Language Problems and Language Planning: A corpus-based historical investigation

As one of the most authoritative journals in the field of language planning, Language Problems and Language Planning has a long history. In this paper, we describe the development and changes that the journal has experienced in different periods, the characteristics that have remained constant, and the role that it has played in the development of language planning. To this end, we collected information from the first 100 issues of the journal (1977 to 2010) to build a corpus, and then used software to extract different categories of information. Through analysis of these statistics, we found that the journal is in many respects representative of changes in the field of language planning, following trends in the discipline and clearly and accurately reflecting the evolving priorities of language planning over the years.