11.3

11.3 Language planning 
 Language treatment includes the many different kinds of a attention which people give to language problems, that is, social problems in which language aspects are pre-eminent Most of these problems are concerned with which language or which variety of a particular language ought to be used on which occasions by which people. These problems appear to grow out of socioeco¬nomic shifts, such as those caused by population growth and migrations, or rapid industrialization, or new group identifications and political processes. The most important type of language treatment•, it’s a language planning. Das Gupta (1973: 157) defines language planning as a Set of deliberate activities systematically designed to organize and develop the language resources of the community in an ordered schedule of time Fishman (1973a:24-25) defines it as their organized parsuit of solutions to language problems typically at the national level.” It can, at one extreme, refer to Individuals who give some thought •and perhaps some action to language problems. In an intermediate position, we find private bodies, such as language academies, which mayor may not operate with government recognition and support. Finally, there is direct pursuit cf language planning by official governmental agencies. 
 Choice of a national language will of course, be related to the monolingual or bilingual nature of the country. There is a very important difference between countries with minorities and those without a majority at all The language chosen may even be that of a small minority, e.g. Irish Gaelic 3 percent or Pakistani Urdu 7 percent In Israel, Hebrew had practically no native speakers at the time it was chosen as the national language. On the other hand. in Indonesia Javanese was spoken by 40 percent of the population, but Bahasa Indonesia. a pidginized variety with no native speakers, was chosen. Bangladesh is an example of a linguistic minority (Bengali speakers within the former Pakistan) recently successful in breaking away own setting up their own separate nation-state.
 Some language are a problem because they are unwritten. while others are written but not standardized, or else still others have practically no written literature in the language. Whether the elite wishes to keep power or to democra¬tize the state, it still has to make language policy decisions.. Choice of a former colonial language as official may benefit the elite, but it also puts speakers of all native languages at the same disadvantage and, hence, is neutral in that respect, e.g. English in Anglophone West Africa or Portuguese in Angola. 
 In order to carry out language planning, it is essential to be well appraised of the sociolinguistic situation in the country. Surveys may be needed to establish what languages and language varieties are actually spoken by what numbers of people. This is important whether are talking about language choice in a Third World country or setting up a bilingual education program in the United States. Good research methods must be used to gather and interpret language use data. 
 Choice of language or language variety involves questions such as at what levels of the school system particular languages will be taught or used as the medium of instruction. After a particular language or language variety has been chosen, changes may be planned for that language, for example, expansion of the lexicon to incorporate needed terms for science, industry, commerce, administration, and other activities with which the language had not previously dealt adequately. Or a writing system may have to be chosen for, devised for, adapted to, or reformed for the language
 There are two approaches to language planning-me policy approach which includes selection of the national language, standardization, literacy, and orthographies, and the cultivation approach which deals with questions such as correctness, efficiency, and linguistic levels fulfilling specialized functions and problems of style. Generally speaking, we find the policy approach in the less developed speech communities whereas the cultivation approach is found in modern industrialized societies (.Rubin 1973b:3-4). 
 Planning by the state is no guarantee that the planning will succeed. For example, in Norway, the ruling socialist have been quite unsuccessful in push¬ing the actual spoken and written standard in the direction of more non-Danish forms, but the most famous failure is that of Gaelic in the Irish Republic. In the Soviet Union, the fumbling methodof the authorities is illustrated by the choice of the Uzbek literary language, where the phonological system was standardized in 1923, but radically revised in 1927, and again in 1937 and 1940 (Bennigsen and Quelquejay 1%1:5,5). 
 On the other hand planning can be successful at the international level . Malaysia and Indonesia have cooperated to develop a spelling system which can be used for their two closely related national languages, Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia "which had quite different orthographies. influenced by English and Dutch spelling, respectively. The long-awaited system was decreed as the official system of spelling in both countries concerned in 1972, with a five year phasing- in period. They planned to have time to produce text books using the new system and to familiarize school children with it (Omar 1975 : 77-78). The new orthography will particularly facilitate the sale of thext books in the other country. Indonesia has the more developed language of the two, and Malaysia. Greatly aided in standardizing its own language and incorporating scientific terminology because of the agreement.
At the opposite extreme, a single person may exert tremendous effect on the language planning process, as exemplified by Ivar Aasen on Norwegian, Atmantios Korais on Greek, Vuk Karadzicon on Serbo-Croatian or Blaze Koneski on Macedonian. The most famous individual language planner, however, is scrably. Eliezer Ben Yehuda Fellman points out that Ben Yehuda himself look seven steps in order to implement his vision of the revival of Hebrew, namely setting up of the first Hebrew speaking household; a call to the Jews in Palestine and abroad assistance and advise, founding of Hebrew speaking; setting up classes in which Hebrew was learned through the medium of Hebrew, publishing a modern Hebrew newspaper, compiling a dictionary of and modem Hebrew, and the formation of language council. These steps differing degrees of effectiveness in the total revival process, people some working with Ben Yehuda, some independently of him, but all by his charismatic leadership, Furthermore, a fertile ground for language revival lay waiting. As fell man notes, "Hebrew at the times was not a dead war in fact a flexible instrument of expression for many purposes, including even some topics of everyday conversation….the linguistic situation before the revival, especially among those European Jews who come to Palestine, was such mat the speaking of Hebrew, once begun, was almost natural." As Rabin points out "Hebrew was on the threshold of speech….for one whose entire intellectual life took place in that language, speaking it offered no difficulty" (quoted by Fell man 1974:427-428).
Although writing is, in essence, a secondary linguistic phenomenon originally based on speech it also has somewhat of and independent existence. Since its origins some five thousand years ago, and speech have continued to influence each other. Because the earliest developed writing system where so some and required lengthy training for there mastery, literacy was from the beginning confined to a small class of specialist who tended to exaggerate the importance, even secret character, of the written word. A certain reverence for the printed word has survived down to our time. Similarly, books were viewed with great respect, if not awe, before the invention of the printing press because of the enormous expense involved in the hand-copying of manuscripts. Because of the reverence for the written word, because of the vested interest of those who have expended great efforts learning to write, the written language is generally more conservative than the spoken language.
Before the invention of writing, all societies were, of course, preliterate. Societies since that time which have no means of writing are referred to as nonliterate, whereas those societies with writing systems have varying proporfloons of their population, which can be characterized as literate or illiterate. A significant social change takes place when a previously homogeneous preliterate society develops a cleavage in is population between the literate and the literate as a result of the introduction of writing, either in their own language or some other.
Almost all new writing systems adopted or suggested in recent years have has been alphabetic. A new alphabet may be demanded in three different types of situations: (1) to create a standard alphabet when the language in question has not yet been written, (2) to provide auxiliary alphabets for languages which already have a non alphabetic script, such as roman script for Chinese (pinyin), transcriptions for linguistic studies and textbooks (for example, for colloquial Arabic); (3) to replace an older, inadequate alphabet with a more phonemic one, that is spelling reform.
For a new alphabet to be successful, it must not only represent the language economically, consistently, and unambiguously but also facilitate learning to read and write and be suited to the needs of modem techniques of printing and typewriting (Berry1986 :737-738). It must furthermore not go against strongly entrenched attitudes, like the desire to have a "modern-looking" alphabet or one which resembles that of some prestigious language with which the people also identify.
In the matter of orthographies, social considerations loom large, as different writing systems have symbolic significance related to group royalty and group identity, as well as to significant reference groups. Utilization, imposition, or abolition of alphabets such as the Latin, Cyrillic, or Arabic is directed at far reaching social and cognitive- emotional reorganization which also will have practical consequences for the relevance of the skills maintained by traditional elites. It is necessary to consider how the new skills and the new statuses deriving from the use of the new alphabet will be allocated. Such momentous matters often arouse the greatest passions, either in the transition from preliterate to literate society or in the substitution of one alphabet for another.
The introduction of writing (graphization) adds another variety of language to the community's repertoire. Eventually the belief develops that the written language is the "real" language and that speech is a corruption of it. This wide-spread belief limits the kind of conscious intervention in the form of language planning that the community will conceive or of accept. They frequently believe that to change the writing is to change the language.
Alphabetic writing systems, when first devised for or applied to a particular language, generally try to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and letter, and most have been initially quite successful in this respect. However, if the writing system remains static while the language undergoes widespread phonological change, the orthography becomes of historic value rather than reflecting how the language is actually pronounce. This is strikingly the case in such languages as English or French. Here, the more or less separate existence of the written language becomes a major social issue, as demands for spelling reform, that is, closer correspondence between letters and sound, are heard. A host of arguments are sometimes heard why it is difficult, costly, or even downright impossible to phonemic the writing system. There is tremendous waste of effort spent by children studying a archaic spelling system (if any actually master it), effort that could be spent much more profitably elsewhere in this age of the knowledge explosion. Nevertheless, there is no effective spelling reform movement anyplace in the English speaking word. In defense of the conservative position, however, it should be pointed out that, should English be written as it is spoken, there would be as many written as there are spoken varieties, thereby impeding written communication among the enormously variegated speakers of English throughout the word. Nevertheless, there is still much that could be done, for example, dropping letters that nobody ever pronounces, as example