Discusses the independent Namibian government's goal of making English (currently the mother tongue of less than 5 percent of the population) the official language to unite various race and speech communities into one national entity, and proposes a systems approach to enable language planners to see the relationships between plans and other…

Examines creativity in Indian English and Singapore English. Highlights the differences between linguistic creativity and literary creativity in the two varieties and suggests that language planning policy and practice in the two countries are responsible for the differences found there. Implications for language planning are explored. (27…

Focuses on the communicative approach in plurilingual settings and analyzes data from Indian English in the light of the speaker/listener, the task, the context, and other negotiating factors that regulate speech in everyday life. Identifies the complementarity of grassroots English with other Indian languages and its emergence as one of the vital…

Analyzes the evolution of a language plan in Brunei Darussalam. It shows a conscious effort to influence the choice of language used in the country is a fairly recent phenomenon, determined mainly be commercial considerations. The article examines definitions, variables, and universals of language planning introduced by Tollefson and Phillipson.…

Discusses the failed attempt to cultivate Oriya as a modern language and to make it the official language of Orissa, India, in the 19th century. The reasons for this failure are a lack of language consciousness among the Oriyas, the pro-English attitude of the Oriya bureaucrats, and an irresolute corpus planning exercise. (eight references)…

Discusses, with reference to the covert policy goals of the American refugee program, the failure of U.S. Refugee Training Centers to facilitate Southeast Asian refugees' self-sufficiency after resettlement in the United States. Five characteristics of covert policy show how such covert policies have ensured their programs' ineffectiveness.…

Argues that problems with English as second language programs in Arab world stem from failures in policy planning, rather than from failures of implementation of these plans. Some crucial considerations previously ignored are sociolinguistic setting of the foreign (English) language and fit between department goals, programs, and curricula on the…

Examines the place of Arabic in language education and language planning activities in Nigeria, highlighting its uses from the nineteenth century to present, methods and content of Arabic education, contributions to historical documentation in pre-colonial Nigeria and lexical expansion of Nigerian languages, and decline in its status and role. (34…

Describes two major events--mass migration to New Caledonia in the 1950s and the conversion from a protectorate to a French overseas territory in 1961--that have confronted Wallis and Futuna (Central Polynesia) with the same sociolinguistic problems that have beset other Pacific islands for decades. (Author/CB)

It is noted that Belgium, particularly Flemish Belgium, is opposed to European unification because of the likelihood of even greater intrusion of foreign influence into the country, especially in Brussels, and an already common negative attitude toward the spread of English. (12 references)

Examines the language policy of the East India Company and the first governor-general who attempted to govern by understanding Indian people, language, and culture. At first, the company's policies helped disseminate Indian vernaculars, but later English-language education reversed this trend. (Author/JL)

Major works on the history, structure, and teaching of American Sign Language (ASL) in the last quarter-century are reviewed, and studies of the culture of the deaf are outlined. Research on the linguistic nature of ASL is highlighted, and some attention is given to British Sign Language. (Author/MSE)

Examines a sociolinguistic thesis on language attrition illustrating first-language (L1) loss in a second-language (L2) environment via interviews conducted with two control groups and L1 German speakers living in Australia. Findings reveal that after 10 to 20 years in the L2 environment, the extent of L1 attrition was such that none of the…

Three sociolinguistic perspectives are considered in a study focusing on the rationale of Israeli linguistic policy toward Arabic. These include (1) school language programs as a matter of linguistic policies of political centers; (2) the relationship of linguistic resources to group boundaries (principally ethnicity); and (3) language resources…

Major background sociocultural factors in the revival of Hebrew as Israel's vernacular during the period 1890-1916 are examined. These include communicative, national-political, and religioeducational factors leading to an unprecedented community acceptance of an unfamiliar spoken language and its use by new generations of native speakers. (MSE)