Nakaarten en Vooruitzien: Een Taalpolitieke Voorbeschouwing

Interest in the process of language change leads - among other things -to the study of the socio-cultural factors affecting this change and to the question whether this process can somehow be influenced by deliberate interventions. Affecting language evolution is possible at various levels - e.g. in connection with language as a communicative system and in connection with language as a social institution - and by various agencies. If it is done by the government and following some sort of explicitly formulated policy, one can speak of language planningA selective treatment of some important language planning processes elsewhere in the world is taken as starting point in order to illustrate concretely what the purpose and meaning of language planning may be. Next a survey is given of relevant factors and events in the linguistic history of the Netherlands. Our main conclusion in this respect is that one can scarcely speak of anything more than incentives to a policy of language planning. On the basis of these findings an attempt is made, finally, to advance some building blocks for an integrated language planning policy.