Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 33, Issue 3, 2009

This paper examines the policy and legislative framework for the regulation of language in Azerbaijan. During the Soviet period, language issues were addressed in the Constitution. Post-independence language revival initiatives promoted laws, high status decrees, and official regulations, particularly in the sphere of status-building. The authors analyze post-Soviet language policy and language legislation from the perspective of both national and minority languages. To illuminate the ways in which language strategies are developed, laws covering various domains are examined and evaluated as reflections of the country’s political priorities, socio-economic tendencies and international relations. This paper also discusses the subject of policy implementation. Although the term “Azerbaijan” refers, mostly in popular parlance, also to the northern part of Iran (“South Azerbaijan”) populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis, in this paper the term will be used in reference to the post-Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, except in certain historical contexts.

This article is a comparative study of how the language-in-education policies of two Southern African countries — Botswana and Malawi — have responded to the need to have citizens who can compete favourably on the global scene. While private schools have tended to offer several international languages, public schools, on the other hand, have not done so. Public schools are unable to give learners the linguistic power needed in a world in which, besides English, there are other languages of global communication. The paper also highlights the dilemma faced when one tries to reconcile the local and the global in the context of language-in-education policies.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, exists in more than 260 different language editions, some larger, some smaller. This article deals with difficulties in comparing them with each other and assessing their strength. Wikimedia Statistics can mislead if not interpreted with a knowledge about the ways Wikipedia editing works. Many language editions embellish the total number of articles by creating pseudo-articles with little or no encyclopedic value. The main question of the study presented by this article is what factors make a language edition grow, such as the existence of a standardized language, language status, Internet access for the average speaker, and the attitude of speakers to their language.

Among what are now more than 1000 efforts to create an international language, primarily the project of L. L. Zamenhof (1887) has developed into a living and flexible language. Although Zamenhof’s hopes for a language accepted worldwide were not fulfilled, Esperanto proves that in principle it is possible to create a new language through language planning and bring it to practical use. This is an important fact for linguistics. Esperanto’s success also lies in the fact that so far it has been able to resist competition from other systems of planned language. The factors that explain this success relate in part to linguistic structures (e.g. the system’s potential for development) and in part to sociolinguistic and language policy considerations. Of particular significance was Zamenhof’s language-policy role: he saw language as primarily a social phenomenon, he linked humanistic ideals to his language, and he passed Esperanto on to an emerging language community with all of its evolving and varied communicative needs. Zamenhof intuitively understood several important factors that contributed to Esperanto’s stability, for example the need for a standard and its codification. Over the past decades, the scholarly literature of Esperanto studies has grown in quality and is regularly recorded in the bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA).