Successes and failures in language planning for European languages in Asian nations

Abstract

Although there have been some attempts to examine language planning and its successes and failures in South and East Asian languages, especially as such planning relates to English and to other European languages, no systematic cross-national study is available that looks systemati-cally at these issues. While such a study is not possible within the limits imposed by this paper – a monograph would probably be needed; we attempt to sketch the broad outlines of what such a study might look like and provide some basic data about, and examples of the successful and more problematic language policy and planning that has occurred in this region. If we look beyond the large regional languages (e.g., Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, and more recently Malay/Indonesian and Filipino) and the multitude of minority lan-guages, we find European – and of course Arabic and other Asian languages – have become es-tablished in the various polities in the region. These languages have come to be used for a number of reasons, including: •Trade internally within the region, from the Arabian peninsula, and later from Europe (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish); •Religious proselytisation conducted through Arabic and various European languages; •Colonization, as conducted through various European (and Asian) languages; •Languages learned to access overseas education and technology; •Wars of aggression, some of which were linked to European, North American, and Asian colonial development; •The geopolitics of the “cold war”, especially for Russian and English; and •The rise of English as an economic world language or lingua franca.