Language, communication, and human needs are intimately connected. Individuals and groups communicate with one another to fulfill human needs--economic, political, social, and cultural.
Each person, unless he is physically or mentally handicap-ped, has at least one perfectly good language that may serve his everyday practical and spiritual needs. He acquires another language either to fulfill intellectual needs or to better his opportunities. Expansion of the intellectual horizon can be attained by transmission of knowledge either through oral medium or through written medium. In the first instance, one is a speaker-hearer, whereas in the second, one is a reader-writer. Those who combine both the facilities often claim superiority over those who have only the oral abilities.
The dominant mode of acquiring literacy all over the world is through schooling. Unfortunately, the expectations from literacy are too high and the commitments too low. There-fore, in the absence of an appreciation of the importance of oral patterns of communication and an understanding of the relationship of the oral patterns to the written patterns, literacy education has suffered considerably, and the fulfilment of the promise of literacy has not been met to the extent desired.
Schooling converts mother tongues into a product and attaches relative values to second and further languages. Through language teaching and use, it regulates access to education, status, and wealth. Thus, the languages that receive preferential treatment tend to appropriate to themselves disproportionate privileges, and inequity sets in.
Since the graduates of educational institutions form the controlling elite group in any society, the style of planning is to a considerable extent determined by the style of thinking inculcated by education. Thus, one would find that in the post-colonial developing countries, educated persons tutored in the modes of Western thinking consider (1) trans-national communication more important than national communication, (2) standardization and uniformity more important than transmission of knowledge and information within the country, and (3) translation and transference of knowledge more important than creation of knowledge. Instead of considering the existing variation as a strength to build upon, they plan for reduction of variation, thus creating confrontation among groups using different languages. They then prescribe so-called neutral languages to be used at different levels among the many groups seeking self-fulfilment through symbolic or token functional recognition of their languages. These societies are then made permanent parasites on the developed countries for knowledge and information. By destroying interdependent self-directed societies, the elites in these countries achieve what colonialism failed to achieve through coercive occupation.
Language is a barometer of the socioeconomic planning in a country. Language use in education which creates inequity by restricting or denying the right of minority language groups even to exist, language use in administration that restricts or denies access to other language groups to effectively participate in the socioeconomic developments, and language use in mass communication which bestows the right to control and manipulate information and knowledge by the controlling elite threaten to destroy the very basis of multilingual, multiethnic, and multicultural countries. It promotes a view of development that equates modernization with Westernization and projects a mono-model as the only way through which plan-ned societies can operate. It is in this context that the Second International Institute of Language Planning was held here with greater participation of Asian and African countries and with greater emphasis on minorities and tribals. It aimed at sharing experiences and exploring alternate styles of planning. I am happy to report that it has proved to be a tremendous learning experience for us and has immensely contributed to language planning theory and practice.
I express my sincere thanks to professional colleagues from different parts of the country and different parts of the world whose participation contributed to this success.
The problems of language and planning for their solution in the developing countries differ in ethos and aspirations from those of the developed countries. These differences may argue for a language planning model in Third World countries that is different from the models developed on the basis of the experience of the Western countries. India has a special place in terms of the complexity of its language problems, and it can learn more profitably from the experience of other developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This sharing of experience will help to reorient the models of language planning, which will contribute to the establishment of language planning as an international academic discipline.
With these objectives in mind, the Central Institute of Indian Languages of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Government of India, at Mysore organized an International Institute in Language Planning from June 16 to July 11, 1980, under the direction of Dr. D.P. Pattanayak. It was a natural follow-up of the International Institute in Language Planning organized by the Culture Learning Institute of the East-West Center in Honolulu in 1977.
The focus of the second institute was on multilingualism and linguistic minorities, which are characteristic features of Third World countries. The participants of the institute came from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Mauritius, Tanzania, Canada, and the United States. The activities of the Institute consisted of lectures on theoretical aspects of language planning, panel discussions on selected problems, presentation of papers on language planning activities in selected countries, seminar presentation of papers on selected themes, and group work done by ten groups. The panels were on linguistic, legal, social, educational, and political aspects of planning. The working groups dealt with issues such as the training and legal aspects of planning for administration, planning in the legal domain, pedagogical and language rights and elite formation issues in the planning for education, planning for mass communication, and planning for script and spelling and for term creation and discourse development. There were special invited lectures by officials of the Government of India and Karnataka involved in language planning tasks.
The Institute was successful in stimulating an intensive intellectual atmosphere for discussing issues of language planning, in sharing the experience of language planning in different countries, and in contributing towards realizing the need for a new model of language planning. The success was the direct result of contributions by the host of CIIL staff, who spared no effort both at personal and official levels, by the Government of India, which provided a substantial part of the funds for the Institute, and by the Ford Foundation, whose grant to the Institute helped to meet expenses of many scholars from abroad. We are thankful to all of them.
It was planned to bring out three volumes arising out of the proceedings of the Institute and a few contributions by the scholars assembled in the Institute, which will be intro-ductions to sociolinguistics and language planning. However, we are able to now bring out only the selected contributions made at the Institute as its Proceedings. We hope that this volume compensates those originally planned by its new orientation and fresh approach to the problems of language and language planning, particularly in the developing countries.
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