Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2007

Except for a few large scale projects, language planners have tended to talk and argue among themselves rather than to see language policy development as an inherently political process. A comparison with a social policy example, taken from the United States, suggests that it is important to understand the problem and to develop solutions in the context of the political process, as this is where decisions will ultimately be made.

The present study examines the macrosociolinguistic situation of Modern Hebrew in oral and written scientific communication among researchers in the various fields of Jewish studies in the international arena. An analysis of selective statistical data from the past four decades shows that during this period Modern Hebrew has been a lingua franca of Jewish studies alongside English, its importance varying in accordance with the fields of study and the modes of scientific communication. English, however, has been growing increasingly dominant at the expense of Hebrew, not only outside Israel but in Israel as well.

The standardization process of the Basque language presents some unusual characteristics. Although some of the first authors to publish in Basque in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries explicitly remarked on the difficulties brought about by dialectal diversity, very little progress in the standardization of the language was made until the second half of the twentieth century. Even the impact of the rise of Basque nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century was not entirely positive, since the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party favored the development of a different written variety for each of the Basque provinces. The extreme puristic and neologizing tendency of some writers at the time was also a source of obstacles on the path towards standardization. A Basque language academy was founded in 1918 with the unification of the written language as one of its main goals, but it made essentially no progress until the linguist Luis Michelena (Mitxelena) presented a report to the Basque Academy in 1968 on the bases for a written standard language. From then on, other stages in the standardization process have taken place very rapidly. This new standard has enjoyed enormous success and in a few decades has become firmly established in Basque society.

The mainstream conduct of research on Esperanto and interlinguistics is a relatively recent phenomenon, which of late has grown easier through better access to libraries and a growing body of scholarly work. The situation of Esperanto and interlinguistics in universities remains stable. However, the years 2005 and 2006 have been marked by the passing of two major figures: Ito Kanzi in Japan and William Auld in Scotland. A survey of recent scholarship shows steady production of studies and reference works in the linguistics of Esperanto, interlinguistics, the Esperanto movement and speech community, Zamenhof studies, the history of Esperanto, Esperanto literature, translation, the teaching of Esperanto, and language policy. There has been an increase in publication on Esperanto and interlinguistics particularly in German and Russian.