Is an example (Leclerc, 1992: 495–8). In 1978, as part of a general nationalization program, Malagasy was

declared the language of education at the primary and part of the secondary levels, with French introduced

as a second language in the second grade of the primary level.

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

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

Language Revival – the attempt to turn a language with few or no surviving native speakers back into a normal means of communication[7]

Language Reform – deliberate change in specific aspects of language, like orthography, spelling, or grammar, in order to facilitate use

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

Language Spread – the attempt to increase the number of speakers of one language at the expense of another

Lexical Modernization – word creation or adaptation

Terminology Unification – development of unified terminologies, primarily in technical domains

Stylistic Simplification – simplification of language usage in lexicon, grammar, and style

Interlingual Communication – facilitation of linguistic communication between members of distinct speech communities

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

Auxiliary-Code Standardization – standardization of marginal, auxiliary aspects of language such as signs for the deaf, place names, or rules of transliteration and transcription

In addition to the education sector, there are non-governmental sectors or organizations that have a significant impact on language acquisition, such as the Académie française of France or the Real Academia Española of Spain.[1] These organizations often create their own dictionaries and grammar books, thus affecting the materials students are exposed to in schools. Although these organizations do not hold official power, they influence government planning decisions, such as with educational materials, effecting acquisition.

38. Speech as social Interaction

The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts are commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting and congratulating.

A speech act is a minimal functional unit in human communication. Just as a word (refusal) is the smallest free form found in language and a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning (-al in refuse-al makes it a noun), the basic unit of communication is a speech act (the speech act of refusal).

According to Austin's theory (1962), what we say has three kinds of meaning:

1. propositional meaning - the literal meaning of what is said

2. illocutionary meaning - the social function of what is said

3. perlocutionary meaning - the effect of what is said

'It's hot in here' could result in someone opening the windows

Based on Austin's (1962), and Searle's (1969) theory, Cohen ( 1996) identifies five categories of speech acts based on the functions assigned to them. Representatives Directives Expressives Comissives Declaratives

Speech act theory attempts to explain how speakers use language to accomplish intended actions and how hearers infer intended meaning form what is said. Although speech act studies are now considered a sub-discipline of cross-cultural pragmatics, they actually take their origin in the philosophy of language.

Philosophers like Austin (1962), Grice (1957), and Searle (1965, 1969, 1975) offered basic insight into this new theory of linguistic communication based on the assumption that “(…) the minimal units of human communication are not linguistic expressions, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving directions, apologizing, thanking, and so on” (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989, p.2). Austin (1962) defines the performance of uttering words with a consequential purpose as “the performance of a locutionary act, and the study of utterances thus far and in these respects the study of locutions, or of the full units of speech” (p. 69). These units of speech are not tokens of the symbol or word or sentence but rather units of linguistic communication and it is “(…) the production of the token in the performance of the speech act that constitutes the basic unit of linguistic communication” (Searle, 1965, p.136). According to Austin’s theory, these functional units of communication have prepositional or locutionary meaning (the literal meaning of the utterance), illocutionary meaning (the social function of the utterance), and perlocutionary force (the effect produced by the utterance in a given context) (Cohen, 1996, p. 384).

When second language learners engage in conversations with native speakers, difficulties may arise due to their lack of mastery of the conversational norms involved in the production of speech acts. Such conversational difficulties may in turn cause breakdowns in interethnic communication (Gumperz, 1990). When the nonnative speakers violate speech act realization patterns typically used by native speakers of a target language, they often suffer the perennial risk of inadvertently violating conversational (and politeness) norms thereby forfeiting their claims to being treated by their interactants as social equals (Kasper, 1990, p. 193).

Searle has concentrated his work on speech acts on how a hearer perceives a

particular utterance to have the force it has, what he calls the ‘uptake’ of an

utterance. In particular, what makes a promise a promise? For Searle there are

five rules that govern promise-making. The first, the propositional content rule,

is that the words must predicate a future action of the speaker. The second and

third, the preparatory rules, require that both the person promising and the

person to whom the promise is made must want the act done and that it would

not otherwise be done. Moreover, the person promising believes he or she can

do what is promised. The fourth, the sincerity rule, requires the promiser to

intend to perform the act, that is, to be placed under some kind of obligation;

and the fifth, the essential rule, says that the uttering of the words counts as

undertaking an obligation to perform the action.

39. Norms governing speech

Norms governing what you can talk about.

Norms governing non-verbal communication.

Norms governing the quantity of speech produced (how much you can talk).

Norms governing the number of people who talk at once (one person at a time?).

Norms governing the number of interruptions.

Skill in speaking depends on a variety of factors, including a knowledge of the relevant rules governing speech. Such rules are of various types, dealing with different aspects of speech, but all we can do here is to mention a few examples. The rules chosen vary from one society to another, which makes it easier to see that there are rules, but this should not be taken to imply that all rules are similarly variable. (It is possible that there are widespread, if not universal rules, though the emphasis in the literature is on differences rather than similarities between cultures.) We shall call such roles norms because they define normal behaviour for the society concerned, without specific penalties against those who do not follow them.

First, there are norms governing the sheer quantity of speech that people produce, varying from very little to very much. Dell Hymes describes a society where very little speech is the norm.

Peter Gardener did some fieldwork in southern India, among a tribal people called the Puliya, describing their socialization patterns. There is no agriculture and no industry, and the society is neither particularly cooperative nor particularly competitive; so children are led neither to be particularly interdependent nor to be aggressively competitive with each other, but simply to busy themselves with their own concerns in reasonable spatial proximity. He observed that, by the time a man was forty, he practically stopped speaking altogether. He had no reason to speak. People there, in fact, just didn't talk much and seldom seemed to find anything much to talk about, and he saw this as a consequence of the particular kind of socialization pattern.

Another kind of norm controls the number of people who talk at once in a conversation. Most readers would probably accept the principle that only one person should speak (otherwise there must be more than one conversation taking place, as at a party), but apparently this norm is not universal. The practices in a village in Antigua, in the West Indies, are described by Karl Reisman: Antiguan conventions appear, on the surface, almost anarchic. Fundamentally, there is no regular requirement for two or more voices not to be going at the same time. The start of a new voice is not in itself a signal for the voice speaking either to stop or to institute a process which will decide who is to have the floor. When someone enters a casual group, for example, no opening is necessarily made for him; nor is there any pause or other formal signal that he is being included. No one appears to pay any attention. When he feels ready he will simply begin speaking. He may be heard, he may not. That is, the other voices may eventually stop and listen, or some of them may; eyes may or may not turn to him. If he is not heard the first time he will try again, and yet again (often with the same remark). Eventually he will be heard or give up.

Other norms refer to the information which participants in a conversation give each other. If our only concern is to communicate as efficiently as possible, then information should flow freely. This may be the pattern in some societies, as suggested by some theories of pragmatics, but we cannot take it for granted. After all, information is an important commodity, and new information is particularly valuable as the substance of interesting conversations and a source of status for those who give it away. Those who have information that others don't know are in a powerful position, and may decide to ration the flow in a way that contradicts our more rational expectations. In familiar societies this is an individual matter (and we probably all know individuals who enjoy making others work hard for their information); but in some societies the process is institutionalised. For example, gossips on Nukulaelae Atoll frequently withhold important pieces of information, such as the identity of a person, from their gossip narratives, thus manipulating their audiences into asking for the missing information, sometimes over the space of several turns, as information is revealed in small doses, requiring further questioning.

There are a number of reasons why speakers are so uninformative in this community. One is that they are afraid that identifying an individual may bring the person to the attention of evil forces, or get them into trouble in other ways. Another reason is the shortage of news in small isolated villages. Consequently, there is no reluctance to give information when it is easily available to anyone − for instance, if there is a pot of rice cooking over a fire, people will refer to it as "the rice" since anyone can see that there is rice there. Clearly, different norms for speech in different societies can often be explained by reference to other aspects of their cultures and cannot, therefore, be satisfactorily studied in isolation.

Finally, there are very specific norms which may vary from society to society, such as the way one answers the telephone. To take another example, in Germany the hostess at a formal dinner party would probably say to her guests Ich darf jetzt bitten, Platz zu nehmen (I may now ask (you) to take (your) places), using a declarative construction, in contrast with the interrogative that might be used by an English hostess: May I ask you to come and sit down now?

The diversity in the norms for speech are matched in the area of nonverbal communication. Conversely, different actions can have the same meaning in different communities.