Noah Webster and the diffusion of linguistic innovations for political purposes

Although language planning is primarily government and bureaucratic intervention in the development and relative status of languages in a society, the innovations introduced by writers, printers, and others outside official positions play a key role in linguistic change. Far from being merely spontaneous and responsive to an aesthetic impulse, many nongovernmental innovations are made consciously in order to influence a society. Writers and other cultural elites who alter languages in order to change a society should be called 'language strategists'. The study of their choices and influences reveals much about the dynamics of the society itself and about the ever-present and interesting relationship between nongovernmental elites and governmental action in bringing about political, social, and economic change. Because these writers rarely work in isolation from other artists and artisans of the written word, it is likely that their friendship and professional relationships — in other words, their networks — are means by which their innovations spread. The method for diffusing linguistic change is an important facet in the study of the role of nongovernmental actors because they do not have a bureaucratic apparatus at their command to spread and enforce their choices. Even in the most authoritarian political systems, writers and the public retain considerable linguistic freedom, and governments may be obliged to make nongovernmental innovations part of their planning. The study of the motivations and actions of writers and the diffusion of their innovations through social networks can shed light on a specific process of cultural change, and it can contribute to the building of language-planning theory. The question to be addressed here is, how do linguistic choices consciously made by individual writers to effect societal change spread with what political consequences?