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What do you think about your local accent?
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'Twirlies' is the name given to pensioners by Liverpool bus crews. Their free bus passes become effective at 9am but if they arrive before this, they enquire 'Are we too early?'
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Page 4 of 4
 Why should we care?
How do languages die?
Can we change the fate of languages?
What else can we change?
Language Ecology by Philippa Law Language planning
What else can we change? Writing angry letters to your local paper about people who speak in a certain way is unlikely to make a jot of difference to the way others speak.But surely, if you can change how a community uses its language, or even revive an ancient tongue from the dead, you must be able to deliberately change the things people say. Well, yes, sometimes you can.'Language ecology' is just one part of 'language planning'. The latter refers to any kind of attempt at changing a language's status or content: coining a word for a new gadget, banning sexist terms, declaring a dialect 'official', constructing an artificial language, eradicating words borrowed from other languages, reforming spelling, adding foreign languages to a national curriculum, or even punishing people for speaking a certain language.Language planning can help promote inclusiveness, diversity and tolerance; it can also be divisive, intimidating or a tool of 'ethnic cleansing'. Whether language planners are the heroes or villains in a given situation depends on your own beliefs and politics. Here are some examples.BSL
There's a long history of hearing people trying to change or replace sign languages like BSL, although their efforts have largely been in vain. One example is the invention of an artificial sign language called Paget Gorman, which was based on the grammar of English and was designed to encourage deaf children to speak as well as sign. It is no longer in widespread use. However, as students of Deaf Studies at Bristol University are taught:"...the planners may introduce things that do become part of the sign languages and this causes some minor changes. For example, the sign from Paget Gorman for an animal is now used by some BSL signers as the sign ANIMAL. Other signers use this "animal" sign to mean PAGET GORMAN itself, because the sign is so particularly memorable."Esperanto
The language Esperanto started as a major feat of language planning: the whole language was invented in the late 19th century. It now has something like a thousand native speakers and about two million use it as a lingua franca.Basque
Language planners did an effective job changing Basque. By the 1960s, when a standard form of the language began to be developed, Basque had accumulated lots of neologisms (new words) borrowed from elsewhere. Unlike the languages it had borrowed from, however, Basque did not use prefixes like anti-, pre-, un- and so on. Some of the new words didn't quite work in Basque without prefixes, so speakers deliberately started developing a system of prefixes to be used with neologisms.Kurdish
It was previously illegal to speak Kurdish in Turkey. The law led to a reduction in the number of speakers, although the language did not die. Bans on broadcasting and teaching in Kurdish were lifted in 2002, and in 2004, Turkish state TV broadcast its first Kurdish-language programme.French
Although France has not gone so far as to ban English entirely, it has taken steps against its use. By law, at least 40% of music on the radio in France must be in French. This piece of language planning was introduced in 1994 to protect French pop from English-language imports, and even applies to the English-language station Paris Live.English
English has been deliberately - and successfully - changed too. In 1844 the British Admiralty, worrying that 'larboard' (sea-speak for 'left') and 'starboard' ('right') sounded dangerously similar in stormy conditions, announced that 'larboard' should be replaced by 'port'. Faced with such a sensible suggestion, the switch was universally accepted. If this has inspired you to initiate a bit of language planning yourself, don't forget that people's language use is closely bound with identity and prestige within a particular social group - which means that language planning is as much about changing attitudes and perceptions as it is about the language itself. No language policy will succeed unless lots of ordinary people make the change in their everyday conversations. If the public aren't convinced, then that's that.Further reading:
I See A Voice by Jonathan Ree
An Introduction to Sociolinguistics by Janet Holmes (chapter 5)
Sociolinguistics by Peter Trudgill (chapter 7)
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