Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 34, Issue 2, 2010

Dallas and the North Texas region of the United States have seen profound demographic shifts that have challenged one regional health care network in its effort to provide quality health services to an increasingly linguistically heterogeneous community. The response to this challenge has included a reconceptualization of the organization’s language policy to create alignment between it and the organization’s mission, considering language policy from both an equity and a quality control perspective. This industry-facing language planning case study looks at how Children’s Medical Center of Dallas has responded to the challenge by explicitly recognizing patients’ linguistic needs, developing its workforce, and creating a language liaison program that bridges the communication gap between doctors and their patients. While governments select language policies and engage in language planning mainly for political purposes, private organizations serving multilingual communications have quality of service as an added incentive to engage in such activities if they are to remain viable.

In the past thirty years or so substantial research has emerged about the status of dialects and their use in education. The literature on dialects in education is diverse and deals with issues related to both dialectal and bidialectal approaches to education. In the present paper an effort is made to propose the construction of a viable bidialectal program that is (a) optimally suited to the Greek Cypriot linguistic setting, (b) specifically attuned to the sociopolitical and historical context of Cyprus and (c) most appropriate in addressing Cyprus’ educational needs and requirements. In proposing the development of a viable model, three major considerations were taken into account: (i) the properties of bidialectal programs that have been in effect worldwide, (ii) the experiences gained by countries that have adopted bidialectal programs and (iii) the findings of recent empirical studies dealing with the linguistic landscape of Cyprus.

This paper seeks to gauge the success of language planning initiatives in reversing language shift in Ireland and the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) amongst Irish and Basque university students who are not first-language speakers of either minority language. By examining data elicited through questionnaires on the students’ language attitudes and practices, the paper aims to uncover the attitudinal support the students exhibit to Irish and Basque respectively and the extent to which these levels of attitudinal support are transferred to actual language use. The resulting data suggest a favourable attitudinal perspective based largely on relevance to ethnic identity. While the data indicate less favourable results with respect to language practices, there are some positive conclusions to be made particularly in terms of the domains in which Irish and Basque language use occurs and the interlocutors involved. For example, the Irish and Basque languages may not form part of the students’ active linguistic repertoire, but there are examples of code-switching in domains from which these languages were traditionally absent.

The function of the public service broadcasting company Sveriges Television (Swedish Television) as a component of the Swedish ecology of language planning and policy is examined. Analysis of recent policy documents as well as data about television programming illuminates how television serves as a language planning mechanism. It is shown that television is explicitly framed as a tool for status planning through regulations about the relative positions of different languages in this domain. The management of content in Swedish, national minority languages, and other languages, in turn, suggests that Sveriges Television is also implicitly engaged in discourse planning that (re)produces the current linguistic hierarchy in Sweden through the representation of multilingualism.

One hundred fifty years after the birth of L. L. Zamenhof in 1859, the audacity of his ambition stands out in sharp relief. Zamenhof intended Esperanto to create a new people for whom ethical relations to all other human beings, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or religion, would be primary. Convinced that Esperanto, to survive, needed to become the hereditary language of a people, he offered it to the Jews of Russia as the medium of a transformed Jewish identity called Hillelism. When the Russian Jews spurned his gift, he offered Hillelism, in multiple versions, to the Esperantists. But the French leaders of the movement found Hillelism unseemly, in part because they deemed it “mystical,” and in part because it had Jewish overtones. During Zamenhof’s lifetime, the Esperanto “people” were hardly the harmonious generation Zamenhof had envisioned; in fact, they would later endure numerous schisms. Nonetheless, they remained Zamenhof’s best hope to people the utopia of the future.