Descriptive frameworks are molds wherein behavior may be poured to cool and harden for analysis. The same behavior, poured into different molds, takes on different shapes. Thus a political scientist's, sociologist's, and curriculum specialist's account of the Ethiopian mass-literacy campaign will differ substantially one from the other. Each analyst, interested in different aspects of the same behavior, employs that framework which facilitates concentration on the features of interest.

While behavior may be divisible for purposes of analysis, it is nonetheless unitary. Just as different independent variables may be combined via multiple regression analysis to “account for” variation in a given outcome, so can the insights obtained from different disciplines be combined to account for a particular phenomenon overall. Inasmuch as there is yet no generally accepted framework for the study of language planning, it may be useful to look at frameworks suggested by other disciplines or subdisciplines not only to understand language planning better but also to forward the development of a framework particularly suited for language planning. Accordingly, we turn to frameworks suggested for the diffusion of innovation, marketing, politics, and decision making and apply them to language planning. Thus I will consider language planning as, in turn, (1) the management of innovation, (2) an instance of marketing, (3) a tool in the acquisition and maintenance of power, and (4) an instance of decision making. Finally I present a second version of the framework for the study of language planning suggested in the previous chapter, modified and elaborated on the basis of the four frameworks presented here.

Just as languages change over time, the functions they serve for particular communities change as well. Familiar examples include the shift in Western Europe from Latin to modern European languages for literary and scholarly purposes, the shift in England from Norman French to English for use in courts of law, and the shift in Indonesia from Dutch to Bahasa Indonesia as the language of government administration. The most spectacular changes of all are shifts in a community's mother tongue, as, for example, the adoption of Arabic as the language of the home throughout most of North African and Middle Eastern territories conquered by the armies of Islam.

Perhaps most of the changes which occur in the functional allocation of a community's languages are spontaneous. Some, however, are the outcomes of planning. For example, the spread of Kiswahili for economic functions in Eastern Africa was the unpremeditated result of expanded trade within a linguistically diverse region. In contrast, the spread of that language for political, educational, and religious functions was the result of deliberate policy (Mazrui and Zirimu 1978). Status planning refers to deliberate efforts to influence the allocation of functions among a community's languages.

Stewart's functions as targets of status planning

What functions serve as targets of status planning? A well-known list of language functions is the one which Stewart (1968) provides in his discussion of national multilingualism. Let us look at each of the functions which he mentions, beginning in each case with his description of the function.

It was September 12, 1974. An old man stood on the steps of his palace. “You can't be serious!” he protested to the soldiers accompanying him, when he saw the green Volkswagen which had been sent to fetch him. “I'm supposed to go like this?” But this was his only protest. The King of Kings, the Elect of God, the ruler of Ethiopia for more than fifty years bent forward and stepped into the back of the car. It took him to a small building where he was to spend the remaining months of his life under house arrest. On the way, he waved to his former subjects (Kapuscinski 1983: 162).

Along the route traversed by the green Volkswagen, an observer could see some arresting juxtapositions: barefoot youngsters leading sheep and goats past tall office buildings, homespun-clad arrivals from the countryside terrified by the traffic, and women carrying on their heads black clay jugs of water drawn from municipal spigots. These contrasts were a reminder of the empire's ongoing modernization and urbanization, changes which the emperor helped to introduce, which he tried to control, and which in the end overwhelmed him.

Haile Sillase's downfall marks the beginning not only of a fascinating story in the annals of language planning but also of a new act in the drama of social change in which the old man had been a significant player.

If the establishment of the Académie française, the promotion of Hebrew in Palestine, the American feminist movement's campaign against sex-bias in language, and the Ethiopian mass literacy campaign exemplify language planning, then language planning is directed toward a variety of ends and encompasses a variety of means. What characteristics do these examples, and by extension all instances of language planning, share? There is no single, universally accepted definition of language planning. Indeed, there is even disagreement as to what term should be used to denote the activity.

Language planning is not the first term to appear in the literature. Perhaps the first term to appear in the literature was language engineering (Miller 1950). This has been used far more often than glottopolitics (Hall 1951), language development (Noss 1967), or language regulation (Gorman 1973). Language policy sometimes appears as a synonym for language planning but more often it refers to the goals of language planning. Jernudd and Neustupný (1986) have proposed the term language management but it is too soon to know if this will catch on. Of all the terms in use today, language planning is the most popular. It is found in the titles of a newsletter (Language Planning Newsletter), a journal (Language Problems and Language Planning), at least five collections of articles (Rubin and Jernudd 1971a; Rubin and Shuy 1973; Fishman 1974a; Rubin, Jernudd, Das Gupta, Fishman, and Ferguson 1977; and Cobarrubias and Fishman 1983), and a major bibliography on the topic (Rubin and Jernudd 1977).

Each example of language planning which appears in this book arose in the midst of social change. With respect to our defining examples, we see that political centralization along with a growing desire for order accompanied the founding of the Académie française; increased persecution of Russian Jews, a growing Jewish nationalist movement, and rising Jewish immigration to Palestine accompanied the renativization of Hebrew; the growing participation of women in the American work force accompanied the feminist campaign against sex-bias in language usage; and a political and economic revolution accompanied the mass literacy campaign in Ethiopia. That social change accompanies language planning is scarcely surprising, inasmuch as language planning, concerned with the management of change, is itself an instance of social change. In a stable world of complete equilibrium, where each day is much like the one before and the one to come, and where all members of society are satisfied with that condition, language planning would be unlikely. Social change, the appearance of new social and cultural patterns of behavior among specific groups within a society or within the society as a whole, has been implicit throughout this book. This final chapter considers social change explicitly.

Sources of social change

What factors produce social change? The most commonly cited factors include the physical environment, population, discovery and invention, cultural diffusion, ideology, and decision-making.

The physical environment. According to Huntington (1924), societies change as geographic conditions change.

After offering four defining examples of language planning and discussing various views of the field, I defined language planning as deliberate efforts to influence the behavior of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their language codes. I argued that descriptive frameworks can help us to formulate testable propositions about language planning, and I offered frameworks from four academic disciplines. Drawing upon those frameworks, I discussed in turn each of the three primary foci of language planning: status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning. Finally, I discussed language planning in terms of various theories of social change.

Based on this tour of language planning as a field of inquiry and as a practical endeavor, I offer the following generalizations:

1. Language planning is a widespread and long-standing practice. It is neither new nor confined principally to developing or underdeveloped countries.

2. Language planning cannot be understood apart from its social context or apart from the history which produced that context.

3. Language planning is typically motivated by efforts to secure or maintain interests, material or nonmaterial or both. There is nothing peculiar to language planning in this. In the struggle to promote interests one uses whatever ammunition is at hand.

4. Language planning may be initiated at any level of a social hierarchy, but it is unlikely to succeed unless it is embraced and promoted by elites or by counterelites.

5. […]

Language-planning scholars face four tasks: (1) to describe, (2) predict, and (3) explain language-planning processes and outcomes in particular instances, and (4) to derive valid generalizations about these processes and outcomes. Accordingly, there are four criteria against which our success in carrying out these tasks can be judged: (1) descriptive adequacy, (2) predictive adequacy, (3) explanatory adequacy, and (4) theoretical adequacy, each criterion related to a different task. In the present chapter I argue that descriptive frameworks or accounting schemes help us not only to carry out these tasks but also to evaluate our success in doing so. In the next chapter, I present descriptive frameworks suggested by several disciplines or subdisciplines and apply them to language planning.

Descriptive adequacy

Descriptive adequacy refers to our success in representing what happened in a given instance. The scholar, confronted with this not inconsiderable task, faces two problems. (1) What should be described? (2) On what basis should the description be evaluated?

The first problem arises from the vast range of behaviors which could be described. What should be described? To what should we pay attention? With respect to my description of the founding of the Académie française, for example, what should I have included that I left out? What should I have excluded that I put in? Was it necessary to refer to events which took place in the century before the Academy's founding? Was it necessary to refer to Cardinal Richelieu's taste in art? Should I have described the composition of the first Academy? Should I have written less or more (and if more, what?) about Mme. de Rambouillet?

Louis Henri Sullivan (1856-1924), an American architect who exerted a considerable influence on skyscraper design, wrote, in connection with the aesthetics of tall office buildings, that “form ever follows function.” Sullivan viewed the ideal relationship between form and function as organic rather than mechanical. That is, he did not believe that a design should mechanically reflect utility. Rather, he believed that an authentic style is a natural expression of the civilization in which it is rooted. Thus an architectural design should express the environment from which it evolves as well as the particular functions it is meant to serve (Koeper 1980).

Although the dictum that form follows function was derived from a theory of architectural aesthetics, perhaps it can be applied to corpus planning. Certainly architecture serves as an apt metaphor for the latter. Both the architect and the corpus planner design structures to serve particular functions, rooted in a given social, cultural, political, and historical context. Both the architect and the corpus planner are influenced by this context. Both the architect and the corpus planner operate with an aesthetic theory, implicit or explicit. For example, just as Sullivan believed that a structure should reflect the civilization from which it springs, so some corpus planners believe that the corpus should reflect an indigenous or a classical tradition, or the values of modernity, efficiency, transparency, and the like.

Immigrants to Israel benefit from numerous organized efforts to help them learn Hebrew. “Absorption centers,” where immigrants live while sorting out their employment and housing arrangements, offer subsidized, on-site, intensive, six-month Hebrew classes. Other classes, intensive and nonintensive, are offered by municipalities for nominal fees. Universities offer special language courses for foreign students and for immigrant faculty and their spouses. When immigrant children go to school, they are offered classes in Hebrew as a second language, if there are enough children to form a class. Otherwise, children may be pulled out of their classes for a few hours of individual instruction per week. A weekly newspaper is published in simplified Hebrew, the news is broadcast daily in simplified (and slower) Hebrew, and Hebrew literature is translated into simplified Hebrew. A television series in simplified Hebrew, produced in the 1970s, is rebroadcast from time to time. All of these programs and devices exemplify acquisition planning, which refers to organized efforts to promote the learning of a language.

Other examples of acquisition planning abound:

To improve the Korean-language skills of Korean-Americans, the University of California at Los Angeles began, in 1987, a program whereby its Korean-American students could travel to Seoul National University for ten weeks of Korean-language study.

To facilitate the acquisition of Russian by non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union, Soviet language planners have imposed the Cyrillic script on most of the Soviet minority languages and use Russian models to modernize the vocabularies of these languages.

This paper explores a central metaphor which Chamulas use to talk about and evaluate speaking. I shall attempt to show how this metaphor – heat – functions as a basic canon of native criticism of nearly all kinds of speech performances which Chamulas recognize, from ordinary language to formal ritual speech and song. Heat possesses great religious significance because its primary referent is the sun deity (htotik k'ak'al ‘Our Father Sun’), who created and now maintains the basic temporal, spatial, and social categories of the Chamula cosmos. Controlled heat, therefore, symbolizes order in both a diachronic and synchronic sense. Language is but one of several symbolic domains which Chamulas think and talk about in terms of heat metaphors. Ritual action, the life cycle, the agricultural cycle, the day, the year, individual festivals, political power, economic status – all are measured or evaluated in units which derive ultimately from ‘Our Father Sun,’ the giver of order. Canons of verbal style and performance will therefore be described as ideal patterns which extend, in homologous fashion, into the whole fabric of Chamula social life and expressive behavior. I hope, thereby, to show how certain Chamula ethical and esthetic values behave as a unitary normative code.

After describing the community and the categories of cosmology which give symbolic power to the heat metaphor, I shall briefly outline the categories of verbal behavior which Chamulas recognize.

Among the modern Longhouse Iroquois, whose eastern population is spread over twelve reserves in Quebec, Ontario, and New York state, there has survived an ancient oratorical tradition which enters into almost every phase of traditional religious and political life. This is the thread that runs through the diverse institutions of the Handsome Lake religion, the Confederate Council of the Iroquois League, the individual rites surrounding death and curing, and the ceremonies of the agricultural cycle. The sight of speaker after speaker representing a family, a clan, a ‘side of the fire’ (moiety), or a whole nation, and taking his turn at formal talk, is familiar to all those who have worked with the conservative Iroquois. I have summarized elsewhere the different categories of speakers who carry this tradition, and have discussed their training and standards for successful performance (Foster 1971). In this paper I want to narrow the concern to a set of three closely related speeches. Except as specific qualifications will be made, all of these are associated with the agricultural ceremonies.

The speeches can be separated into two sets of one and two speeches respectively, depending upon their ritual purposes as conceived by the Longhouse people. In a set by itself is the kanṍhõnyõk ‘let there be thanks’ which is usually referred to in English as the Thanksgiving Address. Its purpose is to give thanks to the Creator for the many benefits of the natural world.

The papers in the four preceding sections represent detailed analyses of particular problems relevant to the ethnography of speaking. Although the papers are closely focused and deal with specific societies, they also raise general methodological and theoretical questions, with wider implications. By contrast, the papers in this final section address themselves primarily to broader issues of method and theory.

The first paper, by Allen Grimshaw, discusses a range of relationships between method and theory in the ethnography of speaking, with particular reference to some of the papers in this volume. Consistent with contemporary linguistics, sociology, and anthropology, Grimshaw stresses the importance of accounting for native intuitions in an ethnography of speaking. But he also warns that the notion of native intuitions cannot be used uncritically; in fact the ethnography of speaking, by its insistence on the interrelation of language and social life, provides new ways of investigating intuitions which avoid the circularity of arbitrarily dealing with linguistic, social, or cultural intuitions as separate systems. Grimshaw also notes the necessary progression from descriptions of particular aspects of speaking to coherent ethnographies of speaking to theory.

During the past decade and even at times in this volume, ‘the ethnography of speaking’ and ‘the ethnography of communication’ have been used almost interchangeably. One of the contributions of this field has been the understanding that various communicative modes (verbal, proxemic, kinesic) are not absolutely independent of one another but are rather interrelated in various ways in various societies.