Current Issues in Language Planning

Introduction: Why Have a New Journal? Language policy and planning is a relatively new field – initially developing as a part of sociolinguistics and language-in-society studies. It came into existence in the late 1950s and, as a serious discipline, early 1960s, largely out of the needs of nations newly emerging out of the collapse of former European colonial empires soon after World War II. Initially referred to as ‘language engineering’, it grew out of the positivistic faith – widely held in the years following World War II – that ‘science’ had the capacity to solve a wide variety of social and economic problems. It was recognised that the newly emerging polities had certain clear needs (if they were to become nation states) – they often needed to establish the myth of a common heritage; they needed to establish some means of communicating with what was frequently a widely heterogeneous and polyglot population, and they needed to solve social problems and provide for educational needs. It was assumed that these newly emergent polities could accomplish these ends simply by emulating the models that had developed in Europe. While the European nations had had centuries to evolve their national linguistic models, it was assumed that the newly emergent polities could transplant and evolve similar structures in merely decades. It was also not recognised that the Eurocentric views underlying the models might not have been entirely appropriate to the