PRESERVING LANGUAGES BEYOND THE POLITICAL DIMENSION: SOME PROPOSALS FOR A DIALECT PLANNING

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.4.1

In the last few years a growing attention on the preservation of languages has developed, thanks to initiatives of language planning, which imply inter alia the recognition of an idiom as a language at the political level. This view follows the dichotomy between those idioms that are official languages of institutions and those which h do not have such status, i.e. dialects. However, the difference between languages and dialects being socio-linguistic and not linguistic tout court, the efforts for preserving languages should not take the official status as a reference point. In addition, since it is very unlikely to give the same official status to a large number of languages, a different solution should be envisaged for non-official languages. Thus, they could be preserved through initiatives that can be named as dialect planning, the main purpose of which is not spreading a language in all domains but its preservation. Dialect planning is analysed in this study considering its five steps: (1) corpus planning that entails, first of all, language documentation; (2) status planning that implies some protections without entailing the recognition of the status of official language in the light of the linguistic rights; (3) prestige planning that counterbalances the ‘weaker’ status of dialects with respect to languages, by instilling in speakers the awareness that idioms are fundamental parts of cultures; (4) acquisition planning that identifies the strategies carried out for teaching a language; and (5) family language planning aimed at strengthening the family language transmission.