Balancing Language Planning and Language Rights: Catalonia's Uneasy Juggling Act

Language planning

Language planning, in one way or another, is as old as human civilization. Every time that one polity  invaded  the  territory  of  another,  the  language  of  the  conqueror  was  imposed  on  the conquered. The Romans imposed their language across the civilized world as they  knew it. In the  21st  century,  the  practice  of  language  planning  has  become  increasingly  sophisticated. Eng...

Issues with Language Policy and Planning in Iranian Higher Education

In this study, we attempt to bring to light various organisational and implementational clashes relevant to the conceptualisation of language policies at national level, and the planning of local practices with regard to degree programmes, language journals and conferences in Iranian higher education. We also prove that in its current status, the ELT syllabus in Iran, both at national and local...

Book Reviews: The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language

The Balancing Act is intended as an exploration into research combining rule-based and corpus-based approaches, that is, qualitative and quantitative methods. The book consists of eight chapters, six of which represent papers selected and revised from those originally presented at the workshop of the same name held following the 1994 annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguisti...

Language rights versus speakers’ rights: on the applicability of Western language rights approaches in Eastern European contexts

The main purpose of the present paper is to draw attention to contexts where two conceptions of linguistic rights—the rights of languages and the rights of speakers—come into conflict. To illustrate such conflict, I will examine justifications of language laws adopted in two post-Soviet countries, Latvia and Ukraine. I will begin with an overview of Soviet language policies and their impact in ...

Language Planning: Theory and Practice