Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 37, Issue 2, 2013

Kaurna, the language indigenous to the Adelaide Plains in South Australia, is being reclaimed from nineteenth-century written historical sources. There are no sound recordings of the language as it was spoken in the nineteenth century, and little has been handed down orally to the present generation. Fortunately, the nineteenth-century records of the language are reasonably good for the time, having been recorded by Christian Teichelmann and Clamor Schürmann, German missionaries who were trained in philology and a range of languages including Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Chinese. The language was also recorded, in part, by a number of other English, German and French observers. The Kaurna language is now being revived: rebuilt, re-learnt and reintroduced on the basis of this nineteenth-century documentation. In this process, numerous problems of interpretation are being encountered. However, the tools that linguistics provides are being used to interpret the historical corpus. A range of concrete examples are analysed and discussed to illustrate the kinds of problems faced and the solutions adopted.

In today’s world, internationalisation is the key to survival for higher education institutions (HEIs). Many argue that English has become the most used language worldwide, the international language of wider communication in a variety of domains ranging from the professional to everyday life. Consequently, non-English speaking countries have entered into a process of introducing English-medium higher education as a means of overcoming any competitive disadvantage associated with their particular linguistic situation. As a result, an ideology has emerged amongst HEIs in non-English-speaking countries that internationalisation is synonymous with the introduction of English-medium degree programmes. This development has implications for the position of national languages in their higher education systems, and consequently as international languages of communication. It is, therefore, necessary to investigate the extent to which the adoption of such language-in-education reforms may potentially act as an impetus to a wider language shift in the countries comprising Kachru’s “expanding circle.” This paper explores the current process of “Englishization” within the German higher education system. By means of Strubell’s “Catherine Wheel” conceptual model, a potential language shift from German to English is postulated and its ramifications for German’s status and role as an international language are discussed.

As one of the most authoritative journals in the field of language planning, Language Problems and Language Planning has a long history. In this paper, we describe the development and changes that the journal has experienced in different periods, the characteristics that have remained constant, and the role that it has played in the development of language planning. To this end, we collected information from the first 100 issues of the journal (1977 to 2010) to build a corpus, and then used software to extract different categories of information. Through analysis of these statistics, we found that the journal is in many respects representative of changes in the field of language planning, following trends in the discipline and clearly and accurately reflecting the evolving priorities of language planning over the years.

In the 1920s Aomori prefecture, a rural part of northern Japan, a group of Esperanto clubs emerged as a sub-part of a “local arts movement”. This movement was an attempt to counter a perception of underdevelopment through the cultivation of local arts and culture together with a simultaneous engagement with global and transnational ideas such as Esperanto. By studying this unexpected manifestation of internationalism (as well as debates regarding the local/global relationship) it is argued that Esperanto represented a cosmopolitan world view that retained explicit respect for local and cultural differences, a “rooted cosmopolitanism”. This enabled the residents of Aomori to imagine an alternative to the process of modern nation building in which their local identity was seen as a remnant of an undesirable past.