Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2011

Utilizing Kloss’s concept of Ausbausprache (language as a sociopolitical construct), this article adopts the view that many languages in the world owe their language status to non-linguistic factors such as their speakers’ ethnic, cultural, and political affiliations, as well as language policy. It is thus possible that individuals who can readily understand each other in everyday conversation (such as two individuals living on either side of the Macedonian/Bulgarian border) can be deemed to speak different languages, while those who cannot understand each other at all (such as speakers of Shanghainese and Mandarin) can be widely perceived as speakers of the same language. This article is an account of how the South Slavic language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian came to be conceived of as a single, unified language due to a number of non-linguistic factors, and how it ceased to be considered a language once these non-linguistic factors were no longer present. Thus, apart from being a case study of how one particular European language was born and how it died without any significant change in linguistic reality on the ground, the present article serves to reinforce the theoretical notion of Ausbausprache as a crucial concept for defining what a language is.

This overview and analysis of language policy and planning (LPP) in Taiwan since the seventeenth century is written from the perspective of language ecology and uses Cooper’s three-part approach: status planning, acquisition planning and corpus planning. The paper investigates how languages and their speakers have interacted with one another and with their sociocultural and political contexts, and how different policies at different times have altered the local language ecology. Three emerging factors that are changing the local ecology are further identified. As the first step to successful LPP is a detailed understanding of the local language ecology, it is hoped that the analysis presented here will provide insights for future LPP in Taiwan.

In largely monolingual South Korea, English has become so important that it is promoted and regarded as a major criterion in education, employment and job-performance evaluation. Recently, South Koreans have also gone so far as to debate whether to adopt English as an official language of South Korea. This article examines the status and role of English in South Korea, particularly in the context of the Official English debate. In so doing, the article critically discusses previous ideologically-based accounts of English in South Korea. By demonstrating that these accounts do not go ideologically deep enough, the article argues that education, under cover of the ideology of merit, serves as a primary mechanism of elimination that conserves the hierarchy of power relations already established in South Korean society. English has been recruited, in the guise of globalization, to exploit the meretricious ideology of merit to the advantage of the privileged classes and to the disadvantage of the other classes of the society. English in South Korea cannot be understood fully unless it is recognized that its importance has not been as much engendered by globalization as it has been resorted to as a subterfuge to conceal where the responsibility for inequality in education lies within the society.

The formation of a language community in a planned language is one of the most important steps in its development. Esperanto is the only fully functional language with relative success among more than one thousand planned language projects. Model texts have played a very significant role in the development of Esperanto. Esenco kaj estonteco de la ideo de lingvo internacia (Essence and future of the international language idea) by the founder of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, is an important document on Esperanto. Taking the essay as the research object, this paper carries through lexical and syntactical analysis on Esperanto by adopting the research methods of quantitative linguistics and complex networks. The results show that the morpheme distribution of Esperanto follows a power law, word frequency distribution fits Zipf’s Law, word length distribution is an exponential curve, and word class distribution obeys linear law. It is also clear that Esperanto is a language with SVO word order preference, the mean dependency distance of Esperanto is 3.85, and the distribution of the dependency distance tends to a minimum, making it typologically a head-middle language. A 43.6% dependency relation appears in adjacent words. The complex syntactic networks of Esperanto display the characteristics of small-world, scale-free networks. All of these quantitative characteristics of Esperanto demonstrate that it is structurally a normal human language.