Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 26, Issue 2, 2002

The Unicode standard is an enormous step toward realizing the goal of a single computer encoding scheme for virtually all of the world’s scripts. Although not all computers will necessarily have the type fonts to print all characters, at least all computers will be able to recognize what characters are required for proper display of text in almost any language. However the Unicode standard presupposes that each language has a script consisting of a finite number of agreed-upon characters. Some languages still lack such agreement. As planning has gone forward for Unicode, more and more code points are being assigned, leaving ever less conveniently accessed code points for future expansion. This article describes the Unicode project. Then it describes the special challenge of encoding Chinese characters. Finally it uses the example of Hokkien, a “dialect” of Chinese spoken by most people in Taiwan, to explore the problem of unorthodox, unstable, or unofficial scripts. Political forces and technical considerations make it difficult to include such scripts in Unicode. As Unicode becomes the “de facto” standard for writing human languages, script innovations will presumably become less and less likely to receive wide use.

The worldwide dominance of English is such that only catastrophic upheaval could seemingly threaten it in the near future. In the longer term, an emerging power (eg, China) may come to challenge American supremacy and with it the dominant position of English. However, even in the event of such a realignment, the language of that emerging power (eg, Chinese) may not succeed in arresting the advantage English already derives from critical mass. To have any chance of global spread, a challenger would need to possess structural characteristics — namely, minimal inflectional morphology, non-tonal phonology, and a non-logographic script — that would facilitate its acquisition by individuals with largely utilitarian motivations. Alternatively, to evolve these characteristics, a challenger would need to be subjected to minimal standardization and be allowed the freedom to accommodate user-driven change, including indigenization. Finally, it would need to be perceived as a vehicle for modernizing values. While hypothetical challengers (eg, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, or Esperanto) all exhibit some of these characteristics, only English exhibits all of them at present and for the foreseeable future. For these reasons, the worldwide dominance of English is likely to survive even a hypothetical passing of the American Era.

This paper sets out to formulate some of the economic reasons for the continuing dominance of English in the boardrooms, government forums, parastatals and laboratories of South Africa, to consider whether this situation is likely to change, and to assess the extent to which such a state of affairs is at odds with South Africa’s new language policy. The historical reasons for the dominance of English in this sphere are well known: the language’s imperial history, its status as a world language, its role as a medium for political opposition during the apartheid conflict, and the accumulation of capital and economic influence by English-speakers from the mid-nineteenth century onward. However, the day-to-day economic basis for the continuing dominance of English at the apex of South African society has hardly been considered.

Nach dem 18. Jhd. verlor Latein, nach und nach, seine Position als internationale Sprache. Seit der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jhd. wird es auf mehreren Feldern wiederbelebt. Der Wortschatz wird durch nötige moderne Worte ergänzt, umfangreiche Fachterminare werden erarbeitet, einheitliche Aussprache wird benutzt, es erscheinen moderne Lehrmittel, -programme und -methoden, die zum Lateinsprechen und -schreiben anregen. Außer traditionellen wissenschaftlichen, universitären und schulischen Gebieten pflegen das lebendige Latein verschiedene internationale Organisationen mit vielfältigen Aktivitäten, von wissenschaftlichen Kongressen bis zu lustigen Ferien. Die Sprache funktioniert also als modernes Kommunikationsmittel, obwohl im verminderten Umfang, weil hinter ihr keine ökonomische Macht steht.