I am seeking evidence that formal language planning works. Classical instances might be Hebrew and Afrikaans. I would be most grateful for research papers which provide solid evidence of the effective impact of language planning on language ecologies. I am interested in large-scale political interventions rather than changes within micro-environments. The nature and quality of the evidence supporting claims of language-planning efficacy is obviously crucial.
Language plans abound, but I would be most grateful to be pointed in the direction of data which shows that these plans have worked as intended.
The way you formulate it one could surmise that what you're concerned with is the undeniable provincialism that sets in once an ethnic or national group makes a political decision to either revive an ancient language (Hebrew), or consciously accentuate what until then had been no more than differences in dialect. (Afrikaans versus Dutch.) (A provincialism that's undoubtedly there in both Hebrew and Afrikaans.) As part of the usual debate about mother-tongue education versus English. This latter issue now becoming increasingly politicised in the name of 'postcoloniality', and the supposed necessity of countering what Wikipedia calls "epistemic injustice". The last time I looked at those Pisa rankings, South Africa didn't even make it onto the scoreboard: https://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-score-of-mathematics-science-reading/
For reasons that would be worth exploring, neither politics, higher education nor the media in SA have been able to do anything about what Eunomix calls the "poisonous divorce between economy and politics". https://martinplaut.com/2021/11/20/south-africas-chronic-economic-decline/ (“Rejection of labor-intensive-export-orientation as a cornerstone of development has been the foundational mistake of democratic South Africa.") Blade's educational policies, which I suspect you may be alluding to, has to bear much of the responsibility for this.
Those issues are in the mix but the macro-frame concerns a miss-match between formal language planning, which usually issues in a mass of policy papers culminating in a formal language policy, and grass-roots language practice which, very understandably, tends to go its own sweet way, driven by sociolinguistic forces only tangentially related to the prescripts of language planners. This is more than the usual disjunct between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. It asks whether language planning starts from false empirical assumptions, collapses ignominiosly as a result. It also chews public money and raises false expectations. That is why I would like to see evidence where language planning on a large scale has demonstrably worked.
How about this one?
http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p92201/pdf/article04.pdf
- Thank you James Victor . Note the following extract from the conclusion: " there is no one-to-one correlation between Commonwealth policy developments and the actual language use patterns of languages in Australia nor of the public priorities for language choices. This is partly because language policies have ambiguous effects and partly because the Commonwealth does not have a jurisdictional monopoly on the contexts where language can be influenced. For example, States jealously protect their constitutional control of education. But there is another reason. The wider Australian community does not seem to share the Commonwealth government’s view about what the national interest is." This is exactly the kind of ambiguity of outcome that makes me doubt the efficacy of formal language planning, except where it reinforces 'natural' tendencies in linguistic ecologies.
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