Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics

CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EDUCATIONAL LINGUISTICS

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CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EDUCATIONAL LINGUISTICS

Edited by BERNARD SPOLSKY Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Consulting Editor R. E. ASHER University of Edinburgh

1999 ELSEVIER AMSTERDAM - LAUSANNE - NEW YORK - OXFORD - SHANNON - SINGAPORE - TOKYO

Elsevier Science Ltd, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK

Copyright © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Concise encyclopedia of educational linguistics / edited by Bernard Spolsky ; consulting editor, R. E. Asher. p. cm. ISBN 0-08-043163-1 1. Language and education Encyclopedias. I. Spolsky, Bernard. II. Asher, R. E. P40.8.C66 1999 306.44'03-dc21 99-35653 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A cataolgue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-08-043163-1

(HC)

© ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Typeset by Polestar Digital Data Ltd., Glasgow, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cambridge University Press, UK.

Contents Editor's Preface

xxiii

Introduction to the Field General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics B. SPOLSKY

1

Applied Linguistics

6

D. A. WlLKINS

Educational Linguistics K. PERERA

17

Ethics in Educational Linguistics A. DAVIES

21

Linguistics and Language Learning B. SPOLSKY

26

The Social Context Society Bilingualism, Societal M. BLANC

31

Diglossia A. HUDSON

37

Language Loyalty R. MESTHRIE

42

Linguicide T. SKUTTNAB-KANGAS & R. PHILLIPSON

48

Minority Languages J. M. Y. SIMPSON

49

Contents Minority Language Rights R. PHILLIPSON & T. SKUTTNAB-KANGAS

51

Multilingual States D. D. LAITIN

54

Multilingualism C. B. PAULSTON

60

Socialization C. B. CAZDEN

63

Sociolinguistics D. R. PRESTON

65

Standardization

70

E. HAUGEN†

Sweden: Immigrant Languages S. BOYD

73

Teaching Endangered Languages L. HINTON

74

National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education Australian Indigenous Languages T. SHOPEN

79

Australian Minority Languages M. CLYNE

80

Canadian Language Education Policy I. PRINGLE

81

Indian Language Education Policy BH. KRISHNAMURTI

83

Irish Language Education Policy T. HICKEY

85

Japanese Language Education Policy T. SHIMAOKA

86

V1

Contents Language Diffusion Policy C. G. MACLEAN Language Education Policy—Africa

92

101

S. G. M. RIDGE Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries Y. SULEIMAN

106

Language Education Policy—Asia B. H. JERNUDD

116

Language Education Policy—Europe J. L. M. TRIM

122

Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union

127

L. A. GRENOBLE Language Education Policy—Latin America

133

N. H. HORNBERGER

Language Education Policy—Pacific R. B. KAPLAN

139

Maori Language Revitalization

144

J. J. McCAFFERY

National Languages C. M. EASTMAN

147

National Language Policy and Education R. D. LAMBERT

151

Wales: Language Education Policy R. MORRIS JONES

157

Literacy and Oracy Literacy C. J. DASWANI

159

Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness M. HERRIMAN

166

vii

Contents Literacy: Phonological Awareness P. E. BRYANT

169

Literacy: Research and Method D. A. WAGNER

171

Oracy A. M. WILKINSON

178

Postliteracy L. BENTON

178

Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries D. A. WAGNER

183

The Home-School Language Gap African American Vernacular English I. F. HANCOCK

187

Ann Arbor Case I. F. HANCOCK

188

Black English (UK) M. DALPHINIS

189

Educational Failure J. R. EDWARDS

192

Gender and Language J. SWANN

200

Home and School Language

202

M. MACLURE

Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar

204

C. CULLEN

Standard English M. FARR & A. F. BALL

viii

205

Contents The Individual Learner Language Acquisition Becoming Bilingual

209

C. LETTS Grammar Acquisition

211

H. TAGER-FLUSHBERG Input and Interaction

219

B. J. RICHARDS & C. GALLAWAY Language Acquisition

225

P. FLETCHER Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability

230

M. ATKINSON Language and the Brain

237

J. M. GURD & J. C. MARSHALL Phonology in Language Acquisition

241

M. L. EDWARDS Vocabulary in Language Acquisition

244

M. D. BARRETT Challenged Learners Deafness and Sign Language Instruction

249

S. WlLCOX

Language Disorders

255

S. L. JAMES Pathology: Intervention

266

B. BYERS BROWN† Pathology: Overview

271

J. M. COOPER Reading and Writing Disorders

275

B. BYERS BROWN† ix

Contents The Blind Child M. GARMAN

276

Second Language Processing Age in Second Language Learning T. SCOVEL

281

Bilingualism, Individual F. GROSJEAN

284

Listening in a Second Language

290

M. ROST Reading in a Second Language A. H. URQUHART

295

Speaking in a Second Language

302

G. YULE Writing in a Second Language

306

U. M. CONNOR The School Context School and Classroom Bilingual Education

311

M. E. BRISK Classroom Language N. MERCER

315

Discourse in the Language Classroom D. ALLWRIGHT

319

Language Across the Curriculum

323

D. J. CORSON Observing Classroom Language A. D. EDWARDS & D. P. G. WESTGATE

325

Pedagogy

332

A. LUKE & C. LUKE

Contents School Language Policies

336

D. J. CORSON Textbooks

337

F. I. DAVIES

Dictionaries Dictionaries for Language Learners

345

R. A. CARTER & N. SCHMITT Lexicology

349

A. P. COWIE Prescription in Dictionaries

353

L. C. MUGGLESTONE

Electronic Age Computer-assisted Language Learning

355

J. D. Fox

Educational Linguistics on the Web

361

L. SELINKER & C. KINAHAN Language Laboratory

363

A. G. SCIARONE New Information Technology in Language Education

366

E. K. L. NG

Teaching Language National Curricula English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)

373

K. PERERA English Teaching in Australia

374

M. O. MEIERS English Teaching in Canada

377

I. PRINGLE

X1

Contents English Teaching in England and Wales

378

R. A. CARTER English Teaching in Scotland R. CAIRNS

380

English Teaching in USA

381

R. E. SHAFER† French Teaching in France

384

D. AGER National Oracy Project J. A. JOHNSON

387

National Writing Projects

387

P. CZERNIEWSKA

Schools Council UK

389

J. J. PEARCE Standards, Scales, and Guidelines B. SPOLSKY

390

Grammar in Mother Tongue Teaching Grammar in British Schools

393

A. M. PHILP Grammar (Mother Tongue) R. DIRVEN

403

Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue) W. B. ELLEY

410

Language Awareness

413

E. W. HAWKINS Systemic Grammar Applied C. S. BUTLER

xii

419

Contents Reading in the Mother Tongue Literature Teaching

425

R. A. CARTER Miscue Analysis

427

H. ARNOLD Readability

428

C. HARRISON Reading: Acquisition

431

J. OAKHILL Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention

440

M. J. SNOWLING & A. EDMUNDSON Reading: Early

450

J. MASTERSON Reading Difficulties

451

M. J. SNOWLING Reading Inventories

453

E. GOODACRE Reading Recovery

453

N. HALL Reading Teaching: Materials

454

K. PERERA Reading Teaching: Methods

457

R. BEARD Reading: Testing

459

P. D. PUMFREY Reading: Theories

462

G. E. MACKINNON

xiii

Contents Spelling in the Mother Tongue Spelling

467

D. BENTLEY Spelling Errors: English

468

C. STERLING Spelling: Invented

469

C. READ Spelling: Learning

470

N. GOULANDRIS

Spelling Tests

473

C. STERLING Writing in the Mother Tongue Writing: Process Approach

475

P. CZERNIEWSKA

Writing in School

477

J. HARRIS Writing Instruction

481

S. W. FREEDMAN Teaching Additional Languages Second and Foreign Language Learning Basic English

483

W. T. GORDON Communication Strategies

484

N. POULISSE

Contrastive and Error Analysis

489

H. RINGBOM Culture C. MORGAN

xiv

495

Contents Intercultural Discourse

500

M. CLYNE Interlanguage

507

E. TARONE Language for Special Purposes

512

A. JOHNS Learning Strategies

518

R. L. OXFORD Morphology

522

I. S. P. NATION Motivation

525

Z. DöRNYEI Native Speaker

532

A. DA VIES Needs Analysis

539

J. L. CLARK Second Language Learning

540

B. MCLAUGHLIN & S. ROBBINS Second Language Learning: Individual Differences

552

R. L. OXFORD The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language

560

GERRY ABBOTT SLA (Second Language Acquisition) Lexis: Acquisition

565

P. MEARA Phonology in Second Language Acquisition

567

A. R. JAMES Second Language Acquisition: Conversation

572

S. M. GASS XV

Contents Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories

577

K. R. GREGG Second Language Acquisition: Sign Language

584

J. G. KYLE Semantics

587

N. DlTTMAR

Syntax in Second Language Acquisition

592

M. A. SHARWOOD SMITH Text

598

J. HOUSE Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy ASTP

603

B. SPOLSKY Content-based Instruction (CBI)

604

J. CRANDALL Fluency and Accuracy

611

I. S. P. NATION Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language)

612

D. LARSEN-FREEMAN History of Second Language Teaching

618

A. P. R. HOWATT Immersion

626

R. LYSTER Intensity

632

K. REEDER Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy

633

A. JOHNS Listening: Second Language Pedagogy N. F. WHITNEY

xvi

639

. Phonetic Pedagogy

Contents 644

J. C. CATFORD Pronunciation

647

D. PORTER Reading: Second Language

652

E. WILLIAMS Second Language Teaching

656

D. A. WILKINS Second Language Teaching Methods

658

W. T. LITTLEWOOD Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy

668

M. BYGATE Starting Early J. L. M. TRIM

675

Ulpan

677

B. SPOLSKY Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy

678

P. J. SCHOLFIELD

Writing: Second Language Pedagogy

682

T. HEDGE

Testing Foreign Language Testing

689

R. KELLY Language Testing

695

B. SPOLSKY Language Testing: Alternative Methods

703

K. SMITH Language Testing: Fundamentals

707

A. J. KUNNAN

xvii

Contents

Language Testing: Impact E. SHOHAMY

711

Language Testing in Mother Tongue D. SPEARRITT

715

Language Testing: Methods C. A. CHAPELLE

721

Language Testing: Users and Uses

724

T. McNAMARA

The Profession Institutions Journals A. VALDMAN

729

Professional Associations R. YOUNG

732

Research Centers B. SPOLSKY

734

Summer Institute of Linguistics J. BENDOR-SAMUEL

739

People Ascham, Roger (1515-68) A. P. R. HOWATT

747

Alatis, James Efstathios (1926-) E. M. ANTHONY

748

Candlin, Christopher N. (1940-) K. SAJAVAARA

748

Carroll, John Bissell (1916-) C. W. STANSFIELD

749

xviii

Contents Caxton, William (ca. 1415-91)

751

W. HÜLLEN

Cazden, Courtney B (1925-) P. ULICHNY

751

Clay, Marie M. (1926-)

752

S. McNAUGHTON

Comenius, Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670) J. L. M. TRIM

753

Cooper, Robert Leon (1931 -)

754

B. SPOLSKY Corder, S. Pit (1918-90)

755

L. SELINKER Elphinston, James (1721-1809)

756

A. P. R. HOWATT Ferguson, Charles A. (1921-98)

757

J. A. FlSHMAN

Finocchiaro, Mary Bonomo (1913-96)

758

J. E. ALATIS Fishman, Joshua A. (1926-)

758

B. SPOLSKY Greenbaum, Sidney (1929-96)

760

B. AARTS Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood (1925-)

760

J. FINE Haugen, Einar (1906-94) N. HASSELMO

761

Heath, Shirley Brice

762

C. B. CAZDEN

xix

Contents Hill, Archibald A. (1902-92) C. W. HAYES

763

Hornby, Albert Sidney (1898-1978) A. P. R. HOWATT

764

Hymes, Dell Hathaway (1927-)

765

N. H. HORNBERGER

Jones, Daniel (1881-1967) B. S. COLLINS

766

Kaplan, Robert B. W.

767

Kennedy, Benjamin Hall (1804-89) C. A. STRAY

768

Krashen, Stephen D. (1941- ) D. E. ESKEY

769

Labov, William (1927-)

770

S. ROMAINE

Lado, Robert (1915-95)

770

J. E. ALATIS Lambert, Wallace E. (1922- ) G. R. TUCKER

771

Lee, William Rowland (1911-96) J. E. ALATIS

772

Mulcaster, Richard (1532-1611) A. P. R. HOWATT

773

Nickel, Gerhard (1928-) K. SAJAVAARA

774

Nida, Eugene Albert (1914-)

774

R. E. LONGACRE

XX

Contents Palmer, Harold Edward (1877-1949) A. P. R. HOWATT

775

Passy, Paul Edouard (1859-1940) J. A. KEMP

776

Paulston, Christina Bratt (1932-)

777

M. SWAIN Piaget, Jean (1896-1980) M. L. DONALDSON

778

Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813-97)

779

M. K. C. MACMAHON

Quirk, Charles Randolph (1920-)

780

J. ROBERTS Ratke, Wolfgang (1571-1635)

781

J. B. WALMSLEY Richards, I. A. (1893-1979)

781

J. P. Russo Rivers, Wilga (1919-)

783

R. STEELE Robinett, Betty Wallace (1919-)

783

B. T. DOWNING Smith, Henry Lee (1913-72)

784

C. A. FARLEY-WINER Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf (1851-1929) J. B. WALMSLEY

785

Stern, H. H. (David) (1913-87)

786

B. HARLEY & A. WEINRIB Strevens, Peter (1922-89)

787

H. G. WlDDOWSON

XXI

Contents Swain, Merrill K. (1944-)

788

A. GUMMING Trim, John L. M.

788

J. SHEILS Troike, Rudolph C. (1933-) G. R. TUCKER

789

Tucker, G. Richard (1942- ) J. CRANDALL

790

Twaddell, William Freeman (1906-82)

791

W. N. FRANCIS Valdman, Albert (1931-) B. SPOLSKY

792

Van Els, Theo (1936-)

793

K. DE BOT

Viëtor, Wilhelm(1850-1918)

794

K. GROTSCH Widdowson, H. G.

795

G. COOK Alphabetical List of Articles

797

List of Contributors

803

Name Index

813

Subject Index

833

xxii

Editor's Preface When I was first approached at the beginning of 1998 with the suggestion that I edit a spin-off volume on language and education, I was immediately tempted by the opportunity this gave me to survey the field to which I have devoted my academic life. I am most grateful to Professor R. E. Asher, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics and to Chris Pringle, Senior Publishing Editor for Elsevier Science Limited for the invitation and for the assistance they gave me in planning the volume, and to Helen Collins and members of the production staff for their constant support and uncomplaining effort during preparation. I am grateful to the authors of the articles in the parent volumes who agreed to modify and update their articles or let them appear unchanged. I am especially appreciative of the authors of the new articles who met virtually impossible deadlines and worked with tight space restrictions to produce them. That this volume has been produced so speedily is a mark both of the efforts of those I have named and of the major advantage that electronic mail gave to the work of preparation and editing. Most of my work was done in this way, from seeking authors for new articles to discussing last minute changes in the wording of titles. I dedicate this volume to the group who stand to benefit most from the enrichment and development of educational linguistics, the children who continue to suffer through insensitive and impractical school approaches to language education. Biographical Note Born in New Zealand, Bernard Spolsky was educated at Wellington College and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English from Victoria University. After a spell of high school teaching in New Zealand (where his bilingual Maori pupils set him thinking about a topic that is still central to his research), he taught at high schools in Australia and England before moving, in 1958, to Israel. In Israel, he spent a year in the army supervising foreign language teaching and two years at the Hebrew University teaching English. In 1961, he became Assistant Professor of education at McGill University, and in 1964, having completed a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Montreal, was appointed Assistant Professor of linguistics at Indiana University. In 1968, he moved to the University of New Mexico, where he was Professor of Linguistics, Anthropology and Elementary Education, Dean of the Graduate School, and director of the Navajo Reading Study. In 1980, he returned to Israel, being appointed Professor of English at Bar-Han University, where he also served terms as head of the English Department and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He has conducted and published research in language testing, second language learning, computers in the humanities, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy. In professional service, he has been President of TESOL, Secretary of the American Association of Applied Linguistics, President of the Israeli Association of Applied Linguistics, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Applied Linguistics, and President of the International Language Testing Association. He has held a Guggenheim fellowship and a Mellon fellowship, and has been Adjunct Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington. He has written and edited a dozen books and published some 200 chapters in books and articles in journals. Selected Books Spolsky B 1978 Educational Linguistics: An Introduction. Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, MA Spolsky B (ed.) 1986 Language and Education in Multilingual Settings. Multilingual Matters Ltd., Clevedon, UK Spolsky B 1989 Conditions for Second Language Learning: Introduction to a General Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford Spolsky B 1995 Measured Words: The Development of Objective Language Testing. Oxford University Press, Oxford Spolsky B 1998 Sociolinguistics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study). Oxford University Press, Oxford Spolsky B, Cooper, R L (eds.) 1977 Frontiers of Bilingual Education. Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, MA Spolsky B, Cooper, R L 1991 The Languages of Jerusalem. Clarendon Press, Oxford

XXlll

Editor's Preface Spolsky B, Shohamy E 1999 The Languages of Israel: Policy, Ideology and Practice. Multilingual Matters Ltd., Clevedon, UK Bernard Spolsky Bar-Ilan University, Israel August 1999

Introduction to the Field General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics B. Spolsky

1. Defining the Field of Educational Linguistics

One of the principal goals of the Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics is to define a field and a profession. The article by David Wilkins on Applied Linguistics sets out the underpinnings of the discipline that was its principal progenitor and that remains its home. Applied linguistics, a term modeled on applied mathematics, won out in competition with the equally logical term 'language engineering' to cover a wide range of interests in practical applications or implications of the knowledge that was being developed through the growth of the modern discipline of linguistics. For some, applied linguistics meant no more than language teaching. In many universities, a course labeled 'Applied linguistics' is essentially an introduction to second language pedagogy. For others, it came to include all the fields ancillary to the study of language itself, such as sociolinguistics, computer linguistics, and psycholinguistics. This wider use is the one institutionalized by the Applied Linguistics congresses that started in the mid-1960s and the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) that grew out of them. Because of this, the term is either too narrow or too wide to label a discipline concerned with the intersection of language and education. For more discussion of this point, see the article on Journals below. 'Educational linguistics' was a term modeled on educational psychology and educational sociology. It describes the commingling of an academic discipline (linguistics) with a practical academic profession (education). While it maintains the higher status for the academic field through using it as the head of the noun clause, it rejects the notion that linguistics is just waiting to be applied, as a hammer is waiting for a nail to drive in. Rather, the use of the term asserts the need for a careful consideration of the educational side as well, producing a responsible new field. The scope of this growing field is best defined as the intersection of language and education. From one perspective the task of educational linguistics is to define the set of knowledge from the many and varied branches of the scientific study of language that may

be relevant to formal or informal education. From a second perspective, the term also includes those branches of formal or informal education that have direct concern with the language and linguistic proficiency of learners. There is an ambiguity here, perhaps captured by saying that educational linguistics includes both the various branches of language education and the knowledge from linguistics and other fields relevant to language education. This Concise Encyclopedia has been planned to reflect this view. It aims to present any knowledge from linguistics (whether the core fields like grammar and phonology and semantics, or the 'hyphenated' fields, as Carl Voegelin labeled them, like sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, or clinical linguistics) that may have bearing on the education of children and adults. It also covers the fields specifically concerned with language learning (in the widest sense) and language teaching. This definition combines the brazenness of claiming breadth and depth of influence with the humility of realizing the complexity of finding useful direct implications for knowledge. A. S. Byatt in her recent novel Babel Tower (Vintage Books 1996) describes in detail the knowledge of 1960s linguistics that was acquired by one of her characters when he was appointed to chair a national enquiry into language education. From Saussure, Jakobson, and Chomsky, he learned of developing understanding of the structure of language, and was encouraged to hope that one day neuroscientists and geneticists might find a physical basis for this structure in the genes and brain cells. But Byatt concludes the discussion of this new linguistic expertise brusquely, noting that 'None of this is exactly helpful with the problem of what to teach to small and not-so-small children, with which the committee is engaged' (p. 194). The task of educational linguistics and of this Concise Encyclopedia is to be helpful rather than imperialistic. Its goal is not, as many linguists have been misled by their scientific understanding to believe, to tell teachers how to teach. When I wrote an introduction to a set of articles on language and education some 25 years ago, I opened with a quotation from an 1

Introduction to the Field unnamed colleague suggesting that the audiolingual method was the worst sin ever inflicted on language learners by linguists. The term 'applied linguistics', I suggested then, had the unfortunate implication that any new discovery about the structure of language has an immediate practical application. Structural linguists had developed some useful techniques for determining regularities in various areas of languages. They somehow believed that their findings were translatable into a language teaching method. The result, at its worst, condemned language learners to hours of meaningless drills. At its best, it gave some order to the practising of forms in the foreign language. Rather, I argued (and still believe) that advances in linguistic knowledge have implications for methods and approaches to helping people learn their own or an additional language. Structural linguistics offered the language teacher a more accurate and efficient way of analyzing the nature of language knowledge that a language learner needed. It was, however, a mistake to assume simply that the patterns used by the linguist needed to be directly learned by the language learner. Transformational linguistics went deeper into explaining the nature of language, but more importantly, initiated a revolution by suggesting the models of language processes and innateness that gave rise to the major discipline of psycholinguistics. Concern with the variation unexplained in transformational grammar produced the field of sociolinguistics, which, in its fullest development, brings language and the language learner in a social context. The interaction of these core linguistic fields with related disciplines—philosophy, sociology, psychology, and others—and with the professional and scientific study of education helps explain the breadth of the topics covered and the knowledge base concerned. We seek then not to apply linguistics, but to derive from its many branches and from other fields that study language, the knowledge that will help in developing the language capacity of others. 2. A Taxonomy of Educational Linguistics The articles in the Encyclopedia have been divided into eight sections constituting a useful taxonomic organization of the field. The titles of articles referred to in this introduction are given in italics. Because most taxonomies leak, some articles from other sections are cited; for instance, the article on Spelling Tests which appears in the section on Spelling in the Mother Tongue is also mentioned in this introduction in the section on Language Testing. 2.1 Introduction to the Field To give a general overview of the field that expands this General Introduction, the first section includes four articles. Applied Linguistics describes the parent field, showing how linguistic knowledge came to be seen as relevant to the practical needs of education. Edu-

cational Linguistics and Linguistics and Language Learning set out the range and coverage of the more precisely defined field. The article on Ethics in Educational Linguistics is included here to summarize the ethical basis of the field as a whole and to reflect the growing sense of responsibility of scholars for the social consequences of their work (for more discussion of the ethical issues, see Language Testing: Impact and Language Testing: Users and Uses). 2.2 The Social Context As Wilkins noted in the opening article on Applied Linguistics, 'natural bilingualism' is more common than is widely believed. The recognition of the importance of the social context in which languages are learned and used has had an increasing effect on educational linguistics since Hymes (see Hymes) objected to restricting attention to the 'linguistic competence of the idealized monolingual' as Chomsky proposed. There are a number of articles which place language and education in their social context. The section is divided into four. Thirteen articles look at Society from a linguistic point of view, asking both what is the social basis of language and the linguistic basis of society. The next 18 articles, many of them specially written for this volume and reflecting the newness of work in the field, look at National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education from a national perspective. Seven articles on Literacy and Oracy set out the critical social and educational effects of the spoken and written organization of language. The final group of eight articles in this section focuses on the HomeSchool Language Gap, various aspects of the educational and social effects of differences between the language of the home and the language favored by the school. 2.2.7 Society In this subsection, as in the parent field of Sociolinguistics, the emphasis is on variation in language, its causes, and its results. Language plays a critically central role in Socialization. Though there are some states that act as though all their citizens speak only one language, most are multilingual, with different patterns of demographic distribution and functional use of the various languages and dialects. Three articles therefore deal with Multilingualism, Multilingual States, and Societal Bilingualism. (The terms 'bilingual' and 'multilingual' continue to be used interchangeably by laymen and experts alike, and an editor respecting language variety is hardly the person to try to enforce a new standard.) One special pattern of societal bilingualism, Diglossia, assigns higher and lower functions to two varieties of a language or to two different languages, producing an educational problem where, as is usually the case, one variety is learned at home and the other required at school.

General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics Faced with choices among languages, speakers show differing kinds of Language Loyalty to the varieties offered, and this affects their willingness to learn or teach languages and so contribute to language maintenance, language shift, or even language death. The corresponding variation in power defines some of the languages as Minority Languages and raises concern for Minority Language Rights in the face of policies that lead to Linguicide or the forced destruction of languages. One article describes the case of immigrants (Sweden: Immigrant Languages), a topic that is dealt with again in the articles on National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education. The recognition of the forces working to reduce drastically the existing diversity of languages has led, belatedly, to a concern for Teaching Endangered Languages. To deal with the variation in language by deciding what variants should be used and so clarify the task of the language teacher, a common process is Standardization. 2.2.2 National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education Given the universality of Multilingual States, purely pragmatic needs of efficient communication are enough to encourage the development of national language policies and the decision on official languages. However, as the articles in this section reveal, this seemingly neutral and objective goal is regularly confounded and distorted by the felt need to express nationalistic or symbolical concerns in the assertion of higher status for one or more chosen languages. National Languages then derive much of their importance from their roles, like flags and anthems, in defining national identity or in proclaiming the superiority of one language and its speakers over others. Many nations often go beyond their own borders, establishing Language Diffusion Policy to widen their influence. National Language Policy and Education surveys these conflicting interests and proposes a model of analysis. In the studies of various regions of the world, Language Education Policy—Africa,—Arabic Speaking Countries,—Asia,—Europe,—Latin America,— Pacific and—Former Soviet Union, one can see the various patterns of treatment that have emerged in recent years. By looking at some special and wellstudied cases, Australian Indigenous Languages and Australian Minority Languages, Canadian Language Education Policy, Indian Language Education Policy, Irish Language Educational Policy, Japanese Language Education Policy, Maori Language Revitalization, and Wales: Language Education Policy, the complexity of situations and the difficulties of developing just and effective policies become even clearer. 2.2.5 Literacy and Oracy As Daswani states in his article, Literacy is no longer just a question of an individual being able to write,

but a social issue of major importance. In Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries one sees the importance of sacred languages and texts. Currently, Literacy: Research and Method are at the core of major national concerns and campaigns. More recently, it has been pointed out that Oracy, the equivalent skills in listening and speaking, is of similar educational and social value. Underlying literacy ability are two critical phenomena, the ability to distinguish language and its structure from the content it carries (see Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness), and the ability to recognize the units of the sound system (see Literacy: Phonological Awareness). To deal with the more advanced skills needed for working in the modern world, the concept of Postliteracy is proposed. The school concern with literacy is discussed in the many articles on reading and writing. 2.2.4 The Home-School Language Gap One of the most crucial transitions that most children make is to go from the social and linguistic context of the home to that of the school. The differences between Home and School Language are a major component, and are partly to blame for, the existence of widespread Educational Failure. In Britain and the US, schools usually emphasize teaching and learning Standard English, rejecting the various other varieties such as Black English (UK) or African American Vernacular English (variously called Black English or Ebonics). This policy was challenged in the United States, one important example being the Ann Arbor Case. A more recent example of backlash to this has been the outcry over a California school board's approach to teaching the variety, which they referred to as Ebonics. The teaching of Standard English has led to controversy over Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar. In recognizing social and linguistic differences, much recent study has been concerned with Gender and Language. 2.3 The Individual Learner The third section of the taxonomy, itself divided into three groups, focuses on the individual language learner. Eight articles cover various aspects of what is (under the influence of Chomsky) now called Language Acquisition rather than language learning. These articles mainly deal with the first language or mother tongue. The next six articles consider Challenged Learners and the various pathologies that affect individual language learning. The last six articles in this section look at the nature of Second Language Processing in the individual, covering together or separately various aspects of learning (or acquiring) foreign or second languages. 2.3.1 Language Acquisition Language exists in social context, but it is learned by individuals. Psycholinguistics is the field that is

Introduction to the Field concerned most with the study of Language Acquisition. What is currently known about the neurophysiological basis of language is considered in Language and the Brain. How language is innate and how much it is learned is the question raised in Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability. Input and Interaction raises the related issue of the how active the learner must be in the process. The acquisition of Grammar (Mother Tongue), Phonology, and Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy are looked at independently. Recognizing how common is plurilingualism (a term favored by some European scholars for individual ability), Becoming Bilingual looks at how children regularly acquire more than one language. 2.3.2 Challenged Learners The next section looks at exceptions. The normal process of language acquisition may be interfered with in a number of ways, resulting in some kind of language Pathology, which may often be treated (Pathology: Intervention). There are broad categories of Language Disorders. More specifically, there may be Reading and Writing Disorders. The Blind Child has special problems. Deafness poses major challenges, to which Sign Language Instruction is one solution. 2.5.5 Second Language Processing As noted earlier, many children learn more than one language, either simultaneously or consecutively. Individual Bilingualism (which can be called plurilingualism if more than two languages are involved) is the study of a widespread phenomenon. One regularly posed question is, what effect does the Age in Second Language Learning of a learner have on learning a second language, attempting to explain why so many empirical studies start off saying 'Everyone believes young children learn languages easily' but end up establishing that older learners are more efficient. The other articles in this subsection ask about the skills of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing in a Second Language and how they compare with the processing of the same skills in the first language. 2.4 The School Context The fourth section of the taxonomy deals with the school context involved in most educational linguistics. Its three parts open with the organization of language in the School and Classroom, and then go on to the important aids, Dictionaries, and conclude with the recent reinforcements that have arrived in the Electronic Age. 2.4.1 School and Classroom Formal language education in first or additional languages generally takes place in the classroom, a context marked by its own Classroom Language. Observing Classroom Language then provides a way

of describing and assessing the effect of Discourse in the Language Classroom in the Language Classroom. The language-related activities are directed by externally imposed School Language Policies, influenced by the teacher's style of Pedagogy. When more than one language is involved, a widespread but still controversial approach is Bilingual Education. Language education is not restricted to the language classroom, but may be spread, as argued in the approach dealing with Language Across the Curriculum. One key feature of the classroom is the ubiquitous Textbook. 2.4.2 Dictionaries Most people assume that learning any language is a matter of learning new words, so the field of Lexicology, the science of dictionary making, is especially pertinent to educational linguistics. Dictionaries provide not only description, but implicitly or explicitly, Prescription in Dictionaries concerning the use of appropriateness of words. Dictionaries for Language Learners need to meet special demands. 2.4.3 Electronic Age Since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been a rapid expansion of the use of New Information Technology in Language Education. For some, instruction has moved from the classroom to the Language Laboratory. In the last 20 years, a new field of Computer-assisted Language Learning has emerged. With the growth of the Internet, we now find Educational Linguistics on the Web. 2.5 Teaching Language The fifth section focuses on language teaching. The articles in this section deal in turn with the nature of National Curricula for teaching for mother tongue, the place of Grammar in Mother Tongue Teaching, and then include 13 articles on teaching Reading in the Mother Tongue, and eight articles in Spelling in the Mother Tongue and Writing in the Mother Tongue. 2.5.7 National Curricula In Britain and the USA, there have been continuing efforts to reform the teaching of the mother tongue. The English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales) and the article on the Schools Council UK deal with this, and other aspects are described in the articles on the National Oracy Project and the National Writing Projects. English Teaching in the USA and Standards, Scales, and Guidelines describe similar efforts in the USA. National mother tongue teaching is also described in English Teaching in Australia, English Teaching in

General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics Canada, English Teaching in England and Wales, and English Teaching in Scotland. English writers often refer to the highly developed and centralized approach to mother tongue teaching that may be seen in French Teaching in France. 2.5.2 Grammar in Mother Tongue Teaching Five articles deal with what remains a highly controversial topic: Grammar (Mother Tongue), Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue), Grammar (Mother Tongue) in British Schools, Language Awareness and Systematic Grammar Applied. Does teaching grammar improve students' language? Should grammar be taught explicitly or implicitly? What model of grammar should be used? The topic of pedagogical grammar is also discussed in the first section of the article Linguistics and Language Learning. 2.5.3 Reading in the Mother Tongue Long the central task of schools, the teaching of reading in the mother tongue depends first on understanding the underlying process, which is examined in Reading: Acquisition. There have developed many Reading: Theories. Reading Teaching: Methods have proliferated, and Reading Teaching: Materials have been published, which may be analyzed for Readability. The question of how early a child should learn to read is discussed in Reading: Early. Reading: Testing and Reading Inventories provide ways of tracking progress. Reading Difficulties can be recognized by tests and inventories and from Miscue Analysis. Dealing with difficulties is the task of Reading Recovery. In more serious cases, disorders are noted in Reading and Writing Disorders and ways of dealing with them in Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention. A goal of teaching reading is Literature Teaching. 2.5.4 Spelling in the Mother Tongue With a language like English, Spelling in an important component of mother tongue teaching. Spelling Tests are one way to find Spelling Errors: English: English. Other articles treat Spelling: Invented and Spelling: Learning. 2.5.5 Writing in the Mother Tongue Three articles deal with writing in the mother tongue: Writing in School, Writing Instruction, and Writing: Process Approach. 2.6 Teaching Additional Languages The sixth section deals with the teaching of additional languages (whether second or foreign). Fifteen articles deal with specific aspects of Second and Foreign Language Learning, another eight deal with subfields of the important discipline called SLA or Second Language Acquisition. The last 18 deal with specific topics in Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy.

2.6.7 Second and Foreign Language Learning The articles in this group cover the broad range of topics of recent research in Second Language Learning. A fundamental issue is raided in an examination of the Native Speaker. One basic approach to planning is provided by Needs Analysis, from which might follow Language for Special Purposes. Historically important developments were made by the introduction of Contrastive and Error Analysis (in which Lado and Corder played an important role) and the associated notion of Inter language. The importance of Morphology is argued. Four articles focus on the learner: Communication Strategies, Learning Strategies, Motivation, and Second Language Learning: Individual Differences. Culture is treated as is Intercultural Discourse. There is an article on The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language and another on the attempt in the 1920s and 1930s to foster Basic English. 2.6.2 SLA or Second Language Acquisition The background for this important subfield, first simply an adaptation of research in first language acquisition but now a critical theoretical basis for educational linguistics, is set out in Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories. The various topics investigated in this field are described in Second Language Acquisition: Conversation, Lexis: Reading: Acquisition, Morphology in the previous subsection, Phonology in Second Language Acquisition, Semantics, Syntax in Second Language Acquisition in Second Language Acquisition, and Text. The approach is further extended in Second Language Acquisition: Sign Language. 2.6.3 Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy Against the social and theoretical backgrounds set out so far, this section groups articles that deal with the teaching of second or foreign languages. Historical background is given in the History of Second Language Teaching of Second Language Teaching or as an overview in Second Language Teaching and Second Language Teaching Methods. The teaching of the various component skills is described in Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue) (Foreign Language), Listening: Second Language Pedagogy, Pronunciation, Phonetic Pedagogy, Reading: Second Language, Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy, Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: Second Language Pedagogy, and Writing: Second Language Pedagogy. Three controversial issues dealt with are Fluency and Accuracy, Intensity, and Starting Early (see also Age, in Second Language Learning). The methods of teaching language for special purposes is dealt with in Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy. Two special cases, the ASTP (Armed Services Training Program), often considered the forerunner of the Audio-Lingual Method, and the Israeli Ulpan, considered a model for many language revival programs, are examined.

Introduction to the Field Two recent developments, Content-based Instruction and Immersion, are also described in this section. 2.7 Language Testing The seventh section expands on the rather condensed treatment of language testing in the parent Encyclopedia by adding five new articles. Language Testing surveys the topic, and the theory of the field is discussed in Language Testing: Fundamentals. Approaches to testing are set out in Language Testing: Methods, Foreign Language Testing, Language Testing in Mother Tongue, Reading: Testing, and Spelling Tests. New ways of evaluating progress are spelled out in Language Testing: Alternative Methods. The recent concern for Ethics is described in articles concerning Language Testing: Impact and Language Testing: Uses and Users. 2.8 The Profession The final section looks at the profession of educational linguistics by first describing some of the important institutions that support its work. There are articles on Journals, Professional Associations, Research Centers, and on the Summer Institute of Linguistics. A fuller picture of the profession is provided by biographical notes on the 50 or so scholars who have helped to shape it. The people included are forerunners of the field, the founding generation, and a selection of the older current members of the group. Omitted are many of the equally significant younger

scholars whose current activities can be seen by their regular citation in the reference at the end of articles. 3. Is There a Theory of Educational Linguistics Having described the field of educational linguistics and set out a preliminary taxonomy, one is tempted to attempt also to sketch a preliminary theory at least of the field as a whole. As a starting point, one might usefully take the model of language instruction proposed by John B. Carroll (see Carroll). Paraphrased in a single sentence, he postulates that the linguistic proficiency or capacity or competence of an individual is a function of his or her language learning ability, his or her individual or socially determined motivation to acquire further proficiency, and the socially or educationally determined exposure to other varieties of language. The role of educational linguistics then is to spell out the nature of each of the terms and processes in this key sentence, and to track the ways in which they may be modified in order to permit the development of socially or individually desired proficiency. Each of the branches of the field examined in this volume have their own contribution to make to this task, but seeing them as a 'unified field' (to borrow a term) offers the best prospect for producing the most beneficial results. This volume is essentially a record of the knowledge available at the end of the millennium. If its publication in any way helps consolidate this knowledge and clarify the gaps that need further study, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

Applied Linguistics D. A. Wilkins

The use of language is central to human experience. Virtually all human intercourse is mediated through language. Through language, thoughts and emotions are made explicit. In the small child, linguistic and cognitive capacities develop hand in hand. Later, the ability to communicate within and across societies and therefore to maintain effective social relations depends on having a language in common with other members of those societies. It is hard to conceive how the complex social world in which we live could possibly have been constructed without the unique human gift of language nor, for that matter, how, without language, the human species could have built up the body of knowledge that it has of itself and of its environment. The nature of the endowment that makes this possible is the subject matter of 'theoretical linguistics.'

The study of the uses that man makes of the endowment and of the problems that he encounters in doing so is the subject matter of 'applied linguistics.' To understand the nature of applied linguistics, it is necessary to consider its origins, its aims, the relation of applied linguistics to linguistic theory, the kind of issues with which applied linguistic research is concerned and the methods of investigating them, and the relation of linguistics to professional practice in various domains. But first it needs to be appreciated what the potential scope of applied linguistics is and to see why in this article it will be necessary to restrict the detailed discussion to the field which has so far generated the greatest body of research and publication, namely that of applied linguistics in language learning and teaching.

Applied Linguistics 1. The Scope of Applied Linguistics In a broad sense, applied linguistics is concerned with increasing understanding of the role of language in human affairs and thereby with providing the knowledge necessary for those who are responsible for taking language-related decisions whether the need for these arises in the classroom, the workplace, the law court, or the laboratory. Given the pervasiveness of language, it follows that applied linguistics is potentially a highly diversified field. Its concerns might be with speech pathology, translation, natural language processing by computer, first and second language pedagogy, language policy and planning, literacy, bilingualism, the design of writing systems, the development of terminologies and lexica, the preparation of dictionaries, automatic (machine) translation, forensic analysis (of linguistic evidence), and the role of language in institutional relations (e.g., politics, medicine, law courts). While in few of these fields are the issues faced by practitioners wholly language related, the goal of applied linguistics is best understood as being to provide them With a coherent 'conceptual basis' for the analysis and understanding of those aspects of their work which are language related. The full implications of this will be considered below, but one consequence is that because of the diverse ways in which language is engaged in these domains, there is no single body of applied linguistic knowledge which is equally relevant to all applied fields. For example, there will be relatively little overlap between the linguistic knowledge-base needed for the design of a new orthography and that needed for the development of natural language processing in computers. It is this that makes any straightforward, general description of applied linguistics virtually impossible and which accounts for the fact that the term 'applied linguistics' itself is not in fact universally applied to the academic study of all the fields that have been mentioned. In other words, the actual scope of applied linguistics tends to be less than its potential scope. A pragmatic way to proceed in identifying what the scope of applied linguistics usually is in practice is to look at the activities engaged in under the explicit rubric of applied linguistics. What topics are dealt with at conferences on applied linguistics? What is the orientation of books and journals dedicated to applied linguistics? What are courses on applied linguistics concerned with? The program of the international congress held under the auspices of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée in 1993 lists 30 sections representing a fairly broad interpretation of what constitutes applied linguistics. The section names include, for example, child language, discourse analysis, interpreting and translation, language and gender, lexicography, mother tongue education, psycholinguistics, rhetoric and stylistics, minority languages, language disorders, and models of

bilingualism, language-attrition, and language shift. Fourteen sections are devoted to topics directly associated with second or foreign language learning or teaching. It should be said, however, that scholars working in at least some of the fields mentioned would probably not regard this conference as the prime forum for the reporting of their research. The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics has been published since 1980. The policy of the editors is to have thematic editions punctuated every few years with general surveys. The general surveys tend to provide updates on research into issues of relevance to second- and first-language learning. Some thematic editions, those on literacy or communicative language teaching, have a similar orientation, but even those that do not, those dealing with language policy, bilingualism, and language and the professions, for example, have obvious significance for the educational profession. The overall picture is much the same in the case of journals. A number of journals incorporate the label 'applied linguistics' in their title or subtitle: for example, Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, The International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, ITL Review of Applied Linguistics, Etudes de Linguistique Appliquee and System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics. In each of these cases the overwhelming majority of the articles published are devoted to topics either directly or indirectly linked to language education. Books which set out to define or survey the field of applied linguistics such as Corder (1973; see Allen et al. 1973-77) or Kaplan (1980) ignore the noneducational applied fields as do coursebooks or textbooks such as the Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics (Allen et al. 1973-77) and van Els et al. (1984). Wardhaugh and Brown (1976) does include articles on literature and language planning, but is still predominantly concerned with educational applications. It is more difficult to make generalizations about courses in applied linguistics. Applied linguistics is largely taught at the postgraduate level and students are generally experienced professionals from one or other of the language-oriented specialisms in education, training, and remediation who are seeking a more rigorous academic background for their professional activity or an opportunity to train for and undertake research. While the flexibility of graduate study permits individual deviation into other applied fields, the rationale behind course design is generally provided by a focus on issues relevant to language education. It is evident that the term 'applied linguistics' is too broad in its potential field of application to be interpreted literally. In its widest sense no coherent field of applied linguistics exists. On the other hand, the term is perhaps misleadingly inexplicit as a des-

Introduction to the Field ignation of the actual activities and interests of those who engage in what is commonly referred to as applied linguistic research and teaching. It should be said that the appropriation and restricted use of the term to what might be more accurately referred to as 'applied linguistics in education' or 'applied linguistics in language learning and teaching' has caused objections to be raised from those whose applied interests lie elsewhere and who perhaps feel the lack of a forum where their interests might be catered for. It is clear therefore that, wide as the field of applied linguistics is potentially, in reality both historically and in the late twentieth century it is a more narrowly conceived field of activity. It is arguable that it might be better that the label should always be specified further so that the field of application and, in consequence, the nature of the applied linguistics involved are better understood. In practice applied linguistics has developed so far as an enterprise principally dedicated to creating a better understanding of the processes of language, especially second language, learning, and it is to applied linguistics in this sense that the remainder of this article is devoted. As will be shown, not all the problems associated with the term 'applied linguistics' have yet been identified. 2. Applied Linguistics in Language Learning and Teaching

2.1 The Origins of Applied Linguistics Although there is evidence of some earlier use of the term 'applied linguistics' (van Els et al. (1984) cite a 1931 publication by Lockhart entitled Word Economy: An Essay in Applied Linguistics), the use of the 1990s stems from the 1940s. In the USA, general linguists with experience of conducting research into Native American and other little-known languages had been deeply involved in the conduct of language training programs during World War II. They tended to regard the approach that they adopted to teach language as being based upon general linguistic principles, and indeed there was a close resemblance between the methods they used and the fieldwork procedures that they used in studying unfamiliar languages with the help of native informants. One major principle which emerged and which was articulated notably by Fries and Lado at the University of Michigan was that similarities and differences between the forms and structures of a learner's first language and those of the second language were a major influence on the process of language learning. A full-scale comparison of the two languages was advocated as a preliminary step in the preparation of a language course for students with a common language background. This process became known as 'contrastive analysis.' Since it involved comparison of phonological, syntactic, and lexical systems, it required trained linguists to undertake research involving full

linguistic descriptions of the two languages on common linguistic principles. This was taken evidently to be an application of linguistics and the name 'applied linguistics' gained wide currency as a virtual synonym for contrastive linguistics (see Contrastive and Error Analysis for further discussion). Given that linguistics itself was widely perceived as the scientific study of language, applied linguistics was expected to provide in due course a technology of language teaching. The scale of the contrastive linguistic research undertaken in the following decades was enormous. Indeed, although its rationale came to be questioned, in many East European countries contrastive analysis remains a major academic activity for linguists even in the 1990s. Given the appeal of the notion that difficulties for language learners are caused by differences between the first and the target language and that similarities between the languages will facilitate learning, it is easy to see why language teaching itself was sometimes regarded as little more than an application of linguistics. Yet, from the beginning, the psychological principles involved were just as important as the linguistic ones. It was the behaviorist theory of transfer that was turned to to provide an explanation for the linguistic phenomena observed and when it came to the application of the results of the contrastive analysis in actual teaching materials and activities, these were designed according to the requirements of behaviorist learning principles. There is no strong reason why this activity should not have been labeled 'applied psychology.' It may be that it was because the prime movers were linguists that 'applied linguistics' became the accepted term. It became apparent in due course that contrastive linguistic analysis and behaviorist psychology provided an inadequate theoretical and empirical basis for foreign language teaching. In neither case was there a substantial body of empirical research dedicated specifically to foreign or second language learning to lend support to the theoretical viewpoints. A number of things happened which caused the scope of applied linguistic debate to be widened. First, serious doubts were cast on the intellectual arguments for the behaviorist interpretation of language learning and language behavior. These doubts originated from outside applied linguistics, but had a major influence on it. Second, and only partly as a result of the first, the actual process of second language learning came to be looked at much more closely. It was discovered that transfer theory could not adequately explain all that was observed in the language and language behavior of second language learners. Third, awareness grew that important as the linguistic and psychological considerations might be in determining an approach to language teaching, other factors operated, many of them not directly associated with language at all.

Applied Linguistics There was in other words more to the theory and practice of language teaching than simply the application .of linguistics or psychology. The observation of the scope of what actually takes place under the rubric of applied linguistics in the 1990s, will show that it has moved from its origins as a primarily linguistic activity, conceived within a single linguistic perspective, to being an interdisciplinary field which accommodates any research activity associated with matters of second language use and learning. The label 'applied linguistics' remains in use to designate the whole spectrum of activity. This is a descriptively appropriate label for research such as that into second language acquisition which mostly closely follows developments in linguistic theory, or for any other research which has the language system as its focus. It is also used, but much more opaquely, for studies of such things as the relation between personality traits and language learning, or for research into computer-assisted language learning. It is necessary to look more closely at the nature of applied linguistic research and argumentation to see whether there is nonetheless coherence in this diversity. 2.2 Applied Linguistic Theory and Research If, as suggested at the beginning of this article, applied linguistics in general has as its goal the provision of a conceptual basis for language-related decisionmaking, then in the present context the conceptual basis has to meet the needs of those, language teachers and others, who contribute to the teaching of second or foreign languages. This aim gives rise to a number of issues. How is applied linguistic understanding advanced? What is the relation of applied linguistics to theoretical linguistics? What kind of a discipline is applied linguistics? Is it, as is sometimes claimed, possible to distinguish between problem-solving and theoretical disciplines? Is there such a thing as applied linguistic theory? What are the appropriate methods of empirical research in applied linguistics? Is everything that may influence language learning a relevant topic for applied linguistic research? The answers to these questions are best found by considering first the domains of linguistic knowledge needed to provide the conceptual base referred to above. This knowledge is of four kinds: (a) knowledge of the nature of language, (b) knowledge of language use, (c) knowledge of language learning, (d) knowledge of languages. 2.2.7 Knowledge of the nature of language It seems self-evident that it would be impossible to teach a language without having a view of what the nature of language is. In fact there is frequently no explicit view expressed, although it should always be possible to reconstruct one from the design of activities and materials used. Since a language teacher is

responsible for creating in students the capacity to use a second language, the knowledge needed is not only of the elements of the language system itself in its universal and particular aspects, but also of the principles on which it generally operates in communication. This distinction is important since to be serviceable a model of language must be complete. It is not possible to limit the model to certain aspects of language only. Even aspects of language on which sound empirical evidence is lacking must be incorporated into the model. 2.2.2 Knowledge of language use Two kinds of knowledge of language use contribute to the conceptual base. The first is knowledge of the psycholinguistic processes involved in using language. While the processes of speaking, listening, writing, and reading are the primary concerns here, the nature of secondary activities like translating might also be relevant. It is worth noting that knowledge of how these processes operate specifically in a second language may be of special significance (see Speaking in a Second Language; Writing in a Second Language; Reading in a Second Language; Listening in a Second Language). The second kind of knowledge is of the features of language itself in use. Language in specific pieces of discourse is not a direct reflection of the forms that are to be found in a descriptive grammar. People do not speak in perfectly composed grammatical sentences. They use language differently in different contexts. Different types of written text may be structured differently. On occasions a specific use calls on only a restricted language competence which may constitute a subvariety of the language in question. 2.2.3 Knowledge of language learning Knowledge of how language, specifically a second language, is learned is clearly of central importance since it is the role of the teacher to create the conditions which will promote such learning. Information to be incorporated into the conceptual base has various locations. It is to be found in the study of the mental (cognitive) processes involved in second language acquisition (see Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories; Syntax in Second Language Acquisition; Phonology in Second Language Acquisition; Lexis: Acquisition; Second Language Acquisition: Conversation; Semantics). If the external conditions under which language is encountered have an effect on learning and if these factors can be controlled by the teacher, it is obviously highly valuable to know what those conditions are. Relevant information may be found in the study of the relation between, on the one hand, personal and social psychological variables (e.g., personality and motivation) and, on the other hand, relative success and failure in second language learning. It is also to be found in

Introduction to the Field the study of the results and effectiveness of specific pedagogic practices (see also Second Language Learning; Second Language Learning: Individual Differences). 2.2.4 Knowledge of languages While the conceptual base in terms of which language teachers can understand the nature of the task that faces them and their students does not in itself require knowledge of specific languages, the application of these concepts does. Most obviously, language descriptions of the target language are needed which will serve pedagogic purposes. It is a matter for debate whether these are the same descriptions as are available for other uses. These descriptions may not be descriptions of a general competence. They may be analyses of restricted language varieties or uses of a kind that are associated with a limited set of contexts. They could include, for example, descriptions of the forms of language that learners might expect to hear addressed to them as foreign speakers of the language. Further, it is not only descriptions of a target language which are needed. The study of language learning reveals that the first language of learners has an impact on second language learning. Descriptions of that language will be needed to clarify the nature of that impact. Description also needs to be made of the language that learners themselves display while in the process of learning—usually referred to as their 'interlanguage' (see Inter language). 2.3 The Role and Methods of the Applied Linguist Like all scholars, applied linguists are both researchers and disseminators of research. As disseminators they have two audiences, their fellow scholars and the professional world to whom their research relates, in this case teachers of languages. The fact that applied linguists have a particular role in their interaction with practitioners outside the academic world itself imparts a special character to applied linguistics. While much applied linguistic research, like research in other fields, fragments progressively and concerns itself with an ever narrower portion of the field, the need to satisfy the expectations of language teaching professionals obliges the applied linguist to strive continually to form a coherent overall view from highly diverse sources. This influences the nature of applied linguistic research. There are three types of source from which applied linguistics may derive knowledge which it attempts to synthesize into a coherent whole. The first is the theoretical and empirical knowledge that is established in those disciplines whose concerns coincide in some degree with those of applied linguistics. The second is empirical research undertaken within applied linguistics itself. The third is observation and evaluation of the pragmatic experience of those engaged in the practice of teaching languages, a pro-

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cess which itself may be undertaken on an empirical basis. Each of these will be considered in turn. 2.3.1 The relation of applied linguistics to other disciplines One of the many tasks of applied linguistics will be to provide a model of language which enables the practitioner to identify the crucial characteristics of the language system. Another will be to provide an account of what mental processes are involved in the successful use of language in activities such as reading and speaking. For the applied linguist to ignore the views about the nature of language that are held within linguistics or the views about the nature of language processing that are held by psycholinguists would be perverse. At the same time, even if such accounts were completely uncontroversial, which is rarely the case, applied linguists could not simply regard them as authoritative as they stand and incorporate them into the model that they provide. Part of the work of the applied linguist is a process of interpretation and reconceptualization. It is worth looking at the relationship with linguistic theory to illustrate these points. 2.3,1.1 Applied linguistics and linguistic theory The use of the term 'applied linguistics' is commonly understood to imply an activity which is in some sense a client of linguistics—a field in which the concepts and categories of linguistic theory are taken and applied to, say, language teaching. This notion of 'linguistics applied,' as it has been termed by Widdowson (1980), suggests that linguistics itself provides an authoritative source for all that is needed to meet the aims of applied linguistics. In fact there are sound reasons for arguing that the concerns of applied linguistics are in some ways more comprehensive than those of theoretical linguistics and that, at the same time, not all that linguistics may provide is of equal value or significance for the applied linguist. These arguments can be illustrated from past and late-twentieth century aspects of theoretical and applied linguistics. In its early years applied linguistics was closely associated with post-Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. In their efforts to attain scientific rigor in their methods of research, linguists of that period concluded that because meaning was essentially mentalistic and not amenable to direct observation, a scientific linguistics could not include meaning within the scope of its investigations. In consequence neither lexical nor sentential meaning were assigned any importance in the model of language adopted by linguistics. It is not difficult to see that it would have been a serious deficiency in a model of language intended to assist in the problematization of the language learning/teaching process that it should neglect or even overlook meaning. However, this neglect

Applied Linguistics did occur in some approaches to applied linguistics and in some approaches to language teaching too. This difference between the conditions which the applied linguist's model of language must satisfy and those that the theoretical linguist's model seeks to satisfy can also be illustrated from late-twentieth century linguistics. The aim of theoretical linguistics is most commonly (though not exclusively) regarded as being to establish the nature of the human language faculty. For reasons of both methodology and principle this means that the linguist does not take human language behavior as the phenomenon to be explained. This has enabled linguists to limit the object of their attention to language systems themselves and to a deliberately restricted notion of 'linguistic competence.' The applied linguist cannot afford to restrict investigation in this way. The language learner's aim is performance and the acquisition of performance skills. Crucial as linguistic competence may be to this, it is far from sufficient to explain all that is involved in performance and all that may need to be acquired. The insights provided by linguistics about the nature of linguistic competence may be invaluable, but for the applied linguist they give a picture of the nature of the task at hand which is in this sense incomplete. It is also important to realize that even in those domains with which theoretical linguistics is concerned, applied linguists are not simply passive consumers of knowledge handed down by the theoretician but must interpret and evaluate the results of linguistic research for their own purposes. For example, the linguist's concern with the exploration of the human language faculty has given special importance to the discovery of those aspects of language which are universal. It is plausible to suppose that whatever features are characteristic of all human languages are so because of the nature of the language faculty that produced them. It can be expected that the linguistic competence of all speakers of natural languages will conform to whatever general principles of language have been discovered. The gradual elaboration of these principles as a result of linguistic research into human language and languages is arguably potentially a major contribution to the understanding of the human species itself. However, their significance in applied linguistics may well not be comparable. If it is predictable that language learners even in their interim attempts at language production will conform to principles of Universal Grammar, then certain logically but not linguistically possible forms of language will not be produced by them. This will explain why certain types of errors do not occur in learners' language. It is obviously necessary to understand this if the view of the learner's language is to be complete. But insightful as such understanding may be, it does not hold the central significance for language teaching that it does for theoretical linguistics. Error will occur

in connection with the accidental features of the target and source languages and it is these that will claim the greater share of the language teacher's and applied linguist's attention. In this way the applied linguist reaches a different interpretation of the relative importance of aspects of language from that of the theoretician. A different kind of problem arises from the changed nature of linguistics (and indeed of psychology) since the days of early structuralism. Whereas linguistics at one time restricted its scope to observable language data and procedures of classification and analysis that could be directly related to what was observed, a concern that came to be disparagingly referred to as 'taxonomic,' late-twentieth century linguistics has more explanatory aims and, in pursuit of these, postulates mental structures arrived at by processes of deductive reasoning and abstraction on the basis of observed data and linguistic intuition. The resulting analyses are not themselves directly observable. Rather, they attempt to capture mental structures and processes that underlie actual language performance. The higher the level of abstraction, the more remote it is from direct interpretation in terms of specific linguistic forms. The phonological representation of a word, for example, frequently cannot be directly interpreted phonetically. Only when certain phonological rules, themselves of an abstract nature, have been applied, will it be possible to 'convert' the representation into an actual speech form. Whether it is phonology or syntax, such representations and the rules that may apply to them are postulated as mental entities which exist below the level of consciousness. That is the nature of a mentalistic approach to language such as characterizes late-twentieth century linguistics. But being subconscious, these processes can be neither observed nor manipulated by a language learner. Unless one accepts the extremely implausible view that raising these naturally unconscious processes to the level of consciousness would enable a language learner to master them more rapidly, the question of how genuine language forms can be manipulated so as to accelerate the acquisition of these mental processes remains open. What has been exemplified here in relation to linguistics could equally well have been illustrated by reference to psychology, sociology, or any other relevant discipline. What makes applied linguistics interdisciplinary is the fact that the eventual outcome is a form of social behavior (hence sociology), involving language (hence linguistics), the capacity for which must be developed in individuals by learning (hence psychology). The fact that the intended outcome provides a focus in this way has led some to characterize it as a problem-solving discipline to be contrasted with theoretical disciplines. It is certainly the case that the bringing together of bodies of knowledge from different disciplinary sources is justified by reference to a 11

Introduction to the Field central issue (problem) of how individuals can best be brought to learn a (second) language. This does mean that in theory at least there is a purely pragmatic way of assessing any interpretation of what it is that contributes to successful language learning. To put it another way, the aim of applied linguistics is not to produce a better theory but to produce effective practice. But there is a danger in placing too much emphasis on the problem-solving nature of applied linguistics. First of all, the very capacity to recognize that a problem exists depends on one's having a metalanguage that enables one to conceive of such a problem in the first place. There is a role for theoretical linguistics, sociology, psychology, or indeed other disciplines in seeding such notions and preventing people from being trapped within the terms of a prevailing model. The relation between applied and theoretical models of language, for example, is continually renegotiated and this can be so only if there is an awareness of and openness to the claims that linguistic theory makes in its own right. Second, there is a temptation to turn to theoretical research in an ad hoc way to seek a solution to a particular problem, or to justify a particular procedure without regard for the maintenance of an overall coherence of view. But there is no support to be found in a solution the implications of which contradict the suppositions underlying other aspects of practice. In applied linguistics as in other applied domains the dictum that 'there is nothing as practical as a good theory' should not be forgotten. 2.3.1.2 Empirical research in applied linguistics From the late 1960s until the early 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in the volume of empirical research motivated by the desire to improve understanding of the nature of (second) language learning and use. Indeed such research was hardly known previously. On the one hand there was research into language, languages, and learning undertaken by linguists, grammarians, and psychologists. On the other hand there was speculation and innovation in methods of language teaching. Sometimes the same people were engaged in both activities. Sweet, Jespersen, Palmer, and Bloomfield among many others found a natural connection between the study of language and the study of language teaching. Their views of how languages should be taught were derived from their views of the nature of language itself. Nonetheless, what was lacking was any body of empirical research dedicated to the direct study of second language use and second language processes that would enable beliefs about language learning to be evaluated or in some way validated. It was commonly held that second language learning was like first language acquisition (as that was understood at the time) or that a general theory of learning would establish general principles that could be applied to second language learning. Attempts were made in the field of education 12

to conduct comparative studies of the effectiveness of methods of language teaching. Results were generally inconclusive, and were interpreted to show that such research was not a useful way forward because of the impossibility of controlling the multiplicity of variables in the classroom environment and because methods, even if they could be controlled, would contrast on many parameters and it would be difficult if not impossible to determine the effects of individual factors on learning. The thrust towards empirical research resulted from reactions to two characteristics of early applied linguistics. The first was the assumption underlying contrastive analysis that the errors and difficulties of language learners arose from the differences that existed between the first language and the target language. This inevitably led to attempts to discover whether the predictions of contrastive analysis were borne out in practice. The learner and the learner's language have remained the focus of much applied linguistic research since. The second characteristic was the linguistically inspired view that the central issue in learning a foreign language was the learning of its syntactic structures and the assumption that this was a uniform task for all types of learners. The effect of contrastive difficulties apart, it was assumed that the content or target of language learning was the same for all learners. As new demands for foreign language learning arose, it became apparent that the type of language needed and the skills to be exercised were not necessarily universally the same. It therefore became necessary to undertake studies of what learners' needs were and what the features were of the language that they would have to learn. These two developments in empirical research will be looked at more closely. 3. Second Language Acquisition and Learning

Previous studies of language produced by learners had been limited to the collection and classification of errors. While this was sometimes done with implicit contrastive assumptions, the data was not examined for explanatory purposes. The stimulus to the huge growth in studies of learners' language was the discovery that many errors either cannot be explained in terms of transfer from the first language or at least that alternative explanations seem equally valid. The implication that something other than transfer was taking place opened up the whole question of what the cognitive processes involved in second language learning are and it is this issue which has produced probably the largest body of applied linguistic research since. The questions which follow are numerous. Since the linguistic performance of second language speakers often includes forms typical of those produced by native speakers of the same language, how far is second language acquisition itself a similar process to that of first language acquisition? It had generally been thought that the presumably

Applied Linguistics innate language acquisition capacities of all normal human beings became inoperative beyond an age usually taken to be at or around puberty. Does the language of learners throw any light on this assumption? Is it possible that this capacity remains and/or that it operates alongside other learning mechanisms? Do concepts from linguistic theory such as those of universal grammar and learnability offer any insight in the attempts to interpret second language data? Can the individual language learner's linguistic progress be explained entirely in terms of the order, frequency, and other conditions in the exposure to the target language (input)? Or, is the learning in some way preprogrammed, independently of the input, because of inherent characteristics of the language being learned or of the learner's language learning mechanism? What is the relationship between the linguistic input to the learner and the learning process? Are all aspects of language subject to the same learning conditions? Is the learning of syntax, for example, similar to the learning of phonology? A substantial body of research into the learning of syntactic, phonological, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of language has been built up in the search for answers to these questions and indeed as a stimulus to the formulation of the questions (see Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories; Syntax in Second Language Acquisition; Phonology in Second Language Acquisition; Lexis: Acquisition; Second Language Acquisition: Conversation; Semantics for more detailed discussion). In keeping with the generally mentalistic spirit of linguistic enquiry, this research is above all concerned to try and increase the understanding of the cognitive processes involved in second language acquisition. It deduces from the features of the language data obtained from learners what the mechanisms in operation are. Such research is intended to reveal what the general processes that control learning are. It is little concerned with individual differences or with relative efficiency in learning. Yet it has always been evident that there is widespread variation in the degree of success in second language learning. Whether or not the cognitive processes engaged are identical from learner to learner, it is clear that success in terms of rate of acquisition is not identical. There is therefore another body of applied linguistic research dedicated to the investigation of differences between learners and the effect of various potentially significant variables on learning. Are there different kinds of motivation for language learning? If so, is one kind of motivation superior to another in promoting language learning? Is there such a thing as language aptitude? If so, what are its characteristics? Are personality traits significant in determining language learning success? Do the age or sex of a learner affect language learning? Does previous language learning experience have a beneficial effect? What are the effects of attitude towards other ethnic groups on learning? Are there

differential preferences for different kinds of learning experience? Do some learners tolerate uncertainty in language learning better than others? Research into issues such as these is based primarily on the attempt to establish correlations between scores on instruments which assess individual variables and scores on language achievement tests (see Second Language Learning: Individual Differences; Learning Strategies for further details). 4. Second Language Skills Second language acquisition research tends to be focused on specific aspects of the language system. In contrast, research on learning variables will look for correlations between individual variables and success in language learning, evidence for the latter being found through tests which should establish the level reached in command of whole components of language (syntax, vocabulary) or level of performance on more integrated language skills. This opens up another area of research, namely whether language skills are exercised in the same way when the language in question is a second language as in the case of a first language. One broad question will be what the respective roles of conscious (declarative) and unconscious (procedural) knowledge of language may be. But other questions arise in respect of individual skills. For example, what is the mental status of the two languages and how does this affect speaking? However fluent the speaker may be in a second language, it is extremely unlikely that the two language systems are held entirely separately. What are the connections between the lexical systems in a bilingual speaker, for example? Does such a person have one semantic system with two linguistic outputs? Or are the systems related in some more subtle and complex way? And how is performance affected by those connections? What is the effect of deviations on communication? Similarly how is intelligibility affected by the degrees and types of phonetic deviations from target language norms? In the case of reading skill it is likely that readers of a second language use the same mental processes in reading as they do in their first language (at least assuming a similar orthographic system). In that sense a well-developed second language system should correlate with a high level of reading skill. But reading is not a purely linguistic skill. Extra-linguistic knowledge contributes significantly to the reading process and since this knowledge will frequently be culturally specific, what effect does partial lack of the relevant cultural knowledge have on the reading process and on success in reading? How successful are second language readers in recognizing the implicit messages conveyed by texts as well as what is explicit? (see Reading in a Second Language). There are many questions to be posed about second language skills. What is apparent even from the above examples is that these skills can be looked at from two 13

Introduction to the Field perspectives. In the preceding discussion they have been considered from a psycholinguistic perspective, that is to say from the point of view of the mental processes involved. They can also be looked at from a behavioral perspective, that is to say from the point of view of the social situation in which they occur, the respective behavior of the participants in the language situation and the impact of their language performance on one another. A major interest of the applied linguist is to analyze spoken and written language produced by or directed to individuals for whom the language being used is a second language. This may include the study of language uses, such as academic language, which are not directed specifically at the non-native speaker, but where the non-native speaker is nonetheless commonly part of the audience. One interest, for example, will be to establish what constitutes coherent discourse and to discover what difficulties will be faced by someone attempting to produce coherent writing or speech in a second language. In the case of writing, for example, it is likely that overall text structure and some formal features of language vary according to the text-genre, narrative, expository and so on. Furthermore it is not sufficient to have mastered the characteristics of sentence grammar. The wider discourse environment provided by a text influences choices at the syntactic and lexical levels. The difficulty for the second-language writer is that the norms and conventions that operate here may well be culture-specific. The learner has to learn to adapt to the expectations of a different culture if he or she is to produce acceptable and perhaps comprehensible text. Research into such issues requires not only an appreciation of the cross-cultural differences that exist, but also the analysis of written texts produced by non-native speakers. Speaking skill requires comparable familiarity with patterns of speech in social interaction. This is not so much a matter of additional knowledge of the language system as familiarity with the ways in which the language system is deployed within the culture, the ways in which language is used to sustain social relationships, how language functions to achieve personal goals in communication. Second language speakers may produce language which is formally correct but which is not appropriate within the culture and which may lead to a breakdown in communication. Both native and non-native speakers typically make accommodations in their speech according to the language and level of skill of their interlocutor. In the case of native speakers this is usually known as 'foreigner talk,' but more needs to be known about the nature of such talk, its effects, and to what extent speakers are able to adapt their speech when it is not their first language that they are speaking. One type of language performance involving second language speakers that is of particular interest to the applied linguist is that which takes place in the 14

language classroom among learners and between learners and teachers. In this case the interest is not limited to developing an understanding of what is necessary for successful communication. The language of the classroom is part of the linguistic input to the learning process and it offers an environment in which the effects of different types and aspects of input can be studied (see Discourse in the Language Classroom). Whatever type of second language performance it is that is observed, it is almost inevitable that it will present frequent evidence of instances where the producer's language system has not been adequate to the communicative task in hand. Probably the most common deficiency will be lack of the relevant vocabulary, but it is not unusual for command of syntax to be insufficient to express a conceptually complex message or for a speaker to be unable to achieve a specific functional purpose. In such cases the speaker has to find a way round the problem by adopting some kind of communication or output strategy. A better understanding of second language communication can be obtained by looking at these strategies and how interlocutors react to them. Where all participants have knowledge of more than one language, one strategy available to speakers is simply to switch languages. However, it is likely that the alternation between languages among bilingual speakers is not merely a way of resolving communication difficulties but on occasions has specific communicative significance of a kind similar to that of style-switching in a monolingual environment (see Communication Strategies', Intercultural Discourse). 5. Language Variety

It is normally assumed, however unrealistically, that the ultimate target of a foreign language learner is a linguistic competence comparable to that of a first language speaker and such as is described within a grammar of the standard language. Certainly such grammars are valuable reference points for anyone preparing a general language learning program. It is not usually regarded as the task of the applied linguist to produce such grammars. However, the notion that language is not a monolithic, uniform entity has long been recognized and given that many language learners can identify a restricted set of uses for which they require a second language, it is potentially of considerable benefit to be able to identify the linguistic and associated characteristics of specific varieties of a language and thereby to limit the learning task to what is relevant for a specific class of learners with identifiable language needs. The task of describing the formal and other features of such varieties has fallen largely to the applied linguist. In the process the notion of language variety has been extended and it has become accepted that the analysis of needs has to take account not only of the language forms required

Applied Linguistics but of the skills that need to be acquired (see Needs Analysis). 6. Bilingualism An unexpressed assumption in the discussion so far has been that when reference has been made to a second (or foreign) language learner or to a speaker using a second language, this individual has been someone whose learning has taken place in an instructional environment. In fact a substantial minority of the world's population gains access to a second language without any instruction in that language. Individual bilingualism and societal multilingualism are far more widespread than is commonly appreciated. The interest of the applied linguist encompasses what might be called natural bilingualism as well as acquisition and use through language instruction. Indeed the study of natural bilinguals, whatever level of bilingualism they may have attained, may provide insights into language processes and behavior which are not available by any other means. But the existence of multilingual societies itself generates other research issues. Interest in these is certainly not confined to the applied linguist, but given that the adoption of a language policy for education can scarcely be avoided in such societies, there is a special role for the applied linguist in investigating the relation between the use of a first or second language as the medium of instruction, and concept development and educational achievement (see Bilingualism, Individual; Bilingualism, Societal; Becoming Bilingual; Multilingualism). 7. Research Methods It is not difficult to see from this overview of research interests in applied linguistics that there is no single research paradigm within which applied linguistics conducts its research. Two kinds of study are typical of research into second language acquisition. These are diary studies, in which at most a small number of subjects are followed and recorded with a view to the collection of data on longitudinal development. The language produced by the subjects is analyzed to reveal how the elements of the language system used change and expand over time. The second type of study usually involves the elicitation of language or responses about language from a group or groups of subjects. The use of groups permits quantitative treatment of results and in consequence the assessment of the statistical significance of trends noted. The use of elicitation procedures enables the research to be focused on particular aspects of the language system and specific hypotheses thereby to be tested. The performance of groups at different levels of language proficiency can be taken to indicate the likely progression of language acquisition within individuals over time. Research into variables that affect achievement in language learning uses broad measures of

language proficiency and correlates performance on such tests by groups which have been established to permit systematic comparison in performance according to the variable being investigated. Use of a multicomponent language test with relatively large groups of subjects allows correlations between each of a number of variables and specific aspects of language to be studied. The substantial body of applied linguistic research which deals with either written or spoken data combines an ethnographic approach to data collection and analysis with techniques of descriptive linguistics. The characteristics of an ethnographic approach are that it permits samples of language events, collected as far as possible under natural conditions and without the intervention of the researcher, to be examined qualitatively and interpretively. In this process, categories which reveal significant aspects of the data are more likely to be developed in response to the features of the data than applied according to some a priori system of analysis. This is a particularly noteworthy aspect of the ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of conversation, for example. In contrast, linguistic categories may be largely taken from existing descriptive systems, especially where syntax and phonology are concerned. However, textual and discoursal features have not been scrutinized sufficiently, so that standard systems of analysis scarcely exist in the early 1990s. The applied linguist is able here to make a contribution to the development of a suitable descriptive apparatus. Given also a special interest in the relation between the form of a text and the processes involved in producing or attempting to comprehend a text, researchers have attempted to uncover the unobservable mental activities of writers and readers by asking subjects to verbalize their thoughts aloud. From these 'think-aloud' recordings protocols are produced from which important processes in production and comprehension can be inferred. The increase in empirical research has lent prominence to the development of suitable ways of eliciting data and the development of expertise in statistical techniques of analysis. Language testing is no longer a field relevant only to the evaluation of student performance (see Language Testing). It is the source of the skills necessary for research too. There is, however, a dilemma which, in spite of the undoubted increase in expertise, has not been completely resolved. It is that of knowing to what degree and in what way any performance by a subject in a second language actually reveals the state of that person's linguistic competence. True competence is presumably the unconscious knowledge of language on which natural use of the language is based. This cannot be observed directly but must be inferred from the performance. But it is impossible to know whether the knowledge used to respond to a test stimulus comes from such a competence or whether, for example, the

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Introduction to the Field subject has simply remembered a form or a rule that was taught and retained in some other part of the cognitive apparatus. While language produced freely in communication probably reflects most closely what the state of the speaker's linguistic competence is, even here that speaker may call on conscious knowledge of the language. But for the researcher, there is another problem. Uncontr6lled language data collection will hardly ever contain sufficient samples of any particular part of the language system for the researcher to be able to test specific hypotheses. For this, far more controlled and directed elicitation techniques are needed. For this reason, most acquisition research is limited in its scope to a specific linguistic sub-system and the elicitation technique be it a multiple-choice test, a word-association test, a grammaticality judgment test, or whatever is constructed with the sole objective of investigating that part of the subject's language. The researcher is still left to infer on the basis of performance of an unnatural kind what the underlying competence is. 8. Applied Linguistics and Language Pedagogy Historically, innovation in language teaching has rarely arisen from the results of empirical research. More commonly, gifted individuals, either through the evident success of their own teaching, or as a result of skilled advocacy have succeeded in convincing the language teaching profession of the benefits of adopting the methods that they recommend. No doubt there has been great benefit from the contribution of such people, but it also explains why approaches to language teaching have been vulnerable to new fashions and why there has sometimes seemed to be too little advance by the accumulation of knowledge and understanding about language learning. Decisions about language pedagogy are not in themselves the domain of the applied linguist, but there are two respects in which there is a role for the applied linguist in contributing to pedagogy. The first is that the applied linguist stands between the theoretical and the descriptive linguist on the one hand, and the language teacher on the other hand. Given the wider concern of applied linguists with how a (second) language is learned and used as well as what the forms of the language are, they are able to look at language in terms of what may facilitate learning, of how it may be necessary to process the language in order to make it accessible to learners. To do this is to look at language structure from a different perspective from that of the theoretician or the descriptivist and with different criteria in mind. For example, the criterion of exhaustiveness is important for the descriptivist who must be satisfied that all data are accounted for. The applied linguist appreciates that a less than exhaustive analysis may be a more suitable basis for language teaching if it makes a part of the language system more accessible to the learner. It is this aware-

16

ness that makes the applied analysis of aspects of the language system a further important contribution of applied linguistics. Informally, information on the success or otherwise of particular approaches or procedures in language teaching has always become available. Among language teachers discussion concerning the merits and demerits of methods and techniques of teaching or of courses based on different principles has always been keen. Because these evaluations are arrived at informally, it has been difficult to incorporate them into any systematic attempt to use classroom-derived knowledge to increase the understanding of language learning. Yet the classroom could be regarded as the most accessible laboratory of all for research. Because the priorities of the classroom are whatever is to the educational benefit of the students, there are limits to what can be achieved by way of research into language learning. There are nonetheless those who advocate a role for teachers in what is often called 'action research' and it would seem that the applied linguist can make a contribution both in assisting teachers to conduct such research and in attempting to introduce a stronger empirical foundation for the evaluations of learning and the effectiveness of procedures that do take place. It is probably fair to say that as yet (in the early 1990s) applied linguistics has not made a great deal of progress in this direction. 9. The Limits of Applied Linguistics The question inevitably arises from this discussion of what, if any, are the limits on the scope of applied linguistics. It has already become clear that the label is what might be called a 'portmanteau' term. It covers a great deal more than the label itself suggests. Are there any matters that impinge in any way on (second) language learning that can be considered to be outside the scope of applied linguistics? If not, should not what is described here be seen as simply a specialized branch of educational enquiry? This is not a question that is often asked, but the answer may be that what is excluded from applied linguistics is whatever may have an effect on language learning (and use) not by dint of the fact that it is specific to language but because it is a factor relevant to all kinds of learning. If there were factors such as social class background or features of the physical environment of the school that affected achievement in language learning just as they did achievement in mathematics or history, then these would not be the concern of applied linguistics however important they might be to the teacher of languages. To put it another way, if it was shown that differences in language learning according to the sex of the subject were reflexes of a general difference in performance by male and female students, this would not be a matter for applied linguistics. If, on the other hand, it was shown that this differential performance was indeed distinctive to language in some way, then

Educational Linguistics this would rightly be a matter for research by applied linguists. The implication of identifying a limit on the scope of applied linguistic enquiry in this way is of course that, in the practice of language teaching, applied linguistic considerations will have to be set against, say, wider educational considerations. As a result, applied linguistic criteria may on occasions have to take second place. 10. Conclusions

By focusing in detail on one field of applied linguistic enquiry, the field that has probably generated the greatest body of research and had the widest social impact, it has been shown that applied linguistics, by the nature of the issues with which it is concerned, is almost inevitably interdisciplinary in nature. It is interpretive in that it must attempt to evaluate, synthesize, and integrate theoretical perspectives that emerge from a number of disciplines, and empirical in that it uses social scientific methods of data collection and analysis to investigate hypotheses concerning the nature of language, language learning, and language use. As stated at the beginning of this article, applied linguistics is 'the study of the uses that man makes of the (language) endowment and of the problems that he encounters in doing so.' The coherence of applied linguistics is determined by the type of language use that the study is directed to. What has been shown here in relation to matters involving foreign and

second languages could have been equally well shown through examination of any other domain of applied linguistic enquiry. See also: Educational Linguistics; Linguistics and Language Learning. Bibliography Allen J P B, Corder S P, Davies A (eds.) 1973-77 The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, London van Els T, Bongaerts T, Extra G, van Os C, Janssen-van Dieten A-M 1984 Applied Linguistics and the Learning and Teaching of Foreign Languages. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K, McIntosh A, Strevens P 1964 The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. Longmans, London Kaplan R B (ed.) 1980 On the Scope of Applied Linguistics. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Kaplan R B (ed.) 1980 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mackey W F 1965 Language Teaching Analysis. Longmans, London Richards J C, Platt J T, Weber H 1985 Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. Longmans, Harlow Stern H H 1983 Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Wardhaugh R, Brown H D (eds.) 1976 A Survey of Applied Linguistics. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Widdowson H G 1979 Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1980 Models and fictions. Applied Linguistics 2(1): 165-70

Educational Linguistics K. Perera

Language is a tool of thought, the medium through which school subjects are taught and a subject of study in its own right. The many and intricate relationships between language and education constitute the rapid developing discipline of educational linguistics (see Alatis 1994; Stubbs 1986). 1. Categories of Language Teaching

The following categories of language teaching can be identified: (a) Language as a mother tongue—which may be either where the mother tongue is the official language of the country, e.g., English in England, USA, Australia, New Zealand (see National Languages); or where the mother tongue is an indigenous language of the country but not the language associated with political

power in the nation as a whole, for example, Welsh in Wales, Maori in New Zealand, Bantu in South Africa; or where the mother tongue is the language of a recent immigrant group (sometimes called a 'community language' or a 'heritage language'), for example, Arabic in Sweden, Italian in Canada, Panjabi in Britain. (b) Second language teaching, where the language is not the mother tongue but is one of the official languages of the country, for example, English in parts of Wales, Irish in the Republic of Ireland, French in parts of Canada, Hindi in parts of India (see Wales: Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy; Canadian Language Education Policy; Indian Language Education Policy). (c) Modern foreign language teaching, where a 17

Introduction to the Field language is taught that is neither an official language nor a community language, for example, French in Britain, Japanese in Australia. (d) Classical language teaching, where a language is taught that has an ancient and extensive literature but no native speakers, for example Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit. The main focus of this article is on mother-tongue teaching. 2. Language Policy and Planning in Education

Given the range of types of language teaching, and the linguistic complexity of many societies, policy decisions have to be made about the role and status of different languages within the education system, and about the provision that is to be made for them (see Bilingualism, Societal; Multilingualism). In some countries these decisions are made at government level, in some at state (or province) level and in some at local or even school level (see, for example, English Teaching in England and Wales; Wales: Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy; English Teaching in USA; English Teaching in Canada; Canadian Language Education Policy; English Teaching in Australia; Australian Indigenous Languages; Australian Minority Languages; Maori Language Revitalization; Indian Language Education Policy; Sweden: Immigrant Languages). Because of the inescapable relationships between language and power, the formulation of school language policies cannot be considered as a purely educational matter, since they reflect and, in due course, contribute to the prevailing political climate (see National Language Policy and Education). 2.1 Indigenous Languages in Education At the end of the twentieth century, there is a fairly widespread acceptance of the importance of the use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction, at least for pupils who speak a language indigenous to the country (see, for example, Canadian Language Education Policy; Wales: Language Education Policy; Maori Language Revitalization). It is recognized that learning through their own language is a key way in which children develop a sense of their own cultural identity and share in their cultural heritage. (It is also clear that it is the only way to prevent the extinction of many of the world's threatened languages.) This represents a major change from the beginning of the twentieth century when Welsh children in Wales and Maori children in New Zealand, for example, were punished if they spoke their mother tongue on school premises, and young Indian and Inuit children in Canada were forced to go to residential schools where the use of their mother tongues was forbidden. However, this principle is not universally accepted—for example, in Tanzania, English is the

18

medium of instruction in almost all secondary schools even though it is not the mother tongue of either the pupils or the overwhelming majority of teachers (Rubagumya 1990). Nor is the principle completely straightforward. There are practical problems—as in India, for instance, where, according to the 1981 Census, there are 89 languages that are not included in the list of 15 major languages recognized by the Constitution and yet that are spoken by more than 10000 people; it is hardly feasible for teaching materials to be available in all of these languages. And even speakers of one of the major languages may pay to have their children educated privately in an English-medium school in order to improve their employment prospects (see Indian Language Education Policy). There are political problems too. Whereas the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand have fought for the right to be educated in their mother tongue (see Canadian Language Education Policy; Australian Indigenous Languages; Maori Language Revitalization), the imposition of mothertongue primary education on the indigenous population in South Africa by the white minority government during the apartheid regime (see Language Education Policy—Africa) was seen as an act of repression, since it contributed to the exceptional difficulty black pupils faced in proceeding to secondary and higher education, which are in English and Afrikaans only (Janks and Paton 1990). 2.2 Community (or Heritage) Languages in Education As far as immigrant groups are concerned, the provision of mother-tongue education varies widely. In Australia, for example, some states encourage the use of the main community languages (e.g., Italian, German) as a medium of instruction in the primary school; and many languages are available as curriculum subjects at both primary and secondary level: there are 17 in addition to English taught in primary schools in Victoria and South Australia (see Australian Minority Languages). Although Canada has some immersion programs in heritage languages (e.g., Ukrainian and Hebrew), on the whole, the languages are taught as subjects, either as part of the school timetable or after school hours: there are classes in roughly 60 languages in Ontario, for instance (see Canadian Language Education Policy). Sweden also provides primary education through the medium of some of its 126 community languages but there, too, it is more common for the languages to be taught as separate subjects. Children have the right to 2 hours instruction per week in their parents' language; because there are so many different languages dispersed through a relatively small population, this is often provided by peripatetic teachers (see Paulston 1994; Sweden: Immigrant Languages).

Educational Linguistics In sharp contrast, in the UK, where there are something like 200 community languages, of which about 20 are spoken by more than 1000 school pupils—there are no exact figures (Department of Education and Science 1990:83)—the state makes no provision for their use as a medium of instruction and rather little for their teaching as a subject. The Swann Report (Department of Education and Science 1985), which was influential in policy-making with regard to language in education, concluded, 'we cannot support the arguments put forward for the introduction of programmes of bilingual education in maintained schools in this country... we would regard mothertongue maintenance... as best achieved within the ethnic minority communities themselves' (cited in Alladina and Edwards 1991:23-24). The survey of 11 speech communities conducted by the Linguistic Minorities Project (Khan 1985), and the accounts of 33 different speech communities reported in Alladina and Edwards (1991) reveal vigorous communitybased language-teaching programs but rather few opportunities for the children of immigrants to learn their mother tongue in a state school, especially at primary level. At secondary level, the National Curriculum in Modern Foreign Languages (Department of Education and Science 1990) requires schools to offer teaching in one or more of the eight languages that, with the addition of English, comprise the working languages of the European Community (Danish, Dutch, French, German, Modern Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). They may, if they choose, also offer any of the following languages: Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Gujarati, Modern Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu. In practice, the number of pupils studying these languages is rather small, partly because there is a shortage of qualified teachers and suitable teaching materials, but also because many of the non-European languages are perceived as having lower status within the British education system. In the USA, while in some states there is a limited amount of teaching in Spanish, there is an increasing trend towards assimilationist policies, with large bilingual education budgets being spent on English language teaching for pupils who start school speaking a community language (Fishman 1989; see also Bilingual Education). 2.3 Standard and Nonstandard Language in Education Where English is an official language and the main medium of instruction, there is generally a strong expectation, either implicit or explicit, that the standard form of the language will be used (see Standard English; Standardization). The UK English National Curriculum (Department for Education 1995:2), for example, states:

In order to be able to participate confidently in public, cultural and working life, pupils need to be able to speak, write and read standard English fluently and accurately.

Although it is clear that pupils need to have access to the standard form if they are not to be at a disadvantage in the formal settings of adult life, such as job interviews and appearances in a court of law, it is nevertheless the case that those who arrive at school speaking a variety of English that is markedly different from the standard may experience considerable difficulty both in becoming bidialectal and in acquiring literacy (see Educational Failure). Within education (though not necessarily in society at large) there is widespread support for the view that pupils should not be expected to relinquish their nonstandard dialect but should be encouraged to expand their linguistic repertoire by the addition of the standard variety. For example, the Cox Report, which formed the original basis for the UK National Curriculum in English, said this: To be effective in their teaching of Standard English, schools should teach it in ways which do not denigrate the non-standard dialects spoken by many pupils. It should not be introduced at too early a stage; teaching pupils a new dialect may be confusing when they are learning many other aspects of language use. The profound implications for pupils' relationships with their families and communities should be recognized... This is consistent with a general policy of widening the linguistic repertoire of pupils. (Cox 1991:30-31)

Such a policy is easier to formulate than to implement (see School Language Policies). Closely associated with bidialectalism is the need for pupils to develop an understanding of the concept of linguistic appropriateness in relation to situation, audience, topic, and language mode. The nature of the relationship between standard and non-standard varieties becomes particularly contentious where Afro-Caribbean varieties are concerned. Here the situation is made complex by the existence of a continuum from acrolectal varieties, which may be very similar to Standard English, to basilectal varieties which differ from the standard form so substantially in their phonology, lexis, and grammar that they are completely unintelligible to English speakers who do not belong to those speech communities; further, there are Creoles spoken in the USA and the UK which are based on French rather than English (Dalphinis 1991; Nwenmely 1991). Where white teachers believe that their black pupils are speaking a nonstandard—or even an impoverished or corrupt—form of English, but the pupils, and their families, see their language as an integral part of their culture and community, it is clear that there is the potential for misunderstanding, alienation, and even conflict (see African American Vernacular English; Ann Arbor Case).

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Introduction to the Field Acquisition). Further, they need some awareness of the nature and purposes of print; for example, that it is the black marks on the printed page rather than the pictures that convey the story (see Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness). Perhaps less obviously, at an early stage in their development as readers—and even more as writers and spellers—they need to have sufficient phonological awareness to be able to identify the individual phonemes in the speech stream, if they are acquiring literacy in English or any other language with an alphabetic writing system (see Literacy: Phonological Awareness; Reading: Early; Spelling: Invented; Spelling: Learning; Spelling Errors: English; Writing: Process Approach). Whether children learn to read through an approach that has a strong phonic orientation, or through one that emphasizes whole word recognition, or through an informed and principled blend of these strategies (Adams 1990), they will learn most effectively if they read meaningful, coherent texts written in language that is familiar from stories they have heard read aloud (see Reading Teaching: Methods; Reading Teaching: Materials; Reading: Theories). Once they have become skilful readers they can progress to books in which the differences between the structures of speech and writing are more apparent. In this way, their linguistic repertoire is extended, with literacy itself serving as an agent in the continuing process of language development. From the late 1970s, a small but influential number of people have propounded the view that learning to read is as natural and as easy as learning to speak (e.g., Smith 1978). This position is undermined, however, both by the extensive differences between speech and writing systems with regard to their place and role in the history of the human race as a whole, and by the exceptional difficulty in learning to read that is evidenced by a significant minority of the population. Where such difficulty affects children with normal perceptual abilities, at least average intelligence, and an absence of emotional problems, the term 'dyslexia' is sometimes used, although it is a contentious label (see Reading Difficulties; Reading: Acquisition; Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention). For many children, a particular source of reading 4. Literacy Learning difficulty is the language of their subject textbooks Probably the single most important role of the school (see Textbooks; Language Across the Curriculum). A is to teach children to read and write. Literacy is not number of methods are used to assess the overall just a useful tool for life in the adult world—important level of difficulty of reading material, including cloze though that is. It is the means by which we gain access procedure and various readability formulae (see Readto the accumulated knowledge of previous gen- ability), but the study of the complex interactions erations; the key to both the enjoyment and the cre- between a reader's psycholinguistic processes and paration of literature; and a necessary adjunct to the ticular semantic, syntactic, and discoursal structures in written language is still in its infancy. If children critical analysis of culture and society (see Literacy). Before they can become literate, children need to are to succeed in the education system, they need not have acquired in speech (or in sign language) the only to be able to understand the language of acawords and grammatical structures that they will meet demic disciplines but also to produce it. For this reain their reading (see Language Acquisition; Grammar son a vigorous area of educational linguistic research 3. Language and Learning As language is the medium through which children learn all their academic subjects, the nature of language in the classroom is an important aspect of educational linguistic research. Focusing on spoken language, sociolinguists, ethnographers of communication, and discourse analysts have all sought to identify and describe typical patterns of interaction between teachers and pupils, and among pupils themselves. They have studied how the right to speak is allocated; how questions are asked and answered; how language is used to establish and maintain control; how the specialist terminology of subject disciplines is transmitted, and so on (e.g., Edwards and Westgate 1987; Heath 1983; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; see Observing Classroom Language; Classroom Language; Language Across the Curriculum). Since the 1960s, researchers have looked for possible linguistic differences that relate to social class differences and that might affect children's ability to profit from their schooling. At first these studies concentrated on features of language form, such as pronunciation, vocabulary selection, and—particularly— grammar (e.g., Hawkins 1977). In the 1980s, there was a greater focus on typical conversational styles, and on the range of functions that language serves, such as establishing relationships, describing, and recalling— with special emphasis on those that are thought to be crucial for academic success, such as predicting, imagining, and hypothesizing (see Educational Failure). The 1990s have seen a growing interest in relationships between language and gender and language and ethnicity in the classroom, as evidence accumulates that certain styles of speech and conversational interaction may be disadvantageous as far as educational assessment is concerned. In addition to the social, 'managerial,' and pedagogic aspects of classroom talk, there are the cognitive aspects. If pupils are given purposeful tasks in structured and supportive settings, they can use talk cooperatively to make what they have learnt their own; to work out solutions to problems; and to formulate and test hypotheses (see Oracy; National Oracy Project).

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Ethics in Educational Linguistics in the 1990s is the description and classification of genres of writing (see Writing in School). 5. Learning About Language Although education necessarily entails the use of language, the extent to which different education systems expect their pupils to acquire explicit knowledge about the nature and structure of the mother tongue varies widely. In Scotland and the USA, for example, language study is an accepted part of the English curriculum, whereas in England and Wales there has been a marked reluctance since the 1960s to engage in any systematic, objective study of language (see Grammar in British Schools; Schools Council UK). The National Curriculum in English (Department for Education 1995); (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)) makes a modest amount of such study obligatory under the heading 'Standard English and Language Study,' as does the National Literacy Strategy (Department for Education and Employment 1998), under the heading 'Grammatical Awareness.' It is important that language is studied not in the expectation that this will enhance linguistic skill, since the evidence available does not support this (see Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue)), but primarily because, as the foundation of human society and civilization, it is interesting and worthy of study in its own right. See also: Linguistics and Language Learning. Bibliography Adams M J 1990 Beginning to Read. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Alatis J E (ed.) 1994 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics: Educational Linguistics, CrossCultural Communication and Global Interdependence. Georgetown University Press, Georgetown Alladina S, Edwards V 1991 Multilingualism in the British Isles, vols. 1 and 2. Longman, London

Cox B 1991 Cox on Cox. Hodder and Stoughton, London Dalphinis M 1991 The Afro-English Creole speech community. In: Alladina S, Edwards V Multilingualism in the British Isles, vol. 2. Longman, London, pp. 42-56 Department for Education 1995 English in the National Curriculum. HMSO, London Department for Education and Employment 1998 The National Literacy Strategy. DfEE, London Department of Education and Science 1985 Education for All ('The Swann Report'). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16. HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1990 Modern Foreign Languages for Ages 11 to 16. HMSO, London Edwards A D, Westgate D P G 1987 Investigating Classroom Talk. Falmer Press, Lewes Fishman J 1989 Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Hawkins P 1977 Social Class, the Nominal Group and Verbal Strategies. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words, Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge James C, Garrett P 1991 Language Awareness in the Classroom. Longman, London Janks H, Paton J 1990 English and the teaching of English literature in South Africa. In: Britton J, Shafer R E, Watson K (eds.) Teaching and Learning English Worldwide. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Khan V (ed.) 1985 The Other Languages of England. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Nwenmely H 1991 The Kweyol speech community. In: Alladina S, Edwards V Multilingualism in the British Isles, vol. 2. Longman, London, pp. 57-68 Paulston C B 1994 Linguistic minorities in multilingual settings: Implications for language policies. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Rubagumya C M 1990 Language in Education in Africa: A Tanzanian Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Sinclair J C, Coulthard M 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The Language of Teachers and Pupils. Oxford University Press, Oxford Smith F 1978 Reading. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Stubbs M 1986 Educational Linguistics. Blackwell, Oxford

Ethics in Educational Linguistics A. Davies

1. Current Obsession Ethics, the study of how we are to live, of right and wrong, also known as moral philosophy, has been called 'the emperor of the social sciences' (Scriven 1991: 134). But it is only in the 1990s that the emperor

has been reclothed. Coady and Bloch (1996) refer to the current 'obsession with ethics ... not the ethics of private individuals so much as the ethical behavior of groups, whether these groups are professions, businesses, government or non-government organisations.' (Coady and Bloch 1996: 1).

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Introduction to the Field There is another reason for this current 'obsession' with ethics, which is its neglect in the first part of the twentieth century. That period, writes Singer (1986) 'was aberrant... due to the influence of logical positivism, with its implication that ethical statements were nothing more than the evincing of emotions.' (Singer 1995). Linguistic philosophy, concerned as it was with meaning rather than knowledge, queried the whole basis of ethics, maintaining that ethical statements were essentially circular. 'Ethics, as I conceive it, is the logical study of the language of morals' (Hare 1952: v). The critical turn in the last decades has made the quest for meaning equally problematic and in a paradoxical way has prompted the search for fragments of knowledge as bulwarks against the emptiness that postmodernism threatens. Docherty discusses the 'basis of an ethical demand in the postmodern,' admitting that 'there is no escape from the necessity of judging in any specific case. Yet' he agonises 'we have no grounds upon which to base our judging.' (1993: 26). Hence, no doubt, the current search for ethical guidance as to what may be expected in group behavior. This search is reflexive in that it seeks to provide some small certainty for the group and at the same time it helps define an identity for the group. Rawls refers to two (equal) principles of justice: '... first each person engaged in an institution or affected by it has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; and second, inequalities as defined by the institutional structure or fostered by it are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out to everyone's advantage and provided that the positions and offices to which they attach or from which they may be gained are open to all.' (1967: 221). And so one of the chief roles for ethics is to balance these two principles, the individual and the social. This requires thought and imagination as much as law-making, offering: '... a way of conceptualising difference which renders it compatible with equality, but also, and crucially, does not simply increase social differentiation.' (Mendus 1992: 414). The danger, of course, is that in our attempts to be fair we end up by destroying completely the social, making all morality individual and therefore never ever achieving fairness anyway. Indeed, Osborne, lamenting the influence on philosophy of poststructuralism and feminism, suggests that we are left only with 'personal ethics or the search for small forms of valid knowledge.' (1992: 181). This is a counsel of despair, but Jackson (1996) shows a way of avoiding such a solipsist trap. Discussing codes of practice she points out that morality is never absolute. For example, codes of health and safety require appropriate protection of employees. At the same time, in all such cases there is a clause

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(either implicit or explicit) which limits employers' responsibility to 'within reason.' Otherwise, their duty would be impossible to fulfill. Without the recognition of the 'within reason' limitation, we are likely to exaggerate the demands of morality and to assume wrongly that you cannot get on in business or carry out your profession unless you are prepared to cast aside or compromise principles. This is not so. Morality as typically encoded in codes of practice constrains action within reason. 2. Institutional Ethics Ethics has a clear role in institutional settings where there is concern to declare and to limit institutional duties and responsibilities. This applies particularly to professions. House offers this definition: 'Ethics are the rules or standards of right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession' (House 1990: 91). It seems important to all stakeholders, both within the institution (e.g., medical doctors) and without (other medical colleagues, patients, the public in general) that professional standards of behavior are stated explicitly (often in an authoritative Code of Ethics or Practice). Academic professions have been reluctant to lay down rules for their members. Thus, in anthropological research: 'the traditional position... is... that questions of ethics are to be decided by the anthropologist according to personal criteria and apart from academic considerations.' (SeymourSmith 1986: 95). But anthropology is no longer so relaxed and laissez-faire: 'this position has been criticised since, it is argued, there is no such thing as a politically or ideologically neutral study in the social sciences.' (ibid.) Since no social science now is immune to such criticisms it becomes less and less tenable for academic disciplines to allow their members the liberty to make up their own minds as to the conduct and practice of their professional research. Indeed, anthropology may have become untenable as a discipline, attacked as it has been on all sides, not only by critical and Marxist theorists but also by feminists, postcolonialists, and anti-imperialists. Critical applied (and educational) linguistics asks us the same question. Following critical theorists in other social sciences, critical applied linguistics has been asking questions about the ethics of applied linguistics and whether an ideologically neutral study of applied linguistics is possible. To a degree this is the current challenge from postmodernism that it questions the professionalism established by the children of the Enlightenment. 3. Professions The relativisation of all knowledge(s) within postmodernism bears heavily on education which has

Ethics in Educational Linguistics become a notable site for struggle as to which knowledge is knowable, in particular in those areas of education in which language is not only the means but also the end, whether in the teaching of the first language (LI) or in the teaching of a second or foreign language (L2) since in both cases what is seen to be at stake is socialization into a culture (see Socialization) as well as the shaping of modes of cognitive development. It is not surprising therefore that in language teaching (both L1 and L2) there is both the yearning for an ethics and at the same time a mistrust of what may be regarded as the imposition of a hegemonic ethics. Institutional ethics or morality (and in particular professional morality) can be seen as standing between public morality on the one hand and individual morality on the other. Public morality is concerned with large social issues in which there is a genuine public interest, for example, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, female circumcision, capital punishment. Professional morality is concerned with codes, contracts, professional training, professional ethical norms and standards, the systematic attempt to illuminate the ethos of a profession, and to elaborate its norms. Individual morality is concerned with issues of conscience, which in some cases will be influenced by religion. Right conduct or practice for the individual will influence views as to such issues as divorce, abortion, military service. The public view in such cases may well be reflected in legal enactment, that is, divorce and abortion, may be legalized; exemption from military service may be permitted in certain cases on the grounds of conscience. Individuals may, however, possibly for religious reasons, choose (or feel impelled) not to avail themselves of legal remedies because in their view what is legal is not acceptable morally. What this means is that the boundary between what is public (or indeed professional) and what is individual is not stable: what for some may well be a matter of individual ethics (or morality) may for others, for example, a religious group, be a matter of public concern. There is also the possibility of conflict between what is morally right within the code of conduct established by one's own profession and what is required by one's individual judgement of one's role in society. Homan points to the conflict for an academic researcher who is offered a post in a field which is entirely legal but which for him/her is unacceptable morally: 'the tension between individual morality and professional ethics is seen to be most problematic when legitimate scruples disqualify a student from taking up a research post or other opportunity.' (Homan 1991: 2) Animal rights might be such an issue for a medical researcher.

The current 'flight to professionalism' represents a desire for social status and a search for an ethical framework which will provide the kind of group security that is no longer available to the individual or indeed to those occupations which do not claim 'a distinctive ethos, where an ethos is understood as a characteristic devotion to a particular good.' (Koehn 1994: 3) Koehn considers that what characterizes a profession is that it serves clients rather than makes a customer-type contract. The profession's moral authority is established by its unconditional concern for the client's good, by its willingness to act when needed, by its willingness to sustain its service, by its certified competence, by its preparedness to demonstrate its accountability, by its discretion on behalf of its clients, and by its self-monitoring. Professions make a public statement which dedicates their agents to a position of public trust and it is notable that it is the agent (the member of the profession) who is bound not the client. In a contract, on the other hand, the obligation lies equally on both parties. What the professional offers is service or duty, to be professional, to act professionally rather than to be successful, since success cannot be guaranteed. Nor of course can the integrity of every member of the profession be guaranteed and when a member violates the ethics of his/her profession then the profession's membership sanctions come into play. As we shall see, the problem with sanctions is that they are essentially legalistic rather than ethical and therefore difficult to implement on 'rogue' members. 4. Limits on Ethics Group ethics must aim at balance: not too much (the 'within reason' limitation) but not too little. What is at issue here is the danger of an incestuous concern with the protection of members of the profession by avoiding and covering over complaints and offences to avoid litigation. Educational linguistics does not in general have the life and death risks that medicine does but all professional activity involving language provides for potential complaints and legal action because of the intrusive nature of the activity and its normative role. Safeguards for professional practitioners, in educational linguistics as much as in medicine, are necessary but it is important that the safeguards are also applicable to stakeholders other than the professionals themselves. Otherwise they become not safeguards but fortresses. It has been suggested that in educational linguistics and in particular in language testing, the existing principles of reliability and validity are in themselves sufficient ethical statements, and that a separate ethics is not needed (Alderson et al. 1995). It appears that for some scholars the existing principles are not enough;

23

Introduction to the Field hence the introduction of consequential validity by Messick (1989). But the promise offered by consequential validity smacks of over-reaching; it violates the 'within reason' principle of professional ethics.

5. Codes In view of the limited influence of professional association in the areas of applied linguistics and language teaching studies, limited because they lack sanctions for exclusion of members for unethical conduct as in medicine and law, limited because there are intractable differences and disagreements in personal moralities, limited too because of the practical problems of locating subjects for research and the consequent temptation of researchers to ignore ethical demands, the solution is probably to create a professional community (community of scholars, self-governing, etc), which has agreed on a code of behavior and organized itself into a formal association. Banks (1995) points out that a Code of Ethics can more easily become accepted by an activity which sees or wishes to see itself as a profession when there is a single form of activity (and one basic qualification), where there is mainly one type of work, and where the activity is already strongly organized and formally registered. The professions of law and of medicine are the canonical examples. Coady and Bloch noted that the current obsession with group ethics has produced a proliferation of written statements setting out what the group intends. 'One reaction of these groups to the challenges of government and to the cynicism of clients and taxpayers is to proclaim their ethical standards through establishing or reestablishing codes of ethics.' (1996: 1).

A Code of Ethics is a set of principles which draws upon moral philosophy and serves to guide good professional conduct. It is neither a statute nor a regulation and it does not provide guidelines for practice, but it is intended to offer a benchmark of satisfactory ethical behavior for all those in the profession. It may be associated with a separate Code of Practice which instantiates the principles of the Code of Ethics. While the Code of Ethics focuses on the morals and ideals of the profession, the Code of Practice identifies the minimum requirements for practice in the profession and focuses on the clarification of professional misconduct and unprofessional conduct. Within educational linguistics several organizations have attempted to establish Codes of Ethics and/or of Conduct/Good Practice/Standards. They vary dramatically in what they intend and what they incorporate (Davidson et al. 1995; BAAL 1994). Both documents survey approaches to the codification issue, both with the avowed purpose of leading to the 24

drawing up of a Code of Ethics/Practice for their profession, respectively for the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) and for the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). It is noteworthy that the process of agreeing a text in both cases has been found difficult: this may be for one or more of the reasons Banks mentions (see above), that the profession consists of a single activity (difficult to claim for Applied Linguistics) and that the activity is strongly organized and formally registered (difficult to claim for ILTA—or indeed for BAAL). Indeed the claim of educational linguistics or applied linguistics (including such sub-areas as language testing, language planning, translation, and interpreting, etc) to be themselves separate professions seems open to doubt since they may not meet the basic criterion of existing to serve their clients' needs: The profession's moral authority is established by its unconditional concern for the client's good' (Koehn 1994). It might be more appropriate to consider these activities as subsets of the profession of teaching. (Koehn 1994: 12) Whether or not educational linguistics can legitimately claim to be a profession is not the point. More to the question is whether there is an ethical code which educational linguistics observe (or should observe). Related activities have published codes (e.g., British Psychological Society, American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education) and others are in the process of development (e.g., British Association for Applied Linguistics, International Language Testing Association, British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes, British Educational Research Association). What this suggests is that in educational linguistics there exists an interest in developing a Code. However, there is a downside to the current development of Codes. Arthurs writes of his lack of confidence 'that codes of professional ethics do have, should have or can have a significance which compels us to deal with them on their own terms as if they meant what they said.' (Arthurs 1990: 93). Beyerstein comments: 'Many people become cynical about Codes of Ethics, because they suspect that such codes are of no help in resolving moral dilemmas ... codes of ethics exist primarily to make- professionals look moral.' (1993: 417). Even so, a Code of Ethics, Beyerstein suggests, can provide guidance to individual professionals, guidance to ethics committees, a pronouncement to the public about the profession's intentions, and information to other professionals as to what they may expect. It may be that our concern with Codes represents a kind of false consciousness of professional activity, a kind of flag of convenience to justify the public and

Ethics in Educational Linguistics professional claims of an activity in relation to society at large. Hence the doubts about the value of Codes. It may therefore be more important to look at less formal statements about an activity, such as the training and the socializing of apprentices. Atkinson writes of practical job training in clinical medicine as 'doctrinal conversion' and of 'passing through the mirror.' He also comments that 'most studies of professional socialization have tended to concentrate on how the novice comes to take on the appropriate perspectives and understandings, behavior and values which characterize their newly-gained occupational culture.' (Atkinson 1981: 19,20). Hence the importance of the 'ethical milieu' (Homan 1991) for professional activity which requires institutionalizing through the profession. Apart from a document setting out the accepted Code of Conduct, which may of course be little more than lip-service, how is that milieu created? Ideally there is a professional association (with regularized membership, an office, officers, publications, etc), agreement on recognized qualifications licensing members to practice as professionals, control (through licensing) on entry to the profession, and therefore on standards and behavior. Of these the last is the most difficult to achieve and probably requires legal support. Even then, as has become apparent recently in several UK instances of rogue members in the legal and medical professions, the sanctions available to their professional bodies appear weak. Perhaps the basic problem with drafting and reaching agreement on Codes is that by their very nature they subtly move what is intended as an ethical framework to a legalistic one. But the activity which lacks Banks's three criteria (see above) has no mechanism for reaching a legalistic accord, and, even where such an accord is possible (as in medicine) even there, as we have seen, Codes may be ineffectual. It may after all be that all that a Code does or can do is to make a single promise, something like the Hippocratic Oath, that what we are about is being ethical, offering our (professional) services to our clients whoever they may be, and being fair to all those affected by our work. In educational linguistics two comments are relevant. The first is that too much should not be claimed: An ethical perspective is necessary. But all professional statements of morality must limit what is achievable or even perhaps desirable. The second is that in spite of their fragility Codes are necessary and through them sanctions can be made available. These may amount to little more than loss of membership of the professional association; but we should never undervalue the importance in professional life of being recognized as a member in good standing by one's

peers. With colleagues like these, such membership would imply, who needs a Code of Ethics? See also: Language Testing: Impact. Bibliography Alderson J C, Clapham C, Wall D 1995 Language Test Construction and Evaluation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Arthurs H 1990 Ideology, interest and implementation of a professional ethical code. In: Macniven D (ed.) Moral Expertise: Studies in Practical and Professional Ethics. Routledge, London, pp. 93-100 Atkinson P 1981 The Clinical Experience. Gower, Farnborough, UK BAAL 1995 Draft Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics. British Association for Applied Linguistics, Lancaster, UK Banks S 1995 Ethics and Values in Social Work. Macmillan, London Beyerstein D 1993 The Functions and Limitations of Codes of Ethics. In: Winkler E R, Coombs J R (eds.) Applied Ethics: A Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 416-25 Coady M, Bloch S 1996 Introduction. In: Coady M, Bloch S (eds.) Codes of Ethics and the Professions. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 1-10 Davidson F et al. 1994 Report of the Task Force on Testing Standards. Melbourne/International Language Testing Association, Melbourne, Australia Docherty T Postmodernism: An Introduction. In: Docherty T (ed.) Postmodernism: A Reader. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, pp. 1-32 Hare R M 1952 The Language of Morals. Clarendon Press, Oxford Homan R 1991 The Ethics of Social Research. Longman, London House E R 1990 Ethics of Evaluation Studies. In: Walberg H J, Haertel G D (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Education Evaluation. Pergamon, Oxford, pp. 91-4 Jackson J 1996 An Introduction to Business Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford Koehn D 1994 The Ground of Professional Ethics. Routledge, London Mendus S 1992 Losing the faith: Feminism and democracy. In: Stewart R M (ed.) 1996 Readings in Social and Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 40917

Messick S 1988 The once and future issues of validity: Assessing the meaning and consequences of measurement. In: Wainer H, Braun H L (eds.) Test Validity. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Osborne R 1992 Philosophy for Beginners. New York Writers and Readers Publishing Inc., New York Rawls J 1967 Distributive Justice. In: Laslett P, Runciman W G (eds.) Philosophy, Politics and Society (3rd series). Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 219-34 Scriven M 1991 Evaluation Thesaurus, 4th ed. Sage, Newbury Park, CA Seymour-Smith C 1986 Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology Singer P 1995 Applied Ethics. In: Honderich T (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 42-3

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Introduction to the Field

Linguistics and Language Learning B. Spolsky

The intersection of linguistics and language learning has led to several distinct areas of study. The unifying field of educational linguistics examines issues such as the characteristics of the language being taught, the spread of its use in the community in which the learner lives and in which his or her school is located, factors associated with setting goals in foreign language education, and the effectiveness of teaching strategies in attaining various educational goals. One subarea of educational linguistics is pedagogical grammar, concerning itself with identifying grammatical rules which facilitate the teaching and the learning of a particular language at various phases of its acquisition, in contrast to scientific grammar, which eventually will exhaustively describe the ideal use of a language. Another area of educational linguistics is contrastive analysis, which examines similarities and differences between the mother tongue of the learner and the language being taught, with the aim of predicting difficulties that learners may encounter in the process of mastering a particular language. Finally, error analysis is based on the systematic study of errors that learners commit at various phases of learning a particular language. 1. Educational Linguistics The scope of educational linguistics is defined both by the areas that it encompasses, such as language education policy; first and second language learning and teaching; reading; literacy; composition; bilingual, immigrant, and minority education; language testing; and by the fields from which it derives its theoretical foundations, including theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and anthropological linguistics (Spolsky 1978a). The focus of study may be on the society (e.g., what languages are used for what purposes?) or the individual (e.g., what is the communicative competence of the person whose education is being examined?). A first major distinction arises between rare homogeneous and more common heterogeneous speech communities, where several varieties are in systematically structured alternative use in the same community, resulting in various kinds of societal bilingualism or diglossia, where one variety is used for informal functions usually including school (Lewis 1980; Spolsky 1988). Studies of communicative competence have shown that language education must be concerned with the ability of the learner to participate in a society as a speaking and communicating member. Approaches that are concerned only with a single variety, or with such a narrow issue as the shibboleths or standard

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grammar rules of a prestigious written variety are unlikely to meet the needs of those being educated. It is necessary to know the patterns of language use in the communities from which children come, the values ascribed to language by different sectors of society, the actual language ability of the children in the various settings in which they are required to communicate, and the modifications in ability that will best fit the children to function as communicating members of the society they are preparing to join. Second language learning is a complex process that occurs naturally in all children. In normal circumstances, children acquire the socially expected control of the variety or varieties to which they are exposed before coming to school. Educational linguistics stresses the broad range of communicative competence and the full social context in which language operates. Basic is the notion that all living languages offer evidence of comparable complexity and so of comparable potential for cognitive development; there is no linguistic evidence of an inherently inferior language, and no linguistic support for the notion that one language is intrinsically better than another. At the same time, all varieties of language are socially valued, and this social value rather than inherent linguistic value or quality is usually what determines language education policy. In a strongly religious community, the variety of language associated with the religion or the language of its sacred texts is likely to have the highest prestige; in a modern industrialized society, the variety used by the dominant social group is usually the prestige variety; in the academic world the style and variety of writing called academic prose has the highest prestige. Prestige is crucial in the determination of rationales and goals for language education. There have generally only been sketchy descriptions of language situations and inadequate methods of measuring the actual level of language control achieved by children before they begin their education; as a result the development of aims and curricula for language education programs is often misguided. Rationales for language education might be linguistic (the notion that acquisition of a variety of language is good in itself), psychological (the notion that mastery of a variety of languages has value for personal, emotional, or intellectual growth), socio-political (the notion that control of a variety of language has value for a social or political unit), cultural (the notion that knowledge of a variety of language provides access to the religious or cultural knowledge of specific bodies), or pedagogical.. The existence of many competing sources of pressure provides the potential for conflict.

Linguistics and Language Learning In heterogeneous communities the study of language education becomes a study of political struggle (Phillipson 1992). There are a number of unfounded opinions about language education which are likely to influence policymakers, parents, and educators. The first of these is the notion that there is a single correct variety of language. In actual fact, sociolinguistic research has shown that all societies have a complex pattern of social values attached to a wide range of registers, varieties, styles, and languages. A second misleading notion is the idea that language education should be concerned with reading and writing alone. Speaking and listening skills are just as important in most communities and deserve full attention from the school, whether in teaching of the mother tongue or of foreign language. A third mistaken notion has already been discussed: there is no evidence of inherent inferiority in any particular language. A forth notion that has not stood up to empirical testing is the dictum of UNESCO experts and others that reading must be taught in the mother tongue: there are many situations in which high levels of literacy are achieved in a second language. A fifth incorrect notion is the idea that bilingualism is in some way harmful. This notion, derived from the work of psychologists who carried out their studies in societies where bilingualism was stigmatized as a mark of membership of a linguistic minority, has been refuted by studies of cases where bilingualism is a mark of membership of an elite group (Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins 1988). A language education policy may choose to extend and improve the variety of language that a child brings from home (mother tongue education, vernacular education, language arts education, teaching of reading and writing), to add another variety for limited use (foreign language or classical language education) or for general use (bilingual education), or to replace the home language with another language immediately (the home-school language switch, submersion, second language education), or temporarily (immersion foreign language teaching). More than one additional or replacement language may be taught. The policy may or may not be congruent with the actual situation: for instance, failing to recognize the actual home or community language situation, a school may use a mother tongue approach when the pupils are in fact learning a foreign or second language. Fundamental policy questions are starting age and the amount of time to be devoted to language instruction. Assuming that the mother tongue is to be taught, the most general pattern is to teach it first, but in certain colonialist or post colonialist situations, instruction in the mother tongue has been delayed until secondary school. There is considerable controversy over the age at which second or foreign language instruction should begin. Research suggest that an

early start, combined with appropriate methods, leads ultimately to higher levels of mastery (see Age in Second Language Learning; Starting Early). The amount of time devoted to language instruction is varied. A number of experiences (the US Armed Services Training Program and the Foreign Services Institute methods that developed from it, the ulpanim in Israel, the immersion bilingual programs in Canada, to name a few of the better-known) have made clear the value of intensive programs for learners of all ages, so that it is clear that the attainment of mastery of a second language comparable to that of a first require comparable exposure. Political and practical considerations usually mean, however, that only a few hours' instruction a week are available (see ASTP', Immersion; Intensity; Ulpari). The implementation of policy covers the full range of language education pedagogy: method, approach, materials, and teachers. More than most fields, this field's pedagogical history is marked by the regular announcement and temporary acceptance of new panaceas for old ills: a list need only be made of some of the labels that have been popular in the various parts of the field: (a) in reading: phonics, look-see or whole word, speed reading; (b) in heterogeneous speech communities: mother tongue, vernacular, transitional or maintenance enrichment, compensatory bilingual, or bilingualbicultural monoliterate or biliterate, second language; (c) in foreign or second language teaching: new method, natural method, direct method, audiolingual method, immersion, cognitive method, language for special purposes or for academic purposes, notional, functional, or notional-functional, content-based. Curricula and textbooks have multiplied, sometimes but not always reflecting growth in understanding of the complex learning processes involved. With the increase of modern technology, language education has joined the subjects that are considered to benefit from modern equipment, such as record players, tape recorders, elaborate systems of tape recorders organized into language laboratories, film, television, programmed instruction with or without computer control, and videodisks. All of these technologies have been applied to various aspects of language education, with varying levels of success. The selection and training of teachers are also matters of considerable variation and dispute. In traditional societies, the status of language teachers has ranged from that of the Greek slave in Rome to that of the priestly scribe in ancient Israel. In modern societies, people who teach the mother tongue or foreign languages usually share the social status of other teachers, although it is generally the case in tertiary 27

Introduction to the Field education that those who teach use of language have lower status than those who teach about it. The question of who should teach a language—a native speaker of the variety being taught or a native speaker of the learners' variety—is usually resolved on political or economic grounds rather than on pedagogical ones. Similarly, the question of the best training for language teachers 'depends on who has control of the universities or institutions where they are trained, which thus determines whether the major emphasis of training be on the language to be taught, on its literature, on linguistics, or on general educational theories and practices. The measurement and evaluation of outcomes of various programs and the testing of individual students are also central concerns of educational linguistics, but are treated elsewhere in the Encyclopedia (see Language Testing). Organizationally, the field of educational linguistics remains comparatively unrepresented: educational linguists are found and trained in various parts of the university, most often where there is collaboration between scholars in education, linguistics, anthropology, and language departments (see Professional Associations; Research Centers). 2. Pedagogic Grammar A pedagogic grammar is a collection of explicit generalizations about a language, derived generally from one or more scientific grammars to provide practical teaching material. Notwithstanding the systematic relationship between scientific and pedagogic grammars, they differ significantly with respect to two important features: (a) their inherent goals; (b) the manner in which they represent the linguistic rules (Spolsky 1978b). The major aim or underlying motivation of a scientific grammar is to describe and explain linguistic knowledge. Such a grammar seeks, therefore, to develop the best theoretical model or framework to provide a vocabulary for discussing the elements of language, such as sounds, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and discourse units, as well as the linguistic rules that define and explain how these elements are used. The writer of a scientific grammar aims to give a systematic account of the idealized linguistic knowledge or competence that underlies the actual use of language in concrete communicative situations. The goal of a pedagogic grammar is quite different, since its major objective is to impart knowledge. Such a grammar concerns itself with the needs of the learner and the teacher. A pedagogic grammar is therefore, by definition, prescriptive in nature, since it must guide the learner in using language properly. In the process of converting linguistic rules into pedagogic generalizations, the writer of a pedagogic grammar has to follow didactic considerations. The ordering of the rules is, therefore, guided by usefulness, frequency, conceptual familiarity, and contrast

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with the mother tongue of the learners. A careful process of sequencing, grading, and recycling of information needs to be applied to the ordering of the rules, thus rendering a grammar very different in nature from the scientific grammar or grammars upon which it is based. Some of the rules in the pedagogic grammar give only partial information, and therefore violate the true linguistic validity of these rules, but such partial definitions may be the result of careful pedagogic considerations and are therefore necessary for the acquisition process (Allen 1974) (see Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language)). 3. Contrastive Linguistics Contrastive linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of comparative linguistics concerned with the comparison of two or more languages or subsystems of languages to determine the differences or similarities between them. After some pioneering contrastive studies with a primarily theoretical bias in the early twentieth century, contrastive linguistic analysis received major impetus from attempts in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s to work out effective and economical foreign language teaching methods. The most efficient language teaching materials and techniques were thought to require a scientific description of the language to be taught, carefully compared with a parallel description of the learner's native language (Fries 1945). The underlying theoretical assumption was the idea, expressed by Lado (1957), that the degree of difference between the two languages also correlated with the degree of difficulty. Later on, attention was also called to the similarities between the languages, and it was found that differences and similarities can be equally problematic. In the United States, a series of extensive contrastive linguistic analyses were undertaken in the 1960s between English and a number of other languages, and in Europe several contrastive projects were launched somewhat later (Fisiak 1981). Although the objectives were normally clearly applied, the results applicable for specific purposes have remained minimal, which has given rise to doubts about the validity of contrastive studies. Contrastive studies nowadays may be theoretical or applied. As well as giving an extensive account of the differences and similarities between the languages compared, theoretical studies provide an adequate model for cross-language comparison and determine how and which elements are comparable. Theoretical contrastive linguistic studies are also useful in adding to the knowledge about the languages contrasted. No claims are made as to the applicability of the results for specific purposes. Applied contrastive studies aim at gathering contrastive information for specific purposes, such as language teaching, translation, and bilingual education. The major concern is the identification of potential

Linguistics and Language Learning trouble in the use of the target language. The main concern of early applied contrastive studies was to devise a reliable prediction of the learner's difficulties. This was later to be called the strong hypothesis of contrastive analysis. The strong hypothesis did not prove to be valid because similarities and differences between the languages were not the only causes of problems for the learner. Error analysis was therefore offered as an alternative to contrastive studies, and the predictive role of contrastive studies was superseded by an explanatory one in this weak version of the contrastive hypothesis. Despite continued criticism, contrastive analysis remains a useful tool in the search for the sources of potential trouble. It cannot be overlooked either in syllabus design, or in the preparation of textbooks and teaching materials (Fisiak 1981; Sajavaara and Lehtonen 1975) (see Contrastive and Error Analysis). 4. Error Analysis Correction of errors has always been a common practice in foreign language teaching. A systematic analysis of learners' errors was introduced in the wake of contrastive analysis. Variability in learner performance could not, however, be explained by means of error analysis alone, and the basic problems found in contrastive analysis, such as comparability of specific items and equivalence, remained. Traditional error analysis consists of five stages. In error recognition, an attempt is made to distinguish systematic competence errors from performance errors; that is, mistakes and lapses easily corrected by the learner when pointed out (Corder 1981). In the following stages, the errors are described according to a model and classified. In the explanation of the errors, three causes are usually distinguished: interlingual errors caused by interference from the mother tongue, intralingual errors caused by the target language system, and teaching-induced errors. At the final stage, the errors are compared with target language norms to assess their influence on the success of communication. The decisions about the nature of feedback to be provided to learners are crucially dependent on the systematicity of the errors. More recent approaches to error analysis consider

systematic errors to be markers of the learner's progress—the phenomenon has come to be characterized as interlanguage, transitional competence, approximative system, or idiosyncratic dialect. It is characterized as a distinct linguistic system resulting from the learner's attempts to achieve target language norms (Selinker 1972). The main problem in error analysis is the same as in contrastive analysis. The theory and methodology of linguistics are insufficient to explain the phenomena involved. A wider framework is needed, involving psychological, sociological, neurological, and other related insights into cognitive mechanisms and information processing in the brain and the speech channel as a whole. See also: Educational Linguistics. Bibliography Allen J P B 1974 Pedagogic grammar. In: Allen J P B, Corder S P (eds.) 1970 The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, London Corder S P 1981 Error Analysis and Interlanguage. Oxford University Press, London Fisiak J (ed.) 1981 Contrastive Analysis and the Language Teacher. Pergamon Press, Oxford Fries C C 1945 Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Lado R 1957 Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Lewis E G 1980 Bilingualism and Bilingual Education: A Comparative Study. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM Phillipson R 1992 Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Sajavaara K, Lehtonen J (eds.) 1975 A Select Bibliography of Contrastive Analysis. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä Selinker L L 1972 Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 10(3):209-31 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Cummins J (eds.) 1988 Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle, Multilingual Matters Ltd, Clevedon, UK Spolsky B 1978a Educational Linguistics: An Introduction. Newbury, Rowley, MA Spolsky B 1978b The relevance of grammar to second language pedagogy. The AILA Bulletin 2(23):5-14 Spolsky B 1988 Bilingualism. In: Newmeyer F H (ed.) 1988 Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

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The Social Context Society Bilingualism, Societal M. Blanc

Societal bilingualism or multilingualism refers to the coexistence of two or more languages used by individuals and groups in society. It should be distinguished from the contact of different languages within the individual, which is sometimes called bilinguality, defined as 'the psychological state of the individual who has access to more than one linguistic code as a means of communication' (Hamers and Blanc in press) and is outside the scope of this article (see Bilingualism, Individual). Societal bilingualism does not necessarily imply that all members of the society are bilingual; in fact, paradoxically, a majority of the members of an officially multilingual country may be monolingual, because the different language groups are territorially separated by more or less fixed and secure boundaries, as is the case in Belgium and Switzerland (territorial bilingualism). Societal bilingualism is a widespread phenomenon, the vast majority of nation-states in the world having more than one language used indigenously within their borders; indeed, this must be the case since the total number of languages has been estimated at around 5000, while there are only some 200 states. The impression that unilingual states are the norm comes from the nineteenth-century concept of 'one nation-one language' and from a confusion between language and official language, a confusion perpetuated by geolinguistic maps. Moreover, language and state are not necessarily coterminous: the same language may be spoken in several different countries. For example, English and French are official in countries the world over, whether spoken as a first or a second language, by majorities or minorities; German is the majority official language in Germany and Austria, one of the official languages of Luxembourg and Switzerland, and spoken as a language or dialect by minorities in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Russia, to name only European countries. 1. Origins of Societal Bilingualism Societal bilingualism develops from a variety of contact both between and within countries and com-

munities. It is found in border areas between states, either because of constant interchange through visits, trade, work, or wars, or because a geographical dialect continuum has been interrupted by more or less arbitrary political frontiers. One example is the West Romance language continuum in Europe which cuts across the national borders of Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Italy. Although the standard varieties of Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian are mutually unintelligible, the rural dialects of these languages are linked by a chain of mutual intelligibility, such that speakers on either side of the political borders have few problems understanding each other. Moreover, these people are bilingual, since they speak the official national language as well as the regional or local language/dialect. For example, many Galicians in northwest Spain speak Gallego (a variety of Portuguese) and Castilian; a majority of Catalans speak Catalan and Castilian. In the Valle d'Aosta many Italians speak French as well as Italian, while a majority also speak a Franco-Proven?al dialect which has recently received some official status. Political events may divide people speaking the same language or bring together people speaking different languages. The first obtains in many African and Asian countries previously under colonial rule, where the colonial powers drew arbitrary frontiers regardless of ethnolinguistic realities. Conversely, alloglots may be brought together, whether voluntarily or by force. In the former case, there are free federations, like Switzerland or the European Community; in the latter case there are more or less enforced federations, like the former USSR or former Yugoslavia. Annexations and invasions, migrations, and mass deportations also bring groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds together, as witness the many shifts of borders in Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with resulting new language contacts and conflicts. Economic factors can also bring alloglots into contact, whether voluntarily 31

The Social Context

2. Sociolinguistic Variations in Language Contact Situations In a situation of societal bilingualism the status of each of the languages in contact varies as a function of, on the one hand, intergroup power relations and, on the other hand, the perception that speakers form of these relations. When intergroup relations change, status relations and perceptions, attitudes, and uses also change. It is important to stress that it is not so much the languages that vary as their speakers, who select from a variety of possible models which are socially marked. As Le Page points out, change only takes place when the social values attached to the models change and the behavior of the speech community also changes (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985).

Africa, situated at the crossroads of three states: Senegal (official languages: Wolof and French), Gambia (English), and Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese) and of numerous ethnic groups and languages: eight African, three excolonial, and one creole. Speakers in Zinguinchor classify their repertoire three ways: languages of identity, of cross-communication, and of culture. In the wider educational domain boys use French, girls Wolof. Speakers vary from a trilingual farmer who uses Diola (the majority language) and Mandinka with men and Wolof with his mother and sister, to a high school boy who declared speaking twenty languages and used eight daily. In the market place Peul (Kpelle) is the language of transactions, Wolof the language of bargaining power, and French is used to conclude a bargain. An example of how a multilingual speaker uses the different codes in his repertoire is that of an Indian businessman dealing in spices and living in the suburb of Bombay described by Pandit (1979). His mother tongue and home language is Kathiawari, a dialect of Gujarati; he reads his daily newspaper in standard Gujarati; in the market place he uses a colloquial variety of Marathi, the state language; at the railway station he speaks Hindustani, the pan-Indian lingua franca; the language of business is Kachchi; in the evening he will relax watching a television film in Hindi or English or listening to a cricket-match commentary in English. (For a typology of speech/verbal repertoire, see Kachru 1982.) What roles does each of the different languages play in a speech community? These various codes are neither used nor valued in the same way: if they were, all but one would become redundant. They usually fulfill different functions in the sense that each is used according to interlocutor, domain, topic, and role, the choice of one code involving an 'act of identity' (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) on the part of the speaker.

2.1 Speech Repertoires in Multilingual Communities In a multilingual speech community a whole range, or repertoire, of languages is available to speakers, who use some of them in their linguistic interactions to perform particular social roles. Note that the term repertoire is also used to refer to the range of language varieties, such as dialects, registers, and styles typical of a unilingual community of speakers for whom the choice of one variety rather than another can have the same social value as code selection in a multilingual community (Gumperz 1968). Repertoire applies to both the speech community and the individual. No bilingual speaker controls the whole range of codes that constitute a speech community's repertoire continuum but only a number of these (his verbal repertoire). An illustration of a complex multilingual repertoire is that provided by Juillard (1995) who has investigated the urban area of Zinguinchor in West

2.2 Diglossic Bilingualism When two or more different varieties or languages cooccur throughout a speech community, each with a distinct range of social functions in complementary distribution, we have a situation of diglossia (see Diglossia). Originally developed by Ferguson (1959) to describe two functionally different varieties of the same language, one called the high variety (H), reserved for formal uses and formally learned, the other the low variety (L), used in informal situations (example of diglossia: Classical (H) and colloquial (L) Arabic), the concept of diglossia has been extended to cover multilingual situations. Examples of diglossic bilingualism range from simple binary contexts, for example, Guarani (L) and Spanish (H) in Paraguay, to double-overlapping diglossia, for example, African vernacular (L), Swahili (L and H), and English (H) in Tanzania (the last two are second languages), or

(e.g., the European Community) or from necessity (e.g., immigrants to North America) or by force (e.g., the slave trade). Religion can be a reason for different linguistic groups who share the same faith to live together, whether temporarily (e.g., pilgrimages) or permanently (e.g., the Indian subcontinent, Israel). Conversely, different religious groups may divide a country along linguistic and religious lines: for example, at the time of partition in 1947 the Indian subcontinent split up along religious lines, thereby dividing a common lingua franca, Hindustani, into two distinct official languages, Hindi used by the Hindu community, and Urdu used by the Muslim community. Lastly, a society may decide to make a second language official alongside the indigenous official language in order to gain access to wider markets or information: an example is the increasing use of English as an official or semiofficial language in many countries of the world and its use as an international auxiliary language. But whatever the reasons for societal bilingualism, it always involves languages in intergroup relations.

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Bilingualism, Societal double-nested diglossia, with L and H having each an L and an H variety, for example, Khalapur in North India, to linear polyglossic situations characteristic of Singapore and Malaysia. For a full discussion of diglossia, with numerous examples, consult Fasold (1984); for a critique of the concept of diglossic bilingualism, see Williams (1992) and Hudson (1994). One of the most complex polyglossic situations is found in Northern India (Khubchandani 1979). At the local level dialects vary from village to village to such an extent that they quickly become mutually unintelligible: when a villager visits a neighboring town he must use a less localized variety in order to be understood. This is how local trade languages developed and became regional dialects. Above them is one of the official state languages. Each state language comprises a colloquial and a standard form. Over and above these are the two official national languages, Hindi and English. Hindi is also a regional language extending over several states and diversified into a number of dialects. The Hindi-Urdu-Punjabi geolinguistic area of Northern India comprises 46 percent of the total Indian population and is a vast polyglossic continuum where languages and dialects complement, or merge or compete with one another according to domains, functions, and social group and religious affiliations. Diglossia does not remain stable but evolves and changes. It is said to 'leak' when one language/variety invades the domains and functions previously reserved for the other: this is a sign of an incipient breakdown in the diglossic relationship which reflects changes in power relations between the groups in the society. The result is either a blend of the two former H and L varieties or a language shift (see Diglossia). 2.3 Language Shift When members of an ethnolinguistic group start using the language of another for domains and functions hitherto the preserve of their own language (LI), the process of language shift is under way. Typically, language shift takes place over three generations: the first is either unilingual or dominant in L1; the second is variably bilingual (L1/L2); the third dominant or unilingual in L2. The shift also takes place in synchrony: at a given point in time the first generation is still monolingual in L1 while the last is already monolingual in L2. Throughout this process L1 is affected by L2: its forms and uses are reduced; its speakers borrow heavily from it, mixing, and switching between, the two codes (see de Bot and Clyne 1994). In extreme cases a group's language may cease to be spoken at all: this is an example of language death. A number of factors account for language shift, the most important being changes in the way of life of a group which weaken the strength of its social networks (e.g., urbanization, education); changes in the power relations between the groups; negative atti-

tudes towards the stigmatized minority language and culture; or a combination of all these. Language shift has been studied from various perspectives: sociological and demographic at the macrolevel (see, for example, Tabouret-Keller 1968); social psychological (see Landry et al. 1996); and ethnographic at the microlevel (see, for example, Gal 1979 and Kulick 1992), each approach using specific research methods which are complementary. Language shift and language death adversely affect the state of societal bilingualism in the world and should be better understood if languages and cultures in pluralist societies are to be maintained (Fishman 1991) (see Language Loyalty). 2.4 Lingua Francas, Pidgins, and Creoles In language shift one language is abandoned for another and may die. But there is a situation in which a new language is born out of languages in contact: this process is known as pidginization. When speakers with different mother tongues want to communicate with each other they use a lingua franca, if there is one available; it is a natural contact language, like, for example, a trade language (e.g., Hausa in West Africa, Swahili in East Africa). A pidgin is a contact language which has no native speakers and is the product of a multilingual situation in which people must develop a new language to be able to communicate. One distinguishes between endogenous pidgins, which are born from the contact of a native population and foreign traders, and exogenous pidgins which develop from contact between nonindigenous populations speaking mutually unintelligible languages, as in the case of slaves or indentured laborers on the plantations and their masters. Typically, a pidgin evolves out of low-status substrate languages spoken as Lls (e.g., the African languages of slaves) which are the principle source of semantic structures, in contact with a high-status superstate, or base language (e.g., English, French, Dutch, or Portuguese) which provides the lexical source, language learning universals being the main source of syntactic development (see, for example, Mühlhaüsler 1986). When a pidgin has to fulfill new, more numerous and complex social functions, it develops new and complex forms and structures, until adults begin to use it as the main language of communication and children learn it as their mother tongue (nativization process): the pidgin has become a creole, which is a relatively stable language, though in constant interaction with the base language (see, for example, Jourdan and Keesing 1997). Sometimes, because of economic, social, and cultural pressures, the creole evolves in the direction of the base language by a process called decreolization (Bickerton 1975). Pidgins and Creoles are real languages, suited to the needs for which they are developed. Some even become official national languages, like Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Their study enables linguists to witness their birth and development; their variety and 33

The Social Context speed of transformation provide new insights into language change and behavior. 2.5 Theoretical Implications of Societal Bilingualism When different linguistic groups come into contact their languages come into contact. These languages may either converge or diverge, or converge and diverge at one arid the same time. This is because the degree of variation in intra- and interlingual uses depends on the relative strength of two tendencies in society: the tendency to reduce intergroup differences (convergence) and the tendency to accentuate these differences (divergence). Convergence is found where speakers are in close and constant contact and there is consensus on the norms of language behavior; it characterizes small communities with dense and multiplex social networks as well as societies where a standard written language is imposed as the legitimate norm on a nation or group of nations (e.g., French, English, and Classical Arabic, as national and international languages). Divergence, on the other hand, prevails in situations where there are no imposed norms and social networks are loose, leading to wide variations in usage. Language creativity is then at its highest, as in pidginization. Sometimes both convergence and divergence are at work, as the following examples show. The 3000 inhabitants of Kupwar in South India between them speak four different languages, Marathi and Urdu (both Indo-European), Kannada, and Telegu (both Dravidian). The village is divided into clearly distinct castes, each identified by its language. As they need to communicate, they, especially the men, learn each other's languages. Over centuries their syntaxes have converged and become more similar than they are in other parts of the Indian subcontinent (the convergence is essentially towards Marathi, the state language). However, they are still distinct in their respective vocabularies, which serve as a powerful symbol of each group's ethnic identity and distinctiveness (Gumperz and Wilson 1971). A case such as this runs counter to a universal of language according to which syntax is more resistant to borrowing than lexis. In Nairobi, Kenya, at a time of great social change, children from four different ethnic and language backgrounds speak Swahili in the streets but, as adolescents they divide into two camps, each one identifying with either Swahili or English, each symbolizing their different social allegiances; as adults, however, they return to their original ethnolinguistic groups through endogamy, but all also use Swahili, while some are capable of speaking English. There are here successively acts of convergence and divergence expressed by allegiance to different groups and languages at different times (Parkin 1977). Mixed languages are in-group languages, usually with their grammatical structure taken from one lan34

guage and their lexicon from another, for example, Maltese (Arabic with heavy borrowings from Italian and English) or Media Lengua (Quechua and Spanish). A very unusual mixed language is Michif in Western Canada and North Dakota (Bakker 1994). The internal structure (phonology, lexis, morphology, and syntax) of the noun group is essentially French (dialect), while that of the verb group is essentially Cree (an 'Algonquian language). Is Michif a case of codeswitching? The answer must be no, since in codeswitching speakers are more or less competent in the two languages and most Michif users speak neither French nor Cree. Is it a pidgin? But Michif is the mother tongue of its speakers and is a fully developed language. Then is it a Creole? In so far as a Creole is a development from a pidgin, then Michif is not a Creole. Thus Michif poses a real puzzle for linguistic theory: What is its syntax? What do categorial rules look like since French and Cree have very different rule systems? How should its lexis be organized? Are there one or two phonologies? Thus, variation and change are the essence of language, because language is at once the expression, symbol, and instrument of a group's identity and of its dynamic relations to other groups in a society. A language is not a homogeneous, static entity; it varies along multidimensional continua and its speakers identify with some of the varieties and their verbal repertoire is an expression of these identities. 3. Language Planning in Multilingual Societies Confronted with many different languages within its boundaries, how does a state solve its communication problems, given the complexity of ethnolinguistic group relations? Historically, the state has imposed one language, usually the dominant legitimized language of the ruling group, upon the other linguistic groups, thus either reducing the latter's languages to minority status or eradicating them by assimilating its speakers through education or coercion. For example, the French state, in its pursuit of national unity, has succeeded in imposing the Parisian sociolect on the whole of its population at home and on the elites of its colonies overseas, thus making French the official language of the French-speaking world (francophonie). Today, however, the state uses the much more subtle instrument of language planning, which is a species of economic planning (Grin 1996). Language planning is of two kinds, internal (or corpus-planning) and external (or status-planning). Corpus-planning, a form of linguistic engineering, is the same in multilingual as in unilingual societies. Status-planning means interfering with the existing status relations between the languages and their speakers and using one or more languages for official purposes. As the status of languages is a function of the relative economic, demographic, social, cultural, and political

Bilingualism, Societal power of the various linguistic groups and of the subjective perceptions of these power relations, statusplanning will necessarily reflect the power structure in society (Fishman 1994). Two main approaches confront each other: nationism and nationalism (Fishman 1968). In the nationist solution a language is selected for reasons of national efficiency (e.g., English and French as official languages in most former British and French colonies). In the nationalist solution language acts as a powerful symbol and instrument of ethnic identification, and the different ethnolinguistic groups resist acculturation by maintaining or reinforcing their language (e.g., Catalan in Spain, Flemish in Belgium, French in Canada). But most cases in the world fall between these two solutions, especially in multilingual states. Usually, one or more regional languages are given national status together with a national or international language. A comparison between Singapore and Malaysia will illustrate the difference between the nationist and the nationalist option. Both Singapore and Malaysia are multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual societies. It is noteworthy that, while these states have evolved along similar historical lines and are composed of roughly the same ethnic mix—though in different proportions—they have chosen very different approaches to language planning. Malaysia has opted for a nationist (or 'depluralization') solution: divided along geographic, political, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and economic lines, it has followed the path of cultural assimilation with the adoption of Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) as the sole official language of the country. In Singapore, by contrast, the traditional cultural values of each major group have been fostered, a policy of cultural integration (as opposed to assimilation) has been pursued, and the four main languages (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English) have been made official. But this policy is not one of strict nationalism, since, while encouraging the three ethnic languages as a foundation for the maintenance of traditional values, it has at the same time emphasized the functional importance of English as the basis for a supraethnic Singaporean identity (Ward and Hewstone 1985). One of the key issues in language planning, particularly in the West, is that between the personal and the territorial solution to the problems of the multilingual state. The personal solution is based on enforcing individual rights throughout the state; these include the right to understand and be understood in public life, to be educated in one's own language, and the right to one's own identity. By contrast, the territorial solution consists of separating the different language populations by fixed boundaries. There are several models of territoriality, of which the Swiss, the Belgian, and the Canadian are examples: all show tensions between the territorial and the personal solu-

tion. In the former Soviet Union the dominant Russian group used the territorial solution on the one hand to protect minorities and, on the other, to protect and promote its own interests: all the republics, with the exception of the Russian Federation, were officially bilingual, Russian being in every case one of the official languages. Russian-speaking minorities had the right to use their mother tongue, while the other ethnolinguistic groups had to learn Russian as well as their own language. But in the Russian Federation only Russian was official. The principle of territoriality led to an asymmetrical, nonreciprocal bilingualism. A presumed link has been suggested between multilingual societies and national underdevelopment: does the fact that a country is culturally and linguistically diverse and heterogeneous cause that country to be economically disadvantaged? Are nation-states more stable than multinational ones? Pool (1969) tried to show that linguistically diverse countries tend to be underdeveloped, while highly developed countries have considerable linguistic uniformity. However, other researchers have challenged Pool's methodology and findings; they argue that both linguistic diversity and economic disadvantage are the legacy of colonialism (Lieberson and Hansen 1974). Moreover, are not some of the most advanced and dynamic countries and cities in the world, such as the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, among the most ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous? As Weinreich pointed out as long ago as 1953, the greater the linguistic diversity of a country, the greater the degree of bilinguality and bilingualism. Where there are many people who speak many different languages, they will learn each other's languages. In other words, individual and societal bilingualism compensates for linguistic diversity. 4. Education in Multilingual Societies Education is one of the tools of language planning. One of the most intractable yet urgent problems of language planning worldwide is that of ensuring at least functional literacy, that is, a level of literacy that will enable people to function in a given society. This is not so much a technical as a social issue, since illiteracy is an obstacle to informed citizen participation in decision-making and to national development. Illiteracy is a problem not only for the Third World but also for developed postindustrial countries which have recently known a sharp rise in illiteracy rates, owing to the marginalization of immigrant communities and the rise of unemployment. Unfortunately, both status and corpus language planning are not adequate instruments for tackling these wider social issues. The limited success of large-scale state measures would suggest that small-scale solutions with multiple literacy programs at all levels are preferable (Tabouret-Keller et al. 1997).

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The Social Context What of bilingual education and the teaching of the mother tongue to linguistic minority children? Two important contextual aspects in the development of these children must be borne in mind: first, they usually come from a devalued linguistic background and, second, because they often come from socially deprived communities, their literacy-oriented skills are less developed than those of the children from the dominant language group. They suffer from a double handicap when they are schooled with the children of this latter group: they have to develop literacy skills in a language they either do not know or only know for communicative purposes and cannot fall back on their first language for literacy functions. The poor academic achievement of these children is then attributed by the educational system to a cognitive deficit. Cummins (1984) has given a critical review of the use made of academic assessment tests to demonstrate the deficit of minority schoolchildren. He shows that there is strong experimental evidence that valorizing the first culture of these children and introducing literacy skills in their first language enhance both linguistic and academic achievement. Experiments in bilingual education, that is, where the first and the second language are used as media of instruction demonstrate how the subtractive situation in which minority schoolchildren find themselves can be turned into an additive bilinguality: by valuing the first language and culture of these children, and motivating them to learn through their mother tongue enhances their linguistic and cognitive abilities (Hamers and Blanc in press). Unfortunately, the majority of bilingual programs for linguistic minority children are transitional ones which have been decided by the dominant group: the ultimate aim is the assimilation of the subordinate groups who will, in the long run, be at best dominant, at worst monolingual, in the second language, and be acculturated or assimilated. So, even if bilingual education appears to be a necessary condition for the maintenance of minority cultures and languages and the academic achievements of minority children, it is not a sufficient one. Only a strong ethnolinguistic vitality, allegiance to the cultural group, and the use of the mother tongue in the home and the speech community will ensure cultural and linguistic survival. For of all the domains it is the family network that most resists the penetration of the dominant language and perpetuates societal bilingualism. See also: National Language Policy and Education; Multilingualism. Bibliography Bakker P 1994 Michif. In: Bakker P, Mous M (eds.) Mixed Languages: 15 Case Studies in Language Intertwining. Institute for Functional Research into Language and Language Use, Amsterdam, 13033 Bickerton D 1975 Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 36

Cummins J 1984 Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK de Bot K, Clyne M 1994 A 16-year longitudinal study of language attrition in Dutch immigrants in Australia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15:1728 Fasold R 1984 The Sociolinguistics of Society. Blackwell, Oxford Ferguson C A 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 125-40 Fishman J A 1968 Nationality-nationalism and nationnationism. In: Fishman J A, Ferguson C A, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations Mouton, The Hague Fishman J A 1991 Reversing Language Shift: The Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Fishman J A 1994 Critiques of language planning: A minority languages perspective. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15: 91-9 Gal S 1979 Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. Academic Press, New York Grin F (ed.) 1996 Economic approaches to language and language planning. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 121 Gumperz J J 1968 The speech community. In: Sills D L (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. MacMillan, New York, vol. 9 Gumperz J J 1971 Language in Social Groups. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Gumperz J J, Wilson R 1971 Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian Border in India. In: Hymes D H (ed.) Pidginization and Creolization of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hamers J F, Blanc M in press Bilinguality and Bilingualism, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hudson R A 1994 Diglossia. In: Asher R E (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Pergamon, Oxford Jourdan C, Keesing R 1994 From Fisin to Pijin: Creolization in process in the Solomon Islands. Language and Society 26: 401-20 Juillard C 1995 Sociolinguistique Urbaine. La Vie des Langues à Ziguinchor (Sénégal). CNRS, Paris Kachru B B 1982 The Bilingual's Linguistic Repertoire. In: Hartford B, Valdman A, Foster C R (eds.) Issues in International Bilingual Education. Plenum, New York Khubchandani L M 1979 A demographic typology for Hindi, Urdu, Panjabi speakers in Northern India. In: McCormack W C, Wurm S A (eds.) Language and Society. Mouton, The Hague Kulick D 1992 Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinea Village (studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, 14). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Landry R, Allard R, Henry J 1996 French in South Louisiana: Towards language loss. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 17: 442-68 Le Page R B, Tabouret-Keller A 1985 Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lieberson S, Hansen L K 1974 National development, mother tongue diversity, and the comparative study of nations. American Sociological Review 39: 523-41 Mühlhaüsler P 1986 Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Blackwell, Oxford

Diglossia Pandit P B 1979 Perspectives on sociolinguistics in India. In: McCormack W C, Wurm S A (eds.) Language and Society. Mouton, The Hague Parkin D 1977 Emergent and stabilized multilingualism: Polyethnic peer groups in urban Kenya. In: Giles H (ed.) Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations. Academic Press, London Pool J 1969 National development and language diversity. La Monda Lingo-Problemo 1: 140-56 Tabouret-Keller A 1968 Sociological factors of language maintenance and shift: A methodological approach based on European and African examples. In: Fishman J A, Ferguson C A, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations. Wiley, New York

Tabouret-Keller A, Le Page R B, Gardner-Chloros P, Varro G (eds.) 1997 Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation. Clarendon Press, Oxford (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics) Ward C A, Hewstone M 1985 Ethnicity, language and intergroup relations in Malaysia and Singapore: A social psychological analysis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 6: 271-96 Weinreich U 1953 Languages in Contact. Mouton, The Hague Williams G 1992 Sociolinguistics: A Sociological Critique. Routledge, London and New York

Diglossia A. Hudson

The term 'diglossia' was introduced into AngloAmerican sociolinguistic scholarship in 1959 by Charles A. Ferguson (see Ferguson). In Ferguson's formulation, diglossia refers to 'a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation' (1959: 336). 1. Characteristics, Origins, and Evolutionary Course of Diglossia

Ferguson proposed a set of nine features by which diglossia might be identified and distinguished from other sociolinguistic situations: (a) the superposed variety (H) and the vernacular variety (L) are in strict complementary functional distribution; (b) H is uniformly held in higher esteem than L by members of the speech community; (c) H has associated with it a substantial and highly regarded body of written literature; (d) proficiency in H is typically attained as a result of formal schooling, whereas proficiency in L is attained through the natural process of mothertongue acquisition; (e) the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of H are standardized and tolerate only limited

variation, whereas there is wide variation in the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of L; (f) diglossic situations are extremely stable, and typically persist for several centuries at least; (g) there are always extensive differences between the grammatical structures of H and L; (h) there exists a series of phonologically unrelated lexical doublets for concepts frequently expressed in H and L; and (i) the sound systems of H and L constitute a single phonological structure, of which L is the basic system (Ferguson 1959: 328-36). Diglossia is distinguishable from the typical instance of a standard with dialects in that 'no segment of the speech community in diglossia regularly uses H as a medium of ordinary conversation' (Ferguson 1959: 336-37). Likewise, diglossia is clearly to be distinguished from 'the analogous situation where two distinct (related or unrelated) languages are used side by side throughout a speech community, each with a clearly defined role' (Ferguson 1959: 325 n.2). Ferguson rejects the proposition that diglossia occurs 'always and only at a certain point in some kind of evolution' (1959: 326-27), and instead takes the position that 'diglossia may develop from various origins and eventuate in different language situations' (1959: 327). Nevertheless, diglossia is particularly likely to evolve (a) when there exists a sizeable body of literature in the language of the community, or in a language closely related to it, which embodies the fundamental values of the community; (b) when literacy in the written variety is limited to a small elite; and (c) when a protracted length of time, on the order of several centuries, has elapsed between the for-

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The Social Context mation of a literary tradition and the democratization of literacy (see Ferguson 1959: 338). Although the diglossic system represents an inherently stable situation once fully matured, its disintegration is frequently accompanied by tendencies toward more widespread literacy, greater communication across social and regional boundaries, and a heightened sense of linguistic nationalism (see Ferguson 1959: 338). In the aftermath of diglossia, H most typically 'fades away and becomes a learned or liturgical language studied only by scholars or specialists and not used actively in the community,' while some form of L, or a compromise between H and L, replaces H as the standard (Ferguson 1959: 339). 2. Incidence of Diglossia Diglossia, so Ferguson has claimed, has probably occurred hundreds of times over the course of history, and is realized in dozens of instances in the modern age (1959: 338). Diglossia has been described as a sociolinguistic areal feature of South Asia, and has been reported for Bengali (Chatterjee 1986) and Sinhala (Gair 1986), as well as for Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu (Bright and Ramanujan 1972: 158; Britto 1986). Whether Sanskrit ever coexisted with any of its IndoAryan relatives in a diglossic relationship is a matter of scholarly debate. Sanskrit was still a spoken vernacular in Panini's time (ca. 500 BC), but had become a superposed, scholarly variety by the first century BC, the mass of the population then being proficient in Prakrit only (Deshpande 1986: 315, 317). Diglossia appears to have existed in China since about the first century AD (Norman 1988: 4, 248-49), and in Japan since at least the seventh (Coulmas 1987: 115-16). The centuries-old three-way opposition between classical written Chinese, vernacular written Chinese, and vernacular spoken Chinese represents an instance of diglossia, or even triglossia, par excellence. Classical Chinese remained the predominant medium for official documents and for literary and philosophical writing intended for the consumption of the educated ruling classes until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 (Barnes 1982: 262). Classical Chinese was also employed as the earliest medium for writing in Japan (Coulmas 1991: 129; Habein 1984: 3). Beginning around the seventh century AD, with the incorporation of Japanese words not translatable into Chinese and of Japanese syntactic patterns, this system was gradually nativized, becoming distinct from the Classical Chinese model while at the same time remaining vastly different from spoken Japanese (Coulmas 1991: 129; Habein 1984: 8-10). This style of writing, known as 'kanbun,' was to remain the style 'in which every respectable book was expected to be written until the Meiji Restoration' (Coulmas 1987: 125 n.8). A more indigenous system of writing Japanese, known as 'wabun,' which

38

employed the native Japanese hiragana syllabary as well as Japanese vocabulary and syntax, was begun some time in the ninth century and perfected by the eleventh; however, although this style of writing initially reflected the spoken language of the period, its basic grammar remained similar to that of the eleventh century, even up until the end of the nineteenth century (Coulmas 1991: 133; Habein 1984: 34, 28). By the end of Meiji era in 1911, however, most literary prose was being written in a style much closer to colloquial Japanese. While some scholars maintain that diglossia in Arabic emerged with the Islamic conquests of the seventh century AD (Blau 1977: 182, 190), others hold that the language of pre-Islamic poetry was radically different from that of the colloquials, and so trace the roots of Arabic diglossia to a period predating the rise of Islam (Altoma 1969: 4; Rabin 1955: 26). Classical Arabic, however, had ceased to be a spoken variety, and had become a purely literary idiom, by the end of the Umayyad caliphate in 750 AD (Rabin 1955:20). Classical Arabic is still used for religious purposes, and is formally taught in schools, particularly in preparation for the study of religion or the study of the Arabic language and Arabic literature (Cadora 1985: 74). Modern Standard Arabic, a modernized and somewhat simplified derivative of Classical Arabic, has become the medium for serious writing, broadcasting, and formal public speaking, and one or other variant of colloquial Arabic, substantially different in structure from the latter, is employed in all informal interaction (Cadora 1985: 75-76). Diglossia is also to be found in several other Semitic languages. In Palestine, from about 1000 BC, spoken Hebrew differed significantly from the Hebrew used in the composition of the Old Testament (Fellman 1985:28; Rendsburg 1980). The latter variety was used for prayers and formal literary composition, while all normal discussion and teaching of religious matters took place in the former (Spolsky 1991). In Ethiopia, the Ge'ez language, which died out as a spoken language between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, remains in active use as the language of worship and sacred literature in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, although as a language of literature it has now largely been replaced by Amharic (Bender et al. 1976: 99-100). Although the language and dialects of oral and written literature in Greek have always differed from the vernaculars, the years following the Roman conquest saw the rise of a movement to replace the Hellenistic koine, by then the normal medium for all prose writing, with the classical Attic Greek of the fourth century BC (Alexiou 1982: 179-80; Browning 1982: 48-50). Up until the end of Ottoman rule in 1821, colloquial varieties of Greek were employed for literary purposes only in peripheral areas of Greek influence or in works of popular edification, not for

Diglossia serious literature in the core areas of Greek cultural influence (Browning 1982: 52). With the establishment of the new Greek state in 1830, an artificially classicized and 'purified' variety of Greek, known as 'katharévousa,' was adopted as the national language, and as the language of civil government and public education (Browning 1982: 53-54); by contrast, the industrialization of Greece, the birth of a nationalist ideology, and the demands for an effective system of public education in the nineteenth century resulted in popular support for colloquial Greek, known as 'demotike' (Browning 1982: 56). Since the fall of the last military junta in July 1974, demotiké has been adopted as the official language of the Greek state, and a decisive expansion of the latter into domains formerly regarded as the preserve of katharévousa has taken place (Browning 1982: 58). The seeds of diglossia in Latin may be identified in the second and first centuries BC with the differentiation of written Classical Latin from the popular spoken variety and the emergence of a Latin literary standard (Hall 1986: 215). From about 100 BC to 400 AD, Classical Latin was widely understood (Pei 1976: 49, 55), although its mutual intelligibility with popular Latin was decreasing steadily (Hall 1986: 213). Later, the functional complementarity between Classical Latin and the early vernacular Romance varieties, combined with the decline in the rate of popular literacy, set the stage for diglossia (Hall 1978: 102, 109). Latin-Romance diglossia of the ninth century was buttressed for a time by Charlemagne's efforts to reform the pronunciation of Latin among the clergy but, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the growth of urban commercial activity, the decline in the relative importance of the clerical orders in secular administration, and the development of oral and written poetry in the vernacular had begun to fuel the expansion of the Romance vernaculars into virtually all domains of interaction (Parker 1983: 336, 338-40). Instances of classical diglossia may be found at various times in Persia, the Slavic lands, and Ottoman Turkey. By the end of the seventh century AD, Middle Persian, or parsi, had become markedly different from spoken Persian, or dari, and had become the medium of administration, religion, and written literature, while dari remained the language of everyday oral communication (Jeremias 1984: 273; Lazard 1975: 596, 598-99). In Russia, the introduction of writing along with Christianity in the tenth century AD, gave rise to diglossia between vernacular Old Russian and a partly Russianized version of Old Church Slavic (Comrie 1991: 161, 165-68). Old Church Slavic was the language of the Orthodox liturgy and of the Old Russian chronicles, although the reported speech of the latter, and legal documents of the period, contain almost exclusively vernacular forms (Comrie 1991: 165-66). In the late twentieth century, Russian Church Slavic is the language only of the Russian Orthodox

liturgy, although its influence on Modern Standard Russian vocabulary is pervasive, particularly in religious and more learned and abstract domains (Comrie 1991: 169). Finally, in sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkey, the court and literary varieties of Turkish began to diverge from the vernacular, becoming maximally distinct early in the eighteenth century (Karpat 1984: 189, 190-91). By the end of World War I, however, Ottoman Turkish, or osmanlica, had become completely moribund and was being replaced by a new standard based largely upon the spoken language of the educated classes of Istanbul and the larger cities (Gallagher 1971: 163). The best known case of diglossia in Western Europe is that between Swiss German and Standard High German in Switzerland. High German, as the liturgical language of Protestantism, the German literary language, and the language of higher education, became the unquestioned norm in the domain of high culture throughout the German-speaking lands (Schiffman 1991: 178). However, whereas Hochdeutsch in time began to displace local dialects of German as a mother tongue in Germany, in Switzerland, antipathy toward nineteenth- and twentieth-century German expansionism has resulted in the relegation of Hochdeutsch to written and formal spoken functions only (Barbour and Stevenson 1990: 215; Keller 1982: 8788). A similar diglossic situation exists in Liechtenstein, where Standard German is the language of administration, parliament, the courts, religious services, and education (Clyne 1984: 18). Yet another instance of diglossia exists in Luxembourg between Standard German and Letzebuergesch, with French as an additional high variety (Clyne 1984: 20-21; Barbour and Stevenson 1990: 230-34; Keller 1982: 73). It seems not to have been recognized that classical diglossia has also existed in Irish and in Welsh. Although a case might well be made for diglossia in the Old Irish period of the eighth and ninth centuries (Ó Murchú 1985: 38), a clearer case is the emergence, around the beginning of the thirteenth century, of a single, tightly controlled, universally accepted, national literary language (Corkery 1968: 41). From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, three main literary styles of Irish could be distinguished, all of them significantly different from the popular vernaculars of the day: an archaizing style used primarily in historical and pseudohistorical writings; a mainstream literary usage known as 'the poets' standard'; and a relatively more casual norm possibly based on the spoken language of the educated classes (6 Murchu 1985: 42). In Welsh, from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, the literary works of the court poets, characterized by deliberate archaism in vocabulary and syntax, became the norm for the Welsh literary language, as did the language of their successors, the poets of the nobility, from the fourteenth century 39

The Social Context 'until the sixteenth (Jones 1988: 126-27). With the translation of the New Testament into Welsh in 1567, and subsequently the translation of the entire Bible, yet another literary standard for Welsh was born, one which was again substantially different from the Welsh of casual social interaction, and one which exercises considerable influence on written Welsh even up to the present day (Jones 1988: 128-31). 3. Typology No single effort to extend, to narrow, or to differentiate Ferguson's definition of diglossia has been as profoundly influential as Joshua Fishman's essay (see Fishman) on the relationship between bilingualism and diglossia (1967) and its various revisions over a period of more than 20 years (Fishman 1970, 1980, 1985, 1989). As defined by Fishman, diglossia is 'an enduring societal arrangement, extending at least beyond a three generation period, such that two "languages" each have their secure, phenomenologically legitimate and widely implemented functions' (1980: 3). The 'languages' in question may be distinct languages or varieties of the same language which are sufficiently different from one another that, without schooling, the elevated variety cannot be understood by speakers of the vernacular (Fishman 1980: 4). Diglossia is the 'stable, societal counterpart to individual bilingualism' (Fishman 1980: 3) in that, while the latter is 'a characterization of individual linguistic versatility' (Fishman 1970: 83), the former represents 'a well understood and widely accepted social consensus as to which language is to be used between which interlocutors, for communication concerning what topics or for what purposes' (Fishman 1967: 34). Fishman's account of diglossia differs from Ferguson's in two significant respects. First, whereas Ferguson restricts the definition of diglossia to situations where the codes in question are strikingly divergent varieties of the same language, Fishman, although limiting the definition to 'significantly discrepant ... varieties,' nonetheless includes within its compass situations where the elevated and vernacular varieties are genetically unrelated (1980: 4). Second, Fishman, unlike Ferguson, recognizes two types of compartmentalization of codes in diglossia: a functional compartmentalization, where different codes are assigned by social consensus to nonoverlapping speech contexts within a single speech community; and a territorial or political compartmentalization, where codes are distributed along population lines within social or political entities comprised of multiple speech communities (Fishman 1967: 33, 1980: 7-8). Fishman's 1980 account of diglossia differs from Ferguson's in recognizing four major categories of diglossia based upon the linguistic relationships between the elevated and vernacular varieties within the code matrix. Ferguson and Fishman both recog40

nize a classical variety of diglossia exemplified by the Arabic and Greek cases, as well as a category, represented by Swiss-German diglossia, where the elevated code is not a classical variety, but rather a written or formal spoken norm in functional opposition to the 'significantly discrepant' variety of spontaneous discourse (Fishman 1980: 4). However, Fishman departs from Ferguson in distinguishing between those instances of diglossia in which the high variety, whether classical or not, is a structural variant of the vernacular and those cases where it is not. Thus, the case of Hebrew and Yiddish in many Jewish speech communities is advanced as an instance of a classical variety in diglossic partnership with an unrelated informal variety, while the case of Spanish and Guarani in Paraguay is advanced as an example of a nonclassical, formal or written norm in a diglossic relationship with a genetically unrelated indigenous vernacular. Fishman's extension of the term 'diglossia' to include cases where the elevated and vernacular varieties are not genetically related in any immediate sense has led to numerous efforts to develop a typology of diglossic situations. Most commonly, the degree of relatedness between the codes in the speech repertoire has formed the principal axis along which the various types have been differentiated. Thus, Kloss distinguishes between in-diglossia, or Binnendiglossie, referring to diglossia between genetically related codes, and out-diglossia, or Aussendiglossie, referring to diglossia between genetically unrelated codes (1976: 316). Timm (1981: 363-64) and Pauwels (1986: 15) capture the same distinction with the terms 'intralanguage diglossia' and 'interlanguage diglossia.' Fasold (1984: 52-54) uses the term 'broad diglossia' to subsume the categories of 'superposed bilingualism' in the case of distinct languages, 'classic diglossia' in the case of significantly discrepant varieties of the same language, and 'style shifting' in the case of minimally differentiated stylistic variants. This same tripartite division surfaces again in Britto's terminological distinction between 'superoptimal codes,' 'optimal codes,' and 'suboptimal codes' (1986: 10). Among the various typologists of diglossia, Britto and Pauwels, in particular, note the importance of the nature and degree of social compartmentalization of codes as an axis of classification orthogonal to that of structural relatedness. For his part, Britto distinguishes between situations where the varieties in question are used by separate speech communities having no direct linguistic contact with each other, situations where the dialect of one particular region or social group is used as the standard variety by speakers of other dialects, and situations where a single community uses two or more distinct codes for within-group communication, each with its own particular range of functions (Britto 1986: 35-40). Britto refers to the first of these categories, where there is

Diglossia no within-group differential functional allocation of codes, as 'pseudodiglossia'; to the second, where the elevated or standard variety is not a superposed variety for all members of the larger community, as 'useroriented' or 'dialectal diglossia'; and to the last, akin in this respect to the classical diglossia of Ferguson, as 'use-oriented' or 'diatypical diglossia' (1986: 3540). Pauwels makes a comparable distinction between situations in which virtually all of the members of a speech community learn the elevated variety as a superposed variety, which she refers to as 'general diglossia'; and situations, which she labels 'partial diglossia,' in which only a substantial proportion of the members of a speech community acquire the high variety as a superposed variety (1986: 15). Pauwels also distinguishes between 'rigid diglossia,' in which there is minimal functional overlap between codes, and 'fluid diglossia,' in which some functions, at least, are less rigidly associated with a particular code (1986: 15). The proliferation of diglossia types, and the many attempts to systematize these types within a general classification, reflects the multiple ambiguity which has crept into the use of the term since it was first employed by Ferguson in 1959. It is this ambiguity that is in large measure to blame for the often conflicting points of view which different scholars in the field hold with regard to the origins, evolutionary course, and social consequences of diglossia. There is little prospect of progress on these issues until such time as a single definition of diglossia is adopted to the exclusion of all others, or, until the various subcategories of broad diglossia are expressly and consistently identified in any theoretical treatment of the phenomenon. There is little agreement on how to proceed. Fasold (1984), Britto (1986), and Pauwels (1986) advocate the use of the term 'diglossia' in a general sense to refer to a situation where a speech community makes use of high and low variety ranges, each with its distinctive functional allocation, and where the high variety, or repertoire of varieties, is customarily acquired later in life, normally through the process of formal schooling. Others, including Hudson (1991: 16), advocate a return to the essence of Ferguson's original definition. The most comprehensive bibliography on diglossia is Fernandez 1993. A shorter bibliography is available in Hudson 1992. (See Ferguson 1991 for a retrospective appraisal of the original article on diglossia.) See also: Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Societal. Bibliography Alexiou M 1982 Diglossia in Greece. In: Haas W (ed.) Standard Languages: Spoken and Written. Barnes and Noble, Totowa, NJ Altoma S J 1969 The Problem of Diglossia in Arabic: A Comparative Study of Classical and Iraqi Arabic. Center

for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Barbour S, Stevenson P 1990 Variation in German: A Critical Approach to German Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Barnes D 1982 Nationalism and the Mandarin movement: The first half-century. In: Cooper R L (ed.) Language Spread: Studies in Diffusion and Social Change. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN Bender M L, Hailu F, Cowley R -1976 Two Ethio-Semitic languages. In: Bender M L, Bowen J D, Cooper R L, Ferguson C A (eds.) Language in Ethiopia. Oxford University Press, London Blau J 1977 The beginnings of the Arabic diglossia: A study of the origins of Neoarabic. Afroasiatic Linguistics 4: 175202 Bright W, Ramanujan A K 1972 Sociolinguistic variation and language change. In: Pride J B, Holmes J (eds.) Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK Britto F 1986 Diglossia: A Study of the Theory with Application to Tamil. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Browning R 1982 Greek diglossia yesterday and today. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 35: 49-68 Cadora F J 1985 Who are the Arabs?: A sociolinguistic view. In: Inaugural Lectures 1984-85. College of Humanities of Ohio State University, Columbus, OH Chatterjee S 1986 Diglossia in Bengali. In: Krishnamurti Bh, Masica C P, Sinha A K. (eds.) South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence, and Diglossia. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi Clyne M G 1984 Language and Society in the Germanspeaking Countries. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Comrie B 1991 Diglossia in the Old Russian period. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 160-72 Corkery D 1968 The Fortunes of the Irish Language. Mercier Press, Cork Coulmas F 1987 What writing can do to language: Some preliminary remarks. In: Battestini S P X (ed.) Developments in Linguistics and Semiotics, Language Teaching and Learning, Communication across Cultures, Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1986. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Coulmas F 1991 Does the notion of diglossia apply to Japanese?: Some thoughts and some documentation. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 125-42 Deshpande M M 1986 Sanskrit grammarians on diglossia. In: Krishnamurti Bh, Masica C P, Sinha A K (eds.) South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence and Diglossia. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi Fasold R 1984 The Sociolinguistics of Society. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Fellman J 1985 A sociolinguistic perspective on the history of Hebrew. In: Fishman J A (ed.) Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. E J Brill, Leiden Ferguson C A 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 325-40 Ferguson C A 1991 Diglossia revisited. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10(1): 214-34 Fernandez M 1993 Diglossia: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1960-1990. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Fishman J A 1967 Bilingualism with and without diglossia: 41

The Social Context Diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23(2): 29-38 Fishman J A 1970 Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Fishman J A 1980 Bilingualism and biculturism as individual and as societal phenomena. Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 1: 1-15 Fishman J A 1985 Bilingualism and biculturism as individual and as societal phenomena. In: Fishman J A, Gertner M H, Lowy E G, Milan W G (ed.) The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival. Mouton, Berlin Fishman J A 1989 Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Gair J W 1986 Sinhala diglossia revisited or diglossia dies hard. In: Krishnamurti Bh, Masica C P, Sinha A K (eds.) South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence and Diglossia. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi Gallagher C F 1971 Language reform and social modernization in Turkey. In: Rubin J, Jernudd B H (eds.) Can Language Be Planned? Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice for Developing Nations. University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI Habein Y S 1984 The History of the Japanese Written Language. University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo Hall R A Jr 1978 Bi-(multi-)lingualism and diglossia in Latin and Romance. Forum Linguisticum 3: 107-17 Hall R A Jr 1986 From bidialectalism to diglossia in early Romance. In: Elson B F (ed.) Language in Global Perspective: Papers in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Summer Institute of Linguistics 1935-1985. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, TX Hudson A 1991 Toward the systematic study of diglossia. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10(1): 1-22 Hudson A 1992 Diglossia: A bibliographic review. LiS 21: 611-74 Jeremias E M 1984 Diglossia in Persian. Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 34: 271-87

Jones D G 1988 Literary Welsh. In: Ball M J (ed.) The Use of Welsh. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Karpat K H 1984 A language in search of a nation: Turkish in the nation-state. In: Scaglione A (ed.) The Emergence of National Languages. Longo, Ravenna Keller R E 1982 Diglossia in German-speaking Switzerland. In: Haas W (ed.) Standard Languages: Spoken and Written. Barnes and Noble, Totowa, NJ Kloss H 1976 Über 'Diglossie.' Deutsche Sprache 4: 313-23 Lazard G 1975 The rise of the New Persian language. In: Frye R N (ed.) The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 4: The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Norman J 1988 Chinese. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 6 Murchu M 1985 The Irish Language. Government of Ireland, Department of Foreign Affairs and Bord na Gaeilge, Dublin Parker I 1983 The rise of the vernaculars in early modern Europe: An essay in the political economy of language. In: Bain B (ed.) The Sociogenesis of Language and Human Conduct. Plenum Press, New York Pauwels A 1986 Diglossia, immigrant dialects and language maintenance in Australia. Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 7: 13-30 Pei M 1976 The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages. Harper and Row, New York Rabin C 1955 The beginnings of Classical Arabic. Studia Islamica 4:. 19-37 Rendsburg G A 1980 Evidence for a spoken Hebrew in Biblical times (Doctoral dissertation, New York University) Schiffman H 1991 Swiss-German diglossia. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 173-88 Spolsky B 1991 Diglossia in Hebrew in the late Second Temple Period. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 85-104 Timm L A 1981 Diglossia old and new: A critique. Anthropological Linguistics 23: 356-67

Language Loyalty R. Mesthrie

Language shift and death are overlapping terms used to describe situations in which a language ceases to be used by a speech community. Language shift occurs when a new language is acquired by a community with the concomitant loss of its erstwhile primary language. If that community is the last (or only) one to use the obsolescent language it is possible to speak, in addition, of language death. Language death may also describe a situation in which a language is lost without a new one replacing it. This is occasioned by the destruction of the speech community itself. Language maintenance denotes the continuing use of a language

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in the face of competition from a regionally and socially more powerful or numerically stronger language. 1. History The extinction of Cornish in England in the eighteenth century is an example of language death as well as shift (to English). The demise of an immigrant language like Norwegian in the USA exemplifies shift without death, since the language survives in its original setting in Norway. (Some commentators might, however, speak of the death of this immigrant dialect of Norwegian.) Language death without shift is exem-

Language Loyalty plified by the fate of Tasmanian, whose speakers were almost entirely wiped out just 73 years after the first contacts with British settlers in 1803. The last speaker of Tasmanian is said to have died with her own language intact, and with no knowledge of English, save for a few loanwords (Swadesh 1948). Although, in popular parlance, languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit are referred to as dead languages, this use of the term is inapplicable within the framework of this article. Languages like these gradually evolved by continuous intergenerational transmission into dialects which gave rise to autonomous and eventually standardized speech forms. At no stage was there a sharp break from one colloquial speech system to another. On the other hand, it is accurate to speak of the death of ancient languages like Pictish, Etruscan, and Gothic. Hebrew provides the unusual example of a language which did die as the medium of everyday conversation, but was revived with considerable effort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is estimated that in the period 1490-1990 about half of the world's languages disappeared. However, one scholar (Brenzinger 1992) is of the opinion that for East Africa, at least, language shift and death are not necessarily more frequent today than before— they have been side effects of migrations and expansions of ethnic groups over the last 5000 years. In the late twentieth century, Aboriginal languages of Australia are greatly in decline. It is estimated that of the 200 languages of pre-contact Australia, fewer than 50 have viable communities in which children are able to speak the language in the 1990s. In the USA the fate of Amerindian languages is not much better, although at least one language— Navajo—is thought to have had as many speakers in 1990 as it had at any stage of its history. In Europe, the Celtic languages struggle to survive against English and French. In southern Africa languages of the Khoi and San families have been the victims of shift and death. Generally, minority languages on the African continent have given way to other more prestigious African languages rather than languages of European colonialism. 2. Causes of Shift For a large number of cases involving indigenous languages in Australia and the Americas the causes of shift and death are clear. Once viable and autonomous speech communities were either destroyed or deprived of their traditional land and resettled with other groups who did not always share the same language. Eventual reorientation to a new westernized society further attenuated the viability of traditional forms of the surviving languages among the young. It is one of the few points of agreement in studies of minority and immigrant languages that there is no single set of factors that can be used to predict the

outcome of language maintenance efforts. Causes of shift are generally multiple and interrelated. Kloss (1966) has pointed out that many of the factors may even cut both ways. Thus, no uniform or predictable consequences for language maintenance or shift are derivable from (a) absence or presence of higher education in the dominated language, (b) relatively large or relatively small numbers of speakers of the dominated language, (c) greater similarity or greater dissimilarity between groups speaking the dominant and dominated languages respectively, and (d) positive or hostile attitudes of the dominant group to the minority. The factors that are most often discussed in individual cases of shift can be grouped as follows: economic changes; status; demography; and institutional support. 2.1 Economic Factors Economic changes are by far the most salient of the factors leading to shift, though the relation is neither necessary nor sufficient. The juxtaposition of different speech communities is frequently brought about by invasion, seeking of refuge, immigration of workers, or trade. All of these (except, perhaps, for refuge) have an underlying economic motive. In many countries modernization, industrialization, and urbanization often lead to bilingualism in a vernacular language and a more widespread regional language associated with the economy. In conjunction with other factors (discussed below) these may lead to shift. Jones (1981) traces the beginnings of language shift in Wales to the creation of an upper ruling class from the Tudor period onwards, which became increasingly Anglicized as it grew more and more drawn to the social, economic, and cultural sphere of London. The second phase in the decline of Welsh involved the immigration of English speakers into the coalfields of south-east Wales in the second half of the eighteenth century. With respect to Scots Gaelic, Thomson (Haugen, et al. 1990) argues that the exodus of people from the Scottish Highlands in search of work in English-speaking areas in the nineteenth century was a key factor in its eventual decline. Economic factors thus counteracted the efforts of the Gaelic Schools Society to foster stable Gaelic-English bilingualism. Less commonly, economic changes can positively affect a threatened language. Paulsen (1981) describes the case of the Ferring dialect of Frisian spoken in the North Sea islands of Fohr and Amrun. After the decline of traditional herring fishing a school was founded in the sixteenth century to teach navigation skills to boys, who subsequently found employment in the new Dutch overseas shipping companies. Speaking Ferring was an advantage and immigrants had to learn it if they wished to become members of this closed seafaring community. This was one of the 43

The Social Context main factors enhancing maintenance of a previously threatened language. 2.2 Demographic Factors Numbers of speakers do have a bearing on successful language maintenance: it might seem obvious that the smaller the size of a community, the stronger the threat of language shift and death. However, it is not possible to specify a 'critical mass' of speakers necessary for the survival of a language. Brenzinger et al. (1991) cite the case of Bayso, an Eastern Cushitic language of southern Ethiopia, which has resisted language replacement for 1000 years although the number of its speakers has always been small (in 1990 in the region of 500). Apart from absolute numbers, or proportions of speakers of dominated language to dominating language, the distribution of speakers is of some significance. Enforced or de facto segregation of immigrant communities would appear to offer better chances of language maintenance, all other things being equal. Li (1982) found that third-generation Chinese Americans residing in Chinese-dominant neighborhoods ('Chinatowns') were less likely to have adopted English as their mother tongue than their agemates outside the Chinatowns. Endogamy within an immigrant group will also improve chances of a family language being transmitted to offspring. Brenzinger cites intermarriage between the Yaaku and Maasai of north central Kenya as one of the main factors leading to a shift in economic practices among the former (from hunter-gatherers to pastoralism), and to an eventual shift in language. 2.3 Institutional Support The use of a minority language in education, religion, the media, or administration may assist attempts to bolster its position. But for minorities, this can only be done at great cost. There are limits to the extent to which a nondominant immigrant language (or, more usually, languages) can be used in schools. A major asymmetry exists between use of a minority language in educational settings (associated with formal and standard norms of a language) and the hypercolloquial and localized use characteristic of a language in its dying stages. The role of German in the religious sphere among the Old Order Amish and Mennonites is considered to be a primary cause of maintenance of Pennsylvania German, though other factors are also implicated (endogamy, resistance to economic and social change, etc.). For many communities religious activities demand an archaic form of their language or a register far removed from colloquial speech. 2.4 Status Some writers consider a group's self-esteem and the status of their language (oral or written, vehicle for 44

sacred texts, major regional language elsewhere in the world, etc.) to play a role in maintenance or shift. These are not entirely separate from economic and class factors, however. Thus, Arabic is a high-status language in the Middle East, but not in Europe, where it is mainly connected with immigrant working-class speakers. In his review of the field, Fishman (1972) emphasizes the ambivalence of generalizations that might seem to have obvious validity. Thus, language maintenance is not necessarily a function of intactness of group membership, particularly of such ideologized expressions of group loyalty as nationalism. Urban dwellers are not necessarily more prone to language shift than rural dwellers. It is not always the case that the more prestigious language displaces the less prestigious one. Women may be in the rearguard of shift in some instances, men in others. 3. The Course of Shift It is obvious that a shift from one language to another cannot be effected without an intervening period of bilingualism. In the initial phases of the relationship the languages may show characteristic distribution patterns over specific domains. More formal domains may, by force of circumstances, be allotted to the dominant societal language; more informal domains like the home to the minority language. Language shift involves the progressive redistribution of the languages over these domains—the home, religion, folk songs and tales usually being the last bastions of survival for the dominated language. Many shifts involve more than one minority language, whose positions are weakened not only by the dominant language but by each other. Immigrant communities from different areas of origin may develop close associations in the workplace and neighborhood, which demand the use of a lingua franca. The most expedient or neutral choice is often the dominant societal language. A similar ethos among different Amerindian groups in the USA, and Aboriginal groups in Australia forced into reservations, has accelerated the pace at which English developed as a lingua franca, often to the detriment of the indigenous languages. The process of shift is often gradual, involuntary, and unconscious. While the circumstances of the shift may be centuries in the making (as with Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic, etc.), there are instances of languages which have been demographically stable for several centuries experiencing a relatively rapid shift. Dorian (1981:51) characterizes this as a sudden 'tip,' after which the demographic tide flows strongly in favor of some other language. Two examples recently cited include the tip from Nubian to Arabic in Egypt, and from Scots Gaelic to English in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in the 1930s and 1940s.

Language Loyalty Leap (1981) believes that there have been no instances, historical or contemporary, where an Amerindian community has intentionally allowed ancestral language fluency to disappear. Although this would appear to be the general norm worldwide, there have been a few instances of shift which have been deliberately hastened by members of the speech community. Eidheim (1969) discusses the case of the Saami fjord community which aspires to full participation in the public network, as it is defined by Norwegians. Many families have taken the drastic decision of preventing their children from learning Saami. Brenzinger et al. (1991) describes the conscious decision made by the Yaaku of East Africa in the 1930s to give up their language in the face of social, economic, and linguistic pressure from the dominant Maasai. After adopting the value system of the pastoralists, the Yaaku considered the Maasai lifestyle and their language to be superior and to have higher prestige than their own 'hunter-gatherer' language. They discouraged the use of the old language even within their own community, insisting that the Yaaku language with its semantic emphasis on hunting was unfit for a cattle-breeding society. The shrinkage of domains in the course of shift is paralleled by receding generational competence in the outgoing language. In its last stages speakers may exhibit an age-graded range of competence from full command to zero. In between these are the competences of young fluent speakers, semispeakers, and passive bilinguals (Dorian 1981). Young fluent speakers are those who have native command of the ancestral language, but who show subtle deviations from the fluent older speakers' norms. Passive bilinguals have full receptive skills in the ancestral language, but are unable to use the language in productive speech. Semispeakers are those who have had insufficient exposure to the ancestral language, but continue using it in an imperfect way some of the time, out of a high degree of language loyalty. Dorian characterizes the semispeakers of Gaelic in East Sutherland, Scotland, as having relatively halting delivery, speaking in short bursts, and exhibiting linguistic deviations of which older speakers are mostly aware. On the other hand, they are able to build sentences and alter them productively, a trait which distinguishes them from the passive bilinguals. Other scholars draw finer distinctions between reasonably fluent semispeakers (who are still able to interact with older speakers despite lack of full proficiency) and weak semispeakers or terminal speakers (whose interaction arises mainly out of necessity of clarifying things for older monolingual speakers, rather than out of language loyalty). A finer distinction can also be made between passive bilinguals and 'rememberers.' The latter exist in the last stages of shift, when a group of older fluent speakers no longer exists with whom to exercise their receptive and

productive skills. That is, passive bilinguals interact within the community of ancestral language users, rememberers cannot. Some language death situations give no evidence of the semispeaker phenomenon. Swadesh (1948) reports on the extinction of the Yahi language of northern California, whose last speaker's competence he characterizes as 'flawless.' This man, Ishi, learnt English only in his last years, after being taken to the University of California in 1911. The Californian languages, Luiseno and Cupeño, whose obsolescence involves shift and death, apparently have no semispeakers. People either speak fairly well or not at all (Dorian 1981:115). The emergence of semispeakers might seem to hinge on the rapidity of death or shift: protracted shift allows for semispeaker competence (and a command of the new language); rapid shift (or 'tip') and death do not. However, this generalization, like much else in the field, admits of many exceptions—Luiseno and Cupeño are cases in point (languages with a relatively protracted period of shift, but no semispeakers). Dorian attributes the existence of semispeakers (rather than young fluent speakers or passive bilinguals) in East Sutherland to the following factors: (a) Late birth order in a large, relatively languageloyal family. In such a family the eldest might emerge as a fluent speaker, whereas the last two or three children may emerge as semispeakers. Although their parents might continue addressing the last two or three children in Gaelic, the influence of elder siblings who bring back English from the school and playground is stronger. (b) A second factor is strong attachment to one or more grandparents (most often a grandmother), who usually use far more Gaelic than one's parents. Less commonly, it is the influence of aunts and parents that encourages the semispeaker phenomenon. (c) Temporary absence from the community often fosters a reawakening of loyalty to the dominated language, which may be first activated as semispeech if there are fellow exiles who share those feelings. (d) An inquisitive and gregarious personality might also lead some young people to participate in conversations with elders in Gaelic. Presumably, such outgoing individuals actively wish to conduct conversations in the preferred language of the other party, irrespective of the possible stigma of their own errors. 4. The Linguistics of Obsolescence Where the actual effects of incomplete acquisition histories on linguistic performance are concerned, equal diversity is found in case studies. An early hypothesis was that dying languages might undergo many pro45

The Social Context cesses reminiscent of pidginization. In dying languages and pidgins, for example, vocabulary is relatively restricted, inflections are simplified or generalized, and movement rules lost. A preference for more analytic syntax (compared to the base languages) is another common feature of pidgins and dying languages. Pidginization often involves a degree of language mixing that was thought to hold for semispeaker speech as well. A second hypothesis saw semispeech as a kind of creolization in reverse, since pidgins become creolized by entering into the primary socialization of children, whereas dying languages cease to be used for primary socialization. The pidginization hypothesis has not stood up to close scrutiny. Unlike pidgins, dying languages do not show a tendency to uniformity in word order. Nor are there any reports of the kind of wholesale breakdown of morphology in dying languages that one finds in pidgins. In connection with dying East Sutherland Gaelic, Dorian maintains that allomorphic variety does not undergo substantial change (see below), that word order is unchanged, embedding handled with ease, and certain categories which have marginal or indirect semantic significance persist. None of these is suggestive of processes of pidginization. Dressier (1972) suggests that languages die on account of rule loss, rule simplification, and the like. Denison (1977) rejects this line of reasoning, claiming that languages become obsolete when speakers no longer deem it worthwhile to communicate with children in a particular variety, and children are no longer motivated to acquire an active competence in that language. In the same vein, Mohan and Zador (1986) place a question mark over exactly when a language may be said to be dead, claiming that the language of semispeakers is not the prelude to death, but the visible signs of an event that has already come to pass. They suggest that the biological metaphor of death is apt in implying a state, not an ongoing process and that languages die intact and earlier than suggested by other writers. Part of the controversy, and other inconsistencies in pinpointing the characteristics of semispeech, can be resolved by taking into account the amount of exposure that the semispeaker has had to the ancestral language as a child, and of opportunities for its use early on. As Menn (1989) emphasizes, a learner who has encountered the language in question through heavy exposure to ritual language will display rote or formulaic language, but rarely preconventional speech involving overgeneralization of words, morphemes, and constructions. A learner who has had good exposure to the ancestral language till schoolgoing age, and little further opportunity, will lack a formal register in that language. Such speech can be expected to lack embedding and other constructions that are rare in caretaker speech. On the other hand, overgeneralization of morphemes by analogy is to be expected. 46

Some characteristic features of individual dying languages will now be considered. These must be taken as examples of individual outcomes, rather than of a grand design. One of the problems facing researchers is that the kinds of changes that dying languages undergo are not qualitatively different from ordinary, contact-induced change in 'healthy' languages, and even from language-internal developments in non-contact situations. It is the quantity of such changes in a relatively short timespan in dying languages that is the distinguishing factor. Breatnach (1964), describing obsolescent dialects of Irish, claims that the effects of disuse are evident at all stages mainly in the vocabulary, and secondarily in morphological, phonological, and syntactic patterns. The purely phonetic character of the language resists influence to the end. Dorian's (1978) characterization of the morphology of East Sutherland Gaelic will be taken as a more detailed exemplification of the linguistics of language obsolescence. Among the ways of forming the plural of nouns in the traditional dialect of the area are the following: (a) Suffixation of the ending -en to some nouns (b) Final mutation (e.g., th —>ch) (c) Suppletion (e.g., the 'house' (sg) versus thro:r 'houses'), (d) vowel alternation (e.g., makh 'son' (sg) versus mikh 'sons') There are still other ways of forming the plural of specific nouns, involving combinations of the above processes (e.g., final mutation plus suffixation, vowel alternation plus final mutation plus suffixation, etc.). In semispeaker performance some degree of simplification is present. There is the notable rise of suffixation (especially the use of a 'favored' suffix by individuals), which leads to grammar simplification. However, a great deal of the original complexity remains. Final mutation, vowel alternation, suppletion, quantity change, subtraction, and zero formation are still in use among semispeakers, though to a lesser extent than among fluent speakers. Dorian (1978:608) concludes that 'East Sutherland Gaelic may be said to be dying, at least with regard to noun plurals and gerunds, with its morphological boots on.' Mithun (1989) outlines the characteristics of an obsolescing polysynthetic language—Cayuga (an Iroquoian language) of Oklahoma. There is a shrinkage of the lexicon, with specific terms being lost before more general ones. Words for objects no longer observed have been forgotten (e.g., animal terms like 'moose,' 'beaver,' 'mink,' 'weasel'). Other changes that do exist in obsolescent Cayuga are quite subtle. Although the inventory of affixes is unchanged, speakers rarely combine several affixes within a word. The reluctance to combine morphemes within single words extends to noun incorporation. In terms of phonology and syntax there are no major changes, leading

Language Loyalty Mithun to remark upon the nearly complete retention of an amazingly complex morphological and phonological system under limited opportunities to use it.

5. Conclusion—Reversing Language Shift

Studies in language maintenance and shift are clearly of great importance for their potential to contribute to language planning on a societal level. The experience of sociolinguists in this area can also be used to help beleaguered communities to stabilize their languages in the face of encroachment of major regional and world languages. Such cooperation is particularly noticeable in the 1990s, with linguists participating in 'endangered language projects' in many parts of the globe. Some important cases of symbiotic cooperation between linguists and local communities are discussed in the journal Language (vol. 68). In his book Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Fishman (see Fishman), a pioneer in the field of the sociology of language maintenance and shift, has provided a theoretical framework for diagnosing and treating language shift. He devised an eight-point scale which characterizes different stages of shift and the extent to which a language is endangered. This Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale is rather like the Richter Scale insofar as it measures and reflects different degrees of sociolinguistic disruption and disarray. (Stage 8 is the weakest stage where most users of the endangered language are socially isolated old people and the language needs to be reassembled from their mouths and memories and taught to demographically unconcentrated adults. Stage 1, the strongest for a minority language, involves use of a language in high school, occupations, government, and media, without the additional safety provided by political independence). Corresponding to this scale is a scheme for reversing language shift, via specific activities at each point. The aim of this program is to eventually ensure continuous intergenerational transmission of dominated languages as spoken vernaculars, not just for special purposes like reading or religious recitation. Fishman (1991: 12) believes that 'there is no language for which nothing at all can be done.' The teaching of endangered languages is discussed further (see Teaching Endangered Languages). See also: Linguicide; Minority Languages; Multilingualism. Bibliography Blanc H 1968 The Israeli koine as an emergent national standard. In: Fishman J A, Ferguson C A, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems in Developing Nations. John Wiley and Sons, New York

Breatnach R B 1964 Characteristics of Irish dialects in process of extinction. In: Communications et rapports du premier congrès international de dialectologie générale. Centre International de Dialectologie Générale, Louvain Brenzinger M 1992 Patterns of language shift in East Africa. In: Herbert R K (ed.) Language and Society in Africa: The Theory and Practice of Sociolinguistics. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg Brenzinger M, Heine B, Sommer G 1991 Language death in Africa. In: Robins R H, Uhlenbeck E M (eds.) Endangered Languages. Berg, Oxford Denison N 1977 Language death or language suicide? IJSL 12: 13-22 Dorian N C 1978 The fate of morphological complexity in language death. Lg 54: 590-609 Dorian N C 1981 Language Death—The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Dorian N C (ed.) 1989 Investigating Obsolescence—Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Dressier W U 1972 On the phonology of language death. In: Peranteau P M, Levi J N, Phares G C (eds.) Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting, the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, IL Eidheim H 1969 When ethnic identity is a social stigma. In: Earth F (ed.) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. George Allen and Unwin, London Fishman J 1972 Language maintenance and shift as a field of enquiry (revisited). In: Language in Sociocultural Change. Essays by J. A. Fishman, selected and introduced by A. S. Dil. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Fishman J 1991 Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Gal S 1979 Language Shift—Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. Academic Press, New York Haugen E, McClure J D, Thomson D S (eds.) 1990 Minority Languages Today. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Jones B L 1981 Welsh: Linguistic conservatism and shifting bilingualism. In: Haugen E, et al. 1990 Kloss H 1966 German-American language maintenance efforts. In: Fishman J Language Loyalty in the United States. Mouton, The Hague Leap W L 1981 American Indian languages. In: Ferguson C A, Heath S B Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Li W L 1982 The language of Chinese-Americans. IJSL 38:109-24 Menn L 1989 Some people who don't talk right: Universal and particular in child language, aphasia and language obsolescence. In: Dorian N C (ed.) 1989 Mithun M 1989 The incipient obsolescence of polysynthesis: Cayuga in Ontario and Oklahoma. In: Dorian N C (ed.) 1989 Mohan P, Zador P 1986 Discontinuity in a life cycle: The death of Trinidad Bhojpuri. Lg 62:291-319 Paulsen J H W 1981 The Faroese Language Situation In: Haugen E, et al. 1990 Schmidt A 1985 Young People's Dyirbal—An Example of Language Death from Australia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Swadesh M 1948 Sociologic notes on obsolescent languages. IJAL 14:226-35

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Linguicide T. Skutnabb-Kangas and R. Phillipson

A taxonomy of policies which a state can adopt towards minority languages (Cobarrubias 1983: 71) distinguishes between the following: (a) attempting to kill a language, (b) letting a language die, (c) unsupported coexistence, (d) partial support of specific language functions, (e) adoption as an official language. The first policy is overtly linguicidal; the second and third may be covertly linguicidal. Linguicidal policies have at times been overt, for instance US policy in Pacific islands such as Guam in the early twentieth century (Kloss 1977). Calvet (1974) describes French colonial overtly linguicidal policy as ' glottophagie' ('linguistic cannibalism,' dominant languages replacing and extinguishing dominated languages) and in 'La Guerre des Langues' (1987), 'linguistic warfare' is not a metaphor but the reality of the politics of language and relations between languages (see Mateene 1985 and Phillipson 1992 for further analyses). Linguicide is the extermination of languages, an analogous concept to (physical) genocide, whereas language death is the withering away of languages, by analogy with natural death. Linguicide, by contrast, implies that there is an agent involved in causing the death of languages. The agent can be active ('attempting to kill a language') or passive ('letting a language die,' or 'unsupported coexistence,' also often leading to the death of minority languages). In liberal ideology, only an active agent with the intention to kill languages would cause linguicide, whereas the other two would fall within the domain of language death. Linguicide is the extreme end result of linguicism (linguistically argued racism) at group level-. Seen from the perspective of a conflict paradigm, the causes of linguicide and linguicism have to be analyzed from both structural and ideological angles, covering the struggle for structural power and material resources, and the legitimation, effectuation, and reproduction of the unequal division of power and resources between groups based on language. The agents of linguicide/linguicism can also be structural (a state, e.g., Turkey vis-a-vis Kurds; an institution, e.g., schools; laws and regulations, e.g., those covering linguistic rights or the position of different languages on time-tables in schools; budgets, e.g., for teacher training or materials in certain languages) or ideological (norms and values ascribed to different languages and their speakers). There is thus nothing 'natural' in language death. Languages cannot be treated in an anthropomorphic way, as organisms with a natural life-span. Language death has causes, which can be identified and analyzed. 48

When the United Nations (UN) did preparatory work for what was to become the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E 793, 1948), linguistic and cultural genocide were discussed alongside physical genocide, and were seen as serious crimes against humanity. When the Convention was accepted, Article 3, which covered linguistic and cultural genocide, was voted down and is thus not included in the final Convention of 1948 (see Capotorti 1979: 37). What remains, however, is a definition of linguistic genocide, which was defined (in Art. 3, 1) as: Prohibiting the use of the language of the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of publications in the language of the group.

Some countries commit linguistic genocide openly and brutally, and Turkey is the most blatant example in the contemporary world (see Skutnabb-Kangas and Bucak 1994): imprisonment, torture, and killing of thousands of people, in addition to threats, hefty fines, and confiscation of Kurdish books, journals, and property. But linguistic genocide is today mostly committed in more covert and sophisticated ways, for example, in educational systems. Here the use of a minority language is prohibited more indirectly, by ideological and structural means. The use of a minority language is in fact prohibited 'in daily intercourse or in schools' every time there are minority children in day care centers and schools, but no bilingual teachers who are authorized to use the languages of the minority children as the media of teaching and child care most of the time. This is the situation for most immigrant and refugee minority children in all Western European countries and in the USA, Canada, and Australia. Immigrant minority education in these countries is thus guilty of linguistic genocide, as defined by the UN. So is the education offered to most indigenous first nations. Dominant or majority languages expand at the expense of dominated (or minorized) languages when minority language speakers are forced to learn dominant languages in a subtractive way (instead of their own languages), where it would be perfectly possible to learn them in an additive way, adding competence in dominant languages to maintenance and further development of their own languages. Linguists estimate that up to 90 percent of today's oral languages (and most sign languages) may not exist in the year 2100 (Krauss 1992). Binding linguistic human rights are urgently needed to prevent linguicide. The UN, UNESCO, ILO, OSCE, OAU, Coun-

Minority Languages cil of Europe, etc., have been concerned about the 'endangered languages' of indigenous peoples and linguistic minorities, but existing international, regional, and national protection and support are clearly completely inadequate (see Kontra et al. in press, Skutnabb-Kangas 1998, Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994,1997, Thornberry 1991,1997, de Varennes 1996). Widespread linguicide, and, occasionally, language death are fatal for linguistic diversity and, through that, also to biodiversity on earth (Maffi et al. in press). See also: Minority Language Endangered Languages.

Rights;

Teaching

Bibliography Calvet L-J 1974 Linguistique et Colonialisme: Petit Traite de Glottophagie. Payot, Paris Calvet L-J 1987 La Guerre des Languages et les Politiques Linguistiques. Payot, Paris Capotorti F 1979 Study of the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. United Nations, New York Cobarrubias J 1983 Ethical issues in status planning. In: Cobarrubias J, Fishman J (eds.) Progress in Language Planning: International Perspectives. Mouton, Berlin, 4185 Kloss H 1977 The American Bilingual Tradition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Kontra M, Phillipson R, Skutnabb-Kangas T, Varady T (eds.) in press Approaches to Linguistic Human Rights. Central European University Press, Budapest Krauss M 1992 The world's languages in crisis Language 68: 4-10 Maffi L, Skutnabb-Kangas T, Andrianarivo J (in press) Language diversity. In: Posey D, Dutfield G (eds.) Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. United Nations

Environmental Programme, New York and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mateene K 1985 Colonial languages as compulsory means of domination, and indigenous languages, as necessary factors of national liberation and development. In: Mateene K, Kalema J, Chomba B (eds.) Linguistic Liberation and Unity of Africa. OAU Inter-African Bureau of Languages, Kampala Phillipson R 1992 Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Skutnabb-Kangas T 1998 Human rights and language wrongs—a future for diversity. In: Benson P, Grundy P, Skutnabb-Kangas T (eds.) Language Rights, Special issue, Language Sciences 20:1, 5-27 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Bucak S 1994 Killing a mother tongue—how the Kurds are deprived of linguistic human rights. In: Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R (eds.), in collaboration with Rannut M Linguistic Human Rights. Inequality or Justice in Language Policy. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 67. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 347-370 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R 1994 Linguistic human rights, past and present. In Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R (eds.) in collaboration with M Rannut Linguistic Human Rights. Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 67. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 71-110 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R 1997 Linguistic human rights and development. In: Hamelink C (ed.) Ethics and Development. On Making Moral Choices in Development Cooperation. Kok, Kampen, pp. 56-69 Thornberry P 1991 International Law and the Rights of Minorities. Clarendon Press, Oxford Thornberry P 1997 Minority rights. In: Academy of European Law (ed.) Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law. Volume VI, Book 2, 307-90. Kluwer Law International, The Netherlands Varennes F de 1996 Language, Minorities and Human Rights. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague

Minority Languages J. M. Y. Simpson

Various international conferences have been held on the subject of minority languages. For example, the First International Conference on Minority Languages held at Glasgow in 1980 had as its theme 'the present-day problems of minority languages, particularly those of the British Isles, The Netherlands, and Scandinavia.' The questions arise: what is a minority language and what kinds of problems does such a language face? The term presents certain difficulties of definition but it seems safe to say that a minority language will exhibit some at least of the features listed below. The problem can be summed up as the danger of the language becoming extinct.

(a) A minority language lives in the shadow of a culturally dominant language, dominant usually because of political factors, which puts the minority language at risk. Thus Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic live in the shadow of English; Breton lives in the shadow of French; Frisian in that of Dutch; and Serbian in that of German. In many cases the absolute number of speakers of the minority language is declining. (b) As a corollary to the above, a minority language is not the language of all areas of activity indulged in by its speakers. It may, for example, be excluded from formal spheres such as admin-

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(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

(i)

50

istration, education, or the mass media and may be confined to the home, religious life, or literature. Scottish Gaelic, for example, is (within the Gaelic-speaking area) widely used in church services but only marginally employed in other forms of public gathering, e.g., sports fixtures, political meetings, parent-teacher meetings, etc. It has no part in national government and virtually none in administrative paperwork. It is only modestly represented in the press (yet Scottish Gaelic literature flourishes). Bilingualism is a characteristic of its speakers. Thus, apart from the very young, there are virtually no monoglot speakers of Irish, Scots Gaelic, or Welsh. In the case of many minority languages, the speakers may be said to form a network rather than a community. For example, there are no urban centers that could be described as Bretonspeaking, Irish-speaking, or Scots Gaelicspeaking. Because the dominant language is used for discussing certain topics, the minority language may lack areas of vocabulary found in other languages that share the same general culture. Indeed its vocabulary may be influenced by that of the dominant language to the extent of accepting borrowings where native terms exist. There may be no standardized form of a minority language. There is, for example, no agreed standard for Scots. Similarly, conventions for such things as writing letters may be lacking. The minority language may be at risk from opponents actively dedicated to its extirpation. An early example of this is the 1616 Education Act passed by the Scottish parliament. This established schools in every parish with the object of imparting the English vernacular so that Scottish Gaelic, described as the source of all barbarity, should be 'abolisheit and remouvit.' Since knowledge of the dominant language is usually necessary for economic advancement, it may be the case that native speakers will not pass on the minority language to their children. Because the language may lack areas of vocabulary, or because there is no standard, or because speakers are completely bilingual, there may be reluctance on the part of native speakers to speak the language to learners or even to other native speakers from different dialect areas, on the grounds that differences of dialect present insurmountable barriers to mutual comprehension. Thus the minority language becomes the marker of an increasingly small in-group. Opponents of the language seize upon gaps in the vocabulary, the absence of a recognized norm, and the reluctance to speak the language to outsiders in order to demonstrate that the language is in some sense 'inferior.'

(j) The cause of a minority language may be taken up by proponents (groups or individuals) dedicated to its preservation or revival. Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg ('Welsh Language Society'), founded in 1962, and the Scots Language Society, founded in 1972 as the Lallans Society, are two examples. (k) Efforts to promote minority languages may include language planning or language purification in order to fill the gaps mentioned.in (e) above. Thus there are lists of technical vocabulary compiled and published for both Irish and Welsh. (1) Problems arise in education and official policy varies from country to country: the language may be banned in school; it may be taught as a subject; or it may even be the medium of instruction. (m) Historical factors may be relevant. The language may not always have been a minority one and it may therefore have possessed at least written norms that it now lacks. Hence a modern writer may incorporate usages from an earlier written language that are no longer found in any spoken variety. A curious claim sometimes made by proponents of individual minority languages is that they are 'old.' If such a description has any meaning, either it is that the language in question was established in its present location at an early date, or first written down at a relatively early date, or that it represents an alleged earlier state of historical development. It is not clear what any of these interpretations has to do with the value of a language; unfortunately, 'oldness' continually crops up as a kind of guarantee of respectability. It should be noted that what is a minority language in one country may well be the dominant language in another. Thus various dialects of German constitute a minority language in France, but Standard German is the official language of (among others) the Federal Republic of Germany. In such a situation the users of the minority language will have a standard to relate to, if they wish to avail themselves of it. See also: Linguicide; Language Loyalty; Minority Language Rights. Bibliography Oftedal M 1969 What are minorities? In: Holmestad E, Lade A J (eds.) Lingual Minorities in Europe. Det Norske Samlaget, Oslo Price G 1969 The Present Position of Minority Languages in Western Europe: A Selective Bibliography. University of Wales Press, Cardiff Simpson J M Y 1981 The challenge of minority languages. In: Haugen E, McClure J D, Thomson D S (eds.) Minority Languages Today. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Wardhaugh R 1987 Languages in Competition. Blackwell, Oxford

Minority Language Rights

Minority Language Rights R. Phillipson and T. Skutnabb-Kangas

People can be discriminated against on the grounds of their gender, class, 'race,' or language. The reality of such discrimination, and the urge to combat the injustice of it, have inspired many human rights covenants and some national legislation. Language can itself be discriminatory in several ways, or it can be used in discriminatory ways. The 'form' of the language itself, its vocabulary (or lack of vocabulary in areas of importance to dominated groups) and connotations, can be racist ('nigger') or ethnocentric ('developing' country), sexist, classist, ageist, militaristic, nationalistic, etc. Words can make some groups of people or their characteristics invisible (the rights of 'Man'), or appendices to others (lady doctor, male nurse), or stereotype them negatively ('Third' World). Language can also be used in discriminatory ways, so that some groups become invisible ('the anglophone countries of Africa' ignores the fact that the vast majority of the population in such countries have no command of English). Several professional associations and publishing houses have issued codes of linguistic conduct which instruct authors how to avoid such discriminatory language. Individuals and groups can also be discriminated against on the basis of language: how they speak (class background, geographic origin, etc.) or which language(s) they speak (or do not speak). Judgments of class background made on purportedly linguistic evidence lead to attributions of competence and moral qualities as well as to the creation of aesthetic norms and feelings of solidarity, as social psychological studies have shown. The class bias of the 'standard' language that schools inculcate has a major influence on school achievement and discriminates against many children (see Pedagogy). This article concentrates on the kinds of discrimination that speakers of minority languages, indigenous, regional, or immigrant, encounter because of their mother tongue(s) (see also Minority Languages).

1. Linguistic Rights and Human Rights

Many minority groups were granted specific protection in the treaties signed at the end of the First World War. Since 1945, within the framework of the United Nations (which has a Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities), a series of human rights covenants have been devised and ratified which attempt to provide minorities with inalienable rights. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) declares:

In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.

A major survey was conducted for the UN (Capotorti 1979) to analyze juridical and conceptual aspects of protection against discrimination, and to solicit information from governments worldwide so as to assess how minorities are treated de jure and de facto. Immigrant minorities were explicitly excluded from consideration, 'because of their voluntary assimilation' (Capotorti 1979: 10), or because they were not to be encouraged to 'form within that State separate communities which might impair its national unity or its security': they 'could not be regarded as minorities as this would endanger the national integrity of the receiving States' (Capotorti 1979: 33). These fears, which reflect a monolingual norm (see below) seem to be largely unfounded (see Joshua Fishman's comparative study of correlations between number of languages in a country, economic prosperity, social strife, and many other variables; Fishman 1989, see also Hide 1995). The Capotorti report concluded that most minorities, not least linguistic ones, were in need of much more substantial protection. It stresses the key role of education through the medium of the mother tongue for linguistic and cultural maintenance and vitality. It also interprets article 27 as imposing an obligation on states to actively promote minority languages. This presupposes that states provide adequate financial support for these languages. The UN Human Rights Committee has in a recent General Comment (6 April 1994) interpreted Art. 27 as: protecting all individuals on the state's territory or under its jurisdiction (i.e., also immigrants and refugees), irrespective of whether they belong to the minorities specified in the article or not; stating that the existence of a minority does not depend on a decision by the state but requires to be established by objective criteria; recognizing the existence of a 'right'; imposing positive obligations on the states. There is, however, abundant evidence of groups and individuals being deprived of their linguistic human rights, and that language shift occurs as a result. Many international covenants, beginning with the UN Charter, declare that discrimination should be outlawed but do not oblige states to promote minority languages. Many states in fact expect their indigenous and immigrant minorities to assimilate to the dominant culture and language (see Linguicide). 51

The Social Context 2. Action Against Linguistic Discrimination

Awareness of linguistic discrimination has led to, inter alia, several European Parliament (nonbinding) resolutions in support of minority languages, to explicit support for them in the draft Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights, and to the Council of Europe elaborating a 'European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages' and a 'Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities' (1994, not yet in force in January 1998) where the Article covering medium of education is much more heavily qualified than any other. A draft Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights was presented to UNESCO in 1996 as a first step towards further elaboration and adoption. Its 52 wide-ranging Articles grant rights to three entities: individuals ('everyone'), language groups, and language communities. Even in this Declaration, it is clear that educational language rights, in contrast to cultural rights, are not seen as inalienable. They apply unconditionally only to language communities, and 'everyone' (individuals not members of linguistic communities or groups) has fewer rights to learning their mother tongue than members of communities have to learning any foreign language. The Declaration gives language communities very extensive rights but leaves 'everyone' with very few rights. This makes the people to be covered by the Declaration vulnerable in several respects. Many states claim that they do not have minority language communities, and do not want to grant minorities any language rights. A Declaration which gives most of the rights to linguistic communities, without specifying firm dutyholders, makes these communities completely dependent on the acceptance of their existence by states, an acceptance that many states are not willing to grant. For these reasons the existence of firm individual rights is enormously important. But such rights are the weakest part of the Declaration. The Declaration is completely unrealistic as it stands and needs a major revision. It is, however, the first major international attempt to specify universal linguistic rights. Court action can be a significant way of challenging linguistic discrimination. In the USA, a number of cases have been brought for this purpose. Significant is the case of Lau v. Nichols, in which students of Chinese ancestry claimed that the San Francisco Unified School District failed in its obligation to provide adequate education for them. The US Supreme Court ruled that 'Under these state-imposed standards there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education' (quoted in Center for Applied Linguistics 1977:7). Many court cases in the USA have challenged discrimination on the basis of language or dialect in education, hiring practices, and promotion.

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A case of central relevance to minority education was brought against the Norwegian state. A Sámi (called 'Lapps' in colonial language), Johan Gávppi, who knew no Norwegian when he went to school and whose teachers knew no Sámi, got little benefit from school and was illiterate until his own children taught him to read and write. He sued the Norwegian state for damages for failing to give him the basic education he was entitled to under Norwegian law. The case was deemed obsolete by all Norwegian courts and the European Commission on Human Rights but other cases may follow. This case has wide symbolic significance. If the principle is established that a minority child is entitled to financial compensation for inappropriate education, then one can envisage indigenous and immigrant minorities worldwide following suit. The relevant academic arguments were already assembled back in 1953 in an authoritative UNESCO report which considers it 'axiomatic that the best medium for teaching is the mother tongue of the pupil' and that this should be 'extended to as late a stage in education as possible.' This has been confirmed in new educational guidelines issued for the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, The Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities & Explanatory Note (October 1996). In the section on 'Minority education at primary and secondary levels,' mainly mother tongue medium education is recommended at all levels, including bilingual teachers in the dominant language as a second language (Articles 11-13). The Recommendations are an interpretation of international human rights law (see the special issue on them, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Special Issue on the Education Rights of National Minorities 4:2; 1996/1997). The education of minorities is still a controversial issue. What needs stressing is that relatively little research has been conducted by minority group researchers themselves. The structure of the academic world (research financing, careers, dominant paradigms, etc.) militates against minority voices being heard (but see SkutnabbKangas 1988). 3. From Sticks to Carrots and Ideas; From Biologically Based Racism to Ethnicism and Linguicism

The means of control over all dominated groups (not just minorities) are progressively shifting from 'sticks' (physical violence) to 'carrots' (negotiation) and 'ideas' (psychological violence). Resisting the powerholders used to lead to physical punishment (an external negative sanction) and later on to shame, a guilty conscience, or a feeling of having chosen wrongly (an internal negative sanction). Submitting leads now to rewards (internal positive sanctions). Rewarding those who submit and making them feel they have made the right choice (by glorifying the dominant

Minority Language Rights language, stigmatizing dominated languages, and making the choice to drop these in favor of the dominant language seem rational), is a less expensive and more efficient way of upholding control than the use of physical violence (armies, police, etc). Making those who do not submit and achieve rewards believe that their own characteristics, deficiencies, and handicaps are to blame, ensures hegemony in a less risky way than the use of physical force. An important criterion worldwide for determining which groups obtained less than their fair share of power and resources used to be their so-called 'race.' 'Race' has, for several reasons, become an untenable criterion. It is no longer claimed that certain 'races' are more fit to rule than others. Biologically based racism as an important ideology of hierarchization has been progressively replaced by ethnicism (Mullard 1988) and linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988), which relate to cultural (rather than biological) characteristics ascribed to various ethnic groups and languages. Instead of superior races, certain ethnic groups (or cultures) and languages are now seen as fitter to rule and expand; others are to adopt their cultures and learn their languages. The characteristics attributed to these cultures and languages relate to modernization, technology, efficiency, development, Western capitalist middle-class market-oriented values, and so on. Since global market connections and the colonization of the mind of the less powerful require the use of a common language, the smaller languages are marginalized and underdeveloped. Internationally there is a hierarchy with functional differentiation between local languages and a 'world' or 'international' language (and its concomitant culture). Internally in countries which do not boast a 'world' language, local languages are increasingly confined as the traditional languages of the home and hearth, whereas the major languages are used for international instrumental roles in business, administration and politics, and also increasingly in domestic contexts (for instance, as the in-house language in transnational corporations, in higher education, in the media, etc.). These processes underlie the dramatic rise of English as an 'international' language in recent decades. Discrimination by means of language can be analyzed as a reflection of linguicism. Linguicism is defined as: ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988: 45)

Language is thus in several ways increasingly important as the instrument through which groups

with less access to power and resources are controlled. Proficiency in the colonists' language was vital for social mobility in the colonial period, and this position has generally not changed since independence. For immigrant groups, proficiency in the national language of the country of residence is regarded by the dominant group as the vital goal of education. This is so, even when there is plenty of research evidence that educating minority children through the mother tongue would be advantageous for their overall educational, cognitive, psychological, and social development and can lead to high proficiency in the dominant language (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988, Cummins 1996). Linguicism ensures that most resources, in teacher education, curriculum development, and teaching schedules are allocated to the dominant language. These structural measures are accompanied by an ideology of maximum support for the dominant language and marginalization of other languages. The latter tend to be regarded as educational handicaps rather than as resources. Education is inspired, misguidedly, by a monolingual norm. This norm implies at a societal level a belief that 'one state, one nation, one language' is a desirable and inevitable state of affairs, necessary for national unity, modernization, and progress, and that multilingualism leads to national disintegration, backwardness, inefficiency, and poverty. At an individual level monolingualism is seen as normal and healthy, and bi- or multilingualism as a temporary, negative phase on the path from monolingualism in one language (e.g., minority mother tongue) to monolingualism in another language (the majority language). The monolingual norm also implies 'either-or' thinking: either you maintain your minority mother tongue, and that means that you do not learn the majority language properly, or you want to learn the majority language, and therefore you cannot maintain your mother tongue (Skutnabb-Kangas 1996). Education inspired by this monolingual norm is organized subtractively (see Lambert 1975) for minority language speakers: they learn a major language instead of their own, not in addition to it. By contrast the foreign language learning of the dominant group is additive, they add more languages to their existing linguistic repertoire, at no cost to their mother tongue. See also: Linguicide; Minority Languages; Diglossia.

Bibliography Capotorti F 1979 Study on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. United Nations, New York Center for Applied Linguistics 1977 Bilingual Education. Current Perspectives. Vol. 3: Law. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA Cummins J 1996 Negotiating Identities: Education for

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The Social Context Empowerment in a Diverse Society. California Association for Bilingual Education, Ontario, CA Eide A 1995 Economic, social and cultural rights as human rights. In: Eide A, Krause C, Rosas A (eds.) Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A Textbook. Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, pp. 21-40 Fishman J 1989 Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Lambert W 1975 Culture and language as factors in learning and education. In: Wolfgang A (ed.) Education of Immigrant Students. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto Mullard C 1988 Racism, ethnicism and etharcy or not? The principles of progressive control and transformative change. In: Skutnabb-Kangas T, Cummins J (eds.) Min-

ority Education. From Shame to Struggle. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Skutnabb-Kangas T 1988 Multilingualism and the education of minority children. In: Skutnabb-Kangas T, Cummins J (eds.) Minority Education. From Shame to Struggle. Multilingual matters, Clevedon, UK Skutnabb-Kangas T 1996 Educational language choice— multilingual diversity or monolingual reductionism? In: Hellinger M, Ammon U (eds.) Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 175-204 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R (eds.) 1994 Linguistic Human Rights. Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin UNESCO 1953 The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. UNESCO, Paris

Multilingual States D. D. Laitin

A 'state' is a territorially bounded organization in the permanent business of rule. All states, at least in their early periods of development, have encompassed populations in which there are many speech communities, and therefore were in their origins multilingual states. (A multilingual individual is a person who is competent in more than one language; a multilingual state is a political entity in which there is more than one speech community.) For many states, an important component in the business of rule has been to effect language change in the population within their boundaries so that all official communication can be transacted in the language preferred by the rulers. It is possible, through individual multilingualism, to have a single official language in a multilingual state. But, historically, the imposition of a single official language has fashioned monolingual societies, which provided a cultural foundation for a 'nation-state.' A nation is a modern, socially differentiated society, in which most of the people imagine themselves to be members of a 'community.' Since uniformity of language creates an aura that all inhabitants of the state form a natural community, the homogenization of language helps to create, but is not a necessary condition for, a nation-state. Not all states become nation-states; many remain multinational, with each national community within the state relying on its own language. Societal multilingualism may persist because leaders do not seek to create language uniformity or because substantial numbers of people ref54

use to learn the language favored by the ruler. Why some states construct language uniformity within their boundaries and others do not remains an important research question in political science. Political scientists also seek to discern the consequences of different language outcomes in the process of state-building, especially for economic growth and democracy. 1. State Rationalization The nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber used the term 'rationalization' to refer to the process of efficient and orderly rule. The development of a professional civil service, with a well-specified division of labor, was for Weber the essence of rationalization in the modern state. The establishment of sharp territorial boundaries, the standardization of the calendar, of weights and measures, and the issuance of a common currency are important examples of state rationalization. A common language is a crucial element of a rationalization program. Legal uniformity is easier to assure when court decisions are delivered and recorded in a common language. Tax can be collected more efficiently and monitored more effectively if merchants all keep their books in the same language. State regulations can more efficiently be disseminated if translations are not necessary for compliance to take place. And territorial boundaries are easier to patrol if the population at the boundary speaks the language of its political center, one that is distinct from the language

Multilingual States of the population on the other side of the boundary. Given these considerations, it is not surprising that rulers of states have sought to transform their multilingual societies into nation-states through policies that can be called 'language rationalization.' Language rationalization policies usually entail the specification of a domain of language use (e.g., appeals court cases, or church sermons) and a requirement that the language of rule be employed within that domain. When rulers have established power over a territorially based speech community, they are easily able to induce some of its members to become bilingual, so as to translate documents from the language of the speech community to the language of the ruler. To the extent that political rule is stable, more and more members of the population will find it useful to learn the language of the ruling elites. Language rationalization is successful when there is a sufficient number of bilinguals among the speech communities with languages different from the official one so that the business of rule can be transacted in a single language. In many cases of successful state building, language change is greater than rationalization would demand. On the individual level, rationalization requires only 'unassimilated bilingualism,' that is to say, that individuals use the language of the ruling elites only for specified domains. But individuals can move to 'assimilated bilingualism' where they use the language of the central elites for most domains, and use the language of their speech community only for family affairs. Finally, in some populations, 'assimilation' takes place, where virtually all members of the speech community become monolingual in the language of the political center. When this occurs, a 'nation' that is commensurate with state boundaries can most easily be imagined. In the real world, there are no examples of the complete elimination of societal multilingualism. Certain minority groups retain their languages despite changes in the rest of the society; immigrant groups often retain the languages of their home area for some generations; and language shifts take place within a single language, yielding de facto multilingualism even when members of the various speech communities claim to speak the same language (e.g., Black American English). Of even greater political importance, groups that had assimilated into the language of the political center may find themselves parties to a 'language revival' movement that challenges basic assumptions as to whether the country involved really is a national state. These sorts of questions persist in politics because there are no clear divisions between unilingual and multilingual societies, or between multinational states and nation-states. Ambiguity feeds political struggle. Despite the ubiquity of minority speech communities, many states have successfully pursued language

rationalization policies. Here we shall outline the processes of rationalization in France, Spain, and Japan, and discuss the anomalous multilingualism in Switzerland, which is clearly a nation-state. 1.1 Language Rationalization in France In 1539 King Francis I issued the Edict of VillersCotterets which established Francien as the only official language of the realm. At that time many related dialects, such as Norman and Picard, had more literary prestige, but the Francien dialect was spoken in the capital and the surrounding Ile-de-France, so it was politically more attractive. There were in the King's realm a number of German, Flemish, Catalan, and Basque speech communities as well. The many languages of the southern region, collectively called 'langue d'Oc,' had long literary histories, and were not mutually intelligible with Francien. But the purpose of Francis's, edict was not to change the language repertoires of his ordinary subjects from different speech communities; rather it was to give support to a national vernacular as opposed to Latin, which was the prestige language of education and law. The language of the court immediately changed to Francien. It was not until 1762, however, when the Jesuits were expelled from France, that Francien could replace Latin in higher education. Rationalization, then, was a long but successful process. France nonetheless remained a multilingual state until the final third of the nineteenth century. As late as 1863, by official estimates, about a quarter of France's population spoke no French. The rigid centralization of administration organized by Napoleon, the rapid increase in enrollments in public education which supplanted the Catholic Church in providing basic literacy, and military conscription all worked to create in France a nation-state where virtually all citizens, in large part through sharing French as a mother tongue, imagine themselves as members of a common nation. The nation was not natural, however; it was created through policies of rationalization. 1.2 Language Rationalization in Spain Spain was multilingual when the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, presided over the final reconquest of the peninsula from Muslim rule. Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galician were the major languages of Spain. The Habsburg kings, following the treaties of Ferdinand and Isabella, respected regional differences in language and in law. Spain's wealth from overseas conquest, however, attracted artists and writers from all over Europe, and Castilian became a language of prestige throughout the peninsula. The literary florescence of the Golden Century (mid-sixteenth through mid-seventeenth century) induced well-to-do families throughout the country to educate their children in Castilian.

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The Social Context It was not until 1716 and the Decree of the Nueva Planta, under Spain's first Bourbon King, Philip V, that Castilian became Spain's language for official business. A series of decrees in 1768-71 required all primary and secondary education to be in Castilian, and in 1772, all commercial establishments were required to keep their accounts in Castilian. Despite these laws, as is shown in the section on language revivals, multilingualism persists. Spain's status as a nation-state was never fully realized. 1.3 Language Rationalization in Japan Japan, because it is an island and had insulated itself so long from foreign influence, is often described as the quintessential nation-state. Yet even in Japan, regional dialects (hogen) were quite distinct. The four major hogen groups are those of Eastern Japan (known as Kanto), Western Japan, Kyushu, and Ryukyu, each with subdialects. The Japanese Alps, dividing Japan east to west, helped form the most politically significant dialect divisions. There is a considerable folklore about the deficiencies and lack of intelligibility of the eastern dialect in the west, and vice versa. Over the course of Japanese history, there were many forces which sustained language differences. The seventh-century borrowing of Chinese orthography created a division between written and spoken language which lasted over a millennium. In the Tokugawa period, the establishment of the provinces, or han, each with its own lord who blocked open communication with rival han, helped to sustain regional differences. On the other hand, the samurai, who served as the military officers for the lords, were educated through manuals that emphasized the dialect of the capital city. It was not until the Meiji period (1867) that the notion of a Japanese standard (hyojungo) emerged. The Meiji rulers, through national education programs, promoted this standard, based mainly on one of the Tokyo dialects (Yamanote) that was heavily influenced by the eastern dialect. This composite is known as Kyotsugo. Even with a century of standardization, and with extensive radio and television, Japanese linguists report that people who speak some hogen, while they can understand Kyotsugo, cannot themselves speak it. Their dialect is hardly comprehensible to Yamanote speakers. The political organization of the Japanese state created conditions so that young students from the regions would want to use Kyotsugo and deemphasize their reliance on their hogen. Japan's nation-state was therefore, at least in part, created politically; the idea that Japan enjoyed a natural condition of linguistic homogeneity is historically suspect. 1.4 Switzerland as a Multilingual State Language rationalization did not occur in Switzerland, which remains a multilingual state. Four languages—German, French, Italian, and Rom-

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ansch—all have official status in the Swiss confederation. The key to understanding Swiss language politics is that rationalization occurred not at the political center but at the cantonal level. Swiss national identity developed over centuries, and did so without need for a common language. From the origins of the Swiss confederation in the latethirteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century, German was Switzerland's sole official language. In the sixteenth century, the confederation expanded into French- and Italian-speaking areas. The collapse of the confederation during the French Revolution and the installation by the French of the Helvetic Republic, led to the formal recognition of French and Italian. With the fall of Napoleon, however, German again became Switzerland's sole official language. Civil war erupted in the early 1820s, only to yield peace in 1848, in which German, French, and Italian were all accepted as national languages. In 1938, a constitutional amendment declared Romansch as the fourth national language, but it did not receive the same full rights as the other three Swiss languages. Despite societal multilingualism and a history of some language conflict, the imagined community of Switzerland developed without homogenization of mother tongues. Yet notions of a common Swiss culture are built upon clear notions of cantonal autonomy. Each canton is permitted to set its own language policies, and the cantons have been strong rationalizers. In 1970, 96 percent of the German Swiss lived in the German region; 92 percent of the French Swiss in the French region; and 79 percent of the Italian Swiss in the Italian region. It is extremely difficult for Swiss citizens living outside their language region to get an accredited education (public or private) through the medium of their mother tongues. Therefore migration of people across language zones has been minimal for centuries. The rationalization of language at the cantonal level is so important to Swiss national consciousness that language is one of the few areas in which the central government supports welfare redistributions. Because the Italian and Romansch areas do not have the resources to invest in higher education and television in their languages, annual subsidies have been sent to these cantons to help authorities defend their languages. The case of Switzerland demonstrates that rationalization of language is not a necessary condition for the creation of a nation-state; but it demonstrates as well how important language rationalization is to rulers, even in a country that has accepted its own language diversity. 2. Immigration and Language Rationalization

Nationalism, the ideology behind movements to build nations out of the diverse populations within states or

Multilingual States to create states to coincide with nations, has often been suspicious of mass immigration, which might threaten the cultural uniformity of the imagined community. Yet massive immigration has, with very few exceptions, led to intergenerational assimilation into the national language. This is so because immigrants leave their home areas—often escaping from poverty or persecution—in order to make a better life for themselves and their families than they could do in their own communities. Except in rare instances when an entire community uproots itself seeking to preserve its lifestyle in another country (for example, the Amish in the USA), each immigrant family finds itself in its new society seeking scarce jobs and limited opportunities. While each immigrant may want to preserve the language and culture of his/her home area, it would be better for him/her if some other immigrant family organized special schools and organized a supply of sufficient reading material to support the language. If every family is better off relying on someone else to help preserve the language, a 'collective action' problem ensues. The likelihood that the preservational activity will be organized is therefore low. Immigration, then, is rarely a threat to the national unity of the host country. Research on immigrants to the USA, European states, India, and Japan all shows that the degree of love any group has for its own language can only marginally affect the timing of intergenerational shift from monolingualism in the language of origin to monolingualism in the language of the new home. In some cases, where the immigrant group fears it might be deported (southern Indians in North India), or where the immigrant group speaks the language of the political center but not of the region of migration (Andalusians in Catalonia; Russians in Estonia), evidence shows language assimilation to be much less likely. Since the 1960s, there have been political movements in immigrant communities to use the power of the state to help immigrant communities retain their mother tongues. These movements are most often led not by the immigrants themselves but by second- and third-generation citizens who seek to solidify a political bond with their own people by generating support for a popular issue. These efforts will help support 'assimilated bilingualism,' where the descendants of immigrants retain competence, albeit limited, in their language of ethnic origin, but they will not stem the general tide of language assimilation.

3. Language Revivals Rationalization from the political center is sometimes countered by revival movements from the periphery. These movements are extremely easy to get going, in large part because language is such an emotional issue. Yet they are difficult to sustain, because while people

may vote for the revival of a language in desuetude, they may not like the idea of having their own children educated in it. It is a safer investment most of the time to educate one's children in the language of opportunity rather than in a language that is considered by the descendants of its core speech community to be one of folklore but not science. In modern European states strong revival movements have occurred in those regions where there was more economic growth in the region than in the political center. Under these conditions, an alliance could form between cultural elites who always wanted to preserve the language and the regional bourgeoisie that was interested more in international business contacts than national ones. Successful revival movements in regions of contemporary states include Catalan in Spain, Flemish in Belgium, Kannada in India, Estonian in the former Soviet Union, and French in Canada. Successful revival movements in countries that overcame colonial rule to become independent countries include Somali in Somalia, Hebrew in Israel, and Finnish in Finland/ Unsuccessful revival movements include the Celtic languages in the UK, Alsatian and the d'Oc languages in France, Maithili in India, and the indigenous languages in most newly independent African countries. A particularly long and involved revival movement supporting Landsmaol in Norway had mixed results. The successful revival movements teach us that apparently stable nation-states need not remain officially monolingual. Like Switzerland, countries can develop bases other than language to imagine themselves a community. Yet these revival movements also show us that when rationalization weakens at the center, the pressure for uniformity becomes even stronger in the region. Proposed language laws in Quebec, Catalonia, and Karnataka (where Kannada is the official language) have been far harsher in demanding uniformity than were usually the case in the states from which these regions sought autonomy.

4. Late Development and Stable Multilingualism In states whose boundaries were settled before the nineteenth century, language rationalization was the norm. Here France, the UK, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and China are the principal examples. In Germany and Italy, following the successful nation-state models of their neighbors, nationalism meant political unification to make the language-based nation and the state commensurate. The ideology of the nation-state was so powerful that the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire was organized largely along linguistic lines. Nearly all states in Europe after World War I (except for Switzerland and Russia/Soviet Union) 57

The Social Context were, at least until language revival movements arose, officially monolingual. 4.1 The Former Soviet Union as a Multilingual State European Russia might have broken up into monolingual states like the Austro-Hungarian empire if it too had lost the war. But the Soviet government was able, until 1991, to retain control over a state with over 100 languages. Like France and Spain, the former Soviet Union achieved a remarkable degree of rationalization, with high percentages of the population of all regions having become competent Russian speakers. The business of central rule could take place entirely through the medium of Russian. But like Switzerland, there were 14 Union Republics outside of the Russian Republic, each with its own official language. The 'titular' nationals who are the majority population in these republics have instituted language rationalization programs. Among the citizens who speak former Union Republic languages, there was considerable resistance to the learning of Russian. Whether there exists an imagined community among these now-independent republics that can override language differences remains to be seen (see also Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union). 4.2 Rationalization in Settler Colonies In the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and North and South America, the language of the settlers dominated the language of the autochthonous populations, who were excluded from political representation in the period of state formation. Only in the case of Paraguay has an autochthonous language (Guarani) taken on an important official role. There have been language revival movements elsewhere, but none with any important success. The settler colonies followed the pattern of early developers. 4.3 The Postcolonial Multilingual State Countries that achieved political independence after World War II have established a new norm, that of the multilingual state. Two factors account for the establishment of the norm of multilingualism for the postcolonial states. First, by the twentieth century, an essential part of the business of rule was to provide public education to all citizens. Heads of state were no longer just interested in efficient extraction of taxes or in the basic provision of infrastructure (e.g., roads and irrigation systems). A highly literate population became associated with economic growth and political power. Ministers of education in multilingual societies recognized the near impossibility of providing literacy in a single language, and they pressed for state recognition of language diversity. A second factor which helped sustain multilingualism in these late-developing states has to do with the colonial experience. Countries in Africa and Asia had, under colonial rule, modern bureaucracies

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before they had political independence. These bureaucracies operated in the colonial language. Students from the colony who were able to learn the colonial language got positions of power and prestige in large part due to their language competence. Once these countries received independence, these bureaucrats were essential to implement the policies of the new nationalist leaders. Yet they had an interest in maintaining the colonial language as the language of administration and higher education. Leading bureaucrats overemphasize the difficulties and political inequalities that would result from the choice of an indigenous language as the sole official language of government. This bureaucratic pressure has made the choice of a single official language quite difficult. A standard compromise has been to rely on the colonial language as official, but to elevate one or more indigenous languages as national, and to have them play a symbolic role in political life. 4.4 India and the 3 + 1 Language Outcome India is a postcolonial multilingual state that is not moving toward rationalization or to linguistic uniformity. During its independence struggle, the Congress Party leaders assumed that upon achieving independence, some form of Hindi should be India's official language. But the Indian Administrative Service and other bureaucratic agencies operated entirely in English, the language of colonial rule. Officials in these agencies had a strong interest in preserving English as the language of administration. Although the Indian constitution called for the imposition of Hindi as the All-Union language 15 years after independence, opposition from bureaucrats and from citizens in non-Hindi-speaking areas indefinitely delayed the change. Consequently, there are now two AllUnion languages, each of which can be used for official dealings within the Indian state. Meanwhile, during the 1950s, citizen pressures at the regional levels compelled the government to redraw federal boundaries consistent with language zones. Each state has an official language today, and most of them are zealously pursuing language rationalization policies within their states. By one official measure, as of 1980, only 2.7 percent of the Indian population has as its primary language a language different from the official language of their state. The Indian constitution, however, assures all minorities the right to an education in their own language." India thus has a multilingual state in which citizens who wish to have a broad range of mobility opportunities must learn 3 + 1 languages. English and Hindi are necessary languages for communicating with the central state. It is necessary as well to speak the language of the state in which you live. This makes for a 3 language outcome. A citizen of Tamil Nadu must learn English, Hindi, and Tamil to be able to operate in a wide range of activities within India.

Multilingual States Those citizens who live in states where Hindi or English is the official language need learn only 3—1 or 2 languages. Citizens who are language minorities in some states (e.g., Marathi speakers in Karnataka) must learn 3+1 languages: Hindi, English, Marathi, and Kannada. Thus, there is a range from 2 to 4 (i.e., 3+1) languages that citizens must know. The result has become accepted by most groups in India, and therefore it is probable that India will remain a multilingual state (see Indian Language Education Policy). 4.5 Other Postcolonial States Many other postcolonial countries, including Nigeria, Zaire, Kenya, and the Philippines, may follow India's track, with a colonial and an indigenous language sharing central stage in the business of rule. In others, such as Algeria and Zimbabwe, the colonial language will remain as a lingua franca, but not at the expense of the continued official reliance on indigenous languages, at least on the regional level. Some postcolonial states, such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Tanzania, and Somalia, are on the road toward rationalization. The situation in these countries remains fluid and merits continued observation.

5. Political Implications of State Multilingualism Throughout this discussion state multilingualism was considered as an outcome of social, economic, and political processes. Political scientists and sociologists have also studied multilingualism as a causal factor explaining political and economic outcomes. This research is not fully developed, and clear patterns have not been specified. 5.1 Multilingual States and Economic Growth Simple correlational studies have shown that multilingual states are less advanced economically than linguistically unified states. However, these correlations are spurious, because so many early developers have become linguistically unified and so many late developers are multilingual. The causal variable here seems to be timing of development rather than level of multilingualism. It is known that multilingualism is not a barrier to economic dynamism, as can be seen in from Switzerland. But the precise role of language diversity for economic dynamism remains to be specified. 5.2 Multilingual States and Democracy Political science approaches to democratic theory originally emphasized the importance of language uniformity for democratic stability. It was thought that because democracy requires public participation in

open debate this would be difficult to sustain when citizens are unable to communicate effectively with each other. More recent models of democracy, sometimes termed consociational, suggest that decentralized systems, in which each language community has considerable autonomy, are a viable form of democracy. Belgium and Switzerland are used as models for decentralized democracies. Since the 1970s, with the Catalan and Basque languages in postFranco Spain, and with French in Quebec, it can be seen that while multilingual states may suffer considerable tensions in managing democracies, multilingualism itself does not preclude democratic stability. While rationalization of language may have some association with democracy, the process of rationalization necessarily entails the curtailment of minority rights. The suppression of Welsh in Britain, of Catalan in Spain, and of Alsatian in France was not done in a democratic spirit. Leaders promoting similar decrees seeking to rationalize Amharic in Ethiopia and Malay in Malaysia have been accused of contravening basic democratic rights of minorities. In twentieth-century state-building, democrats will be compelled to adjust to multilingualism; they will not, in most cases, be able to rationalize language in their states through democratic procedures.

Bibliography Anderson B 1983 Imagined Communities. Verso, London Deutsch K W 1953 Nationalism and Social Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Haugen E I 1966 Language Conflict and Language Planning. The Case of Modern Norwegian. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Kirkland M (ed.) 1990 Language Planning in the Soviet Union. St. Martin's Press, New York Laitin D 1977 Politics, Language and Thought The Somali Experience. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Laitin D 1988 Language games. Comparative Politics 20:289-302 Laitin D 1989a Linguistic revival: Politics and culture in Catalonia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31(2): 297-317 Laitin D 1989b Language policy and political strategy in India. Policy Sciences 22(3-4): 415-36 Lieberson S 1981 Language Diversity and Language Contact. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA McRae K 1983 Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies Switzerland. Wilfred Laurier University Press. Waterloo, Ontario McRae K 1986 Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies Belgium. Wilfred Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario Pool J 1986 Optimal strategies in linguistic games. In: Fishman J A et al. (eds.) The Fergusonian Impact, vol. 2. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin Weinstein B 1983 The Civic Tongue. Longman, New York

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The Social Context

Multilingualism C. B. Paulston

Multilingualism is here defined as the presence and use of two (bilingualism) or more languages within a modern nation state. Classical diglossia (Ferguson 1959), where two dialects of the same language coexist in functional distribution, and where there are no native speakers of the prestige dialect (H form), constitutes a special case of bilingualism (see Diglossia). The social meaning of languages in multilingual settings is not necessarily different from the social meaning of standard language and dialectal variation in monolingual settings. 1. Introduction Bi/multilingualism holds an enduring interest for scholars from many disciplines. Linguists are interested in multilingualism for the historical changes of the languages in contact and for the insight bilingualism may give on the process of language acquisition; psychologists study the relationship of bi/multilingualism to intelligence and cognition, to personality and sense of self, to motivation and achievement; sociologists seek to understand questions of the relationship between multilingualism and sociodemographic factors like language shift and its causes, between language and occupational patterns in multilingual situations, the role of national languages (see National Language), etc. Educators take an interest because they have to deal with the practical concerns which are involved in teaching children in multilingual settings. The focus of scholarly work on bi/multilingualism may then take various forms: (a) language(s) may form the primary unit of research; (b) the bilingual individual may be seen as the focus of investigation; or (c) bilingualism may be seen as a characteristic of social or ethnic groups. The specific focus follows from the questions asked about bilingualism and from the conceptual framework chosen in answering them. Few areas of study so intertwine theoretical issues and practical concerns, and much of the theoretical interest surrounding bi/multilingualism is the result of the practical problems educators are facing in schooling children in a second language (L2) (see Second Language Learning). 2. Group Multilingualism Most linguistic definitions of bi/multilingualism involve the competence of the individual (Bloomfield 1933; Weinreich 1953; Hornby 1977). Others are concerned about group bi/multilingualism which may be unofficial, as in the USA, or official and institutional, as in Canada, where institutional bilingualism grants 60

each citizen the right to use the official language of his or her choice in dealing with the Federal Government. Institutional bi/multilingualism does not entail that all individuals are bilingual, but often the opposite with only a small group serving as brokers between the two groups. So, for example, in multilingual Switzerland, German-speaking Swiss do not typically also speak French, Italian, or Rhetoromance (Romansch). In discussing group bilingualism, Gaarder (1977) makes the crucial distinction between elitist bilingualism and folk bilingualism. Elitist bilingualism is the hallmark of intellectuals and the learned in most societies as well as of upper-class membership as in Western Europe. It is a matter of choice. Folk bilingualism, on the other hand, is the result of ethnic groups in contact and competition within a single state, where one of the peoples becomes bilingual involuntarily in order to survive. National concern and interest in multilingualism typically involves folk bilingualism, since elitist bilingualism rarely presents any problems on the national level. (There are of course exceptions: the Sanskritization of Hindi and consequent failure of Indian language planning can be seen as a consequence of elite bilingualism.) 3. Languages of Wider Communication Most nations in the world are multilingual, that is, they contain ethnic groups in contact within their borders. Even Europe, considered frequently the one nation-one language ideal, has only two monolingual countries, Iceland and Portugal. In addition to multilingualism within nation states, one needs also to consider the larger federations like the former USSR and the People's Republic of China, where demographic factors lead to the development of lingua francas or LWCs (Languages of Wider Communication; Fishman 1971) as a means of communication between peoples of mutually unintelligible languages. The former Soviet Union had Russian as an LWC and there was much pragmatic concern over its dissemination in the vast federation. China uses intrastate pu tong hua, a reformed version of Mandarin, as its LWC after a very lengthy process of language planning. China has also gone through a protracted process of changing the interstate official LWC from Russian to English with the retooling of teachers, new curricula, and textbooks; this process illustrates another function of LWCs, that of international communication. The world has always needed international languages, and the Western world has during the last two millennia seen a succession from Greek to Latin to French to English.

Multilingualism Such a generally accepted world language is a matter of expediency and practicality, but in one sense, it is really only in the twentieth century with advances in modern technology of communication and travel that one can truly speak of a world language. There are many factors which contribute to the status of a LWC but one common factor is the prestige and power of its speakers. There are many bases for prestige and power, but the most common are military, political, and economic, and English forms no exception. The development of English as a world language can be traced to World War II, which ended with victory for the Allied Forces. Other major factors were ex-colonial British influence, American technological advances, and the state of the world economy. Even after prestige and power have passed from its native speakers, one may speculate that English is likely to remain as an international language because of the enormous investment of effort and money in English as a world language. In the late twentieth century English has more non-native than native speakers (Fishman et al. 1977). 4. Ethnic Groups in Contact In order to understand multilingualism within nation states, one needs to understand the relationship of ethnic groups of which multilingualism is the direct result. As Schermerhorn points out, 'the probability is overwhelming that when two groups with different cultural histories establish contacts which are regular rather than occasional or intermittent, one of the two groups will typically assume dominance over the other,' (1970: 68), and he says elsewhere that it is the nature of this dominance which is the major factor in ethnic relations (1972:379). The central question, then, in research in ethnic relations (immediate causal factor of groups' multilingual status) is 'what are the conditions that foster or prevent the integration of ethnic groups into their environing societies?' (1970:14.) Schermerhorn sees three causal factors as determining the nature of the relationship between ethnic groups and the process of integration into the environing society. The first refers to the origin of the contact situation between 'the subordinate ethnic and dominant groups, such as annexation, migration, and colonization'; the second to 'the degree of enclosure (institutional separation or segmentation) of the subordinate group or groups from the society-wide network of institutions and associations'; and the third to 'the degree of control exercised by dominant groups over access to scarce resources by subordinate groups in a given society' (1970:15). 5. Language Maintenance and Shift Ethnic groups within a nation state, given opportunity and incentive, typically shift to the language of the dominant group. Voluntary migration, especially of individuals and families, results in the most rapid shift,

of which the great immigration countries of America, Australia, and Canada give evidence. Annexation and colonialization, where entire groups are brought into a nation with their social institutions of marriage and kinship, religious and other belief and value systems still more or less intact, tend to result in much slower shift, if at all. Such groups are also likely to be exposed to higher degrees of enclosure and control with concomitant strife and conflict, which often becomes expressed through language conflict. The 1976 Soweto riots in South Africa, in which many black students were killed, concerned a change of medium of instruction in the schools from English to Afrikaans, neither of which language was native to the students, but Afrikaans had become a symbol of apartheid and hated oppression. Schermerhorn also posits three contextual variables which modify the effect of the independent variables of which the most important for students of multilingualism is the agreement or disagreement between dominant and subordinate groups on collective goals for the latter, such as assimilation or pluralism. He then makes the distinction between assimilation, which is cultural, and incorporation, which is sociostructural. Economic incorporation of an ethnic group with access to the goods and services of a nation is the common goal of minority groups and the most common reason for the recent migrations in Europe (some also claim religious freedom or refugee status). Economic incorporation is different from cultural assimilation and the giving up of values and beliefs, but it is primarily to the perception of forced assimilation that strife over language policies in multilingual nations becomes tied. If economic incorporation necessitates, as it mostly does, learning the official language, ethnic minority groups do learn it, frequently with consequent language shift and certainly often with assimilation to the dominant culture. But what is not generally recognized is that language maintenance is not a necessary condition for maintaining culture and ethnicity, as Lopez (1976) documents for the Chicanos in Los Angeles. It is possible for groups to maintain their own ethnic culture even after language shift, as with groups like the English Gypsies and many Amerindian tribes. Language shift in multilingual nations only takes place if there are opportunities and incentives to learn the national language. Such opportunities of access would include participation in social institutions like universal schooling, exogamy, military service and religious institutions; access to mass media like television; demographic factors like urbanization, etc. There are many kinds of incentives, but the two major ones are economic advantage, primarily in the form of source of income, and social prestige. Without rewards, language learning is not salient. Sometimes language shift is held to be problematic (Quebec),

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The Social Context sometimes it is encouraged as national policy (France), sometimes it is resisted by ethnic groups (Catalonia), but it is invariably to the social factors one must look to understand what happens with multilingualism within a nation state. Where shift does not take place, it is for three major reasons: (a) self-imposed boundary maintenance (Barth 1969), always for reasons other than language, most frequently religion, like the Amish and the orthodox Jewish Hassidim; (b) externally imposed boundaries, usually in the form of denied access to goods and services, especially jobs; and (c) a diglossic-like situation where the two languages exist in functional distribution where each language has its specified purpose and domain. Although most ethnic minority groups within a nation do shift language, they will vary in their degree of ethnic maintenance and in their rate of shift. Some causal factors can be identified. For example, in Pittsburgh (USA) the Greeks' shift over a four-generation span compared with the threegeneration shift of the Italians. Factors contributing to the slower Greek shift were: (a) knowledge and access to a standardized, written Greek language with cultural prestige and tradition, which is taught by the Greek churches in Pittsburgh; (b) arranged marriage partners directly from Greece (who then are monolingual in Greek). The Italians in contrast spoke a nonstandard, nonwritten dialect of Italian with no prestige, and they shared their Roman Catholic churches with the English-speaking Irish, typically with Irish priests and nuns, so they found no language maintenance support in the churches. Nor was there any pressure for endogamy as long as the marriage was within the Roman Catholic Church. Important features in supporting prolonged language maintenance are marriage patterns of endogamy, a prestigious language with a literary tradition, and access to a social institution with formal instruction, that is, literacy in the original mother tongue, a very important feature. Ethnic groups also vary in, quite vaguely, ethnic pride or ethnic stubbornness in culture maintenance even after they have shifted language and become socially incorporated into a nation. Alba says in the preface to his book about Catalonia: 'Catalonia is not especially notable for anything except its persistence— its stubbornness in existing despite the most adverse conditions' (1975:ii). The survival of Catalan exemplifies the notion of stubbornness, as Alba calls it, in group maintenance. Groups also vary in group adhesion and there is wide intragroup variation in members' attitudes toward language maintenance and cultural assimilation (see Language Loyalty). 6. Language Problems and Language Policies

With ethnic groups in contact and competition within multilingual nations, certain problems arise and must be considered. Language planning which does not

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consider the social context of language problems, and especially the forces which contribute to language maintenance and shift, is not likely to be successful. Language choice is one of the major language problems, whether it be choice of national language (as in Finland and Israel), choice of national alphabet (as in Somalia), or choice of medium of instruction (as in Norway, or indeed, most multilingual nations). In Israel, social conditions and religious attitudes toward Hebrew and the Promised Land made possible the rebirth of Hebrew and its implementation as a national language; Israel serves as an example of social forces facilitating national language planning. In contrast, Peru, during the Velasco government, in May 1975, officialized Quechua and Aymara as national languages with resounding failure of implementation. In Peru, as in much of Latin America, race is defined primarily by cultural attributes, and to embrace Quechua would be to declare oneself Indian with all the accompanying socioeconomic stigmatization. Such planning held no hope of successful implementation and Peru serves as an example of language planning which goes counter to existing sociocultural forces. Language can be seen as a resource which is available to ethnic groups in their competition for access to the goods and services of a nation. The case study of Bangladesh documents how an ethnic group, the East Bengal Muslims, when they perceived such action best suited to their purposes and demands,- claimed religious status and identity and Pakistani nationalism; later they claimed linguistic-ethnic nationalism and separatism and independent status for Bangladesh founded on religiolinguistic identity. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, language and religion have been resources variously utilized in the battle for survival in a harsh world. Other ethnic groups are not very different in this respect from the Bengalis. When they see that learning the national language well and fluently is in the best interest of their children (and there are social institutions available like the schools and the church, which can help them do so), there are very few problems associated with the educational policies for minority groups. Within the single city state of Singapore, with her four official languages and three major religions, there is no sign of ethnic strife or major educational problems. Because of Singapore's very strong and expanding economy there is enough of the good of this life for everybody, and competition takes place on the basis of individual qualities, not along ethnic lines. But when these same ethnic groups see, instead of socioeconomic opportunity, stigmatization, economic exploitation, and systematic unemployment, they are likely to use the original mother tongue as a strategy for mobilization. Language boundary maintenance reinforced with religion is an even stronger tool, a process which the Turks in Europe have frequently followed.

Socialization The most visible (and the most costly) problem which accompanies multilingualism is the educational policy of mother-tongue medium of instruction. There is no general scholarly consensus based on research findings, and most policy decisions are political in nature. See also: Bilingualism, Societal; National Language Education Policy. Bibliography Alba V 1975 Catalonia: A Profile. Praeger, New York Barth F 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Allen and Unwin, London Bloomfield L 1933 Language. Henry Holt, New York Ferguson C A 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 325-40 Fishman J A 1971 National languages and languages of wider communication in the developing nations. In: Whiteley W (ed.) Language Use and Social Change. Oxford University Press, London

Fishman J A, Cooper R L, Conrad A W (eds.) 1977 The Spread of English. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Gaarder B 1977 Language maintenance or language shift. In: Mackey W F, Andersson T (eds.) Bilingualism in Early Childhood. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Hornby P A 1977 Bilingualism: Psychological, Social and Educational Implications. Academic Press, New York Lopez D E 1976 Chicano language loyalty in an urban setting. Sociology and Social Research 62:267-78 Schermerhorn R A 1970 Comparative Ethnic Relations: A Framework for Theory and Research. Random House, New York Schermerhorn R A 1972 Towards a general theory of minority groups. Cited in Verdoodt A 1972 The differential impact of immigrant French speakers on indigenous German speakers: A case study in the light of two theories. In: Fishman J A (ed.) Advances in the Sociology of Language, Part II. Mouton, The Hague Weinreich U 1953 Languages in Contact. Linguistic Circle of New York, New York

Socialization C. B. Cazden

Socialization is the process of internalization through which human beings become members of particular cultures, learning how to speak as well as how to act and think and feel. The term 'language socialization' is used more often for the primary socialization that takes place during childhood within the family (for which Schieffelin and Ochs 1986, is the best short review); but it should also refer to secondary socializations throughout life to specialized forms and uses of language in school, community, and work settings. Language socialization is a more inclusive term than language acquisition, emphasizing pragmatic as well as syntactic and semantic competence; it is the preferred term in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and culturally oriented psychology. 1. Relationships between Language and Socialization Language relates to socialization in three ways. First, language is the primary medium for socialization into culture; that is, there is socialization by or through language, where language is the means. Second, there is socialization for language, where situation-specific and culture-specific language use is the outcome. Third, there is socialization about language in the form of knowledge about, and attitudes toward, language forms and functions. While these three aspects of socialization occur together in real life, they

are often studied separately, and by different research techniques. 2. Socialization through Language Language plays an especially important role in socialization because it is such a pervasive and orderly feature of everyday life in every culture (Sapir 1962). Three characteristics of language contribute to this role: its propositional nature makes possible explicit cultural instruction; its reference to the non-here-andnow permits the sharing of memories and knowledge of the past, plans for the future, and imagined worlds; its indexicality means that units of language, such as terms of address or speaking one dialect rather than another, point to culturally interpreted aspects of the nonverbal world. (Ochs 1990 discusses this last, and more subtle, relationship.) 3. Socialization for Language Learning to speak is never simply a matter of learning a particular language or dialect—i.e., the words, syntactic patterns, and accent spoken in a particular community; it also involves learning multiple registers, that is, particular ways of using language in particular settings within that community. When one shifts registers, one also often shifts what one is talking about, and the values and beliefs implicit

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The Social Context in those words. For this reason, Gee uses the term 'discourses' for 'forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities' (1996:127; see Discourse). He then distinguishes primary and secondary discourses (including literacy in the latter), and also dominant and nondominant discourses according to their social prestige and power (see Literacy). Even young children exhibit some register variation—for example, by speaking differently to adults or their peers (reviewed in Andersen 1990). For most people, secondary socialization in additional registers continues into adulthood, as they acquire new ways of speaking in new roles. Examples include the nearly universal, but culturally expressed, roles of student (Cazden 1988) or parent (Snow and Ferguson 1977); professions such as doctor or lawyer (Philips 1982); age-specific rhetorical styles such as 'the talk of the elders of bygone days' in Mexicano communities in the southwestern USA (Briggs 1986); and occasional oral tasks like chairing meetings, or conducting sociolinguistically appropriate interviews in a particular speech community (Briggs 1986). Most research on language socialization is ethnographic. But experimental situations such as role playing can reveal register knowledge for roles never enacted in reality. Andersen (1990) provides both a research review of such knowledge in children, and a report of experimental research in which 4- to 7-yearold children gave a doctor puppet lower pitch and more imperatives and questions when talking to a nurse, and gave the nurse more polite requests to the doctor. 4. Socialization about Language Socialization about language includes both knowledge and attitudes. One kind of metapragmatic knowledge is evidenced in the way speech is reported in narrative. Whereas 7- and 10-year-old children frame direct speech, usually with 'said,' 4-year-olds often provide no verbal framing but sometimes differentiate voices by pitch (Hickman 1985). Other kinds of knowledge become important when children enter school and confront the task of learning to read (see Pedagogy). Where alphabetic orthographies are used, learners must become aware of the sounds in oral language and their relationship to letters; and even teachers, whose mental representation of language has been influenced by experience with written texts, may have to learn to distinguish the number of phonemes in a word from the number of letters. As with oral language, 'literacy socialization' is a more inclusive term than 'literacy acquisition': while the latter may refer only to learning to encode, decode, and comprehend print; the former points also to uses of reading and writing for different purposes in different settings.

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Attitudes toward language can often be inferred from observations of which forms available in an environment are in fact learned, and from spontaneous comments about other people's oral or written language use. More systematic study of language attitudes requires more experimental techniques, often by social psychologists. One widely used technique is the matched guise in which subjects evaluate messages spoken in different languages or dialects but, unknown to the subjects, by a single speaker. 5. Environmental Influences on Language Socialization There is general agreement that primary socialization occurs through participation, and through interaction between children and more mature speakers, both adults and peers. In fact, family and community settings for the virtually universally successful process of language socialization are often cited as the prototype of effective learning environments. While implicit immersion in language-related activities is certainly crucial, there is also evidence that more explicit tuition also occurs, for example, in elicited imitation routines found in many cultures in which an adult will direct a child to say a word or phrase (Ochs 1990). How secondary socializations can be aided in school is less clear, and educational controversies continue over the most effective combination of implicit immersion and explicit instruction. Heath (1983) gives a vivid picture of primary socialization in three communities that differ in race and social class, and an optimistic report of how teachers adapted their teaching for more effective secondary language socialization in school—including getting learners to 'become ethnographers' and study language use themselves. In the study of language socialization, gender differences in ways of speaking—sometimes referred to as genderlects—are especially interesting because most children are exposed to both men's and women's speech during their primary socialization. Differential socialization cannot, therefore, be explained by differential exposure (Warren-Leubecker and Bohannon 1989). 6. Socialization and Resistance Many writers on language socialization imply that language socialization is always successful as long as the learning environment is at least minimally adequate. But resistance does occur. Familiar examples are immigrant children resisting speaking the language of their primary socialization at home, if the language of the school is also the language of the wider society, or nondominant dialect speakers resisting speaking a standard dialect despite its availability at school and on television. Writing about the more general field of the socialization of cognition Goodnow (1990:280) states: 'I

Sociolinguistics seek an account of socialization that goes beyond saying that the individual must be regarded as agent or actor, or that influences are bidirectional... [E]ven if much of one's life is spent in puppet fashion, there remain at least the occasional times when one notices the strings and decides to cut them.' Of all forms of learning, language is closest to one's social and individual identity; and that identity helps to account for both resistance and learning, and is also their result. In Sapir's words, 'In spite of the fact that language acts as a socializing and uniformizing force, it is at the same time the most potent single known factor for the growth of individuality' (1962:19). See also: Intercultural Discourse. Bibliography Andersen E S 1990 Speaking with Style: The Sociolinguistic Skills of Children. Routledge, London Briggs C L 1986 Learning to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Cazden C B 1988 Classroom Discourse. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Gee J P 1996 Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. Taylor & Francis, London Goodnow J L 1990 The socialization of cognition. In: Stigler

J W, Shweder R A, Herdt G (eds.) Cultural PsychologyEssays In Comparative Human Development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hickmann M 1985 Metapragmatics in child language. In: Mertz E, Parmenter (eds.) Semiotic Mediation Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives. Academic Press, Orlando, FL Ochs E 1990 Indexicality and socialization. In: Stigler J W, Shweder R A, Herdt G (eds.) Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Philips S U 1982 The language socialization of lawyers: Acquiring the cant. In: Spindler G (ed.) Doing the Ethnography of Schooling. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Sapir E 1962 In: Mandelbaum D G (ed.) Culture, Language, and Personality: Selected Essays. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Schieffelin B, Ochs E 1986 Language socialization. Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 163-91 Snow C E, Ferguson C A (eds.) 1977 Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Warren-Leubecker A, Bohannon J N 1989 Pragmatics: Language in social contexts. In: Gleason J B (ed.) The Development of Language, 2nd edn. Merrill, Columbus, OH

Sociolinguistics D. R. Preston

The relevance of Sociolinguistics to second language acquisition (SLA) is twofold: First, it is concerned with the variation of language itself—the product, process, storage, and acquisition of such variation, including the variation learners acquire in a target language. That concern is surveyed in Sect. 1—Quantitative Microsociolinguistics. Second, it concerns itself with sociocultural and social psychological aspects of language, again including those involved in the acquisition and use of other languages. That concern is surveyed in Sect. 2 1. Quantitative Microsociolinguistics 1.1 The Labovian Paradigm A central claim of this approach is that the alternative forms of variable linguistic elements do not occur randomly. The frequency of their occurrences is predicted (a) by the shape and identity of the element itself and its linguistic context, (b) by the stylistic level

of the interaction, and (c) by the social identities and relationships of the interlocutors. The first attempt to apply this style of analysis to SLA data was very likely Dickerson (1974). Figure 1 shows the sensitivity of Japanese learners' pronunciations of English /r/ to the phonological environment. Before low vowels ( V10), the pronunciation is fairly accurate (around 75 percent); before mid vowels ( Vmid), however, it drops to around 45 percent accuracy, and before high vowels ( V hi ), it is categorically wrong. The shape of variable /r/ in the Japanese learner's English is dramatically predicted by the phonological environment. The predictability of the different realizations of a linguistic variable is often expressed in terms of a variable rule, one aspect of which allows the degree of influence of each determining factor to be expressed as an independent probability. This style of analysis is used by Bayley (1990) to show the influence of linguistic, stylistic, and social factors on Chinese lear-

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The Social Context

Figure 1. Percentage of acceptable pronunciations or English /r/ in three environments by a Japanese learner (Fasold 1984: 250; adapted from Dickerson and Dickerson 1977:20).

ner's deletion of final t/d (in such clusters as mist, left, and walked). These probability scores are to be read as follows: those above 0.50 have a promoting effect on the rule; those below 0.50 have an inhibiting effect. (Here the rule is of t/d deletion; it could have as well been one of t/d retention, reversing the probabilities.) Like Dickerson's work, Bayley's shows that the following phonological environment is significant: vowels and pauses inhibit t/d deletion; consonants, liquids, and glides promote it. The stylistic dimension is also important in quantitative sociolinguistic work. The less monitored a performance, the more natural and governed by earlylearned rules it will be. Labov (see Labov, William) refers to this stylistic level as the vernacular and to the difficulties inherent in eliciting it in such potentially inhibiting settings as tape-recorded interviews as the 'observer's paradox.' Nonvernacular styles usually reveal not only a greater density of speech community prestige forms but also later-learned and less systematically applied rules (Labov 1972: 208-09). To tease out stylistic variety, sociolinguists have employed minimal pairs, word lists, reading passages, and techniques which promote various degrees of attention to speech in spontaneous talk. Table 1 shows Table I. Word-final t/d deletion probabilities (in consonant clusters) in Chinese learner-English (adapted from Bayley 1990:8). Following segment:

Style: Social network:

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Vowel Pause Glide Consonant or liquid Reading Elicited narrative Conversation Chinese Chinese and American

0.40 0.45 0.55 0.60 0.30 0.53 0.67 0.39 0.61

Bayley's elicitation of the stylistic continuum at three points; his respondents read a set passage, recited a narrative (the story line of which was familiar to them), and engaged in spontaneous conversation. The least-monitored form of the language learners' performance ought to reveal the interlanguage vernacular, and, indeed, these respondents increase t/d deletion in their least-monitored style (0.67) and decrease it in their most heavily-monitored one (0.30). The stylistic continuum is represented in several SLA accounts of learner variation. Krashen's monitor model, for example, Krashen 1987, turns the continuum into a two-way distinction, suggesting that some few, easily-represented rules are the result of conscious activity (learning) but that most rules, difficult to describe, are the result of nonconscious activity (acquisition). In performance, Krashen claims, learners do not have sufficient time to monitor the learned rules, and their systems fail. Native speaker studies, however, have been little concerned with the monitoring of overtly learned rules. Even the most carefully-monitored (or 'formal') end of the stylistic continuum results from the application of rules which native speakers lack metalinguistic awareness of. From this perspective, monitoring refers to general attention to speech, not to attempts to retrieve consciously formulated rules. It is true, however, that native speakers, particularly in unfamiliar and/or status-ridden settings, may attempt to monitor ancient secondary school prescriptions or other shibboleths (e.g., who versus whom), and a relatively small number of such often socially damaging stereotypes exist in every speech community. Krashen may believe that an even greater number of rules have just such status for the language learner. Since it is only dichotomous, however, the monitor theory provides no explicit account of variation within both learned and acquired sets of rules nor does it appear to allow learned items to permeate the area reserved for acquired ones. In contrast, the continuous competence SLA model, for example, Tarone 1982, suggests that the stylistic continuum of the language acquirer operates much like that of the native speaker. The more attention the learner pays to speech, the more prestige forms are likely to occur (where prestige forms are construed to be target language forms or learners' understandings of what those forms are). Tarone's characterization of what style is, however, borrows heavily from the operational devices used to elicit this dimension rather than from its underlying causes (e.g., degree of formality). Stylistic fluctuation, in her account, is due to the degree of monitoring or attention to form, and varying degrees of attention to form are by-products of the amount of time which various language tasks allow the language user for monitoring (e.g., writing perhaps the most, spon-

Sociolinguistics taneous conversation the least). This variation, however, all takes place for the language acquirer within only one envelope.of performance or register; language learners, at least those in the early stages, are monoregistral. Only more advanced learners acquire different registers which entail such matters as genre and other complex norms of interaction and use which, in turn, contribute to the positioning of a task on the stylistic continuum. Perhaps just some such distinction is at work in the data reported by Bayley in Table 1. The operational realization of the stylistic dimension is satisfactorily explained by the notion that greater monitoring leads to more target-like performance (presumably the retention of t/d/ in final clusters). Oddly, however, the respondents whose network associations show greater contact with native speakers also show an increase of t/d/ deletion (0.61). This apparent contradiction may be explained in the following way: the respondents with low network associations with native speakers have a single register of performance, something which might be called the learner register. In it, absolute t/d realization is the target norm, and t/d/ deletion is the learner vernacular. (The sources of the latter may include Chinese syllable structure, universal preferences for syllable structure, stage of learning, and other matters.) For them, the stylistic continuum is operationalized as tasks and is straightforwardly represented in their scores as those tasks allow them more or less monitoring time. In contrast, the respondents with greater native speaker network contacts may have begun to acquire some of the complex registral factors which lie behind the continuum. In those registers which promote informality (where, presumably, less monitoring goes on), native speakers also delete t/d in final clusters. Superficially, all the respondents appear to be observing a rule that states that the more they monitor, the more they delete. The different network relations, however, suggest that different factors lie behind this performance. For the low network relations group, the stylistic continuum is driven only by the amount of time made available for monitoring by the linguistic task set. For the high network relations group, the continuum is indeed defined by the amount of attention given to a task but as determined both by the purely linguistic shape of the task and by the nativespeaker like registral considerations which contribute to the determination of a task's position on the continuum. An apparent fly in the ointment of the stylistic continuum, however, emerges in such sets of data as those shown in Table 2. The third person singular indicative marker (3rs) follows the predictions made earlier— the more attention paid to form (obviously "here the grammar test), the greater likelihood of native-like performance; but the article shows exactly the reverse trend—the greater attention paid to form, the less target-like the performance.

Table 2. VARBRUL probabilities for target-like realization of third singular indicative markers (3rs) and articles in English by Japanese and Arabic learners (Tarone 1985). Japanese Arabic Grammar test Interview Narrative

3rs 0.63 0.37 0.63 0.48 0.39

Article 0.42 0.58 0.23 0.56 0.72

Preston (1989) suggests that this apparent contradiction may be explained by incorporating something of the monitoring distinction into the continuous competence model. The 3rs in English is clearly marked—it (and only it) of the present indicatives has phonological substance, and it is, except perhaps for its morphophonological adjustment, simple, controlled by the purely local concern of agreement. The article, on the other hand, is multifunctional, has alternative forms (including even null), and is driven by such non-local factors as presupposition, given-new information, and so on. The 3rs, therefore, is the sort of form which monitoring will provide the right answer for, even if learners have come up with theories of their own rather than being explicitly taught. Rumination on what form (if any) of the article to use, however, is apparently more likely to lead to disaster than success. Its rules are complex and not guided by an immediate, simple context. Preston (1989) concludes that, in general, marked forms will make more rapid progress in the interlanguage development of more highlymonitored styles and unmarked forms will more quickly develop in the unmonitored ones. Native-speaker studies of variability were done at least in part to show how variation was central to linguistic change, and studies of respondents of different age groups (studies in apparent time) rather than longitudinal ones have predominated. Only a few SLA studies have followed this lead; Young (1990), for example, shows that for Chinese learners of English the factor of low proficiency retards plural marking on nouns with a probability of 0.32 while the factor of high proficiency promotes plural marking with a probability of 0.60. SLA studies may, therefore, use quantitative methods to indicate the degree to which level of proficiency contributes to the predictability of target-like performance for a given feature. 1.2 The Dynamic Paradigm The most noteworthy of the competing models in quantitative microsociolinguistics is associated with the work of Bailey, Bickerton, and DeCamp, particularly in its application to Creole languages. Their work makes use of an implicational scale, which is sensitive to relations among variables in the entire

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The Social Context Table 3. Implicational ordering of the acquisition of English /8/ in five different environments by French Canadians (Preston 1989: 32; adapted from Gatbonton 1978). Linguistic environments Heaviest V

VCT VS Lect 1 1 1 1 1 1 1,2 2 1 3 1,2 1,2 1,2 4 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 5 1,2 1,2 6 1,2 1,2 2 7 1,2 1,2 2 8 2 1,2 2 9 2 2 2 10 2 2 2 11 2 2 V = preceding vowel VCT = preceding voiced continuant VS = preceding voiced stop VLCT = preceding voiceless continuant VLS =preceding voiceless stop.

VLCT. 1 1 1 1 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 2

2

Lightest VLS

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 2

Number of subjects N 3 7 3 0 2 2 3 1 1 0 0

1 = categorical presence of nonnative substitute for English 2 = categorical presence of native or native-like English 1, 2 — variation of 1 and 2.

system rather than to the set of determining influences on one variable. The first application of such techniques to SLA is very likely Gatbonton (1978). Table 3 shows an implicational array of the voiced interdental (/6/) for Canadian French learners of English. The controlling environments (here the preceding sound) are arranged on a scale of heaviest to lightest, but these weights are not only related to probabilistic influences of the various environments on the feature in question. The weight is an expression of the relation between one environment and all the others and the lect which that unique relationship defines. Lect 1, for example, is the grammar of learners who have not even begun to vary between non-native and target-like performances of /6/ in the most likely phonological environment for target-like performance (i.e., after vowels). What is implicational about this arrangement is that every lighter environment also has, predictably, categorial non-target-like performance. Conversely, speakers of lect 11 who have invariant target-like performances in the lightest environment (i.e., the one least likely to promote such performance, here a preceding voiceless stop) predictably have it in every heavier environment. Such implicational arrays are apparently not arbitrary, for of the 28 respondents sampled in Gatbonton's study, only six did not fit one of the predicted lect patterns. The dynamic paradigm approach is perhaps even more appropriate to semanto-syntactic and morphosyntactic variation, for the emerging lects are seen as ones which reveal redefined form-function units

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increasingly in line with target language norms. Huebner (1983), for example, in a year-long longi tudinal analysis of an adult Hmong acquirer of English, shows, among other things, how is (a) moves, in different environments, from marking asserted (or comment as opposed to topic) information to the range of functions which is has in the target language. At first, there may appear to be only trivial differences between the Labovian and dynamic paradigms. The first studies the exact degree of influence of each factor; the second specifies the categorial states before and after variability and ignores the precise contribution of each controlling factor during variability, although the weight of each shows its relative effect. The psycholinguistic corollaries of the two modes are, however, quite distinct. The system which encloses the variety of probabilistic influences within the Labovian paradigm is a unified one. That is, variability, although clearly related to change, may also be relatively stable within the single competence of a monodialectal speaker. In short, variability is inherent. In the dynamic paradigm, any inherent variability is short-lived, lasting only during the brief transition between categorial presence and absence of formfunction change (in a given environment). The greater variability which appears to be present is, in fact, simply the shifting back and forth from one lect to another. In short, most variability is apparent. The psycholinguistic ramifications of these two differing views have not been worked out in either native speaker or SLA contexts.

Sociolinguistics 2. Language in its Social Context The second group of general research trends surveyed here is represented by a variety of schools, the first three of which in particular are only briefly summarized. 2.1 The Ethnography of Communication Closely associated with the American anthropological linguists Hymes and Gumperz, this style of sociolinguistic inquiry examines an array of contextual concerns in language performance, status, intent, reception, and the like. The targets of investigation typically include larger forms (e.g., genres, speech acts, and events) as well as those investigated in quantitative styles, and the manner of investigation is more often qualitative. The results of such studies characterize the elements necessary to the communicative competence underlying appropriate speech behavior. Generally speaking, the influence of this area of sociolinguistic inquiry on SLA has been on the description of native-speaker behavior as a target model for speech acts (particularly in such culturally variable speech activities as warning, complimenting, requesting, and the like). 2.2 Ethnomethodology and Discourse Analysis Discourse studies are associated with Sociolinguistics, at least in part, due to the important contribution of such sociologists as Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks. In general, such studies hope to find a grammar of larger units, particularly the grammar that is created in the give-and-take of conversation. Like the ethnography of communication, discourse studies of native-speaker interaction have been held up as models in SLA, although an important additional trend has been that of the study of classroom interaction, and those and other studies have focused on the conversational details of native-non-native and nonnative-non-native interactions (see Intercultural Discourse; Discourse in the Language Classroom). 2.3 The Sociology of Language SLA studies have also been sensitive to the larger concerns of societal and individual bi- and multilingualism and to the concerns of language planning, minority languages, area linguistics, and emerging standards and varieties (see Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Individual; Bilingualism, Societal). 2.4 The Social Psychology of Language Language attitude studies have been related to SLA concerns from their beginnings, although early work in such studies by Lambert and Fishman focused on the affective domain in bilingual settings. Consideration of attitudinal factors (both towards and of acquirers) has been a component of many approaches to SLA. Krashen's monitor theory, for example, includes an affective filter which may impede or pro-

mote acquisition (see Krashen). Schumann's acculturation model (e.g., Schumann 1978) suggests that maximum or attenuated social distance between learners and members of the speech community they wish to join may result in a frozen, pidginized variety of the target (a dramatic form of fossilization). Gardner (1985) reviews SLA theories which contain strong social psychological elements or are themselves byproducts of investigations into the social psychology of language. Studies in this framework are generally quantitative, often experimental studies of affective responses to language samples. Some studies, however, focus on linguistic details and others on social factors. Such studies as Schumann's, for example, detail the pidginized forms of an unsuccessful language learner and suggest that the learner's rejection by and of the new language environment is a major factor. On the other hand, studies carried out in the tradition of Giles and his associates, following on earlier work by Lambert and Fishman, detail the attitudes toward native and target languages and their speakers by learners and hosts, and reason that language learning success or failure is related to positive or negative valuations, respectively, on both sides (see Second Language Learning: Individual Differences}. 3. Trends and Prospects The Labovian and dynamic paradigms are being brought together in such quantitative work as Bayley's and Young's, for probabilities are being assigned to underlying semanto-syntactic categories as they emerge in new varieties of a developing interlanguage. Perhaps such focus will provide insights into the important psycholinguistic differences between the two models of research. For ethnographic and attitudinal studies, Preston (1989) has suggested that the development of an interlanguage is best thought of as a process which will produce a competent bilingual, not one which will clone a native speaker. That understanding should allow even more careful investigation of the developing rule systems of an interlanguage, perhaps even singling out those subtle rule differences which effectively symbolize the nonnative but successful speech community member. Speech communities are made up of speakers who share norms of communication, not necessarily of those who share the same native language. As interlanguages develop, it is logical to assume that learners are putting together a competent but distinctive system (open to quantitative analysis), which gives them a place in the speech community (or communities) where they intend to interact, such interaction being open to the various means available for the study of language in its social context. Both approaches will surely engage the interest of those

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The Social Context who care to look at sociolinguistics in SLA settings (see Inter language), Bibliography Bayley R 1990 Modeling interlanguage variation: -t, d deletion in Chinese English. (A paper presented to NWAVE-XIX (New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, October, 1990) Dickerson L J H 1974 Internal and external patterning of phonological variability in the speech of Japanese learners of English: Toward a theory of second-language acquisition. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL Dickerson L, Dickerson W 1977 Interlanguage phonology: Current research and future directions. In: Corder S P, Roulet E (eds.) The Notions of Simplification, Interlanguages and Pidgins and their Relation to Second Language Pedagogy (Actes du 5ème Colloque de Linguistique Appliquee de Neuchatel, May 20-22,1976). Libraire Droz, Geneva Fasold R W 1984 Variation theory and language learning. In:

Trudgill P (ed.) Applied Sociolinguistics. Academic Press, London Gardner R C 1985 Social Psychology and Second Language Learning. Arnold, London Huebner T 1983 Linguistic systems and linguistic change in an interlanguage. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 6:33-53 Krashen S O 1987 Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Labov W 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Preston D R 1989 Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Blackwell, Oxford Schumann J H 1978 The acculturation model for second language acquisition. In: Gingras R G (ed.) Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA Tarone E E 1982 Systematicity and attention in interlanguage. Language Learning 32: 69-84 Tarone E E 1985 Variability in interlanguage use: A study of style-shifting in morphology and syntax. Language Learning 35: 373-103 Young R 1990 Variation in Interlanguage Morphology. Peter Lang, New York

Standardization E. Haugen+

Any vernacular (language or dialect) may be 'standardized' by being given a uniform and consistent norm of writing that is widely accepted by its speakers. It may then be referred to as a 'standard' language. The requirements posed in this definition involve (a) an explicit norm and (b) speaker acceptance. The first is fulfilled by an individual (or a competent group) who selects the forms of one or more dialects and decides on a suitable transcription for the standard. The second is fulfilled by the wide acceptance of the standard as a desirable mode of writing the vernacular. In its initial phase the users of a standard are usually a tightly knit group of elite members (a coterie, a church, an academy) and are only gradually extended to include a whole people or a nation. Throughout the world, language standards are the product of either military conquest, immigration, or commercial contact. 1. History of Standardization The idea of standard languages arose during the Renaissance in Europe, and it may be questioned whether there were any standardized languages prior to the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. Most standards were preceded by a profusion of scri70

bal varieties, which reflected either the scribe's local dialect or some personal idiosyncrasy. An example is Sanskrit, which was based on a dialect spoken by Hindus living in northeast India from ca. 1500 BC. While the spoken dialects kept changing, Sanskrit was codified in the fourth century BC by the linguist Panini. After that it became the sacred medium of Hinduism and was preserved in a ritualized form which resembled the modern standards. But it remained the possession of a small coterie of specialists. Greek has been known since the fourteenth century BC but its literature was written in several dialects until the Hellenistic period, i.e., the fourth century BC. It then achieved a fairly unified form known as the koine, or common language, based on Attic Greek. Modern Greek is ultimately based on the koine, but is widely different. When Adamantios Korais (1748-1833) in the early years of the nineteenth century conceived the idea of a new standard language for Greece, he adopted a highly literary form, partly based on the koine, which came to be known as the Katharevousa, or 'pure' language. Modern writers have in part deviated by adopting elements from spoken Greek, the Demotike, or 'popular' language.

Standardization Latin began as just another Indo-European dialect in Italy, spoken from the fourth century BC. But Rome's conquest of the peninsula in 338 BC laid the foundation for the replacement of the dialects of Latium by the Latin of Rome. Early writers like Plautus and Terence have been credited with writing the first forms of Latin. In the development of Latin, Greek played a large role. The Latin language was then spread by the conquest of what became the Roman Empire. This was for centuries the learned language of European nations, while the spoken vernacular developed into the modern Romance languages. It was roughly codified by Latin grammarians in the early centuries of our era. Even though it was spread widely, the lack of printing kept it from counting as a true standard language. 2. Institutional Efforts at Standardization The idea of the Language Academy as an instrument for creating a standard language was launched in Italy by Count Cosimo I of Florence. He founded the Accademia della Crusca in 1582. A generation later Cardinal Richelieu followed suit by founding the Academic franfaise in 1635. Richelieu gave its 40 'Immortals' the power to encourage all that was 'noble, polished, and reasonable' in the French language, but as has been pointed out, there was hardly one of the members who was trained in linguistics or lexicography. They were really social arbiters whose function it was to decide on criteria of good taste in language. However, they did produce both a grammar and a dictionary of French. A similar institution was founded in Spain by King Philip V, the Real Academia Espanol in 1713, designated to 'clarify, purify, and glorify' the Spanish language. Here the first codification had already been made by Antonio de Nebrija, who presented a grammar of Spanish to Queen Isabella in 1492. In its wake other academies were founded in the countries of the Spanish New World. In Germany Sprachgesellschaften sprang up with the idea of 'purifying' the German language. In Sweden an academy was established by King Gustav III in 1786. In Hungary one was established in 1830. Arabic academies grew up in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. A Russian Academy produced a dictionary (1789-94) and a grammar (1802). Conspicuous here is the absence of any English institution of similar import. There was active agitation for the creation of one in the eighteenth century by persons as eminent as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. But in typical Anglo-Saxon manner, private enterprise took over. In 1720 the indefatigable Samuel Johnson produced his English dictionary, which fulfilled the needs of the English. The example was followed in the United States by the work of Noah Webster.

After the Reformation the Scandinavian languages were standardized by the translators of the Bible, working in close contact with the royal chanceries. A Danish version of the New Testament came in 1529 by Christienn Pedersen, who also published a LatinDanish dictionary (1510). The official Danish Bible appeared in 1550. A Swedish New Testament was translated in 1526 and the complete Bible in 1541 under the guidance of the reformers Olaus and Laurentius Petri. An Icelandic New Testament by Oddur Gottskalkson came in 1540. Norway as a dependency of Denmark did not receive a translation of its own, and consequently no standard language. Two initiatives to create a Norwegian standard were launched in the mid-nineteenth century, after Norway was detached from Denmark in 1814 and got autonomy in a union with Sweden. In 1853 the dialectologist Ivar Aasen devised a norm of Norwegian based on the rural dialects, especially the western ones which retained most of the Old Norwegian quality. He was opposed by the schoolman Knud Knudsen, who in 1856 proposed a Dano-Norwegian norm that took account of the cultivated speech in the cities, especially in Eastern Norway. Aasen's standard was known as Landsmål 'Country Language' (now Nynorsk 'New Norwegian'), Knudsen's as Dansknorsk or Riksmål 'Language of the Kingdom' (now known as Bokmål 'Book Language'). These two standards have contended ever since for supremacy; in modern times the Nynorsk has captured only one-sixth of the school districts, none of them urban. In the twentieth century the Scandinavian languages have emphasized the principle of 'language cultivation' (Swedish språkvård, Norwegian sprdkr0kt, Danish sprogr0gt). Beginning with the Swedish Nämnden for svensk språkvård ('The Committee for Swedish Language Cultivation') in 1944, a whole series of such committees were established in the Scandinavian countries: Swedish Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Faroes. Each of these countries also has Centers of Technical Terminology, with the special task of unifying the specialized terminologies of their languages. After intense controversy the Norwegian Language Committee was reorganized in 1972 as the Norwegian Language Council (Norsk Språkråd) with new guidelines. In 1978 a joint Scandinavian Committee was established with offices in Oslo. 3. Means and Effects of Standardization As will be seen, the creation and propagation of a standard involves on the one hand the creation of instruments for standardization in the form of grammars and dictionaries, and on the other the presence of a population that finds the standard useful in its communicative efforts. Standardization in effect creates a new language, since it can never capture the entire language nor remain entirely static. Beginning

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The Social Context as a reading language, it may in time lead to a new standard spoken language, which may in part be imposed on a population, either by coercion or voluntarily. It usually has a greater prestige than the vernaculars on which it is based and serves to unify the population ruled by a central government. An example is the switch of Turkish from an Arabic to a Roman script, decreed in 1928 by Atatürk. While this in itself did not change the language, it was accompanied by an increased activity in purifying it from Arabic and Persian elements. The 'revival' of Hebrew in Israel after its settlement by Jewish groups in the 1900s is a striking example of the adoption of a traditional language as a written standard, resulting in a new spoken vernacular, following the initial agitation of Eliezer Ben Yehuda. However, the modern vernacular is far from identical with biblical Hebrew. It is said to be influenced by the thoroughly Western substratum of its predominantly Yiddish origins (Yiddish being a dialect of German). Chinese is not a single language, but several mutually unintelligible ones, often called 'dialects.' They are joined by a common writing system, which goes back to a classical script known as 'Wen-yen.' This script has no common pronunciation, but is read by each speaker in his or her particular dialect. The most prestigious variety of Chinese is the Mandarin, spoken in the north; this is known as 'Modern Standard Chinese,' and is based on the Peking (Beijing) dialect. There are two major systems of romanization: the Wade-Giles devised in 1859 by Sir Thomas Francis Wade; the present-day official Chinese romanization is known as 'Pin-yin' and was adopted in 1958. But the traditional characters persist. Japanese is spoken in various dialects, but the Japanese adopted the characters of Chinese as their writing system in the early centuries AD. The characters are known as 'kanjf and are still used, though restricted in number. Because of the entirely different, structure of Japanese, an additional, more phonetic, system was devised, known as 'kana.' This comes in two versions, the 'hiragand' or 'common kana' used for grammatical particles, and 'katakana' 'one-sided kana,' used for foreign loanwords. This cumbersome system has resisted all attempts at reform, though some changes have been made in a colloquial direction since 1880. Korean was also first written in Chinese characters, but a native script was introduced in 1446. This 28letter alphabet was devised by a group of scholars working at the behest of a reigning king, but did not win the recognition of the literati until the beginning of the twentieth century. Korean can be written in two ways in the late twentieth century, one which is purely alphabetic and one which is a 'mixed' script, including some Chinese characters. The former is used in North Korea, the latter in South Korea. Arabic is a language whose Classical form was established by the religion that bore it to triumph

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through North Africa and the Near and Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries AD. It was used by Muslims through the Middle Ages and is still the language of the school and administration in all Arabic countries. There is a considerable gap between the often mutually unintelligible vernaculars that are derived from classical Arabic. Except in Malta, which has adopted Roman writing of the language, it is everywhere written in the Arabic alphabet. Both Arabic and Hebrew writing are descended from an alphabetic Phoenician script. The major Indo-Aryan languages of North India are written in the Devanagari script or varieties of it, developed in the seventh to ninth centuries. It has remained essentially unaltered to the present. Varieties of it spread with Buddhism from India into other south Asiatic countries as far east as Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The languages have been standardized at various times. 4. Colonial and Missionary Efforts at Standardization

In Africa a number of lingua francas have developed to bridge the tremendous number of native vernaculars of the continent. Of these, Swahili is official in Tanzania and Kenya, and is used widely in East Africa. Others are Lingala, Fanakalo, and Sango. Hausa is used in Nigeria; Amharic is official in Ethiopia, Wolof in Senegal and Gambia, and Kongo near the Congo River. There are also countries where nonAfrican languages are in common use, including Arabic, English, and French. The Island of Madagascar has a Malayo-Polynesian language. Although the first grammar of an African language (Kongo) goes back to 1659, extensive study was not begun until the nineteenth century. Yoruba boasts the earliest dictionary written by a native speaker (1843). There has been intensive missionary activity, resulting in many local grammars, but there are few languages that can be described as standardized. In South Africa the formerly Dutch population uses Afrikaans, the English a variety of standard English. American Indian languages are also numerous, with many local grammars and dictionaries, but little if any standardization. As in Africa, most such initiatives were taken by linguists. An interesting exception is the Cherokee syllabary, devised in 1821 by a halfCherokee native named Sequoyah and widely used for a time. In Greenland the first book in the native Greenlandic was published by the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede in 1742. A systematic orthography in Roman letters was devised by the German missionary Samuel Kleinschmidt in 1851. But as a self-governing overseas administrative division of Denmark it has Danish as one of its official languages (along with Greenlandic.) As this brief survey of selected languages shows, standard languages are usually artifacts of religious or military penetration and the needs of a central

Sweden: Immigrant Languages government, abetted by an ever-expanding literate population. Bibliography Edwards J 1985 Language, Society and Identity. Blackwell, Oxford Haugen E 1972 The Ecology of Language. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA

Haugen E 1976 The Scandinavian Languages. Faber, London Palmer L R 1961 The Latin Language. Faber, London Priebsch R, Collinson W E 1962 The German Language. Faber, London Sebeok T A 1963-1976 Current Trends in Linguistics, 14 vols. Mouton, The Hague Språk i Norden 1961-1989. Cappelen, Oslo

Sweden: Immigrant Languages S. Boyd

Prior to World War II, Sweden was an unusually homogeneous country, both ethnically and linguistically. This situation has changed dramatically, so that by the late 1990s there were over a million resident immigrants (12 percent of the country's population). Immigrants have come to Sweden as labor migrants, refugees, and members of the families of natives and of immigrant residents already in the country. Provisions have been made for the education of immigrants and their children at virtually all levels. Labor migration was dominant from the late 1950s through the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, workers came from other parts of Europe, particularly the other Nordic countries (with whom Sweden established a free labor market in 1954), and southeast Europe. Restrictions were made on the migration of non-Nordic residents in 1967, and all labor migration was ended in 1973, but the open Nordic labor market and 'family-tie' migration kept the figures high during the 1970s. The increasing importance of family-tie migration has changed the official view of immigrant minority groups in Sweden from that of guest workers (typical of early labor migration) to that of immigrants. The migration of spouses and the subsequent birth of a second generation in Sweden have also changed the demands minorities have placed on Swedish society as regards education, social services, opportunity to practice non-Christian religions, etc. Sweden has also received refugees during the entire postwar period, first from Eastern Europe and South America, later from the Middle East and former Yugoslavia. During the first half of the 1990s Sweden granted asylum to between 12000 and 45000 people annually, most of them from Bosnia and other parts of former Yugoslavia, but since 1995 the number granted asylum is only about 5000 annually. The official policy of the Swedish state toward immigrants is relatively generous as it stands. Its basic point of departure is that immigrants should be

granted the same rights and privileges as the native population. The government provides extra resources to facilitate a certain linguistic and cultural 'freedom of choice' for the immigrants. This is theoretically intended to provide the opportunity either to practice the culture of their country of origin, or to adopt Swedish culture. The official policies also apply to a broad category of people, not all of whom actually consider themselves to be immigrants. Accordingly, an individual is an immigrant if they were born abroad or had at least one parent born abroad. Persons born in other parts of the Nordic region, particularly in Finland, comprised about one-third of all foreign born residents in the middle of the 1990s. Other minorities with over 30 000 members included immigrants from Bosnia, other parts of former Yugoslavia, Iran, Turkey, and Iraq. In the compulsory school in the mid-1990s, over 100000 pupils (12 percent of all) report that a language other than Swedish is regularly used in the home. The number of mother tongues reported was 120 nationwide. Of these 100000 pupils, over half received instruction in their mother tongue (L1) and almost as many instruction in Swedish as a second language (Sw2). Both these subjects now have their own official curriculum. Instruction of pupils with non-Swedish Lls is sometimes provided within the framework of a preparatory class, where pupils with a variety of backgrounds receive short-term intensive instruction in Swedish as a second language, and sometimes in a mother-tongue class, where all pupils have the same non-Swedish first language and receive instruction in most subjects in their LI as well as instruction in Sw2. But the vast majority of pupils with non-Swedish L1 attend regular classes with Swedish children, and receive instruction in Sw2 during school hours and/or instruction in their mother tongue after school, by a peripatetic teacher. The provision of instruction in mother tongue classes has decreased 73

The Social Context since the mid-1980s. At the same time, the number of independent schools offering instruction in a language other than Swedish has increased, and the proportion of pupils with other mother tongues attending independent schools is higher than the proportion attending public schools. In the upper secondary school, a comparable proportion of pupils are of foreign background. Here, the main thrust of instruction has been in Swedish as a second language for pupils who have inadequate Swedish to pursue regular studies in the upper secondary school. For adult immigrants and refugees, introductory courses in Swedish have been provided free of charge since 1965, the organizers and amount of teaching provided changing several times since then. In the mid-1990s approximately 25000 adults participated in this instruction, most of which was organized by municipalities. Despite the official policy of freedom of choice, and the provision of 'home language instruction,' language shift in the second generation is widespread, and retarded only slightly by measures such as mother-tongue classes. This picture may change, however, as immigrants and refugees from more distant countries arrive in greater numbers. Although the policy towards immigrants, particularly in relation to language may be seen as relatively generous, several problems have remained pressing particularly within the field of education. First, much of the instruction in the compulsory school, especially in Sw2, but previously also in L1, has been organized along the lines of remedial education, requiring pupils to leave their regular classes for one or more lessons per week. In the late 1990s, L1 instruction has taken place primarily after school hours, when children are

tired and other activities compete with it. Instruction in Sw2 thus has taken on a quality of compensatory education, while L1 instruction has become an 'extra' subject of minor importance, like sports or music lessons. Second, teacher training courses have not met the demands for teachers in the field, so many.teachers providing the programs are inadequately trained. As regards home language instruction, problems are exacerbated by the large number of minority languages in any one school, and in many cases, by the small number of pupils with the same L1 in a particular area. Third, many teachers and other personnel in close contact with minorities feel the need to incorporate a multicultural component in their own training, as well as in the school curriculum, in order to meet the needs of individuals from an increasing variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds now living in Sweden. As immigrants come from further afield and from a greater diversity of cultural backgrounds, language instruction alone is no longer adequate to meet the needs of immigrants and native Swedes in an increasingly multilingual, multicultural society. See also: Australian Minority Languages; Canadian Language Education Policy; Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Individual; Bilingualism, Societal. Bibliography Breeder P, Extra G 1999 Language, ethnicity and education. Case studies of immigrant minority groups and immigrant minority languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Hyltenstam K, Arnberg L 1988 Bilingualism and education of immigrant children and adults in Sweden. In: Paulston C B (ed.) International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Greenwood Press, New York

Teaching Endangered Languages L. Hinton

There are presently more than 6000 languages in the world, but almost half of the human population are native speakers of the top 10 of these languages (Grimes 1996). What this means is that the majority of human languages are spoken by very small numbers of people. We are in the midst of worldwide social change where economic and political forces combined with a revolution in communications are working against the continued existence of these small languages. Language shift to the world languages is so rapid and so extensive that we can well expect that 74

over half of the languages on earth will disappear in the coming century (Krauss 1992). We call these languages 'endangered,' especially, as is the case with so many now, they are no longer being learnt at home by children, but are known only to adults or even just to a few elderly speakers. The decline of linguistic diversity in the world is linked to the world political economy which invades and takes over the territories of indigenous peoples, threatens the ecosystems in which they live, and wipes out their traditional means of livelihood. Because of

Teaching Endangered Languages these links, the right to maintain minority languages has become a human rights issue, supported by such international organizations as UNESCO. A worldwide movement for the rights of indigenous peoples is resulting in the development of language revitalization efforts in thousands of speech communities. The revitalization of Hebrew, which had not been spoken as a native language for 2000 years, was an exceptional early case of the revival of an actually extinct language. A more typical case, however, involves revitalization of a language that still has some (perhaps only a few) speakers. Current strong revitalization programs are underway in such locations as New Zealand (Maori), Hawai'i (Hawaiian), Spain (Catalan), Wales (Welsh), and Ireland (Gaelic). The multitude of indigenous languages of the Americas are especially threatened, and in recent years literally hundreds of maintenance and revitalization programs have developed all over the hemisphere. 1. The Role of Schools in Language Revitalization The core of a language revitalization movement necessarily involves second language teaching, since by definition endangered languages are not spoken by a large portion of the population to which that language belongs. Most revitalization efforts are centered in schools. This has an ironic twist to it, because schools themselves have been one of the parties most responsible for language decline. In North America, for example, the first half of the twentieth century saw a purposeful policy of language eradication toward indigenous peoples through the establishment of boarding schools where children were removed from their families and cultures, and punished whenever they were 'caught' speaking their language anywhere on the school grounds. Even when schools do not purposefully set out to destroy languages, their influence on language development and social development is so strong that the children of minority groups may abandon their language of heritage early in life. The end result is that in one generation or another the language ceases to be spoken at home, at which point it becomes moribund. Despite the fact that schools have played such a major role in language shift, they are also capable of being the major players in reversing language shift. When the families find their ancestral language silenced at home, their only hope for reversing language shift is in second language learning, and communities look to schools as the place where second language learning can most effectively take place. 2. Differences Between Teaching Endangered Languages and World Languages The teaching of endangered languages is very different from the teaching of world languages, in terms of the following factors:

2.1 Resources Available for Language Teaching Resources may be slim for teaching an endangered language. Funding is rarely stable, pedagogical materials may be nonexistent (at least initially), and finding teachers who are also speakers may be difficult or impossible. Expertise may be lacking in state-ofthe-art language teaching methods. Thus, any language revitalization program must have a strong training program and must spend a good deal of energy on the development of materials and curriculum, or else on developing a teaching methodology that is not strongly dependent on materials and fixed curriculum. 2.2 Goals In a typical foreign language classroom, goals are usually simply to learn the language in order to communicate with native speakers of the language or read literature in that language. For an endangered language, the goals are much larger and the stakes much higher. The language has ceased being the languageof communication, so not only must people learn to speak it, but communicative functions of the language must be recreated in order for it to be used again. If the classroom is the site of learning, for a language to be revitalized it must also leave the classroom, and be brought back as the language of communication within the community. The goal, then, is Reversing Language Shift (RLS), as termed by Fishman (1991). Furthermore, language revitalization must be seen only as part of a more general cultural revitalization, usually accompanied by the reaffirmation of traditional activities and values and possibly efforts toward ecological restoration as well. All of this means that any language program in the school must be part of a community-wide program, and cannot simply be something the school itself designs and implements without strong community involvement. In fact, very frequently revitalization programs involve the setting up of separate schools, rather than the establishment of a program within an existing school. 2.3 The Consequences of Language Teaching In the case of successful RLS, the second language learners of today will become the main carriers and teachers of the language tomorrow. This means that any incomplete learning (accent, grammatical, or lexical deficiencies, etc.) will become part of the future of the language itself. The only way for a learner to become fluent is to create an intensive immersion program. In schools, this generally means a program where the language becomes the language of instruction in the school. Endangered languages, which are not presently used as the language of communication, lack much of the vocabulary needed to talk in today's world and today's classroom. Generally connected with intensive second language teaching for endangered languages 75

The Social Context must be a way to generate new vocabulary, and some authority structure to oversee the development. All in all, then, one of the consequences of teaching an endangered language is that the language will undergo intensive change. The social and political changes that accompany RLS are also often very profound, both in the speech community and in the surrounding 'mainstream' community, as we will see in the Hawaiian example below. 3. Hawai'i One of the most successful programs so far in achieving RLS through second language teaching is the Hawaiian program, run by the 'Aha Punana Leo Foundation. It now has nine preschools and two highschools (one public, one private) with Hawaiian as the main language of instruction, and 14 elementary schools with Hawaiian-language tracks. A recently opened Masters Program in Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo means students may go all the way to a master's degree with Hawaiian as the main language of instruction. Children enter preschool knowing English only, but through structured immersion principles, they are usually using Hawaiian exclusively in school within 6 months. Since few people of professional age know Hawaiian fluently, people planning on becoming teachers in the program learn the language at the University of Hawai'i. As the 'lead group' of students progressed through school, the University of Hawai'i at Hilo kept a year ahead of them in producing materials and books, having to develop the curriculum and write or translate books for all school subjects. This also demanded the development of a massive new vocabulary, so a 'Lexicon Committee' was founded which meets regularly to determine what the new words shall be. For the computer, important programs such as Claris Works now have a Hawaiian language version. Since people of parenting age do not know Hawaiian, unless they have learnt it in college, parents of the children in the immersion schools are encouraged to do volunteer service in the classroom, and go to once-a-week night classes to learn basic classroom Hawaiian. Parents sending their children to this program often have a strong commitment to the language, and there are a dozen or so families who have committed to making Hawaiian the language of their homes. In order for this program to succeed it needed legislative support, for up to then, it was illegal to use anything but English in the classroom. After a great deal of hard work, Hawaiian and English were made the co-official languages of the state, and it was made legal for schools to teach in either language. Through the enormous efforts of many dedicated and talented people, this program has resulted in the growth of several thousand new fluent speakers. 4. Other Programs New Zealand served as a model for the Hawaiian program and, like Hawai'i, is experiencing a great

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resurgence of the Maori language. Some other programs around the world, such as Irish, also teach the language in schools nationwide, but do not have such a strong emphasis on immersion and use of the language as the primary language of instruction (although there are enclaves where such schools exist). Smaller groups, such as the Blackfeet and the Mohawk, have developed immersion programs on a smaller scale. Bilingual education has been the focus elsewhere, such as among the Navajo, and the Quechua in the Andes. In some communities, the schools have not been the primary focus of language education. Some of the Pueblos (e.g., Cochiti) have summer immersion programs and after-school classes. In California, where 50 languages are still spoken, but only by a dozen or less elderly speakers each, a unique intertribal program has developed, called the 'MasterApprentice Language Program,' where adult learners pair up with elderly speakers and are given training that allows them to interact informally together for up to 20 hours per week using only their ancestral language. Some 60 teams, for over 20 languages, have gone through this program over the last 7 years. The goal is for the young apprentice to gain fluency in the language and then to be able to teach children in whatever setting is available (Hinton 1997b). 5. Documentation An important part of any revitalization program should also be documentation. In their zeal to get new speakers, sometimes communities forget that while the elders are there to help now, they will not be there in the future and they have much knowledge that will probably not be adequately transmitted during their lifetimes. Audiotapes and videotapes of the elders are of tremendous value long after their death, and often form the basis of excellent CDs, storybooks, and other pedagogical materials. 6. Role of the Linguist In all of these programs, linguists have played a central role in design, development, training, and implementation. The most important functions of the linguist are to bring analytical knowledge of the language into the program where needed, good knowledge of documentation, and effective theory and methodology of language teaching into whatever kind of program is developed. Immersion, communicative competence, and links to cultural revitalization are stressed in all the most successful programs; the role of writing may also be important (e.g., with Hawaiian and Gaelic), or it may be insignificant (as with the California masterapprentice program, where most of the languages have no official writing system or literary tradition, or with the Cochiti, who have officially decided not to write their language at all). Each community has unique needs, and the linguist and the community must work closely together to develop the right program.

Teaching Endangered Languages Bibliography Hinton L 1997b Survival of endangered languages: The CalFishman J A 1991 Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical ifornia master Apprentice Program. InternationalJournal and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened of theSociology of Language 123: 177-91 Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, PA Krauss M 1992 The world's languages in crisis. Language Grenoble A, Whaley LJ (eds.) 1998 Endangered Languages. 68: 4-10 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Reyhner J (ed.) 1996 Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Grimes F (ed.) 1996 Ethnologue: Languages of the World Center for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona (13th edn.) Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, University, Flagstaff, AZ TX Reyhner J (ed.) 1997 Teaching Indigenous Languages. Center Hinton L 1997a Hawaiian language schools. News from for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona UniverNative California 10(4): 15-22 sity, Flagstaff, AZ

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National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education Australian Indigenous Languages T. Shopen

There were over 200 languages in Australia at the time of European conquest. In the 1990s only 20 of these are still spoken by children in their full form (Schmidt 1990). Over half of these are being used along with English in bilingual schools, including Yolngu and Warlpiri in the Northern Territory, and Western Desert language varieties in South Australia and Western Australia. The teaching of Aboriginal languages has special urgency. Many Aboriginal people want their languages used in school. But opinion is divided, with other Aborigines believing their children should have their education in English only. 1. Bilingual Schools for Aboriginal Children

A factor in Aboriginal language death was a policy of 'English only' in schools. When a Labor government came to power in 1972, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam proclaimed that all Australian children should have the right to become literate in their native language first. This led to government bilingual schools for Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory, where most surviving Aboriginal languages are spoken, and the start of several such schools in Western Australia and Queensland. The ones in Western Australia and Queensland are no longer in operation. There are, in the late twentieth century, four nongovernment bilingual Aboriginal schools in Western Australia, two Catholic and two independent. Queensland has none. South Australia has eight, all run by the government. It had bilingual education for Aboriginal children in mission schools as early as the 1940s, and the government there has had bilingual Aboriginal schools since 1969. The issue does not arise in New South Wales, Victoria, or Tasmania, where there are no living Aboriginal languages. With about 80 major communities in the Northern Territory in which Aboriginal languages are still spoken, the government there has 17 bilingual schools,

but some of these are in small satellite communities. There are four nongovernment bilingual schools for Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory, three Catholic and one independent. The government schools follow a transition model of bilingual education: children receive their introduction to literacy skills in their native language and then all their academic work is in English. Aboriginal languages are used only for traditional topics such as dream time stories and hunting trips. This program has been badly undercut in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Bilingualism, Societal}. 2. Lack of Academic Success for Aboriginal Children

Most Aboriginal children do not succeed academically, with or without bilingual education—few go on to secondary school—because schools have culturally inappropriate activities without enough input from Aboriginal teachers. More important than bilingual education for the support of Aboriginal language and culture is the development of Aboriginal teaching staff and Aboriginal pedagogy. With all its shortcomings, the Northern Territory bilingual program has been important because it has raised the status of Aboriginal teachers as well as of Aboriginal languages. There are several independent Aboriginal schools, including Yipirinya in Alice Springs and the Strelley school in Western Australia, where attempts are made to use Aboriginal languages as much as English throughout primary school. Work has been needed to develop vocabulary and ways of talking in Aboriginal languages about European concepts, and here the work of Aboriginal teachers has been crucial (see Intercultural Discourse). 3. Other Use of Aboriginal Languages in Schools

Aboriginal people take pride in knowing about their languages even when they no longer speak them.

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The Social Context Urban Aboriginal writers are writing poetry in the languages of their ancestors. In some communities where the traditional language has died or is spoken only by old people, people have struggled to develop school programs where Aboriginal children can learn about their languages as part of their cultural heritage. But there is no permanent support structure providing adequate skills, resources or advice for these programs. There are several institutions where adult White Australians learn Aboriginal languages, some schools where White school children learn about Aboriginal languages, and a few schools where they learn to speak Aboriginal languages. 4. Prospects for Maintenance of Aboriginal Languages

From 1987 to 1990, the Federal Government gave 2.5 million dollars to the National Aboriginal Language Program, with aid for language education programs (Lo Bianco 1987). By the early 1990s this money had run out. Despite discussion in the government about renewing support no other funds have been allocated. Language maintenance will not be possible without

social maintenance. Speakers of Aboriginal languages have Third World status in a First World nation. Young Aboriginal people see the helplessness of their elders and this discourages them from taking their parents as models and continuing to speak the traditional languages. In a program where Aboriginal people gain self reliance and improve their health, education, and employment, the use of their languages in education could take on great significance (Shopen et al. 1987). See also: Wales: Language Education Policy; Maori Language Revitalization; Teaching Endangered Languages. Bibliography Lo Bianco J 1987 National Policy on Languages. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra Schmidt A 1990 The Loss of Australia's Aboriginal Language Heritage. Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, Canberra Shopen T, Reid N, Shopen G, Wilkins D 1987 Ensuring the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages into the 21st century. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 10(1): 143-57

Australian Minority Languages M. Clyne

About 90 community (immigrant) languages are in daily use in Australian homes as are about 50 of the 150 still extant Aboriginal languages. The most widely used community languages are Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, and German. As Australia is a federation, the provisions for teaching Aboriginal and community languages vary from state to state and are partly determined by the demographic situation. However, education is one of the key domains covered in Australian languages policy (e.g., Lo Bianco 1987) which encompasses aspects of all languages used in Australia, including English, and strongly promotes language maintenance and second language learning (see English Teaching in Australia). State policies on languages in education are complementing the national policy with implementation strategies and timetables to facilitate the availability of a language other than English as part of the normal primary and secondary education of every child. Timetables vary in relation to the situation in the state concerned. Provision for language maintenance in education, while part of the policies of all major pol80

itical parties, had not, by 1992, been enshrined in legislation. Australia does not usually pass laws on matters of this kind, in the way that, for example, the USA does. Since multiculturalism replaced the former assimilation policy in the early 1970s, schools have increasingly supported the use and maintenance of languages other than English. Victoria and South Australia each teach a total of 17 languages other than English in their primary schools, most of the languages being those of sizeable communities. The extent of bilingual education varies too between the states. Such programs for mother-tongue speakers of the language are less prevalent than in some other countries, notably the USA. They may be found in inner-city areas settled by recent immigrants and are usually followed up by maintenance programs. But Victoria and, to an increasing extent, other states as well, is focusing attention on the second generation who are losing their community language; educationists see immersion principles as an appropriate methodology to serve both the children of immigrants and second

Canadian Language Education Policy language learners. Thus many primary schools are now teaching some subjects through the medium of a community language to all participating children. Fifty-three languages are examined at the external final secondary school examination. These include Arabic, Latvian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, indigenous languages, and Australian Sign Language. Where children wish to take languages not offered at their school, in some states they can learn them on Saturdays at a regional language center of the Ministry of Education. Teacher training in community languages, though increasing, is lagging behind school demand. Curriculum materials are being produced in a range of languages, and language teaching is supported by initiatives in multilingual TV, radio, and library services. Bilingual education for Aboriginal languages, especially in the Northern Territory, although pre-

dating the community language programs, has not covered all the languages required, and very few White Australians have the opportunity of learning an Aboriginal language at school. There is a strong community input into Aboriginal bilingual education. A college program in Darwin trains Aborigines to undertake descriptions of their own languages. See also: Australian Indigenous Languages; Maori Language Revitalization; Sweden: Immigrant Languages; Multilingualism. Bibliography Clyne M 1991 Community Languages: The Australian Experience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/Sydney Lo Bianco J 1987 National Policy on Languages. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra

Canadian Language Education Policy I. Pringle

In Canada, education is a jealously protected area of provincial responsibility. The federal definition of Canada as an officially bilingual and multilingual country therefore does not require that language in education reflect federal policies. Nonetheless, a combination of historical precedents, openness to the interests and rights of most linguistic minorities, and offers of federal funding for provincial programs held to be in the national interest, has ensured that the 10 Canadian provinces and the three territories have policies for language in education that now reflect much of the complexity implicit in the federal definition. In most discussions of language policy in Canada, distinctions have to be made between the Official Languages (English and French) (see National Languages), the Indigenous Languages (Inuktitut, Ojibway, Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi, and about 50 other languages, most of them spoken only in Canada), and the immigrant 'Heritage' Languages (spoken by immigrant groups), of which there are probably close to 200 in daily use. 1. Official Languages Education is of course compulsory in all provinces and territories, usually to age 16. All provinces and territories except for Nunavut Territory provide for education through the medium of the locally dominant official language (French in Quebec, English elsewhere) from the elementary level to the university

postgraduate level. In addition, all provinces and territories make some provision for education through the medium of the other official language. These provisions are most extensive in Quebec (which is officially French speaking), but they are also considerable in New Brunswick (which is officially bilingual) and Ontario (which, though not officially bilingual, has high concentrations of French speakers in the east and north, and makes extensive provision for French-language services in these regions), as well as in Manitoba. In all these provinces, as well as Alberta and Nova Scotia, education up to the university graduate level is available to mother-tongue speakers of the minority official language (English in Quebec, French elsewhere). At the other extreme, Newfoundland currently has only five and the Yukon Territory only one French-language school for mother-tongue francophones resident there. In all jurisdictions, study of the other official language is a mandatory component of the elementary and usually the secondary curriculum. In the Englishlanguage schools in Quebec, French is required from grade 1; in the French-language schools, English begins no earlier than grade 4. In French-language schools in other jurisdictions, English is usually obligatory from grade 1, while in English-language schools, French (in the form commonly referred to as 'core French') is usually mandatory at least from grade 4 to grade 8, 9, or 10; in some provinces, one

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The Social Context year of high-school French is a prerequisite for highschool graduation. An exception to the pattern of 'core French' is the pattern known as 'French Immersion.' This Canadian invention of the late 1960s seeks to create effective bilingualism in Canadian anglophone children by segregating them in classes in which (initially) all the instruction takes place in French, thus taking advantage of the ability of children to acquire a new language with relative ease when it is being used as the medium of communication. Such programs are available in every province and territory. The official languages are extensively taught as second languages to adults, as well, in a huge variety of programs. Their major purposes are to insure that immigrants can function in one of the official languages; to enable speakers of one official language to communicate with (and perhaps even understand) speakers of the other; and to maintain a sufficient cadre of bilinguals to insure that civil servants and others working in bilingual areas can serve the public in either language. 2. Heritage Languages

The 1996 Census revealed that close to 44 percent of the population of late twentieth-century Canada is descended from speakers of languages other than French and English, and some 17 percent claim a language other than French or English as their first language. Nonetheless, immigrant languages are little used as the medium of instruction; indeed, in Ontario, it is illegal to use any language other than an official language as the medium of instruction except in 'transitional' programs designed to help recent immigrant children acquire enough French or (usually) English to pursue further education in an official language. In other provinces, the model of French Immersion has been used to provide for partial (usually 50 percent) immersion schools using Ukrainian, German, and Hebrew as the medium of instruction in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta; Russian in the Castlegar region of British Columbia; and (in summer programs) Gaelic in Nova Scotia. Otherwise, the concern of immigrant groups for the maintenance of their ancestral languages, in keeping with the definition of Canada as a multicultural society, has been addressed through the 'Programme d'enseignement des langues et cultures d'origine' (PELCO) in Quebec (currently suspended pending a review), and by what are usually called 'Heritage Language Programs' in the rest of Canada. Such programs are virtually nonexistent in Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, but all other provinces and territories have some, and in Ontario, and British Columbia they are of considerable political importance with (for example) about 100000 children in Ontario receiving instruction in about 60 languages. The details of these pro-

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grams are quite variable. What they have in common is that they provide 2-3 hours of instruction per week in the heritage language to ethno-linguistic minority children (who may or may not already speak the language). In Quebec, these classes were integrated into the regular program; in Ontario, however, they are usually offered either after school or during the weekend. At the same time, the Ontario government requires all school boards to offer a heritage language program in any language for which 25 or more parents make an official request. Most heritage language programs are offered only up to grade 7 or 8; in the larger metropolitan areas, however, the commoner languages can often be taken as subjects for as many as three years in high school (i.e., after grade 8), and the Province of Manitoba also grants credit on examination to students who demonstrate fluency in their mother tongue even if that language is not taught as a heritage language. 3. Indigenous Languages

The generosity towards immigrant languages implied by the heritage language programs is in marked contrast to traditional policies concerning the indigenous languages. Education of Indians and Inuit used to fall within federal jurisdiction. Traditional policies were avowedly assimilationist and often brutal, with school-age children removed from their home communities to residential schools in which they were forbidden to speak their mother tongue (even when, on arrival, it was their only language) and were punished and humiliated for doing so. In addition to the devastating effects of these policies on native cultures and natives' self-esteem, they also did great harm to the survival of Amerindian languages. In the 1990s, 50-60 are believed to survive. Of these, about 40 have fewer than 1000 speakers, and are in imminent danger of extinction within the next generation. Only Inuktitut (about 27 000 speakers), Ojibway (about 23 000), and Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi (about 85000) appear certain to survive. Nonetheless, attitudes have changed radically. Currently, language and education are central components of the Aboriginal drive towards political self-determination. Increasingly, policies governing Aboriginal education are being devolved upon the indigenous communities themselves, albeit with federal control still exercised through power over funding and provincial or territorial control of standards, certification,- and interpretations of official languages legislation. The picture is thus one of rapid change in both policies and practices. In some areas of the country, language retrieval programs modeled on New Zealand's kohanga reo ('language nests') (see Maori Language Revitalizatiori) have been put in place to help bilingual grandparents pass on the ancestral language over the heads, as it were, of their own monolingual children. The three territories recognize local Aboriginal lan-

Indian Language Education Policy guages as official languages within their education acts, and make variable but growing provision for education through the medium of these languages. In most provinces, Aboriginal language and education policies are under review. Minimally, Aboriginal language programs are provided in at least some locations under the same conditions as heritage language programs, i.e. as 'core' second language instruction at the elementary level or as accredited subjects at the secondary level. Most provinces provide some support for boards engaged in curriculum development for indigenous language teaching. It is, thus, no longer a matter of conscious attempts to destroy the indigenous languages, as was the case in the earlier period of federal domination. Nonetheless, it is widely recognized that instruction on second-language models will not guarantee language retrieval or survival. Only programs which provide for mother tongue education, such as those of the Kativik and James Bay Cree boards of northern Quebec, the Baffin District Board of Nunavut Territory, and some smaller community initiatives such as those of the Mi'qmaq of Nova Scotia, seem to hold any such promise.

See also: Australian Minority Languages; Sweden: Immigrant Languages; Wales: Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy; Indian Language Education Policy; Australian Indigenous Languages; English Teaching in Canada; Teaching Endangered Languages. Bibliography Commissioner of Official Languages 1997 Annual Report, 1997. Canadian Government Publishing Centre, Ottawa Fettes M 1998 Life on the edge: Canada's Aboriginal languages under official bilingualism. In: Ricento T, Burnaby B (eds.) Language and Politics in the United States and Canada: Myths and Realities. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ MacMillan C M 1998 The Practice of Language Rights in Canada. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Statistics Canada 1998 Nation Series: 1996 Census of Canada. Ministry of Industry, Ottawa http://www.statcan.ca;80/english/Pgdb/People/Population/ demol8b.htm http://www.statcan.ca;80/english/Pgdb/People/Population/ demo39a.htm http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/971104/d971104.htm http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/980113/d980113.htm

Indian Language Education Policy Bh. Krishnamurti

Of the 1652 mother tongues registered by the 1961 Census of India, 197 were spoken by 10000 or more speakers and fell into four major language families: Indo-Aryan, 98; Austro-Asiatic, 21; Dravidian, 26; Tibeto-Chinese, 52. The corresponding figures for 1971 (221) and 1981 (104) are indeed puzzling. The 15 major languages recognized by the Constitution (adopted in 1950) consist of four literary languages of the Dravidian group and 11 literary languages of Indo-Aryan, including Sanskrit, a classical language (see Table 1). In 1992, three more languages were added to the schedule: Gorkhali (Nepali) (1 252444), Konkani (1584063) and Manipuri (904350). The linguistic diversity poses enormous problems in the use of language in education. Multilingualism is encouraged in education but the status of the major regional languages vis-a-vis English has remained undefined for want of proper planning.

Table 1. Scheduled languages in descending order of speakers' strength (1981 household census). Number of Percentage of Language speakers total population 1. Hindi 264188858 39.94 2. Telugu 54226227 8.20 3. Bengali 51503085 7.79 4. Marathi 49624847 7.50 5. Tamil 44730389 6.76 6. Urdu 35323481 5.34 7. Gujarati 33189039 5.02 8. Kannada 26887837 4.06 9. Malayalam 25952966 3.92 10. Oriya 22881053 3.46 11. Punjabi 18588400 2.81 12. Kashmiri 3174684 0.48 13. Sindhi 1946278 0.29 14. Assamese* 70525 0.01 15. Sanskrit 2946 — *No census was taken in Assam.

1. Pre-Independence (1947) Period

The nineteenth century was marked by three conflicting views of the use of language in education. 'Orientalists' fought for the preservation and pro-

motion of Sanskrit and Persian, while 'Anglicists' wanted Western knowledge in science, letters, and philosophy to be imparted through English. The 'Ver83

The Social Context nacularists' championed the cause of the native languages. Thomas Babington Macaulay's celebrated minute (February 2, 1835) inaugurated the use of English in education in India. It says: 'We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern... a class of persons, Indian in blood and color but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect' (Kanungo 1962:25). After the British Crown took over the rule of India from the East India Company in 1857, many policy changes were effected which extended the use of Indian languages in education. Vernacular schools were established after 1913 and Sir Michael Sadler's Commission of 1917 clinched the issue in favor of the use of regional languages in education. (For details of this controversy, see Kanungo 1962.)

implemented the three-language formula in education, the Hindi-speaking states introduced Sanskrit and English as second and third languages. The purpose of the Three Language Formula' requiring that every high-school student must have command of two modern Indian languages (Hindi and one other) besides English has thus failed. Tamil Nadu has ruled out the use of Hindi in education thus adhering to the twolanguage formula. Most states have introduced by legislation the use of the mother tongue medium for instruction beyond the secondary stage, up to first degree level, as optional to English (the latter mainly for linguistic minorities). But the universities, by and large, continue to use English as the medium of instruction—compulsorily in professional courses, and as a subject at the Bachelor's level where the instruction medium is the regional language.

2. Post-Independence Period

By the time of Independence in 1947 the dominant regional languages became the media of instruction up to the high school level (XI Class, age 15) and English was taught as a subject from the IV or V standard (age 8 or 9) onwards. At college and university levels, English continued as the medium of instruction for all subjects (arts, science, and technical courses). Schedule VIII of the Constitution of India lists 15 languages. The population figures are given in Table 1 (1981 Census). They constitute 95.58 percent of the total population which contrasts with 87 percent registered in the 1961 and 1971 Census. Linguistic States (based on dominant regional languages) were formed in 1956. Most of the states have since adopted the regional languages of the majority as the official languages of the states; the exception is the northeastern hill states where no one language is dominant. Hindi in Devanagari script is the official language of the country (see National Language) with English given an 'Associate Official' status. The University Education Commission report of 1949, and the Education Commission Report of 1964-6 emphasized the use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction up to the highest level (see Educational Linguistics). The latter report also suggested that three languages should be introduced and taught before the end of Class X: mother tongue/regional language from the primary level (I-X, age 5-14); then Hindi and English at postprimary and secondary levels (V-X, VIII-X), introduced one at a time, depending on the predilection of the State Government. In the Hindi-speaking states, where the regional language and the official language of the country are one and the same (viz. Hindi), English was to be taught from Standard V onwards and a modern Indian language (preferably a South Indian language) from VIII to X. Even the phased introduction of three languages in education has failed. While the Southern states, by and large, have 84

3. Deficiencies in Language Planning

Owing to defective planning by policy makers both at the state and the federal levels, the English language has emerged as the favored language in education. Because of legal complications, graduates with the regional language medium get no preference in employment. State and central administration and courts at all levels use English as the major official language. Industry, business and trade continue to use English in transactions. A consequence of this has been the mushroom growth of English-medium schools during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to replace regional language medium schools in the private sector, and the former are now favored even by lowincome groups for their children. All these developments cause concern to educationists, since the pre-Independence pattern of language use in education produced scholars, professionals and intellectuals who had not lost touch with their native language and culture. Further, the demand for English teaching from the preprimary stage is not matched by supply of teachers of an acceptable standard in that language. There are nearly 7000 colleges and 154 universities at present turning out every year about 4 million undergraduates and 400 000 postgraduates in various fields. The quality of education has suffered, because of the denial to the population of the right to learn through their mother tongue. The northeastern hill states (Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya) have adopted English as the official language. The rate of literacy in India in 1991 was 52 percent in the population aged 7 +. Among the literate population, about 4 percent can use English with some confidence. They control all positions of power in education, politics, industry, and business. Language planners and policy makers have to grapple with the complex problems of multilingualism and of keeping the Indian languages center stage by giving them their

Irish Language Education Policy due place in the educational process and national development. Linguistic minorities and minor languages (including tribal languages) pose a different set of problems. Linguistic minorities (migrant populations from other major language areas) prefer to study in Central Schools through the medium of English or Hindi. Teaching materials for minor languages (those not in the VIII Schedule of the Constitution) are not available, thus denying the children their right to have literacy/primary education in their mother tongue. While the use of more than one language is the official policy in education, a clear definition of the functional role of each language within the framework is either ignored or blurred. The New Education Policy of the Government (1986) supports the Education Commission Report of 1964-66 (adopted by Parliament in 1968) insofar as the roles of different languages are concerned, but in actual implementation very little has been done in an organized manner. See also: Canadian Language Education Policy; Multilingualism; National Language Policy and Education.

Bibliography Census of India 1961, vol. 1, part II-C (ii), Language tables 1964. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi Census of India 1971 Language handbook on mother-tongues in census 1972. Office of the Registrar General of India, New Delhi Census of India 1981 Series 1 India, Paper 1 of 1987. Households and Household Population by Language Mainly Spoken in the Household 1987. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi Kanungo G B 1962 The Language Controversy in Indian Education. Comparative Education Center, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Krishnamurti Bh 1986 A fresh look at language in school education in India. Int. J. Soc. Lang. 62: 105-118 Krishnamurti Bh 1990 The regional language vis-a-vis English as the medium of instruction in higher education: The Indian dilemma. In: Pattanayak D P (ed.) Multilingualism in India. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Pattanayak D P 1981 Multilingualism and Mother-tongue Education. Oxford University Press, Delhi Report of the Education Commission (1964-66): Education and National Development 1966. Ministry of Education, Government of India, New Delhi Sridhar K K 1989 English in Indian Bilingualism. Manohar, New Delhi

Irish Language Education Policy T. Hickey

Irish is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. Some small communities which are Irishspeaking exist (known as the Gaeltacht) mainly on the western seaboard. However, most areas of the country are English-speaking and the majority of children only begin to learn Irish on entering school. Figures from the 1991 Census indicate that about five percent of children entering school in the state have at least some home-generated competence in the language. Almost a third of the total population reported an ability to speak Irish in the 1991 Census, but 6 Riagáin and 6 Gliasáin (1984) estimated that only 10 percent of their survey sample had at least conversational Irish. At its founding in 1922, the state's objective was the revival of Irish, using the educational system as its main instrument. Some progress was made towards the initial aim of achieving bilingual or immersion programs in all schools, despite early difficulties. The number of Irish-medium schools peaked in the 1940s, but then declined significantly. This decline coincided with a perceived (unofficial) change in state policy away from the promotion of bilingual education. This precipitated the founding of a parent-led movement

(Gaelscoileanna) in 1973 to lobby for Irish-medium education in particular localities. As a result, recent years have seen significant growth in the number of Irish-medium schools, to 113 all-Irish primary schools outside of Gaeltacht areas, with 18 000 pupils in 1997, and 24 second-level schools, with 5000 pupils. In addition, there are about 170 Irish-medium preschools (or naíonraí) with about 2500 children outside of the Gaeltacht (Hickey 1997). However, this recent resurgence of interest in Irish- medium education is still restricted to a minority, and Department of Education statistics for 1995-96 indicate that only about four percent of primary school children in Englishspeaking areas are educated entirely through the medium of Irish. While the ideal of producing competent Irish speakers might be better served by more partial-immersion or immersion programs, surveys show that there is no broad public support for Irish-medium instruction for all children. Although general support for Irish-medium education has risen somewhat, to 30 percent in the national survey of adults in 1993 (6 Riagáin and Ó Gliasáin 1994) reporting that they would choose an 85

The Social Context all-Irish school primary school for their own children if one were accessible to them, nevertheless 70 percent of those surveyed favored the teaching of Irish as a subject only as the norm. For the majority learning Irish a subject in primary school, it is estimated that about 20 percent of the school day is devoted to teaching Irish and Irish reading (Mac Aogáin 1990). The audio-visual course introduced in the 1960s encouraged expectations that children would leave school with a basic speaking competence in the language, despite the absence of pressure to communicate in Irish outside school, and relatively little inside. Dissatisfaction has been expressed with the poor results from this approach, though Harris (1988) suggests that this is due more to the frustration of unrealistic expectations than to a substantial fall in standards. A new Irish curriculum has now been drafted for primary schools, based on the communicative approach, and it is expected to be put into practice by the year 2000. Irish is a compulsory subject at secondary school level. Until 1973 it was necessary to pass in Irish in order to be awarded state certificates. While this acted as an incentive, it also increased negative feelings towards the language. The loss of this status and a decline in the perceived utility of Irish led to a fall in the numbers taking higher-level Irish courses, and a substantial rise, to about a third of pupils, in the numbers failing or not sitting the examination. Second-level Irish courses leading to Junior Certificat and Applied Leaving Certificate have been changed towards a more communicative syllabus in the 1990s, but the mainstream Leaving Certificate courses remain traditional and literature-based. The absence of an Irish entry requirement for third-level institutions outside of the National University of Ireland has contributed to the decline in the perceived utility of Irish. Thus educational policies regarding Irish since the founding of the State have changed from aspiring to provide for all Irish-medium education towards that of teaching Irish as a single subject to the majority, with a small minority only in Irish immersion schools.

Schools now find themselves in a dilemma: while they have an official state policy of language promotion and a majority of public opinion which favors the teaching of Irish, yet they must also recognize that the language is becoming increasingly marginalized, with a decline in its utility for employment and higher education, and current low levels of usage. Nevertheless, the growing sense of Irish cultural identity in response to greater contact with continental Europe, the success of Irish-medium schools, and the advent of Teilifis na Gaelige (An Irish-medium TV channel) have led to some favorable changes in the image of the language in recent years. However, 6 Riagain (1997) concludes that, while there has been some measure of revival in the last 70 years, the long-term future of Irish is not yet secure. Turning to the study of other languages, the majority of pupils at second-level study at least one modern language. The most popular language is French, studied by 75 percent of candidates for the Junior Certificate (age 15), while German is studied by 30 percent. A pilot projected introducing modern languages for the upper grades of primary school was initiated by the Department of Education in 1998, with funding from the European Science Foundation. See also: National Language Policy and Education; Teaching Endangered Languages. Bibliography Harris J 1988 Spoken Irish in the primary school system. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 70: 6987 Hickey T 1997 Early Immersion Education in Ireland: Na Naionrai. ITE/Linguistics Institute of Ireland, Dublin Mac Aogáin E 1990 Teaching Irish in the Schools: Towards a Language Policy for 1992. ITE/Linguistics Institute of Ireland, Dublin 6 Riagain P, Ó Gliasáin M 1984 The Irish Language in the Republic of Ireland Preliminary Report of a National Survey. Institiuid Teangeolaiochta Eireann, Dublin 6 Riagain P 1997 Language Policy and Social Reproduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK

Japanese Language Education Policy T. Shimaoka

Japan's contact with Europe and America officially started in 1868 when the Tokugawa Government returned political power to Meiji Emperor. Japan found to her surprise that she had been left behind during 250 years' isolation, and that unless she took

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some action, she would be at the mercy of foreign powers, particularly in the field of science and technology. The reaction of the government was to adopt a policy of 'Enrich the nation and strengthen the army.' The language policy adopted then was to produce

Japanese Language Education Policy the personnel who could read and understand anything relevant to the military. Direct communication with English speakers was not of primary concern, and the so-called grammar-translation method was the one usually adopted nationwide. This was all the more so, because there were very few native English speakers available to teach English in the educational system of Japan at that time. The natural method or direct method was adopted by a very few leading teachers in Japan, and it attracted the attention of a small number of teachers. The end of World War II (1945) was a significant turning point in the history of English teaching in Japan. From then on, teachers of English came to pay more attention to the oral aspect of language teaching. The policy adopted widely was the oral approach, mainly disseminated from ELEC (The English Language Educational Council) where some first-class linguists, such as Charles C. Fries, Freeman Twaddell, and many others advocated the oral approach. This article focuses on policy in Japan for the teaching of English, as there is no other foreign language teaching comparable in scale, size of teaching staff, number of learners, and facilities. The teaching of German, French, and other foreign languages is mainly conducted at the college and university levels. Classical Chinese is an elective subject taught at the senior high school level, and it is psychologically accepted as part of Japanese language education. The body responsible for language teaching policy as part of school education is the Ministry of Education of the central government. For its decisionmaking, the opinions of language teachers are monitored, mainly through a dozen or so recruited committee members representing opinions in the language teaching profession. Foreign-language learning starts in the seventh grade or the first school year of junior high school. The Ministry of Education issues the suggested course of study for language teaching for junior and senior high schools. 1. Who are the Students and How Often are They Taught? More than 95 percent of all age groups in junior and senior high school students study English, although a foreign language is not a required subject. They have three to four classes per week for the first three years in junior high schools, whereas in senior high schools, the number of classes per week is usually 5-5-5, that is, five English classes per week for each school year. The types of English classes and the standard credits are shown in Table 1 (up to 1993 for junior high school and to 1994 for senior high school). English I is a multiskills course, including the review of junior high school English. English II, more advanced level English, has more complicated grammatical structures and more difficult vocabulary items.

Table 1. Standard junior Standard senior high school high school credits credits 4 English I 3 English Bk 1 5 English II English IIA 3 3 English Bk 2 3 English IIB 3 English IIC 3 English Bk 3

English IIA is for conversation practice, English IIB for extensive reading, and English IIC is for composition. Most of the high schools which encourage their students to enter universities usually offer English IIB and English IIC as school subjects, but not English IIA. It is to be noticed that there is no grammar instruction per se, as there is a basic understanding that grammar is not a subject to teach, but a useful means of understanding the structure of language. 2. The Use of Authorized FL Textbooks Japan seems to be one of the few countries in the world which spell out the English teaching curriculum in great detail in terms of grammar and vocabulary selection. Too much restriction may cramp originality in authorized textbooks, but in other respects, it may help produce neatly arranged teaching items. Japanese FL learners in nonprivate schools are required to use textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education. The textbooks are given free to all junior high school students, as the first 9 years of schooling are compulsory. In order for textbooks to be authorized, textbook editors must follow the suggested course of study issued by the Ministry. But this does not mean the teacher-led classroom activities will be restricted. FL te