Language policy and planning as an interdisciplinary field: towards a complexity approach

Abstract

One of the dangers that we should be aware of when we study issues of language policy and planning is the fragmentary perspective by which they can be approached. Reality, by contrast, is interrelated and overlapping. This is why a complexity perspective stresses the importance of studying the contexts of phenomena, that is to say, their external relations. The direction to be followed here leads towards a better understanding of reality as a set of open systems that are in continuous exchange with the surrounding ecosystem, bearing in mind always that any apparent stability is the result of a dynamic equilibrium. Making headway towards an interdisciplinary approach is therefore necessary and imperative.

Headings such as status/normative/institution vis-à-vis others such as solidarity/normal/individual seem to imply a basic distinction in the definition of sociocultural reality. To discover and understand the dynamics of the interaction between these two major categories is, in fact, one of the most important subjects waiting to be addressed by language planning and policy strategies and more broadly by sociolinguistics. An interrelated set of guiding questions for the field could thus be stated as follows: What group or organisation, in pursuit of what overall objective or intention, wants to achieve what, where, how and when; and what do they actually achieve, and why? With this approach, even if how a group or organisation obtains its desired goal – that is, its actual intervention – is included as one of the main elements in a piece of research, the research will not focus exclusively on this topic, but will frame the intervention and identify how it is interrelated with all the other elements involved globally in this phenomenon, trying to establish a clear theoretical understanding of the entire interwoven set of events and processes.

Keywords:

• language policy
• language planning
• sociolinguistics
• complexity
• language ecology
• interdisciplinarity

Notes on contributor

Albert Bastardas-Boada is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Language Ecology and Language Policy at the University of Barcelona. His main research interests are (socio)complexity theory, and language ecology and policy for the medium-sized languages in the global era.

Notes

1. The field of ‘language policy and planning’ encompasses a set of distinct but interwoven domains that need to be studied together in their specificity and in their interdependence. For instance, the historical formulation of contexts and circumstances will have an influence on the sociopolitical definition of issues, and the issues, depending on the correlation of power, will tend to be reflected in provisions of the law. Likewise, legislation will affect general and specific sector-related policies (e.g. the distribution of political power at different levels, the public administration, education, media, businesses and economic power, health care, signage, labelling, etc.) These policies, in turn, will inter-influence upon and with socially significant behaviours and representations as well as the emotions of populations. Although each of these dimensions is legitimately studied by its own separate discipline, they need to be considered in an integral manner within language policy and planning in order to examine their interrelationships and their integrated, dynamic development.

2. Adopting the suggestion of William F. Mackey, my practical proposal is to view the concept of ‘language policy and planning’ as a unified, interdisciplinary field in which ‘planning’ only covers actions that address the ‘corpus’ of a language. The remaining elements fall under ‘policy’. This is a reformulation of the long-standing distinction made by Kloss (1969). It should also be noted that it seems confusing to me to apply the word ‘policy’ to the field of family and interpersonal uses as advanced by Spolsky. I would reserve ‘policy’ only for explicit, ‘formal’ institutional actions.

3. Unfortunately, the term ‘complexity’ is used to mean different – albeit interrelated and complementary – things in the various disciplines and branches of knowledge that are developing a perspective to take into account the self-organising, interwoven and dynamic nature of many phenomena of reality. The precise meaning of the term, therefore, can vary by author. In this text, we start from a perspective of complexity that is more epistemological and theoretical in nature, applying this perspective to sociocultural phenomena. Our aim, however, is not meant to disregard the potential of other approaches, such as the study of so-called ‘complex adaptive [or evolving] systems’, which may contribute new advances to the sociocultural sciences by means of computer modelling and simulation (Castelló, Porto, & Miguel, 2013; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2009; Helbing, 2012; Holland, 1995, 1998).

4. Free translation of ‘Tout objet d'observation ou d'étude doit désormais être conçu en fonction de son organisation, de son environnement, de son observateur’.

5. Free translation of ‘idéal défini par des jugements de valeur et par la présence d'un élément de réflexion consciente de la part des gens concernés’.

6. In this basic configuration, the distribution of functions that we typically find between a standard and dialects also tends to appear in typical situations of diglossia and of language subordination.

7. Contrary to its internal effects within France itself, however, the French Revolution would almost certainly appear to have contributed to the destruction of ancient privileges through its ideals of liberté, egalité and fraternité, and it led to an upsurge of new independent nations with their own processes of language standardisation: Norway (1814), Greece (1829), Belgium (1831), Romania (1861), Hungary (1867), Bulgaria (1878), Albania (1913), Finland (1917), Estonia (1918), Latvia (1918), Lithuania (1918), Iceland (1918), Ireland (1921), Czechoslovakia (1918), and also the Russian Revolution, which led to the codification of many of the languages of the then Soviet Union (cf. Haugen, 1966). Other processes of political autonomy and independence have added more standardized languages in the 20 and 21st centuries.