13
This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham] On: 17 November 2014, At: 19:54 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Language and Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlae20 Literacy and language planning Nancy H. Hornberger a a Graduate School of Education , University of Pennsylvania , 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PH, 19104–6216, USA Published online: 04 Nov 2009. To cite this article: Nancy H. Hornberger (1994) Literacy and language planning, Language and Education, 8:1-2, 75-86, DOI: 10.1080/09500789409541380 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500789409541380 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Literacy and language planning

  • Upload
    nancy-h

  • View
    217

  • Download
    2

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham]On: 17 November 2014, At: 19:54Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Language and EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlae20

Literacy and language planningNancy H. Hornberger aa Graduate School of Education , University ofPennsylvania , 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PH,19104–6216, USAPublished online: 04 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Nancy H. Hornberger (1994) Literacy and language planning, Languageand Education, 8:1-2, 75-86, DOI: 10.1080/09500789409541380

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500789409541380

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information(the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor& Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warrantieswhatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purposeof the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are theopinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor& Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francisshall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs,expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arisingdirectly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

LITERACY AND LANGUAGE PLANNINGNancy H. Hornberger

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street,Philadelphia, PH 19104-6216, USA

Abstract In a world which is simultaneously coming together as a global societywhile it splinters apart into ever smaller ethnically-defined pieces, the two-facedpotential of literacy to both open and bar doors of opportunity becomes increas-ingly evident. Nowhere are these tensions more evident than in multilingualnations, where literacy development faces the challenge of attending to a multiling-ual population, many of whom do not speak the country's official language. Apersistent model of literacy development has been that of national literacy;competing models include mother tongue literacy, multiple literacies, local literac-ies, and biliteracies, all of which have in common notions of a variety anddiversity of literacies, reflective and constitutive of specific contexts and identities.Given such a model of literacy, the question for literacy developers becomes:which literacies to develop for what purpose? Language planning offers a wayof outlining options and identifying different literacies and their different goalsand uses, which may be useful for literacy planning. Offered here is a frameworkwhich integrates two decades of language planning scholarship, categorising 22language planning goals in terms of the intersections between three types (status,corpus, and acquisition) and two approaches (policy and cultivation) of languageplanning.

In a world which is simultaneously coming together as a global society while itsplinters apart into ever smaller ethnically-defined pieces, the two-faced potentialof literacy to both open and bar doors of opportunity becomes increasinglyevident. (See Barton, this volume, on the globalisation and diversification ofliteracy itself.) As the new literacy studies of the past decade turn our attentionto the variety of literacy practices and their inextricable links to cultural andpower structures in society (Street, 1993a:7), and bring to light 'the often ignoredlanguage and literacy skills of non-mainstream people and . . . the ways in whichmainstream, school-based literacy often serves to perpetuate social inequalitywhile claiming, via the literacy myth, to mitigate it' (Gee, 1991:268), long-dominant assumptions that literacy is a technical skill, neutral, universal, andkey to both individual and societal development, and that there is a 'great divide'of difference between oral and literate cultures (cf. Street, 1988), give way to therealisation that not only are there continuities across oral and literate traditions,but that there are also contradictions inherent within literacy itself (Graff,1986:72-74; Hornberger in press b).

Nowhere are these tensions more evident than in multilingual nations, whereliteracy development faces the challenge of attending to a multilingual population,

0950-0782/94/01/0075-12$01.80/0 © 1994 N. H. HornbergerLANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Vol. 8, Nos 1 & 2, 1994

75

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

76 LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION

many of whom do not speak the country's official language. The variety amongthese multilingual nations is great. A recent UNESCO document suggests thatmultilingual nations can be characterised in terms of four main contextual possi-bilities, depending on whether there exists within the nation: no one linguisticmajority (e.g. Nigeria, with three major languages and 400 others), a locallydeveloped lingua franca (e.g. Swahili in the East African countries), a predominantindigenous language (e.g. Quechua in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia), or multiplelanguages with literary and religious traditions (e.g. India with over 1000 languagesand twelve scripts) (UNESCO, 1992:15-18 as cited by Fordham, 1994).

In a memorable piece entitled 'The Curse of Babel,' Einar Haugen arguedeloquently that 'language (diversity) is not a problem unless it is used as a basisfor discrimination' (1973:40). More recently, Dell Hymes has reminded us of thedifference between actual and potential equality among languages—that while alllanguages are potentially equal, they are, for social reasons, not actually so(1992:2-10). The same is true for literacies: all literacies are potentially equal,but, for social reasons, not actually so. Literacy is, simultaneously, potentialliberator and weapon of oppression (Gee, 1991:272). For literacy developers inmultilingual contexts, then, the question is not so much: how to develop literacy?but, which literacies to develop for what purposes?

A persistent model of literacy development has been that of national literacy;competing models include mother tongue literacy, multiple literacies, local literac-ies, and biliteracies. National literacy implies the existence of a national literacy,one national literacy, such as those promoted in much of Europe, in the US andother Western developed nations. Joshua Fishman (1968; 1971) suggests that thechoice of one or another national language reflects either an underlying nationalismwhich seeks sociocultural integration based on authenticity or an underlyingnationism which seeks politico-geographic integration based on efficiency. Yet,Fishman also suggests that the choice for one national language is not the onlypossibility; rather, given that not all language differences that exist are noted letalone ideologised by their speakers, that conscious and even ideologised languagedifferences need not be divisive, and that most new nations are not ethnic nations,another possible national language policy choice is diglossia, wherein a languageof wider communication (LWC) is the language of government, education, andindustrialisation, while local languages are used for home, family, and neighbour-hood purposes. I suggest that the same can be said for national literacy and localliteracies.

Mother tongue literacy offers an alternative to the national literacy model. Theaxiomatic principle that people acquire literacy best in their own mother tongue,as formulated in UNESCO's 1953 statement, has been widely implemented inmother tongue literacy education throughout the world for the past four decadesespecially (Limage, 1994). Mother tongue literacy as an alternative or complementto national literacy is not without controversy however; the objections and limi-tations reviewed and refuted in that early UNESCO document are still very muchwith us. Objections include that the language lacks a grammar and an alphabet,that the child already knows his/her mother tongue, that the use of the mothertongue will prevent acquisition of the second language, and that the use of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

LITERACY AND LANGUAGE PLANNING 77

vernacular languages impedes national unity; while practical limitations cited arethose of inadequate vocabulary, shortage of educational materials, multiplicity oflanguages in a locality or country, need for reading material, shortage of suitablytrained teachers, popular opposition to use of the mother tongue, and specialproblems surrounding the choice of a lingua franca or pidgin for mother tongueliteracy instruction. Nearly all of these objections and limitations have met withcreative and effective solutions in one case or another over the past forty years,yet the desirability of mother tongue literacy remains a debated point.

Other alternative models are those of multiple literacies, and more recently,local literacies, as introduced by Street. By multiple literacies, he intends tounderline the fact that literacy is not one uniform technical skill, but rather itis something different in each different context and society in which it is embedded(Street, 1984). By local literacies, he refers to those literacy practices that areclosely connected with local and regional identities and indeed often overlookedby international or national literacy campaigns. Elsewhere in this volume, hesuggests three possible local literacies: local literacies that consist of the differentlanguages and writing systems within a national context; local literacies that areinvented, 'often by indigenous peoples in the face of the dominant literacies ofcolonial powers' (1994); and vernacular literacies, which involve not a differentlanguage nor a different writing system, but a different literacy practice (here,vernacular is used in the sense of everyday, but not to refer to vernacular language;cf. Street, 1993a:221).

Finally, in my own work (Hornberger, 1989,1990b, 1992, in press a), I suggestthe model of biliteracies, and by extension, multiliteracies, as another alternative.In this model, any instance—whether it be an individual, a situation, or a society—in which communication occurs in two or more languages in or around writing,is an instance of biliteracy. The model situates biliteracies (or instances ofbiliteracy) within nine nested and intersecting continua which define biliteratedevelopment, biliterate media and contexts of biliteracy. Thus, biliteracies areseen as developing along intersecting first language-second language, receptive-productive, and oral-written language skills continua; through the medium oftwo (or more) languages/literacies whose linguistic structures vary from similarto dissimilar, whose scripts range from convergent to divergent, and to whichthe developing biliterate individual's exposure varies from simultaneous to success-ive; and in contexts which range from micro to macro levels and are characterisedby varying mixes along the monolingual-bilingual and oral-literate continua.

What all of these latter models of literacy—mother tongue literacy, multipleliteracies, local literacies, biliteracies—have in common are notions of a varietyand diversity of literacies, reflective and constitutive of specific contexts andidentities (cf. Street, 1992). Given such a model of literacy, how can we approachour earlier question, which literacies to develop for what purpose? We need aframework which outlines our options, which identifies different literacies andtheir different goals and uses, in order to begin to address the question.

Language planning, referring to 'deliberate efforts to influence the behaviourof others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocations oftheir language codes' (Cooper, 1989:45), offers one such possible framework for

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

78 LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION

thinking about literacy planning. Table 1 represents my attempt to integrate sometwo decades of language planning scholarship into one coherent framework forthis purpose. The paragraphs below provide a skeletal explanation of the table1.

The first use of the term language planning in the literature dates back to1959, when Haugen used it in his study of language standardisation in Norway(1959:8). The first use of the widely accepted status planning/corpus planning'distinction was by Heinz Kloss (1969); while acquisition planning as a third typeof language planning was introduced twenty years later (Cooper, 1989). Withrespect to language/literacy planning, we may think of status planning as thoseefforts directed toward the allocation of functions of languages/literacies in agiven speech community; corpus planning as those efforts related to the adequacyof the form or structure of languages/literacies; and acquisition planning as effortsto influence the allocation of users or the distribution of languages/literacies, bymeans of creating or improving opportunity or incentive to learn them, or both.These three types comprise the vertical axis of the table.

The horizontal axis presents another distinction made early in the language plan-ning literature, between policy and cultivation approaches to language planning

Table 1 Language planning goals: An integrative framework

Approaches

Types

Status Planning(about uses of language)

Acquisition Planning(about users of language)

Corpus Planning(about language)

Policy Planning(on form)

Goals

StandardisationStatus

OfficialisationNationalisationProscription

GroupEducation/SchoolLiteratureReligionMass MediaWork

StandardisationCorpusAuxiliary code

Graphisation

Cultivation Planning(on function)

Goals

RevivalMaintenanceInterlingual

CommunicationInternational

IntranationalSpread

ReacquisitionMaintenanceForeign Language/

Second LanguageShift

ModernisationLexicalStylistic

RenovationPurificationReformStylistic simplificationTerminology unification

Based on Ferguson, 1968; Kloss, 1968; Stewart, 1968; Neustupny, 1974; Haugen, 1983; Nahir,1984; Cooper, 1989.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

LITERACY AND LANGUAGE PLANNING 79

(Neustupny, 1974). The policy approach, seen as attending to matters of societyand nation, at the macroscopic level, emphasising the distribution of languages/literacies, and mainly concerned with standard language, is often interpreted to bethe same as the status language planning type; while the cultivation approach, seenas attending to matters of language/literacy, at the microscopic level, emphasisingways of speaking/writing and their distribution, and mainly concerned with literarylanguage, is often interpreted to be synonymous with corpus planning. Yet thematch is not perfect, and Haugen offers a more finely-tuned interpretation whichmaps these two binary distinctions (status/corpus and policy/cultivation) onto afourfold matrix defined by society/language and form/function axes and comprisingselection of norm, codification of norm, implementation of function, and elaborationof function as the four dimensions (1972; 1983). His is the interpretation I usehere, with the addition of acquisition planning as a third type, thus yielding six,rather than four dimensions of language/literacy planning.

Language/literacy planning types and approaches do not in and of themselvescarry a political direction, however, and thus cannot begin to answer our questionabout which literacies to develop for which purposes. Rather, it is the goals that areassigned to the language literacy planning activities that determine the direction ofchange envisioned (cf. Hornberger, 1990a:21), and it is to these that we nowturn. In my interpretation, and as represented in the table, goals are at the heartof language/literacy planning. The matrix of types and approaches defines theparameters, but the goals identify the range of choices available within thoseparameters. In what follows, I present some 30 goals upon which there seemsto be some consensus in the literature; however, I make no claim that these arethe only possible goals.

An early formulation of language planning goals was Ferguson's (1968) dis-cussion of standardisation, graphisation, and modernisation, which I have placedin the figure under corpus policy and corpus cultivation planning, respectively(Ferguson's cover term, language development, seems to correspond to corpusplanning). The definitions Ferguson provided then for language planning can beapplied to literacy planning today: standardisation, referring to the developmentof a literacy norm which overrides regional and social literacies, and graphisation,referring to the provision of a writing system for a hitherto unwritten language,both attend to the formal aspects of languages/literacies (cf. Haugen's codification,1983:271-2); while modernisation, referring to the lexical and stylistic develop-ment of a language literacy for its expansion into hitherto unused domains,attends to the cultivation of languages/literacies for particular functions.

In a pair of articles, Moshe Nahir (1977; 1984) identified eleven goals oflanguage planning, nine of which I interpret as representing cultivation planning,of the status and corpus types, respectively. Revival, maintenance, spread, andinterlingual communication all exemplify status cultivation, or the cultivationof a language/literacy's status by increasing its functional uses (cf. Haugen'simplementation, 1983:2722); while lexical modernisation, purification, reform,stylistic simplification, and terminology unification belong to corpus cultivation,that is, the cultivation of a language/literacy's form for additional functions (cf.Haugen's elaboration, 1983:273-6). Nahir's remaining two goals, standardisationand auxiliary code standardisation will be taken up below.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

80 LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION

Beginning then with status cultivation planning, we have revival, maintenance,interlingual communication, and spread. I provide brief paraphrases of Nahir's(1984) original definitions and examples, with my own italicised additions empha-sising the applicability of these goals to literacy. Revival as a language/literacyplanning goal refers to the effort to restore a language with few or no speakersor a literacy with few or no users to use as a normal means of communication ina community; Hebrew is the oft-cited example of success. Maintenance, saysNahir, is the effort to preserve the use of the native language, or native literacy,in situations where the status of the language/Ztfmrcy as a means of communication,a cultural medium, or a symbol of group or national identity is (or is perceivedto be) under threat due to political, social, economic, educational or other press-ures; here Nahir gives the maintenance of French in Quebec and of minoritylanguages in the US as examples of dominant and ethnic language maintenance,respectively. Interlingual communication refers to efforts toward facilitating com-munication between members of different speech communities, whether by useof an artificial or auxiliary language/toeracy (e.g. Esperanto for internationalcommunication), or a language/Ztteracy of wider communication (e.g. Spanish asa regional language in Latin America, or English as an intranational language inIndia), or by adapting cognate languages for greater mutual intelligibility (e.g.the Scandinavian languages). Finally, spread, such as the remarkable spread ofBahase Indonesia/Malay from about 15 million to 125 million speakers in a fewdecades, refers to the attempt to increase the number of speakers of a languageor users of a literacy at the expense of another language/toeracy-

Turning now from the cultivation of a language/literacy's status by increasingits functional uses to the cultivation of a language/literacy's form for additionalfunctions, Nahir's five goals, for each of which he provides abundant examples,are: lexical modernisation—assisting in the development of terms for new bor-rowed concepts: purification—prescribing correct usage and protecting againstinternal change: reform—deliberate change in specific aspects of the language orliteracy, with the intention of improving it; stylistic simplification—reducingambiguity in lexicon, grammar, and style, particularly as it occurs in professionaljargon and terminology unification—reducing ambiguity in terminology, particu-larly technical and scientific terminology.

Note that while lexical modernisation corresponds to Ferguson's (1968) originalmodernisation (which included both lexical and stylistic modernisation), theremaining four corpus cultivation goals (purification, reform, stylistic simplifi-cation and terminological unification) do not. Cooper's (1989) addition of reno-vation, as a fourth corpus planning goal, to Ferguson's original standardisation,graphisation and modernisation, provides the appropriate rubric for these latterfour sub-goals. Indeed, as Cooper (1989:154) points out, the distinction betweenmodernisation and renovation (both of which belong to corpus cultivation planningin my framework) is that while modernisation finds ways for existing language/literacy forms to serve new functions, renovation does the opposite, finding newforms to serve new functions. It is to this latter goal, renovation, that the subgoalspurification, reform, stylistic simplification and terminological unification allbelong.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

LITERACY AND LANGUAGE PLANNING 81

Nahir's remaining two goals, standardisation and auxiliary code standardisation,bring us to a closer look at the term standardisation. In the language planningliterature, the term covers a broad spectrum of meanings, as the following sampleof definitions will serve to illustrate:

Language standardisation is the attempt to turn a language or dialect spokenin a region . . . into one that is accepted as the major language of the region. . . (Nahir, 1984:303-4).

Standardisation . . . consists basically of creating a model for imitation andof promoting this model over rival models (Ray, 1963:70 cited by Karam,1974:114).

Language standardisation . . . (means) prescription of linguistic norms . . .(Tauli, 1974:62).

Language standardisation is the process of one variety of a language becomingwidely accepted throughout the speech community as . . . the 'best' form ofthe language . . . The concept of standardisation also includes the notions ofincreasing uniformity of the norm itself and explicit codification of the norm.It is sometimes extended also to include . . . the choice of one language insteadof another as an official or national language . . . (Ferguson, 1968:31).

The notion of standardisation which emerges from these definitions is one ofa language planning goal that embraces both process and product (Nahir vs.Tauli); both language status and language corpus (Nahir vs. Ray and Tauli; cf.Ferguson); and means ranging from recognising or accepting an existing standard(Ferguson), to creating, selecting, or imposing one (Nahir, Ray, Tauli). Giventhe breadth of its application, I have located it under both status and corpusplanning in the figure, such that status standardisation refers to language planningactivities that accept or impose a language as the standard; while corpus standardis-ation refers to language planning activities that codify the linguistic forms of thatstandard as a uniform norm. Related to the latter is auxiliary code standardisationwhich seeks to establish uniform norms for auxiliary aspects of language/literacysuch as 'signs for the deaf, place names and rules of transliteration and transcrip-tion, either to reduce ambiguity and thus improve communication or to meetchanging social, political, or other needs or aspirations' (Nahir, 1984:318).

Turning from corpus standardisation back to status standardisation, we enterthe status policy dimension of planning (cf. Haugen's selection, 1983: 270-1);here the figure includes, along with status standardisation, three goals, none ofwhich appear in Ferguson's, Nahir's, or Cooper's typology, but which are never-theless widely recognised language planning activities: officialisation, nationalis-ation, and proscription.

Officialisation refers to planning activity making a given language/literacyofficial (following Stewart, 1968). Cooper suggests that there are three types ofofficial languages/literacies and uses the case of Israel to exemplify the distinction:statutory official, that is, declared official (e.g. Hebrew and Arabic); workingofficial, that is, used by the government in day-to-day business, e.g. Hebrew,Arabic and English); or symbolic official, that is, used by the government for

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

82 LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION

symbolic purposes (e.g. Hebrew); further, Cooper notes that languages/literaciesmay be official at the national or the provincial/regional level (1989:100-4).

Another distinction within officialisation is that between vernacularisation andinternationalism (Cobarrubias, 1983:66) where vernacularisation refers to thechoice and development of an indigenous language/literacy as official language/literacy (e.g. Quechua in Peru in 1975), while internationalism reflects the choiceof an international language/literacy of wider communication as official language/literacy (e.g. English in India).

Nationalisation refers to planning activity establishing a national language/literacy (cf. Heath, 1985). While the national language/literacy may also be thenational official language/literacy (e.g. Spanish in Mexico), it is not necessarilyso. There may be one distinctive indigenous, non-official national language/literacyalongside another, official one (e.g. Guarani and Spanish in Paraguay as nationaland official, respectively); there may also be multiple, indigenous, regional, non-official languages/literacies alongside another, official one (e.g. in Senegal, Frenchis the official and Jola, Manding, Pulaar, Sereer, Soninke, and Wolof are nationallanguages/literacies (Diop, 1986).

Proscription refers to planning activity that proscribes the use of a givenlanguage/literacy (cf. Kloss, 1968). History provides ample examples of suchactivity: the Basque language was banned during the first years of Franco's regimein Spain (Cobarrubias, 1983:45); Quechua was banned in Peru from the time ofthe Tupac Amaru revolt in the late 18th century up to the time of its officialisationin 1975 (Cerron-Palomino, 1989:21).

As noted above, Cooper introduces acquisition planning as a third planningtype (1989:157-63), distinguished from status planning by being about the usersrather than the uses of a language/literacy; but by the same token having morein common with status than with corpus planning. Acquisition planning can beclassified, he suggests, according to its overt goal, for which he identifies thepossibilities of: reacquisition, maintenance, foreign language/second languageacquisition, and to which I add shift as a fourth possible goal, thus producing anexact correspondence with the four status cultivation goals (revival, maintenance,interlingual communication and spread). As for acquisition policy planning, thelatter five of Stewart's functions, as discussed and amended by Cooper in hisdiscussion of status planning, make up the six goals here, identified in terms ofthe domains in which users are targeted to receive opportunity and/or incentiveto learn the given language/literacy group: education/school, literature, religion,mass media, and work.

What does this figure tell us, in terms of our question: which literacies forwhich purposes? Beyond identifying possible goals for development of a particularliteracy, the figure can also provide a reminder that, no matter what the goal,language/literacy development proceeds best if goals are pursued along severaldimensions at once. Fishman has argued that status planning and corpus planning'are usually (and most effectively) engaged in jointly' (1979:12). The same is truefor the more elaborate schematic of planning types/approaches represented bythe figure above: language/literacy planning will be most effectively carried outif all six dimensions are attended to. To take a simple example: to declare a

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

LITERACY AND LANGUAGE PLANNING 83

language/literacy the national official language/literacy, while not providing incen-tive or opportunity for it to be a school language nor a writing system andstandardised grammar for it, will not go far toward achieving the stated goal.

Similarly, to endow a national official language/literacy with a new writingsystem that makes it more compatible with certain regional first languages/literacies (reform), while not providing incentive or opportunity for it to belearned nor a cross-regional communicative purpose for its use, will also not gofar toward achieving its goal. On the other hand, to undertake a planning activitythat not only selects a national official language/literacy, but also seeks to extendits use into interlingual communication, and therefore makes provision to offeropportunity and incentive for people to learn it as a second language throughthe domains of religion, work, and education; as well as ensuring that its writingsystem is standardised and its lexicon modernised, offers far greater promise ofsuccess.

What the figure does not show, however, is that planning for a given language/literacy never occurs in a vacuum with regard to other languages/literacies. It isa figure that suggests focus on one language/literacy in isolation from others, andit is therefore incomplete with respect to our question about multiple/local/biliteracies and how we plan for them. For this last dimension, we turn to yetanother language planning concept—orientations. Ruiz (1984:16) defines orien-tation as 'a complex of dispositions [largely unconscious and pre-rational] towardlanguage and its role, and toward languages and their role in society.' He goeson to outline three orientations (which are neither the only possible ones, norare they mutually exclusive of each other):

(1) a language as problem orientation which would tend to see local languagesas problems standing in the way of the incorporation of cultural and linguisticminority groups in society, and to link language issues with the social prob-lems characteristic of such groups—poverty, handicap, low educationalachievement, and little or no social mobility;

(2) a language as right orientation which would tend to see local languages as abasic human and civil right for their speakers, and to seek the affirmationof those rights, often leading to confrontation, since a claim to something isalso a claim against something else;

(3) a language as resource orientation which would tend to see local languagesas resources not only for their speakers, but for society as a whole, and toseek their cultivation and development as resources, in recognition of thefact that they are exhaustible not by use, but by lack of use.

'We can leave the oil in the ground, and it will still be there to use in a hundredyears; the more we use it, and the more we use it unwisely, the less we have ofit later. Just the opposite is true of language and culture. The more we use these,the more we have of them; but the longer we neglect their use, the closer weare to extinguishing them. That has already happened for some languages, andwe may be starting to see the consequences. The world will one day end, butthe overriding cause is more likely to be a shortage of human resources likelanguage and culture than a shortage of physical resources like coal and oil.'

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

84 LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION

(1981:28). The resource orientation applied to local literacies suggests that localliteracies will thrive where multiple literacies are seen as a resource, and not aproblem.

Consider the example of Quechua literacy in Peru. There, as in other multiling-ual nations, popular and political voices, as well as educators themselves, com-monly assert that there is no point in fostering indigenous local, mother tongueliteracy since very little (or no) writing exists in the indigenous mother tongue(in this case, Quechua)3. In another paper (Hornberger in press a), I refute thatassumption using case studies of three biliterate adults to explore functions anduses of Quechua literacy already existent in Peru: Faustino Espinoza, an 82 yearold self-taught scholar of rural origins who uses Quechua literacy for the promotionof the Quechua language; Maria Centeno, a 62 year old city-reared housewifeand mother who uses Quechua literacy to teach the Word of God; and RufinoChuquimamani, a 41 year old rural-born schoolteacher and bilingual educationconsultant who uses Quechua literacy to investigate and promulgate Quechuaknowledge. I go on to argue that, not only does it follow logically that increasingnumbers of indigenous mother tongue readers and writers would inevitably leadto more indigenous mother tongue writing, but perhaps more importantly, thepromotion of indigenous mother tongue literacy increases the potential for fullliterate development and fuller social participation of hitherto marginalised sectorsof the national society. To return to our opening metaphor of literacy as both adoor and a bar to opportunity; if it is true that literacy practices position us, itis also true that they may be sites of negotiation and transformation (cf. Street,in press). Though literacy may not in actuality be a causal factor in individualand societal development, planning for the development of local literacies opensup the possibility that it can be an enabling one.

Notes1. Throughout the following discussion, in order to underline my emphasis here on the

usefulness of these concepts for literacy planning, I will often use the paired termlanguage/literacy (or languages/literacies) where the original scholar referred only tolanguage (implicitly including literacy).

2. Note that Nuessel (1988:185-7) also groups these four together, under the functionwhich he designates as restorative-augmentative (as opposed to the normative function,which encompasses the other seven goals); he further suggests that the four goals beara hierarchical relation to each other, such that revival would be primary, to be followedby maintenance, which in turn could be followed by spread and/or interlingual communi-cation.

3. Quechua, often known as the language of the Incas, is spoken today in Ecuador, Boliviaand several other Andean republics, in addition to Peru, with the total number ofspeakers exceeding 10 million. For a brief period in the 1970s in Peru, Quechua enjoyedthe status of offical language co-equal with Spanish (cf. Hornberger, 1988a, b); thecurrent Constitution, however, recognises only that Quechua and Aymara are in officialuse in zones established by law.

ReferencesCerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1989) Language policy in Peru: A historical overview. Inter-

national Journal of the Sociology of Language 77, 11-33.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

LITERACY AND LANGUAGE PLANNING 85

Cobarrubias, Juan (1983) Ethical issues in status planning. In J. Cobarrubias and J.Fishman (eds) Progress in Language Planning: International Perspectives (pp. 41-86)Berlin: Mouton.

Cooper, Robert L. (1989) Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: CUP.Diop, Amadou (1986) Language planning problems in Senegal. Unpublished manuscript,

University of Pennsylvania.Ferguson, Charles A. (1968) Language development. In J. Fishman, C. A. Ferguson and

J. Das Gupta (eds) Language Problems of Developing Nations (pp. 27-35). New York:John Wiley and Sons.

Fishman, Joshua A. (1968) Nationality-nationalism and nation-nationism. In J. A. Fish-man, C. A. Ferguson and J. Das Gupta (eds) Language Problems of Developing Nations.(pp. 39-51). New York: John Wiley and Sons.(1971) The impact of nationalism on language planning. In J. Rubin and B. Jernudd(eds) Can Language Be Planned? Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice for DevelopingNations (pp. 3-20). University Press of Hawaii.(1979) Bilingual education, language planning, and English. English World-Wide 1(1),11-24.

Fordham, Paul (1994) Language choice. This volume, pp. 65-74.Gee, James P. (1991) The legacies of literacy: From Plato to Freire through Harvey Graff.

In M. Minami and B. Kennedy (eds) Language Issues in Literacy and Bilingual/Multicultural Education. Cambridge, Massaschusetts: Harvard Educational Review(pp. 266-85) (reprinted from Harvard Educational Review (1988) 58, 195-212).

Graff, Harvey J. (1986) The legacies of literacy: Continuities and contradictions in Westernsociety and culture. In S. de Castell, A. Luke and K. Egan (eds) Literacy, Societyand Schooling: A Reader (pp. 61-86). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haugen, Einar (1959) Planning for a standard language in Norway. Anthropological Linguis-tics 1(3), 8-21.(1966) Linguistics and language planning. In William Bright (ed.) Sociolinguistics(pp. 50—71). Harmondsworth: Penguin.(1972) Dialect, language, nation. In J. B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics(pp. 97-111). Harmondsworth: Penguin.(1983) The implementation of corpus planning: Theory and practice. In J. Cobarrubiasand J. Fishman (eds) Progress in Language Planning: International Perspectives(pp. 269-90). Berlin: Mouton.

Heath, Shirley Brice (1985) Bilingual education and a national language policy. In J. Alatisand J. Staczek (eds) Perspectives on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (pp. 75-88).Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.

Hornberger, Nancy H. (1988a) Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A SouthernPeruvian Quechua Case. Dordrecht/Providence: Foris. (Reissued by Mouton).(1988b) Language planning orientations and bilingual education in Peru. LanguageProblems and Language Planning 12 (1), 14-29.(1989) Continua of biliteracy. Review of Educational Research 59 (3), 271-96.(1990a) Bilingual education and English-only: A language planning framework. TheAnnals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 508, 12-26.(1990b) Creating successful learning contexts for bilingual literacy. Teachers CollegeRecord 92 (2), 212-29.(1992) Biliteracy contexts, continua, and contrasts: Policy and curriculum for Cambod-ian and Puerto Rican students in Philadelphia. Education and Urban Society 24 (2),196-211.(in press a) Continua of biliteracy: Functional Quechua literacy and empowermentin Peru. In L. Verhoeven (ed.) Attaining Functional Literacy: Theoretical Issues andEducational Implications. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.(in press b) Oral and literate cultures. In H. Günther, O. Ludwig, and H. Wenzel(eds) Writing and Its Use: An Interdisciplinary Handbook of International Research.Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14

86 LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION

Hymes, Dell H. (1992) Inequality in language: Taking for granted. Working Papers inEducational Linguistics 8, 1-30.

Karam, Francis (1974) Toward a definition of language planning. In J. Fishman (ed.)Advances in Language Planning (pp. 103-24). The Hague: Mouton.

Kloss, Heinz (1968) Notes concerning a language-nation typology. In J. Fishman, C.Ferguson and J. das Gupta (eds) Language Problems of Developing Nations. NewYork: Wiley and Sons.(1969) Research Possibilities on Group Bilingualism: A Report. Quebec: InternationalCenter for Research on Bilingualism.

Limage, Leslie (1994) Lessons from UNESCO on language issues and literacy and theissues so far. This volume, pp. 95-100.

Nahir, Moshe (1977) The five aspects of language planning—A classification. LanguageProblems and Language Planning 1 (2), 107-22.(1984) Language planning goals: A classification. Language Problems and LanguagePlanning 8 (3), 294-327.

Neustupny, J. V. (1974) Basic types of treatment of language problems. In J. Fishman(ed.) Advances in Language Planning (pp. 37-48). The Hague: Mouton.

Nuessel, Frank (1988) National language academics: The hierarchical aspect of goals inlanguage planning. In J. Lihani (ed.) Global Demands on Language and the Missionof the Language Academies (pp. 183-9). University of Kentucky.

Ruiz, Richard (1981) Ethnic group interest and the social good: Law and language ineducation. Unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin, Madison.(1984) Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8 (2), 15-34.

Stewart, William (1968) A sociolinguistic typology for describing national multilingualism.In J. Fishman (ed.) Readings in the Sociology of Language (pp. 531-45). The Hague:Mouton.

Street, Brian (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.(1988) A critical look at Walter Ong and the 'Great Divide' Literacy Research Center4 (1), 1, 3, 5.(1992) Literacy practices and the construction of personhood: Cross-cultural perspec-tives. Unpublished manuscript, University of Sussex.(1993a) Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(1994) What do we mean by 'local literacies'? This volume, pp. 9-17.(in press) Cross-cultural perspectives on literacy. In L. Verhoeven (ed.) AttainingFunctional Literacy: Theoretical Issues and Educational Implications. Philadelphia: JohnBenjamin.

Tauli, Valter (1974) The theory of language planning. In Joshua Fishman (ed.) Advancesin Language Planning (pp. 49-67). The Hague: Mouton.

UNESCO (1953) The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. Paris: UNESCO.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f B

irm

ingh

am]

at 1

9:54

17

Nov

embe

r 20

14