Language Planning - Language Planning Goals

Language Planning Goals

Eleven Language Planning Goals have been recognized (Nahir 2003):

1. Language Purification – prescription of usage in order to preserve the “linguistic purity” of language, protect language from foreign influences, and guard against language deviation from within
2. Language Revival – the attempt to turn a language with few or no surviving native speakers back into a normal means of communication
3. Language Reform – deliberate change in specific aspects of language, like orthography, spelling, or grammar, in order to facilitate use
4. Language Standardization – the attempt to garner prestige for a regional language or dialect, transforming it into one that is accepted as the major language, or standard language, of a region
5. Language Spread – the attempt to increase the number of speakers of one language at the expense of another
6. Lexical Modernization – word creation or adaptation
7. Terminology Unification – development of unified terminologies, primarily in technical domains
8. Stylistic Simplification – simplification of language usage in lexicon, grammar, and style
9. Interlingual Communication – facilitation of linguistic communication between members of distinct speech communities
10. Language Maintenance – preservation of the use of a group’s native language as a first or second language where pressures threaten or cause a decline in the status of the language
11. Auxiliary-Code Standardization – standardization of marginal, auxiliary aspects of language such as signs for the deaf, place names, or rules of transliteration and transcription