry', which could mean either any item on a list of titles, a full bibliographic description of an item in accord with a few standard criteria, etc. Very similar problems arose more frequently in the Chemistry Committee, since long lists of terms in conceptual relationship to each other are quite common in that field, e.g., -ide, -ite, -ate, -ous, -ic, etc.
RECURRING PROCEDURES
Sessions The members of a Committee sit around a table, the center of which soon becomes cluttered with copies of the UNESCO list and other standard works on fields of terminological concern. From time to time other references, usually dictionaries, are taken from the shelves that line the walls and are consulted. Each member has a copy of the mimeographed list of terms under discussion at a particular meeting. The secretary also has all of the lists discussed at previous meetings so that it is possible to check for consistency with earlier recommendations. Each meeting lasts roughly three hours and covers approximately 50-60 problematic terms.
Handling disagreement In a large proportion of cases, agreement is reached among those seated around the table. Majority sentiment in favor of one suggestion or another is normally enough for minority recommendations to be abandoned. When this is not the case, the chairman or another member may sound out those assembled as to whether both of the alternatives might not be acceptable. If there is serious objection to recommending two terms (and this does not seem to be a preferred solution) then both the majority and the minority recommendations are noted in the minutes.
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It is generally understood that no committee can send through a large number of split-decisions, and this awareness seems to be instrumental in keeping the number of minority recommendations at a low level.
The thanks of the Academy The final session of a committee's labors is a somewhat special occasion. The chairman, and the other Academy representatives, thank the specialist members for their efforts and for their good work. The specialists are rather pleased that their work has finally come to an end, but they say 'it was a pleasure' and 'let's hope the General Meeting approves', and 'may our work find favor in the eyes of our colleagues'. The thanks of the Academy, ratification by the General Meeting, mention in the official publication, and adoption in practice of the terminology proposed are the only rewards received by the specialist members of terminological committees of the Academy. Most of them will serve on no other terminological committees for many years to come, if ever again. For them, service on a committee of the Academy is expected to be its own reward. It is an opportunity to interact with and to contribute to a major national symbol which is not always respected but it is an aspect of majesty none the less and few indeed will refuse to serve it when called upon.
RECURRING QUESTIONS
What does the term mean ? A frequent first question in connection with a term on the UNESCO list was 'What is it? What does it refer to? What does it really mean?' Such questions may necessitate considerable discussion and referrals to various reference works. On occasion, members are surprised to find that an English word (or French word, etc.) which they have always used with a particular meaning is defined as having another meaning or additional meanings by other members or by the references consulted. Some examples of terms which provided definitional problems are: 'shared catalog', 'incipit', 'excipit', 'digest'.
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Who suggested that ? The Committee members are all equal before the law but they are not equal in status or in each other's eyes. The suggestions and arguments advanced by some members receive more careful and more sympathetic consideration than those advanced by others. This is also the case when written comments are received from outside critics. 'Who suggested that?' is a common question, and the reputation of the individual named functions as a halo effect in helping the questioner to interpret the intent and the merits of the suggestion or view under consideration.
What is the Academy's position re — ? The substantive specialists on the Committee are, as a rule, less familiar with the Academy's policies, preferences and positions. As a result, they more commonly ask for information along these lines and the Academy representatives more commonly offer unsolicited comments along these lines. For example, even though the Academy long ago expressed a preference for the use of indigenous Hebrew] roots in the formation of new terms, a preference not considered binding in scientific fields, questions frequently arise about the acceptability of such-and-such an 'internationalism', 'Americanism', etc.
RATIONALES EMPLOYED
Almost invariably several alternative Hebrew terms are suggested, whether seriously or only half seriously. The choice among alternatives is then rationalized on one or more of the following grounds.
Intertranslatability: fidelity to source language(s)] 1. taqqanon sifriyya 'library statutes' (1. rules 2. regulations). One term was retained in Hebrew instead of two as in English, since in French there is only one term, 'règlements'. 2. tavnit qetana 'miniature edition', was changed to tavnit zeira, as zeira translates 'miniature' more closely, and miniature is the form used in the English, French and German UNESCO equivalents. 3. reshima was kept over the proposed ozar because it more closely corresponds to the corresponding English 'list' and French 'table'.
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J. Feliman and J. A. Fishman
4. sam sefer shelo bimekomo 'to misplace a book' (involuntarily), was formed and retained as equivalent to the English, French (déplacer, malplacer un livre) and German (ein Buch verstellen). In Chemistry terminology, the order of the Hebrew terms in the various compounds is, by necessity, the same order as the internationally accepted symbol-writing of the various elements. Thus in writing the term for water H 2 0, the Hebrew for 'hydrogen' must precede the 'oxygen', even though Hebrew is written in the opposite direction from European-Latinate languages.
Consistency with prior recommendations 1. In ones maksimali al harizpa 'maximum floor load', maksimali, although of foreign provenience, was favored over the indigenously formed meravi as a legitimate Hebrew creation, the form having been coined by the public press and not by the Academy. 2. The spelling arxiyonay 'archival' although questioned, was kept, with full pointing of o in the Hebrew script, in accordance with Academy rules for spelling. 3. Thirty-four terms were all accepted en masse, as they had already been prepared by the Academy Committee on (IBM) computer terminology, and had also been accepted en masse by a similar Academy Committee on photography. 4. The pronunciation of >6
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