Four Examples in Search of a Definition

Robert L. Cooper provides four examples of language planning.

1. Founding the Academie Française2. The Promotion of Hebrew in Palestine

3. Androcentric Generics and the Feminine Mystique

4. A Mass Literacy Campaign

Founding the Académie Française

• Académie Française is the best known and most consistently respected language academy in the world.

• In 1624 Cardinal Richelieu came to the power as first minister to Louis XIII.

• The period that he came to the power was very chaotic.

disintegration, religious conflicts, a very young and incapable King.

• Richelieu created royal extended thoroughout the realm.

• He created the Modern French state.• He was obsessed with order and he viewed

the state as an instrument of power for the creation and maintenance of order.

• He sees art as a way to influence public opinion in support of his policies.

• The relative security, patronage by the King and the Court were conditions that were provided by Richelieu for the centralization of artistic and literary life in Paris.

• The French Phenomenon Salon• Hotel Rambouillet: the aristocrats were getting together and reading

their writings to each other. The Hotel supporting the eliminating the

vulgar from polite speech and from serious literature.• The club that consist of professional writers who meet in the Hotel

was discovered by Richelieu and he wanted to transform this private club into an institution that could serve the state.

• According to Richelieu the Academy’s principal function is to regulate the French language and to regulate it.

The Promotion of Hebrew in Palestine

• Until the 19th century the immigration Jewish people to Palestine was small but with the improved life conditions the number of Jewish people who came to Palestine reached 40.000.

• The only language which united all Jewish people was Hebrew. Althought Hebrew wasn’t used in daily communication, it continued to be used as a written language and in religious and philosophical texts.

• The movement for revival of Hebrew began in Palestine under the influence of European nationalist movements which viewed the langugae of people as inseparable from its nationality.

• Separateness from surrounding people• Nationalist self-consciousness • Unity of those who spoke it• Continuity of Jewish attachment to that land • Reestablish a national home there.• In the case of Jewish people language used as a

tool for social change.

Androcentric Generics and the Feminine Mystique

• The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963

• It evoked a tremendous response.• Women are thaught that their biggest duty in life is being

a good wife and a good mother.• The mobilization of men into the armed forces during the

Second World War promoted the employment of women.• the percentage of women in the labor force was 53 in

1984 whereas it was 17 in 1940.

• The massive entry of married women into the workforce began to change traditional role relationships between spouses

• Women were active in both the civil-rights and anti-war movements

• The main goal of the feminist movement was not only for the economic reasons but for the liberation of women.

• Parents, teachers, children books, toys, media, everything set of expectations for boys and girls.

• Verbal behaviour serves a s aprimary tool for socialization, it is plausible that our use of language serves to create and reinforce sexual stereotypes.

• Use of androcentric generics contributes to sexual discrimination.

• Reducing bias in language would serve to reduce discrimination.

• The language structure influences non-verbal behaviour.

• Consciousness raising

What did feminist do to reduce sexist usage?

• They wrote manuals showing people how to avoid such usage.

• Journals published.• They were remarkably successful with respect to

written usage.• It is harder to change people’s spoken language • The women’s movement shows us that social

movements have linguistic consequences whether or not such consequences influence non-linguistic behavior.

A Mass Literacy Campaign

• At the time of revoulution, the population of Ehiopia was thought to be about 26 to 30 million. They speak 70-80 different indigenous languages of which Amharic, Oromo and Tigrinya.

• The Amhara and Tigre regard each other as rivals amd they regard themselves as superior to other ethnolinguistic groups.

• Before the revolution Amharas, Tigres and Oromo worked together but most of the top positions in the army and in the government were occupied by Amhara and Tigre. Also most of the political and financial elite were either Amhara or Tigre.

• Oromo was the supressed urban class and they were subject to a corrupt and inefficient administration such as schools and health care.

• The basic cause of the revolution was the extreme inequality in the distribution of power and income among the country’s ethnic groups.

• Amaric was the country’s official language and it was difficult for the non-Amhara majority to acquire a modern education.

• The Amharicization policy could be justified on seveeral grounds; with respect to education, it would have been difficult and expensive to train teachers to prepare materials in the many languages of the empire when there were inadequate resources even in the official language.

• The promotion of a single lingua-franca could serve as distinctive, unifying factor.

• After the Derg ( a commitee) took the power with revolution saw the importance of language in social control. And the Derg announced a multilingual mass-literacy campaign.

• University students emerged as the most vocal and consistent critics of the regime. They had three demand : land reform, representative government, and ethnic self –determination.

• Language served as a symbol of ethnic distinctiveness among university students. Tigrean University students refused to speak Amharic which they viewed as a colonial language.

• With the Emperor’s downfall, The Derg closed the only university of the country and anounced that all university students have to engage in rural development work for the next two years.

• Teaching literacy in language other than Amharic was a gesture of support for ethnic self-determination but a gesture which need not to be accompanied by any real grant of power.

• While the rhetoric of the state’s rules has changed, the state’s problems have remained.

Thanks for your listening

Naile Özge Dermenci