Volume 2008, Issue 191

1. A (rather longish) introduction to the introduction An Ausbau language, to repeat Kloss's (1967: 30) original definition, is a language that has “deliberately been reshaped so as to become a vehicle of variegated literary expression.” It is a language because “it has been made” such. Its opposite is an Abstand language, a language that is there, so to speak, “by nature,” and that would be recognized as such “no matter what” by virtue of its inherent distinctiveness. With his dichotomy Kloss brought to the fore and highlighted, to use Fishman's words (this issue), “the importance of organized human intervention into the natural language-change processes.” Still, between the two terms of his dichotomic opposition, it is Ausbau that has received the greatest attention, and it is to the concept of Ausbau that Heinz Kloss owes his place among the great linguists of the past century. The reason is easily spelled out: as Fishman (this issue; here and below emphasis in the original) again notes, “ Ausbau and Abstand are not really on one and the same dimension ,” and “the latter term, Abstand, is entirely unneeded in any language planning typology because it lacks any reference to human agency .”

There are several advantages to reconceptualizing Heinz Kloss's dichotomy “ Ausbau vs. Abstand ” as separate continuous variables, only the former of which ( Ausbau ) is needed for corpus planning studies. Such a reconceptualization would not only be preferable from the point of view of measuring the connectedness between degree of Ausbauization and various population attitudes and academy implementation successes, but also to furthering continuous variable measurement in general sociolinguistics and to appreciating the co-presence possibilities of various other measures of corpus planning efforts that have most recently been introduced. One of the greatest gifts of Heinz Kloss to macro-sociolinguistics was the formulation of a polar opposite distinction between any two contrasted languages or varieties such that they are each either (a) easily recognized (i.e., judged) to be functionally independent from one another due to the major and natural (that is, not man-made) differences have already transpired between them, referred to as being “independent by Abstand ,” on the one hand, or (b) those whose functional independence is recognized only as a result of the human effort that has been expended in order to make them appear sufficiently different from one another, so that the smaller and weaker of the two can be recognized as independent from the larger and stronger one and, therefore, referred to as being “independent by Ausbau.” Thus, the major theoretical contribution of Kloss, initially made well before his Nazi days (see Hutton 1999) was essentially a tripartite one, one which was simultaneously (1) judgmental and perspectival, (2) focused upon the importance of organized human intervention into the natural language-change processes in order that prestige- and power-related societal functions for, as well as the independence of, the contextually weaker variety were to have a chance of being recognized at all, and (3) preoccupied with “dialect avoidance efforts” more generally as a major desideratum governing intervarietal comparisons in the realm of social power. The above-mentioned tripartite considerations may be highly interrelated but they are, nevertheless, sufficiently independent from one another to also be considered separately, rather than necessarily only jointly. Finally, Ausbau and Abstand , rather than being totally separate, are also independently related to various yet other language planning dimensions and it is these last-mentioned relationships that actually disclose the major importance of Ausbau to the entire language planning venture in various polities (Schiffman 1996; Kalogjera 1985).

Reading Professor Robert D. Greenberg's book Language and Identity in the Balkans , one encounters many obviously wrong claims. It takes a while to perceive that it results from an approach that disregards reality. The author believes indeed that Serbo-Croatian really existed as a living unified language, and then ceased to exist, although he himself mentions many data about developments and circumstances that allow us to infer that this was not the case. Nevertheless, his faith remains unshakable. Things appear even stranger when it becomes evident that his belief is almost solely based on the so-called 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement and the 1954 Novi Sad Agreement, which stipulate such a unified literary language for Serbs and Croats without taking into account the whole historical context of these two events. This only shows that a unified Serbo-Croatian standard language was a project supported by important champions, but nota linguistic reality. In the book, linguistic reality is consequently disregarded as a factor in itself and considered in the light of normative regulations and legal acts of language policy, which they were subsumed under. This considerably hampers any deeper understanding. Such an approach is not only inadequate in itself, but also leads to inadequate interpretations and wrong judgments about the course taken by language history, especially with regard to the literary and the standard language. In addition, the book contains a series of false data and untrue statements about factual matters and obvious misinterpretations of historical developments. In this respect, it is not trustworthy. It is also obvious that, quite regrettably, these mistakes clearly reveal the author's bias in controversial matters. As a case study of scholarly treatment of an atypical course taken by the history of a literary language, this paper may help in understanding other analogous developments in the world, more so as the approach of Professor Greenberg is not quite atypical on occasions in which undesired linguistic loyalties are to be intellectually repressed.

Tamil is a Dravidian language that began to try to develop itself, i.e., undergo Ausbau , when the perception developed that there was a threat from other languages to its very existence. In this study I claim that Tamil linguistic culture's Ausbau project has had limited success, principally because of an excessive concern with and devotion to purism. That is, rather than apply a number of different strategies for vocabulary (i.e., “word-formation”) development that are available to all languages, such as abbreviation, blending, borrowing, and nativization, Tamil linguistic culture has opted primarily for the strategy of loan translation, using “native” (or what are thought to be “pure” native) roots, or neologizing ex nihilo, making up new terms but using only what are thought to be “pure” native resources. This study thus looks back in the history of the language to a number of moments when Tamil (and the other Dravidian languages) were confronted with linguistic “threats” of various sorts, i.e., the influx of loan words from Sanskrit, and later pressures from both English during the British colonial period, and from Hindi, after independence. In the end, the fact that higher education has always been in English in India, and continues to resist any switch to other languages, has severely hampered the development of scientific and technological registers in any South Asian language, including Tamil.

The introduction of the Roman script since the turn of the twentieth century was the first attempt of mass alphabetization in Africa, and it has become the most important writing system. It was, however, not the first script on the continent. In Old Egypt and its successor states, writing systems were developed, transferred to other languages and modified, replaced by new systems, and occasionally became obsolete. In a number of northern and north-eastern African languages, the Latin alphabet replaced earlier scripts. Despite many efforts to alphabetize the population and graphize African languages, only a few languages have become media of written communication and learning. For some languages, however, independent scripts were designed, some of which are still used today. The introduction of the Internet has enhanced the chances for the Latin script as a written medium for African languages. It is also the platform for a revival of the old scripts like Tifinagh and Ajami, and some of the independent African scripts.

The history of Ethiopia has witnessed a constant struggle between centralizing forces and regional powers. Since 1991 the pendulum has swung clearly toward a policy of “ethnic federalism.” Nevertheless, to date only a few of the about eighty ethnic groups of Ethiopia have implemented the right to fully develop their own language and use it in education and administration, as enshrined in the new federal constitution. Actually, only Oromo (the second or possibly even the first language of the country in demographic terms) has been equipped to become a full-fledged medium in the fields of education, administration, and publication. For many other languages, reshaping has been limited to the selection of an orthography, accompanied by the introduction of the local language in the first years of the school curriculum and the production of primers or dictionaries. After a comparison with the previous language policies of the country and of neighboring Eritrea, the article discusses the problems facing the standardization and Ausbauization of Ethiopian languages: orthographic choices, the selection of the official variety to be implemented, the elaboration of modern technical vocabulary, and the production of high-quality written material.

The sociolinguistic concept of an Ausbau language is widely thought of as exclusively associated with the standardization of languages for the political and social purposes of nation states. Language policy initiated by state institutions, the development of literacy and new specialist registers of language are typical elements involved in the Ausbau process. However, the linguistic ideologies of small language groups such as those of the minority languages of Aboriginal Australia can drive certain forms of deliberate language elaboration. An important aspect of Aboriginal linguistic ideology is language diversity, reflected in the development of elemental sociolinguistic varieties such as patriclan lects. In the Bininj Kun-wok dialect chain of western Arnhem Land, a regional system of lectal differentiation known as Kun-dangwok has developed, reflecting an Aboriginal linguistic ideology whereby being different, especially different ways of speaking, are seen as central aspects of identity. The functions of the Kun-dangwok clan lect system are described using examples of naturally occurring conversation which provide evidence that clan lects are the result of an Ausbau process that results in the opposite of language standardization and an increase in Abstand between varieties.

This article describes a collaborative project for language documentation involving the North American indigenous languages of Mohave and Chemehuevi. We define the essential elements of field methods and of project design while proposing a basic model for collaborative community-based projects in language documentation. Our recommendations apply to community-based projects in North American indigenous communities; however, we anticipate that they will be extendable worldwide to others working in the field of language documentation.