Mengenal Ekolinguistik

Oleh: Yusradi Usman al-Gayoni

Salah satu isu yang hangat dibicarakan banyak pihak dewasa ini adalah soal lingkungan. Betapa
tidak, perubahan iklim (climate change) akibat efek rumah kaca berimplikasi pada naiknya
permukaan air laut, secara massive sangat memengaruhi kehidupan sosial di kawasan kepantaian
termasuk di kawawan pegunungan. Hal tersebut semakin menekan terjadinya pelbagai perubahan
ragawi lingkungan. Dengan kata lain, tekanan terhadap lingkungan turut terjadi. Satu diantara
perubahan yang paling dirasakan adalah terjadinya pergeseran nilai, norma, dan kultur
masyarakat tempatan. Lebih spesifik, terjadi pelbagai perubahan pada bahasa. Bahasa berada
diambang kritis, yang semakin sulit untuk “hidup,” bertahan, dan terwaris pada pemakai yang
lebih muda. Belum lagi, dengan adanya hegemoni dan dominasi beberapa bahasa internasional,
regional, dan nasional yang semakin mengkhawatirkan keberadaan bahasa-bahasa minoritas di
sebuah kawasan.

Perubahan timbal balik antara lingkungan dan bahasa di atas lah yang coba diakrabi melalui
kajian ekolinguistik. Ekolinguistik terbilang baru dalam kajian Linguistik. Dalam istilah lain,
kajian ini dikenal pula dengan istilah ekologi bahasa. Sebetulnya ada empat istilah yang merujuk
pada kajian ini, yaitu linguistic ecology, ecological linguistics, the ecology of language/language
ecology, dan ecolinguistics (Lechevrel, 2009: 5). Sementara itu, dalam bahasa Indonesia dikenal
istilah ekologi linguistik, linguistik ekologi, ekologi bahasa/bahasa ekologi, ekologi bahasa, dan
ekolinguistik (al-Gayoni, 2010:25). Dalam bahasa lain, dikenal pula istilah Ecologie des
langues/Ecologie du langage, Linguistique ecologique, Ecologie linguistique dan
Ecolinguistique (Perancis), Okologie der Sprache/sprachologie, Okologische Linguistik,
Linguistik Ekologie dan Okolinguistik (Jerman), serta Ecologia des las lenguas, Ecologia
linguistic dan Ecolinguistica (Spanyol) (Lechevrel, 2009:5 dalam al-Gayoni, 2010: 26)

Kajian ini ini pertama kali dikenalkan Einar Haugen dalam tulisannya yang bertajuk Ecology of
Language tahun 1972. Haugen lebih memilih istilah ekologi bahasa (ecology of language) dari
istilah lain yang bertalian dengan kajian ini. Pemilihan tersebut karena pencakupan yang luas di
dalamnya, yang mana para pakar bahasa dapat berkerjasama dengan pelbagai jenis ilmu sosial
lainnya dalam memahami interaksi antarbahasa (Haugan dalam Fill& Mühlhäusler, 2001:57)

Pengertian Ekolinguistik dan Ekologi

Ekologi bahasa menurut Haugen, adalah

Language ecology may be defined as the study of interactions between any given language and
its environment (Haugen, 1972, dalam Peter, 1996: 57).

Ekologi bahasa dapat didefinisikan sebagai studi tentang interaksi antarbahasa yang ada dengan
lingkungannya (terjemahan penulis)
Fill (1993:126) dalam Lindo & Bundsgaard (eds.) (2000), mendefinisikan ekolinguistik sebagai
berikut.

Ecolinguistics is an umbrella term for ‘[…] all approaches in which the study of language (and
languages) is in any way combined with ecology’.

Ekolinguistik merupakan payung istilah terhadap ‘[…] semua pendekatan studi bahasa (dan
bahasa-bahasa) yang dikombinasikan dengan ekologi (terjemahan penulis)

Sementara itu, Mühlhäusler, dalam salah satu tulisannya yang berjudul Ecolinguistics in the
University, menyebutkan

“Ecology is the study of functional interrelationships. The two parameters we wish to interrelate
are language and the environment/ecology. Depending on whose perspective one takes one will
get either ecology of language, or language of ecology. Combined they constitute the field of
ecolinguistics. Ecology of language studies the support systems languages require for their
continued wellbeing as well as the factors that have affected the habitat of many languages in
recent times” (p.2)

Ekologi adalah studi tentang hubungan-hubungan timbal balik yang bersifat fungsional. Dua
parameter yang hendak kita hubungkan adalah bahasa dan lingkungan/ekologi. Tergantung pada
perspektif yang digunakan baik ekologi bahasa maupun bahasa ekologi. Kombinasi keduanya
menghasilkan kajian ekolinguistik. Ekologi bahasa mempelajari dukungan pelbagai sistem
bahasa yang diperlukan bagi kelangsungan mahluk hidup, seperti halnya dengan faktor-faktor
yang memengaruhi kediaman (tempat) bahasa-bahasa dewasa ini (hal. 2) (terjemahan penulis)

Crystal (2008: 161-162) dalam kamus A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics 6th Edition,
menjelaskan bahwa

ecolinguistics (n.) In linguistics, an emphasis – reflecting the notion of ecology in biological

studies – in which the interaction between language and the cultural environment is seen as
central; also called the ecology of language, ecological linguistics, and sometimes green
linguistics. An ecolinguistic approach highlights the value of linguistic diversity in the world, the
importance of individual and community linguistic rights, and the role of language attitudes,
language awareness, language variety, and language change in fostering a culture of
communicative peace.

ekolinguistik (nomina) dalam linguistik, sebuah perhatian– merefleksikan sifat ekologi dalam
studi biologis – yang mana interaksi antara bahasa dan lingkungan kultural dilihat sebagai inti:
disebut pula dengan ekologi bahasa, ekologi linguistik dan kadang-kadang linguistik hijau.
Pendekatan ekolinguistik menyoroti nilai keragaman linguistik di dunia, pentingnya hak
linguistik dari individu dan komunitas, peranan sikap, kesadaran, variasi, dan perubahan bahasa
dalam mengembangkan sebuah budaya perdamaian yang komunikatif (terjemahan penulis)

Sementara itu, istilah ekologi berasal dari bahasa Yunani oikos, yang berarti house, man’s
immediate surroundings. Ricklefs (1976:1) dalam bukunya The Economy of Nature A Textbook
in Basic Ecology mendefinisikan ekologi sebagai berikut

Ecology is the study of plants and animals, as individuals and together in populations and
biological communities, in relation to their environments – the physical, chemical, and
biological characteristics of their surroundings.

Ekologi merupakan studi yang mempelajari tumbuh-tumbuhan dan hewan-hewanan sebagai

individu dan secara bersamaan dalam populasi dan komunitas biologis dalam kaitannya dengan
lingkungannya – fisik, kimia, dan karakteristik biologis lingkungannya (terjemahan penulis)

Disamping itu, Haeckel (1870) dalam Ricklefs (1976:2) menerangkan

“By ecology,” he wrote, “we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature –
the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and to its inorganic
environment; including above all, its friendly and inimcal relation with those animals and plants
with ehich it come directly or indirectly in contact – in a word, ecology is the study of all the
complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.”

terkait ekologi, ‘beliau menulis “kita artikan pokok ilmu pengetahuan mengenai ekonomi alam –
penelitian hubungan mutlak dari hewan baik lingkungan organik maupun non-organik; termasuk
secara keseluruhan, keramahtahamannya dan hubungan inimcal dengan hewan-hewan tersebut
dan tanaman-tanaman dengan ehich yang datang dalam kontak secara langsung atau tidak
langsung – dalam kata lain, ekologi adalah studi keseluruhan hubungan intra yang kompleks
yang dirujuk Darwin sebagai kondisi perebutan eksistensi” (terjemahan penulis)

Dengan demikian, kajian ekolinguistik lebih melihat tautan ekosistem yang merupakan bagian
dari sistem kehidupan manusia (ekologi) dengan bahasa yang dipakai manusia dalam
berkomunikasi dalam lingkungannya (linguistik). Lingkungan tersebut adalah lingkungan ragawi
berbahasa yang menghadirkan pelbagai bahasa dalam sebuah masyarakat. Situasi dwi/multi
bahasa inilah yang mendorong adanya interaksi bahasa. Lingkungan ragawi dengan pelbagai
kondisi sosial sangat memengaruhi penutur bahasa secara psikologis dalam penggunaan
bahasanya (al-Gayoni, 2010:31).

Kajian Ekolinguistik

The discipline of ecolingusitics is traditionally divided into two main branches, eco-critical
discourse analysis and linguistic ecology. Eco-critical discourse analysis includes, but is not
limited to, the application of critical discourse analysis to texts about the environment and
environmentalism, in order to reveal underlying ideologies. In its fullest formation, it includes
analysis of any discourse which has potential consequences for the future of ecosystems, such as
neoliberal economic discourse and discursive constructions of consumerism, gender, politics,
agriculture and nature. Eco-critical discourse analysis does not just focus on exposing
potentially damaging ideologies, but also searches for discursive representations which can
contribute to a more ecologically sustainable society (Sumber: Wikipedia).

Secara tradisional, ekolinguistik dapat dibagi menjadi dua bagian utama, yaitu analisis wacana
eko-kritis dan ekologi linguistik. Wacana eko-kritis tidak terbatas pada pengaplikasian analisis
wacana kritis terhadap teks yang berkenaan dengan lingkungan dan pihak-pihak yang terlibat
dalam lingkungan dalam pengungkapan ideologi-ideologi yang mendasari teks tersebut, tetapi
kajian ini menyertakan pula penganalisisan pelbagai macam wacana yang berdampak besar
terhadap ekosistem mendatang. Misalnya, wacana ekonomi neo-liberal, ketak-terhubungan dari
konstruksi konsumerisme, gender, politik, pertanian dan alam. Disamping itu, wacana eko-kritis
bukan sebatas memokuskan pada penulusuran ideologi-ideologi yang berpotensi merusak,
melainkan mencari representasi diskursif yang dapat berkontribusi terhadap keberlangsungan
masyarakat secara ekologis (Sumber Wikipedia) (terjemahan penulis).

Haugen (1970) dalam Mbete (2009:11-12) menyebut, ada sepuluh ruang kajian ekologi bahasa,
antara lain, pertama linguistik historis komparatif, menjadikan bahasa-bahasa kerabat di suatu
lingkungan geografis sebagai fokus kaji untuk menemukan relasi historis genetisnya. Kedua,
linguistik demografi, mengkaji komunitas bahasa tertentu di suatu kawasan untuk memerikan
kuantitas sumber daya (dan kualitas) penggunaan bahasa-bahasa beserta ranah-ranah dan ragam
serta registrasinya (sosiolek dan fungsiolek). Ketiga, sosiolinguistik, yang fokus utama kajiannya
atas variasi sistematik antara struktur bahasa dan stuktur masyarakat penuturnya. Keempat,
dialinguistik, yang memokuskan kajiannya pada jangkauan dialek-dialek dan bahasa-bahasa
yang digunakan masyarakat bahasa, termasuk di habitat baru, atau kantong migrasi dengan
dinamika ekologinya. Kelima, dialektologi, mengkaji dan memetakan variasi-variasi internal
sistem bahasa. Keenam, filologi, mengkaji dan menjejaki potensi budaya dan tradisi tulisan,
propeknya, kaitan maknawi dengan kajian dan atau kepudaran budaya, dan tradisi tulisan lokal.
Ketujuh, linguistik preskriptif, mengkaji daya hidup bahasa di kawasan tertentu di kawawan
tertentu, pembakuan bahasa tulisan dan bahasa lisan, pembakuan tata bahasa (sebagai muatan
lokal yang memang memerlukan kepastian bahasa baku yang normatif dan pedagogis).
Kedelapan, glotopolitik, mengkaji dan memberdayakan pula wadah, atau lembaga penanganan
masalah-masalah bahasa (secara khusus pada era otonomi daerah, otonomi khusus, serta
pendampingan kantor dan atau balai bahasa). Kesembilan, etnolinguistik, linguistik antrofologi
ataupun linguistik kultural (cultural linguistics) yang membedah pilih-memilih penggunaan
bahasa, cara, gaya, pola pikir dan imajeri (Palmer, 1996 dalam Mbete, 2009), dalam kaitan
dengan pola penggunaan bahasa, bahasa-bahasa ritual, kreasi wacana iklan yang berbasiskan
bahasa lokal. Kesepuluh, tipologi, membedah derajat keuniversalan dan keunikan bahasa-bahasa.
Berdasarkan cakupan ekolinguistik di atas, penelitian ini berhubungan erat dengan ekologi sosial
yang membahas sosiolinguistik dan etnolinguistik.

Hubungan Bahasa dan Lingkungan

Terdapat hubungan yang nyata prihal pelbagai perubahan ragawi lingkungan terhadap bahasa
dan sebaliknya. Dalam tulisannya Language and Environment, Mühlhäusler (hal. 3) menyebut,
ada empat yang memungkinkan hubungan antara bahasa dan lingkungan. Semuanya menjadi
subjek yang berbeda dari kajian linguistik pada satu waktu, atau pada waktu yang lain. Keempat
hubungan tersebut adalah (1) Language is independent and self-contained (Chomsky, Cognitive
Linguistics); (2) Language is constructed by the world (Marr); (3) The world is constructed by
language (structuralism and post structuralism); (4) Language is interconnected with the world
– it both constructs and is constructed by it but rarely independent (ecolinguistics).

Di Takengen, Kabupaten Aceh Tengah, khususnya di seputar Lut Tawar (Danau Lut Tawar)
misalnya. Sebelumnya, penamaan kampung di seputar danau sebanyak 128 kampung (Saleh,
2009). Tetapi, saat ini, masyarakat Gayo, khususnya generasi muda tidak lagi mengenal nama-
nama tempat tersebut. Hal tersebut terjadi karena adanya pelbagai perubahan sosio-ekologis yang
berlangsung pada masyarakat seputar danau, seperti kebijakan penggabungan kampung, migrasi
penduduk dari pelbagai kampung seputar danau baik di Aceh maupun ke luar Aceh khususnya ke
Kabupaten Bener Meriah, bencana alam dan lain-lain (al-Gayoni, www.gayolinge.com, 24
Desember 2009). Karenanya, terdapat hubungan yang nyata terkait pelbagai perubahan ekologis
terhadap bahasa. Lebih luas lagi, perubahan-perubahan ekologis tersebut turut memengaruhi
nilai, ideologi dan budaya sebagai bagian dari identitas keetnikan sebuah masyarakat (al-Gayoni,
2010: 35-36).

Sebaliknya, bahasa sangat memengaruhi pola pikir, sikap, dan pola tindak manusia. Hal tersebut
dapat berimplikasi positif terhadap lingkungan fisik, ekonomis, dan sosial yaitu dengan
terpelihara, adanya keseimbangan dan terwarisnya lingkungan yang ada kepada generasi
berikutnya. Sebaliknya, dapat pula berdampak negatif dengan terjadinya pelbagai perubahan,
ketidakseimbangan, dan kerusakan ekosistem. Dengan demikian, bahasa dapat mengarahkan
penggunanya baik untuk hal-hal yang bersifat konstruktif maupun yang bersifat destruktif terkait
lingkungan (al-Gayoni, 2010: 36).
 Albert Bastardas-Boada
CUSC - Centre Universitari de Sociolingüística i Comunicació, and General Linguistics
Department,Universitat de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain

Language Planning and Language Ecology:Towards a theoretical integration

(Symposium30 Years of Ecolinguistics, Graz, Austria (2000))

1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS:
1. THE (BIO)ECOLOGICAL METAPHOR In recent years, in order to answer the fundamental
questions in the field of linguistic policy and pl anning, we have m ade m et aphori cal use
of the conceptual iz at ion and organiz ati on of biological phenomena into systems,
known popularly asecology. Of course, sociolinguisticobjects are not fundamentally (or
exclusively) biological; they belong to a different, emergingorder of phenom ena.
Nonet hel ess t he anal ogi e s we const ruct , the concept s we adapt , t he questions we
raise, and, above all, the paradigm we seek to produce - by considering languagesas cultural
'species' living in a particular environment with their own ecosystems - are likely to be
illuminating and suggestive.We should of course be clear at all times that the model is
metaphorical, and be aware of the potential dangers of a reification of systems of linguistic
communication. Though we place themin broader sociocultural contexts than those
usually considered, there is always the risk of neglecting individuals inside the model and
of forgetting the fact that these cultural 'species' are,in the final analysis, the product and
function of the cognitive and communicative activity of human beings.1.1 The ecological
perspective: its fundamental contributionAt the theoretical level perhaps the greatest virtue of the
ecological analogy for sociolinguisticsand linguistic policy and planning, and for
linguistics in general, is that it provides us with conceptual instruments that can give a
more operative definition of what we habitually term the 'cont ex t '. Appl yi ng t he s ys t em -
bas ed approach of bi ol ogi cal ecol ogy (see Margal ef 1991)enables us to thi nk
of li ngui sti c forms and codes as el em ents that are b y t hei r ver y n at ure integrated
in their sociocultural habitat. These forms and codes stand in relation to other objectsin the
ecosystem, such as individuals’ ideas of reality, the social meanings attributed to formsand
codes, the socioeconomic categorization of individuals, group representations, and so on.As
Morin (1991) says, the ideal approach considers that linguistic forms live in society and inculture
which, at the same time, live in linguistic forms. We are thus on the way to expressingthe non-
fragmentation of reality, the non-separation of elements and their contexts.The ecological vision
enables us to bring together elements which appear to be separate, whileat the same time
maintaining a degree of autonomy for each distinct part. So we can now leave behind us the
image of linguistic codes as separate from the other components of reality, thoughthis idea of
separation has presided over most of the field of linguistics for many years.
This perspective provides a much clearer understanding of language change and shift. Without
anyhes i t ation on t heoreti cal grounds we can rel at e m odi fi cati ons of form t o t he
decis ions of speakers or to changes in their demolinguistic, sociological or economic
contexts. The 'life anddeath' of languages – to be metaphorical again - are much better
understood from an ecological perspective. The use or neglect of language varieties is the
consequence of developments inother relevant sociopolitical aspects that comprise the
sociocultural ecosystem as a whole: anychange i n i deologi es, val ues, e conom i c or
polit i cal organiz ation, waves of mi grat ion,t echnol ogi cal innovati ons, whi ch
dis rupt s t abi li t y of t he ecos yst em are li kel y t o l ead torespecti ve changes i n the
forms and codes of l inguisti c com muni cat ion bet ween hum ans. Languages, then,
like biological species, never live in a vacuum; they are fully integrated and adapted to
their sociocultural ecosystem and to the other elements inside it. Substantial changesi n cert ain
ke y as pects of t heir habit at m ay si gnif y t hei r repl acem ent or negl ect, and
s o eventually their gradual extinction.Certain precise conceptualizations of biological
ecology are of great heuristic use to us, in particular with regard to our understanding
of developmental phenomena. For example, thefi ndi ngs of t he bi oecol ogists t hat
have pr eceded us wil l deepen our underst anding of t he contacts between different
linguistic groups. The contact between two species, they tell us, isnever purely binary.
A third element is always present: the environment in which the contact takes place. The
application of this perspective to the field of sociolinguistics is extraordinarily productive. In
the contact between two linguistic groups, we should not focus solely on thegroups
involved but also, and indeed above all, on the broader context in which the
contacttakes place. As in biological species, the context may tend to favor one group over the
other, and

so the third element may have a decisive impact on the situation's development (see
Bastardas1993).The ecological metaphor is extremely useful for our theoretical representations.
It is also veryvaluable at the
ethical level
, that is, in our consideration of the responsibility of humans for their linguistic
systems. In recent years public awareness of the danger of loss of biological diversity
has risen dramatically; every day more people lament the disappearance of animal and plant
species. The crisis of biodiversity is a topical theme in the press and the media. Politiciansand
citizens’ groups call for decisive action in favour of conservation. The cri sis of
linguisticdi versit y, however, is t reat ed ver y di fferentl y. Li ngui st i c groups al l
over the worl d are abandoning their ancestral languages, condemning them to gradual
extinction. The spread of thenation-states and the processes of industrialization and
globalization have caused irreparablechanges in the historical ecosystems in which
these languages have subsisted and reproduced(see Junyent 1998 and Mühlhäusler
1996).The ecological perspective – or perhaps more precisely the 'ecologist' perspective – is a
usefulfocus for linguists who call for measures to reverse this trend of language shift and
extinction. If we value
biological
diversity and strive to protect it, surely it is equally important to take moralresponsibility for
the conservation and development of
linguistic
diversity. Why sentence todeat h hundreds of l anguages and cult ures which m ay
contain t he seeds of creati vit y and innovation for the whole of humanity? How can
we ignore the suffering of minority groupsforced to abandon the use of their own codes in
order to survive?Reversing this trend is a particularly difficult task. Our efforts have
only just started. Theresistance from economic and political powers may be strong. Only the
creation of international, pl anet -wide organizat ions abl e to m ake t hem sel ves heard
can hel p speakers of mi norit y languages make the required changes in their environment.
As they develop economically andculturally, they should also conserve their languages
and cultures, and guard against a total,uncontrolled assimilation by the dominant languages
and cultures in the contemporary world.T h e t a s k o f h a r m o n i z i n g e c o n o m i c
' d e v e l o p m e n t ' , i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n , a n d maintenance of languages is
one of the great theoretical and practical challenges of the
politicallevel
today. If we do so in terms of ecological intervention, what should our
p o l i t i c a l commitment aim to achieve? Is the solution to turn back the clock and
return to a traditionalsociocultural organization with its limited technical and
economic resources? Probably not, because once individuals have experienced the benefits
of ‘western’ technology and civilizationthey will neither want, nor be able, to give up its
perceived advantages.
 LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE:
POLICIES AND SOCIAL PERSISTENCE

ALBERT BASTARDAS

LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AS A PROCESS

The socio-political evolution of western societies, that have corne to provide a model imitated by
other non-western countries, has led, especially over the last two centuries, to an enormous
increase in the functions and power of the state in the everyday life of the community. Language
is one of the areas in which the state's influence has grown most quickly. Over and above the
self-organizing and polycentric secular social dynamic used to solve problems of everyday
linguistic communication, political authority has become, in many countries, the
chief organizer of public language communication. In contemporary societies, then, the final
choice of linguistic code or codes for institutionalized public life lies in the hands of political
bodies. As a result, in general terms the language that the population must know is also decided
by political bodies through universal and obligatory
education. Political power will also decree -directly, or by delegating the task to academic
institutions or linguistic authorities- the form of the code or codes to be used. Nevertheless, the
actions of political bodies take place within a complex sociocultural medium; this medium
determines these actions, and in addition is regularly modified by them. It is highly likely that in
order to reach a better understanding of sociolinguistic phenomena
it will also be necessary to focus attention on society as a global and interrelated whole, of which
political power is just one part, albeit a particularly influential one. For example, cases of
linguistic
normalization in present day Spain can be much better understood if we view them globally and
dynamically whilst, at the same time, incorporating a vision of the cause and effect of current
policies.
Language management studies should take into account those actions which stem from political
decisions as well as those brought about by 15 16 ALBERT BASTARDAS
organized social movements which herald a change in linguistic behavior and ideas. This would
enable us to study, in an integrated way, the relations between political power and social
movements; this in tum would lead to a greater understanding of the global processes of
linguistic normalization. These processes are often initiated and
promoted by the active militancy of specific social groups and not by the political power.
Political bodies can be very influential in determining global linguistic behavior, and so we
should not underestimate the importance of the study and understanding of language policy -the
set of measures taken by public bodies with the intention of intervening in society's linguistic
communications- and its sociocultural effects. As a rule, one of the fundamental objectives of
these interventions is to organise linguistic activity -even if it is only public linguistic
activity -by assigning functions to one or more linguistic varieties. This assignation of functions
 has repercussions on the linguistic level; it strengthens or impoverishes the expressive capacity
of different language varieties, according to the use they are accorded in public life. In a process
of language planning, for example, reaching a certain level of standardization involves
introducing measures that implant the language and reinforce its official status through
governmental or legislative decisions. These measures aim to make the particular
language variety the language of habitual use in adrninistration, education and other official or
paraofficial activities and institutions and in public life in general. If there is linguistic conflict
the govemment can, if necessary, take action against the language variety which it does not want
to be used in public life, prohibiting and
penalizing its use in official spheres. This process may cause the
particular subordinate language variety to be substituted. On the other hand, in a situation of
linguistic plurality, if the state bases its policies on egalitarian principIes, these policies will tend
to assign language functions on the basis of territorial or even personal criteria and will also
tend to offer protection to minority languages. The
assigning of functions based on territory, as in the case of
Switzerland, favors stability and the non-conflictive continuity of the
various languages existing within the same state, so that they establish
different, but juxtaposed, ecosystems (Bastardas & Boix, 1994). This
type of organisation, however, is more difficult to implant where
there is a mixture of populations within the same territory -as is often
the case in Spain- and in this situation functions may be assigned on
the basis of personal criteria, either exclusively so, or in combination
with territorial criteria. The ideological orientation of the political
body has, then, a huge influence on the types of measure taken and on
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... I7
the overall evolution of the sociolinguistic situation. This evolution
obviously bears a very close relationship with the language behavior
norms and mental representations of the society in question.
Language policy is not, then, a static, given form, but a concept
that reacts with and is shaped by other elements inside the
sociocultural ecosystem. This ecosystem also includes all the other
factors that control daily language behavior, factors that may (or may
not) change in the direction that officiallanguage management desires.
In this respect, then, there is an overriding necessity to ascertain as
much as possible about the social dynamic of behavioral change and,
correlatively, about the persistence of certain habits. No amount o[
descriptive data -as Kurt Lewin said- will salve the problem o[ which
techniques to use to bring about the desired changd (1978:163).
Imaginative theories and a conceptual knowledge of reality therefore
become vital to the success of sociolinguistic planning. Continued
 observation, dispassionate and objective analysis of situations,
research into causes and dynamics, the evaluation of real experiences
and the reformulation of strategies and concepts are fundamental,
unavoidable tasks in which both theory and understanding are vital
components (see Bastardas, 1994). The study and understanding of
actions and ideologies in the political sphere regarding
institutionalized and individualized language uses and its codes, and
their interrelations in the sociocultural medium should be studied
together and should figure among the fundamental objectives of
sociolinguistics as a highly interdisciplinary scientific field.
ApPROACHING SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPLEXITY:
THE ECO-SOCIO-DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE
This century has seen some remarkable changes in scientific thought -
an astonishing range of technical achievements and, perhaps even more
importantly, a rethinking of fundamental aspects of the basic postulates
of science. Successive transformations, particularly in physics, have
raised serious doubts about the philosophical foundations of scientific
thought and about our models of reality. In spite of the flow of
information in society today it appears that the conceptual revolutions
of the first half of this century have not had in other disciplines the
impact they have had in physics. For example, in socio-cultural science
today there is a sense of pride that the calming empiricism which
I All quotations from non-English books are my own free translation.
18 ALBERT BASTARDAS
physics adopted towards the end of the last century has finally been
incorporated, whereas in contemporary physics the mind of the
observer is now assumed to be a vital part of current theories. Likewise,
whilst the models used in other sciences still tend to be analytical and
reductionist (looking for truth in the final, irreducible components of
their particular reality) theoretical physics now also uses a holistic
approach and has embarked on an exploration of the models and
images adopted by oriental cultures. The universe is seen as an
ever-changing spider's web of interrelated events. None of the
properties of any part of the web is fundamental; each foUows the
example of the properties of the other parts, and the overaU consistency
of their mutual interrelations determines the structure of the whole
(Capra, 1984:324).
Taking the reflections of theoretical physics as a starting point, it
seems clear that the application of a systemic and dynamic perspective
to phenomena of language management is not only advisable, but vital
 to a thorough understanding of the field, its causes, and its social
consequences and effects. Viewing socio-politico-linguistic events
inside an ecological-type framework (Haugen, 1972; Mackey, 1994;
Bastardas, 1993, 1996) which takes account of their causes and micro
and macro dynamics and which allows us to understand their
evolution and transformation is, today, an unavoidable necessity in
any branch of socio-cultural science.
Ecology, for example, gives us the idea of ecosystems, though on
transferring this concept to sociocultural sciences we need to
emphasize cultural rather than physical aspects. The idea of the
ecosystem - a level of reference formed by discontinuous individuals,
together with the materials that are the result of their activity (...) and
their matrix or physical surroundings of which they form a part and
where they carry out their activities (Margalef, 1991)- provides an
interesting point of departure when beginning to sketch the
complicated landscape in which language management and language
behavior change are located. Likewise, theories such as that of
interaction between species provide extremely interesting
formulations in the analysis of linguistic contacts. Ecology therefore
focuses our attention on the importance of the medium in which
phenomena occur, an element of crucial importance in understanding
the structure and evolution of language processes.
Ecologists affirm that when there is interaction between two
groups or species the relation is not binary but ternary, i.e., it consists
of three elements, the third being the environment in which the
interaction takes place. This concept can be usefully transferred to the
field of sociolinguistics. If we postulate that the sociocultural world
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAV10R CHANGE... 19
consists largely of institutionalized linguistic communications (Corbeil,
1980), i.e. communications that exist because of and in relation to the
institutions or organizations (official and non-official) of which society
is composed -government, school, media, advertising, etc.- these
communications constitute a type of sociolinguistic space which
escapes the direct control of the individual but has an inf1uence on the
bulk of society as a whole. This type of linguistic emission contrasts
with individualized communication - private and informal language
actions between neighbors, workmates, friends, etc., in everyday life. It
is highly likely that, in the linguistic ecosystem, institutionalized
communications wiil exercise an important, dynamic inf1uence on the
linguistic behavior of individuals, and may on occasion lead to dialectal
 homogenization or language shift. Understanding the interrelation
between these two levels of communication would be an enormously
useful step on the way to developing a global theory of language
behavior and language management.
PERSISTENCE AND CHANGE IN SOCIOLINGUISTIC MANAGEMENT
Human societies contain elements which favor persistence in cultural
and linguistic behavior - especially intra-generationally - and elements
which favor change - more likely to evolve inter-generationally. Which
elements help us to understand the dynamics of processes and to carry
out sociolinguistic planning in order to ensure, for example, maximum
use of a language in recession both in institutionalized and
individualized communications? At least three important,
complementary aspects should be considered here: persistence,
resistance and change itself. We shalllook at the first of these aspects
now. Human behavior shows a tendency towards functional
persistence. The subconscious is responsible for a large part of human
behavior, and so once a certain behavior has shown its efficiency and
functionality in everyday life it becomes routine and occurs without
the subject being aware of it, unti! a new behavior becomes the normo
Many norms in language behavior have this characteristic, which may
explain the sociological observation that many types of behavior persist
even though the conditions which led to such behavior disappear. The
concept which perhaps most adequately explains this phenomenon is
that of habitus, which Pierre Bourdieu defines as systems o[durable and
transposable dispositions, structured structures which are predisposed to
[unction as structuring structures, that is to say as generative and
organizing principIes o[ practices and representations which might
objectively be adapted to their goal without supposing a conscious vision
20 ALBERT BASTARDAS
ot the ends or conscious manipulation ot the necessary operations
attending it, objectively regulated and regular without being at all the
product ot obedience to the rules, and orchestrated collectively without
being the product ot the organizing action ot the leader otan orchestra
(1980:88). Accordingly, not only the problem of persistence affects pure
action, but the whole cognitive plan is organized in such a way as to
make change difficult and to maintain -also often unconsciouslyrepresentations of reality
interiorised at an earlier stage. Persistence is
then a factor of great importance which planners or politicians must
overcome if they are to achieve their objectives. Alerting individuals to
the situation, heightening their awareness of it, and ensuring that they
 do not reject a vision which differs from the one that they have corne
to perceive as "normality" may well be no simple task, at least unti!
certain structural changes have occurred in their surroundings.
The habitus installed in people's minds needs to be shaken off if
they are to reorganize their systems of interpretations and formulate
new visions of reality which favor changes in specific behavior. In all
probability the modification of ideas and of social behavior on a mass
scale will be more difficult if individuals do not perceive that the new
situation represents a step forward, be it for instrumental or utilitarian
reasons, or for reasons of identification. It will be even more difficult if
the changes are seen as threatening or inappropriate. We must not
discount, then, the possibility tint the attention that individuals pay to
the changes may well cause them to resist them rather than to accept
them. Whether for ideological or practical reasons, many individuals
may decide not to accept the new situation; indeed, they may actively
oppose it. In fact, given that the advantages or disadvantages of changes
in behavior will not be tangible until the new norms are put into
practice, the immediate problem will be the value hierarchy and the
ideological framework within which the changes are evaluated. For this
reason, the level of conflict between supporters and opponents of
change can vary according to the extent to which the modifications
shape the new situation, and according to the extent to which they tie
in with expectations of it.
Even if we succeed in overcoming initial ideological
representations which make acceptance of the changes difficult there
will still be elements of resistance due to the inconvenience involved in
implementing them. This type of resistance will corne above all from
individuals who do not personally support the change. An example
might be that of linguistic competence. In this case, a person's linguistic
knowledge may greatly influence his/her attitude towards change. A
person who is capable of using -or learning to use- a certain instrument
of communication without difficulty will tend to offer less resistance
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... 21
than a person who sees the task as time-consuming and costly. One
would expect, then, to find a certain degree of resistance amongst
people who, at the beginning of the process, had to acquire the
necessary knowledge to be able to use the new standard variety in
institutionalized communications.
These and other resistance-generating factors should alert the
planner to the need for in-depth study of a particular area of
 intervention before attempting to influence it. If our aim is to design an
optimal type of intervention, it is vital that sociolinguistic planning
should understand ideological representations, the norms of linguistic
use, competence and, in general, the contexts of the individuals or
organizations whom any change will affect.
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT IN SPAIN:
LANGUAGE NORMALIZATION PROCESSES
IN A STATE WITH A HISTORY OF OFFICIAL MONOLINGUALISM
Spain is one of the most linguistically complex states in the European
Union. Four languages in particular stand out: Basque, Galician,
Catalan and Castilian - the last of which is frequently referred to as
"Spanish." The populations of the areas in which the three
non-Castilian languages are also official languages represent over a
third of Spain's total population. The sociolinguistic situations of the
three languages differ widely, however, and there are even differences
within each area.1
The Basque, Galician and Catalan-speaking populations share
certain common characteristics that define the current situation in
non-Castilian speaking parts of Spain (Bastardas & Boix, 1994):
1. In all three cases the greater part of speakers of the three
languages occupy compact, self-contained territories; they are not
scattered around Spain.
2. The languages of the three communities do not have the same
legal status as Castilian in the state's central governing bodies. Within
their linguistic limits and within the "autonomous communities"
(communities with regional governments), Basque, Galician and
Catalan share equal status with Castilian as officiallanguages. Castilian
is, nevertheless, the only official state language as such, which means
2 More detailed informations on multilingualism in Spain can be found in BastardasBoada (1986
and 1989), Siguan (1991), Bastardas & Boix (1994), and Etxebarria (1995).
22 ALBERT BASTARDAS
that Spain presents itself officially as a monolingual state. This legal
regulation is the extension of a historie process: the expansion of
Castilian, an expansion which, until a few years ago, involved an
asymmetrical process of unilateral "bilingualisation" within
non-Castilian speaking populations. Castilian thus become
indispensable, and the other languages lost ground; all of them felt the
impact of the process of language shift, and some became almost
unnecessary within their own territories.
The policy of Spanish governments since 1978 - the year of the new
 Constitution - has not essentially altered either the legal framework or
the monolinguistic inertia of the central government in most of the areas
inside its jurisdiction. As a result, recognition abroad of the Basque,
Galician and Catalan languages is almost nil. Catalan citizens and
organizations cannot communicate with the central government in
Catalan, even in writing, in spite of the fact that Catalan is the second
most widely spoken language in Spain; only rarely do they receive
communications from the central government in Catalan. Comparison
with a country such as Switzerland, for example, whose egalitarian
principies allow the French minority to be Swiss without renouncing
their own language, spodights the ground still to be covered.
Nonetheless, within this limited framework, the new autonomous
governments of the Basque, Galician and Catalan-speaking areas have,
with varying degrees of commitment, set in motion processes of
linguistic normalization aimed at (re)instating their own standard
language in institutionalized communications. In doing so they aim to
halt the processes of linguistic extinction and to construct new
sociolinguistic ecosystems which will permit the recovery and habitual
use of their own languages and which will guarantee their future
stability and normality. These normalization processes resemble each
other in so far as they encourage the customary processes of
standardization - given that the political conditions that prevailed in
the past made the normal existence of a standard variety impossible -
but differ, obviously, due to the complexity of their respective
situations. This complexity resides in the fact that in these territories
many people do not speak the local language and use only Castilian,
because of intergenerational language shift, or because they are
immigrants from other language areas of Spain. For this reason, points
of departure in the different areas have tended to vary. For example, in
the Basque country - even though the population in the main supports
self-government and is proud of its culture - individuals who
habitually use an autochthonous vernacular language variety are in the
minority in the population as a whole. In this case, then, the process is
not simply one of typical standardization but one of recovering the
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... 23
autochthonous language variety and using it for communicative
functions in all areas, official, public, or private.
In the case of Galicia, the situation is different again. Of all the nonCastilian linguistic
communities, Galicia has the highest proportion of
residents who know the indigenous vernacular varieties, and is thus in
 theory the community with the most favourable preconditions.
Nonetheless, the commonly accepted ideas of the value of local
linguistic forms work against the normalization of Galician. As often
happellS in a situation characterized by long term political and
economic subordination, the speakers of vernaculars corne to see their
own language negatively, devaluing it symbolically and investing
standard Castilian - used in all official and non-official public functions
- with great prestige. Given that a majority in Galicia do not appear to
share the political ideal of linguistic emancipation, linguistic policy
does little to encourage the rapid incorporation of Galician in
institutionalized communications. This situation has obvious
repercussions for the overall advancement of the normalization
process. The case of Galicia also provides an example of the problem of
reaching social consensus on the form of the standard variety.
Languages with a longer history of standardization, such as Castilian or
French, have overcome this problem; in contrast, in Galicia, there exists
the dilemma of whether to plan the language so that it is closer to
Portuguese - a language which is, in fact, descended from Galician, and
which would integrate the community more in the Luso-Brazilian
sphere - or whether to move closer to Castilian, a language with which
Galician has co-existed for long periods of its history. The society is
divided over the issue. Once again, individual ideologies and
interpretations of a particular situation, and the relations between these
individuals and other groups, are factors of enormous importance in
explaining the strategic options chosen for language policy and
language planning.
In the normalization processes in the Catalan-speaking area there
are also internal differences. Whilst in Catalonia the great majority of
the indigenous population habitually speak their own vernacular, in the
Valencia region a high number of the indigenous population, especiallY
in the cities, now use a more or less standard Castilian -though with
local characteristics- even in informal communication. They use
Castilian when talking to their children, a fact which has interrupted
the normal intergenerational transmission of their own vernacular. A
similar situation has arisen recently in the Balearic Islands, although
perhaps with less intensity than in the case of Valencia. The linguistic
policies adopted by the various autonomous governments also diHer.
In Catalonia progress has been made in introducing a standardized
ALBERT BASTARDAS
variety of Catalan as the linguistic vehicle of a unified education
 system; it is the language normally used in autonomous and local
administration, and on two television channels. In the Valencia region,
in contrast, the autonomous government has opted for a policy of
providing two separate lines of education, so that people can choose to
have their children educated in Castilian or in Catalan -legally called
Valencian. The autonomous television channel does not use Valencian
exclusively or even predominantly, a fact which means that knowledge
of the autochthonous language is not spread as efficiently as in
Catalonia. Another factor in the Valencia region has been the lack of
consensus on the adoption of the new standard variety, rejected by
certain groups that consider it excessively "Catalonia-oriented." These
same groups have tried to promote the adoption of a standard variety
which differs slightly from that used in the rest of the Catalan linguistic
area. The situation is also different in the Balearic Islands because the
education system there comes under the direct control of the central
education authority, a body that is in general hostile to the use of the
locallanguage in educatÍon. In all three cases there is also the problem
of the presence of large numbers of inhabitants from other parts of
Spain, generally Castilian speakers, a phenomenon which has made it
difficult to adopt political measures which would work towards the
recovery of the local language. The case of Valencia is further
aggravated by the fact that the interior fringes of its territory have
historically been Castilian-speaking.
These cases of language management in Spain are still taking form
and emphasize clearly the need for dynamic, integrated theorizing
which takes into account changes in the situation and the interrelation
of factors which bear on that situation. In this case, language
management must especially bear in mind the relation between
language policy and its overall effect on society; it must be able to
explain why certain goals and cases of language management are
successful whilst others, with similar regulations, fail (take, for
example, the case of Ireland). Understanding these phenomena
involves, then, the need to look not only at official linguistic
regulations but at the other aspect - those elements in society which
favor the persistence of established behavior and their relation to
sociocultural and political change.
 LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... 25
PLANNED LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE
AND SOCIAL PERSISTENCE IN HISTORICALLY SUBORDINATED GROUPS:
THE EXAMPLE OF CATALAN.
As we stated above, the present linguistic normalization process
undertaken in Catalonia at the end of the dictatorship in Spain (see
Bastardas 1986, 1987 and 1989) has produced an important advance for
Catalan in the field of institutionalized communications - such as the
educational system, the local and autonomous public administration,
radio and television, etc. However, changes in the field of oral one-toone inter-personal
communications have been far less marked,
especially in the interactions of the LI Catalan indigenous population
with LI Castilian-speaking immigrants. As many people from other
regions tend to use Castilian rather than Catalan in their inter-group
communications, most native Catalans linguistically adapt to the
immigrants and use Castilian in order to follow the speechconvergence principIe in daily
conversations.
In fact, the most usual behavior of the indigenous population in
their social framework seems to be to speak Castilian in general to any
person perceived and considered as a non-Catalan speaker (Boix, 1989,
199°,1993; Tuson, 1985, 1990; Woolard, 1983,1992), with the exception of a
conscious, militant minority who maintain the use of Catalan in all
situations. Thus the norm of Catalans using Castilian -or Spanish- is
applied to unknown individuals who are addressed in Catalan but
answer in Castilian, and also to people who are now able to speak
Catalan but with whom initial contacts were conducted in Castilian and
with whom the use of Castilian is thus established. The norm is also
followed - especially in Barcelona and its Metropolitan area - to speak
to individuals with professional or social roles perceived as usually
belonging to people who do not use Catalan - for example, waiters, taxi
drivers, policemen - and also when speaking to chi1dren of immigrant
origin who are assigned the linguistic categorization of their parents, or
even strangers one meets in the street. The indigenous population tends
initially to address these individuals in Castilian rather than in Catalan.
In addition, members of the Catalan-speaking indigenous group may
themselves conduct conversations in Castilian although these
conversations are sometimes (but not always) re-directed to Catalan in
the event that one or both speakers stop considering the other individual
as a non-Catalan speaker (owing to his/her accent, etc.).
 This situation is evidently the resuit of the historical contexts in
which these successive encounters between autochthonous and
allochthonous individuals have taken place. These historical contexts
are generally characterized by the absence of Catalan in the
z6 ALBERT BASTARDAS
institutionalized areas, and the predominance of Castilian especially in
the schooling system, the mass media, and the administration. This fact
gave rise to a general asymmetric bilingualization of the Catalan
inhabitants, favoring Castilian (in oral and written forms) and
downgrading Catalan (used only orally and informally, due to the
almost total absence of any formal public use under the dictatorship).
This situation maintained monolingualization among many immigrant
people who had Castilian as their first language. Generally speaking, in
all these historical contexts, intergenerational population substitution
gradually favored the progress of bilingualization amongst inhabitants
of Catalan origin, increasing their use of Castilian; it did not increase in
the same degree the use of Catalan among immigrants, especially in the
large cities. The persistence of Spanish monolingualism among most of
the new generation of immigrants favored the use of Castilian by
young Catalans, who spoke the predominant language with ever
greater fluency and ever greater frequency. As a result, there were far
more indigenous individuals who spoke Castilian regularly to
immigrants than immigrants who spoke Catalan to native Catalans. As
time went by, the norm of using CastÏlian to address all individuals
categorized as non-Catalan speakers became a totally interiorized,
automatÏc behavior, seen as completely natural by most of the entire
population. The initial posture, adopted to make communicatÏon
possible with recently arrived immigrants who spoke a different
language, gradually transformed - despite the gradual rise in
competence (in receptive competence, at least) of a substantial number
of immigrants - into a widespread social custom, sanctioned by habit,
with all the consequences that this linguistic use had for the changing
of such behavior patterns.
With the advent of democracy and the restoration of a certain
amount of politÏcal autonomy at the end of the seventies, Catalan and
Castilian were declared co-officiallanguages in Catalonia. As we said,
the Catalan Government took steps to encourage linguistic change in
the educatÏonal system and the new autonomous administration,
supporting the generalized use of Catalan in public communication. It
also created mass media services in Catalan, and other measures were
 taken in local administration and sectors involving cultural and
economic actÏvitÏes. The bodies in charge of the new linguistic policy in
Catalonia also tried to make the population aware of the problem of the
predominance of interpersonallanguage behavior that favored the use
of Castilian. The Catalan Government embarked on a campaign
advocating what were called bilingual conversations (in which each
person speaks in his or her first language) and encouraging the use of
Catalan in all situations and social domains. These campaigns included
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... 27
messages of the type: "Catalan depends on you" or "in Catalan you
show respect for yourself and others." Although the precise impact of
these campaigns and the substantial political changes on the intergroup
language behavior of the indigenous population cannot be reliably
assessed, what we can say is that change is a slow process, and by no
means general. Few native Catalans conduct bilingual conversations;
the majority automatically adapt to the other speaker in one-to-one
interactions, even when, as is now commonly the case, the other
speaker has a good understanding of Catalan. How can we account for
the persistence of the use of Castilian with non-Catalans who
understand Catalan? Why is the behavior change so slow? These issues
coincide with those described by Bourhis (1984) with reference to the
French/English case in Quebec. Bourhis also perceived that Frenchspeaking individuals followed
the norm of adapting linguistically to
English-speakers, in spite of the efforts at governmental level to raise
the status of French in Quebec and to increase its use.
Although the situations in Quebec and Catalonia are different in
many important aspects, both cases are in all probability an example of
the general social perpetuation of a wide range of routines, habits and
functions in spite of political pressure and legal measures taken by
official authorities. In this context, we will now explore some factors
which may explain this sociolinguistic evolution.
SUBCONSCIOUSNESS
One factor that may go a long way towards explaining the
phenomenon of the persistence of behaviors established within settings
subsequently modified by political power is, probably, the fact that
much social behavior -especially linguistic behavior- is subconscious
(Bourdieu, 1982; Gumperz, 1985). Once a social norm for a specific area
has been created, the norm becomes routine; it becomes subconscious.
It will receive no further attention unless some kind of crisis emerges.
Habit substitutes conscious thought (Nisbet, 1982); the individual will
 only become aware o[ the deficient nature o[ the scope of his/her
knowledge when a new experience does not adapt to what had been
considered as the presupposed valid reference scheme up to that moment
(Schutz & Luckmann, 1977:29). In alllikelihood, few LI Catalan natives
will have experienced a crisis that severely questions their usual way of
addressing non-Catalan speakers. For the most part, the current
organization of interpersonal linguistic use between natives and
immigrants works efficiently. Other factors of a symbolical and
ideological nature which could raise doubts about the present norm do
ALBERT BASTARDAS
not seem to be sufficiently strong for the majority of the population to
feel the need to modify their behavior -at present at least.
Thus, generally speaking, attention is paid more to the content than
to the code, despite the ideological value afforded to the latter. This
situation may well be typical: a population that persists in behaviors
which may have negative consequences for the autochtonous language
in the future, but which work perfectly well in practice. The awareness
campaigns carried out to date have not been powerful enough to draw
the attention of Catalan-speakers to the need to change a behavior
which is deeply ingrained but, in the final analysis, negative.
CONSCIOUS ASSESSMENT
Another part of the population, generally better informed and more
given to reflecting on and assessing personal behaviors, empathizes with
the government messages, and take the issue seriously. Nevertheless,
these people may argue against this change in behavior towards
individuals who understand but do not speak Catalan on the ground
that it could be interpreted as a lack of respect and good manners. The
time-honored practice of speaking Castilian in this situation is one of the
reasons why they would not tolerate or even conceive of speaking
Catalan to non-Catalan-speakers. They defend their present linguistic
behavior towards the non-bilingualized, non-Catalan population at the
level of oral expression. Their habitus automatically excludes any
behaviors which may be seen as anomalous (Bourdieu, 1980). These
people either ignore or argue away the anomaly which their behavior
represents for the indigenous linguistic community, and disregard the
possible results of their behavior in the future.
There is yet another group within the indigenous population that
conceives ofanother possible, normal situation in which it is the
individuals of immigrant origin who adapt linguistically, and not the
natives. The attitude of this group is probably a result of a
 representation of reality which differs from that of the former group,
together with a set of ideological predispositions which tend to see the
present reality in a different way. These people consider the idea of the
bilingual conversation to be reasonable. The most committed among
them try to put the principIe into practice, but find it hard to do so in
real sociallife. Relationships with totally unknown individuals, and in
institutionalized, formal situations rather than individualized ones - as
in situations in which the indigenous individual is in a position of "nonsubordination" or "non-
absolute necessity" Ca customer in a shop, a
customer asking for some kind of service, etc.) present little problem.
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE". 1.9
Difficulties arise, though, in situations in which the non-Catalan
speaking interlocutors have a higher social status - a higher professional
category, etc. - or if the Catalan-speaker is in the minority, or in other
situations in which the use of Catalan could be interpreted as entailing
certain negative consequences.
A part of this population will probably not insist on a bilingual
conversation when speaking with non-Catalan individuals in informal
and friendly situations, in which mutual empathy is highly valued. It
will also be difficult to introduce this norm with individuals with
whom the Catalan-speaker has so far spoken in Castilian. The
consolidated habit of speaking Castilian to a specific person will
become a very powerful constraint on the change of linguistic behavior.
In all these conscious assessments of linguistic behavior change, the
social significance of changing the norm plays a fundamental role. The
fact that behavior is subconscious does not mean that habitual actions
lose their significance regarding the individual (Berger & Luckmann,
1983), because, as G.H. Mead stated, awareness or consciousness is not
necessary to the presence o[ meaning in the process o[ social experience
(1934:77). The breaching of generally accepted and followed social
expectations is not, then, a neutral, connotation-free fact, but an issue
that attracts the attention of the interlocutor (obviously enough) and of
the others present during the communication: they will all probably
notice the change and will assign meaning to it. The awareness of this
effect and of the repercussions of the assessments of the other
individuals may well be a decisive factor in the maintenance and
persistence of many social behaviors, because the individual in question
values - and, to a considerable degree, depends on - the esteem and
positive consideration of the people with whom he/she is regularly in
contact (Berger, 1963; Davis, 1984; Milroy, 1987). (This fact probably also
 accounts for the speech-convergence observations described by Giles
and colleagues). In the case of 'Catalan as well, natives are probably
aware that their new intergroup behavior could be interpreted
negatively; they may well be intimidated by the history of the
relationship of the groups in contact, and may feel a hidden symbolical
violence (Bourdieu, 1982).
Moreover, among the individuals who have decided to adopt the
new norm it may frequently be the case that, in an interaction in which
they have decided to use Catalan, they end up speaking Castilian
because of behavior automatization - i.e., they respond in Castilian
upon hearing a message in this code. This automatization may lead
Catalan-speakers to change language whenever they drop their guard,
especially in the initial period when the new behavior is as yet
unassimilated. This is frequently observed in debate programs on
30 ALBERT BASTARDAS
television in which the group consists of individuals from both
linguistic groups: even ministers of the Catalan government switch to
Castilian - in a program or channel which is identified as Catalan - to
respond to an interlocutor speaking Castilian. This occurs especially
when the debate becomes heated and the scope for conscious control of
the linguistic behavior diminishes.
Consequently, the persistence of the oId behavior, in spite of
officiallanguage management programs at government level, seems to
respond mainly either to the functional and subconscious nature of the
current linguistic intergroup behavior or to the fear of negative
assessment of this change by non-Catalan speakers.
 SOME PRINCIPLES AND INFERENCES FOR THE MANAGEMENT
OF LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE
The analysis of persistence in spite of language management strategies
shows that, as in other sociocultural matters, the situation that faces us
is not one that is easily transformable but a complex situation in which
results will take time. It requires an ecological macro and micro
approach. Attracting the attention of the Catalan-origin population,
providing them with good reasons for language behavior change and
overcoming the automatic response problem are not easy tasks; the
process may well take more than one generation. The present intergroup linguistic usage norms
are rooted in everyday life, and, as we
have seen, they are efficient. For this reason, continuity is far easier
than change. A new micro approach to the change of code-switching
behavior in intergroup relations as a part of a language management
process should take the following points into account:
A) Any majority change regarding language behavior norms in oral
interactions tends to be slow. A direct intervention on the part of the
political institutions is unlikely, especially in instances in which
common usage has fulfilled its communicative function. It is for this
reason that Bourdieu can say that linguistic mores are nat modified by
decree, as those who advocate a well-intentioned policy o[ language
de[ence o[ten believe (1982:36). Social uses consecrate a series of specific
norms maintained by the social interaction itself. This interaction tends
to be founded on mutual expectations which are generally taken for
granted and which may lead to some kind of social sanction if they are
not obeyed and followed (Davis, 1984).
B) Linguistic behaviors tend to become routine and subconscious
actions - the only exception being that of a generalized situation of
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... 31
conflict, which is not the case in Catalonia - in which individuals
consciously concentrate more on the specific meanings to be
transmitted rather than on the vehicle they use to transmit them.
C) Faced with the planned implementation of a change, the speaker
will assess its reasons and effects, and will act accordingly. If the change
is considered appropriate and legitimate and unlikely to have negative
consequences, the speaker may decide to implement it. In order to do
so it is necessary to overcome the initial difficulties posed by the
existence of a firrnly rooted behavior automatization (Bandura, 1982).
From the macro point of view, the planned management of language
 behavior should start from a global and interrelated view of the
problem. The two coexisting groups should be seen together, as a unit
of analysis. Due to the difficulties involved in changing the language
behavior norm of Catalan-origin people, the project should be
approached from the view of the ecosystem. In this context, the
problem can be reformulated. For example, one can see now that the
intergroup use of Catalan by indigenous people will only increase
massively if the immigrant-origin individuals also speak Catalan or, to
a lesser extent, when these people show a clear and positive acceptance
of the change. In fact, the situation will in all probability change to
the extent that the immigrant population speaks Catalan with those of
native origino If this is so, the generalized change of the behavior
of Catalan speakers may depend on the behavior change among those of
immigrant origino The central issue, then, may not be how to change
the behavior of Catalan speakers, but how to contribute towards the
change amongst the immigrants. It is a question of how to create a
situation in which all or most intergroup relationships are built up in
Catalan and not in Castilian, as has been the case up to the present time.
The problem, from this perspective, lies mainly in the fact that the
immigrants do not speak Catalan and not in the fact that Catalan
speakers address them in Spanish. Thus both groups simultaneously
require a global focus which enables a comprehensive, dynamic
understanding of the situation, bearing in mind the circular and
retroactive - not linear - causality in human interaction (Elias, 1982).
We should focus our efforts mainly on the new generations, and
especially on those whose first language is Castilian.
Language management theory, then, has to bear in mind the
psycho-sociologicallaws concerning the perpetuation of social norms
and the dynamics of behavior change. Linguistic usage norms are, in a
certain way, autonomous, and tend towards self-persistence, as they are
strongly maintained by means of social control - the result itself of
32 ALBERT BASTARDAS
human interaction and also of the need for the esteem and approval of
other people. The situations in which the possibility of change appears
to be highest are those of inter-generational transition, in which new
socÍalization processes are taking place. It is at this moment that
linguistic competence is developed, behavior norms are formed and
adopted, and identities are acquired (Berger & Luckmann, 1983). Some
innovations -even though they differ from adult behavior- can be
adopted and extended, and even though some of them may disappear
 during the evolution of the generation itself, others will remain.
The changes in linguistic behavior seem, in general, to follow a
dynamic similar to that of other spheres of human social behavior. The
acceptance of change will probably depend on the assessment of its
advantages and drawbacks according to the representation of each
concrete social reality. Changes seen as legitimate, and justified in this
definition of reality, will be implemented more rapidly, and will
consequently extend from the original dynamic nuclei to the rest of
society. Nevertheless, those changes which may generate social
resistance may not gain generalized social acceptance, and may entail
social sanctions and practical disadvantages in everyday life. They will
encounter many more difficulties before they expand and root, to the
extent that their social introduction on a mass level may eventually
prove impossible. However, these changes which like linguistic changes
Ïnvolve complex motor abilities~ will tend to be slow precisely because
of the non-permanent predisposition of human beings towards the
development of such complex abilities. Thus, in the case of linguistic
events, the extent to which the necessary abilities are developed will be
an important factor, and it may influence individual attitudes and the
degree to which the changes take root. On the other hand, the degree
to which such linguistic abilities develop often escapes the control of
the individual involved, and depends on the structure of the contexts in
which he/she participates.
The Catalan case is also representative with regard to the birth of
the norm of language use in intergroup encounters. The narm will be
the product of the conditions of the particular moment and of the past
history of the different human groups in contacto The level of language
competence developed up till then by the individuals involved, the
representation of reality as a result of their previous experiences, and
the power relationships existing between the groups will determine the
choice and the evolution of the intergroup linguistic behavior. If
headway is made towards a deep and stable social integration, this
norm will probably have an impact on the direction of future linguistic
changes in the new plural society. Changes in the norm initially
adopted by a majority, and implanted further by daily routine usage,
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... 33
will not be easily achieved by language management intervention on
the individuals themselves.
 CONCLUSION:
SOME POINTERS FOR THE CATALAN LANGUAGE
NORMALIZATION PROCESS
If change in the reallinguistic behavior of a population is not easy to
achieve, what can be done to facilitate it? What factors favor change?
How do we overcome persistence and resistance? Kurt Lewin can also
help us here: because a group's habit has lasted a lang time daes nat
necessarily mean that that habit is a rigid ane, but simply that there
have been no changes in related conditians during that periad (1978:164).
This means that intervention for change should concentrate not
directly on the habits of individuals but on their surroundings, on the
ecasystem in which they live, the aim being to change the sociomental
factors which determine their behavior, especially institutianalized
communications. The specific objective of intervention then should be
to achieve change in the cognitive representations of the people in
control of organizations (politicians, company owners and directors,
directors of associations, etc.). By acting effectively - slowly and
flexibly, but with a clear idea of the objectives - political powers (or
civil movements promoting sociolinguistic intervention) can achieve
good results if they base their actions on legitirnisation, cooperation
and facilitation and not on direct coercion. It is highly probable that
sociolinguistic intervention will be more effective if it acts on the
communications of organizations and not on individual
communications. Changing the opinion of certain leaders in the
productive or commercial sectors, for example, may weB be less
difficult than attempting to change the specific behavior of individuals.
If two people are used to speaking to each other in Y, for example, they
are highly unlikely to change to communicating in X. Or again, if a
person has interiorised the idea that his children should not speak in X
but in Y our powers of persuasion must be great indeed if we are to
persuade that individual to change, unless he/she is convinced
ideologically or has seen sufficiently clear evidence of change in his/her
environment of the importance and need for X. Thus, any intervention
based solely or almost solely on an attempt to interfere directly with
individual cognitive representations is liable to fai! uniess it is
 accompanied by real transformations in public communications (in
adrninistration, education, commercial activities, the media, etc.) which
validate expectations regarding the new situation (see Hindley, 1990).
ALBERT BASTARDAS
All these problems are extremely difficult to solve in the case of
already socialized adult individuals. Children, however, are in the
process of socialization and are virtually without ingrained habitus ; as
they are biopsychologically open to their environment, they are much
more amenable to sociocultural change. The careful structuring of
contexts for the socialization of children can permit the development
of linguistic competence in the chosen language and the establishment of
new usage norms, as well as representations of reality which are nearer
language management goals. It should be borne in mind, however, that
the socialization process may take place in an ecosystem which is still
dominated by adult society, the values and behavior of which may
diverge from those desired by the socializing institutions. In any case,
intergenerational change should be the main focus of the process (see
Bastardas, 1985). If we have to choose which institutionalized
communications to prioritize it is clear that the most vital and urgent
intervention should be in the communications to which children are
most exposed. As the most fundamental sphere in linguistic
socia1ization still appears to be the family, studies of persuasive
intervention in this area are required, even though, as we are dealing
with individualized communications, success in this area is by no
means guaranteed. On the other hand, the need for intervention in the
linguistic inputs that children receive from social organizations is more
pressing and more concrete. In the case, for example, of current
linguistic riormalization processes in Spain, the (re)introduction of the
indigenous variety as the linguistic vehicle in education (even if it is not
exclusive and the process is carried out as gradually as seems
convenient) as well as in other areas related to or outside education
(leisure centers, videos, special television programs, board games and
computer games, comics and magazines, etc.) is absolutely vital. At the
same time, there is a need to introduce schemes in other areas of human
activity which aim to project an image of the normalization process as
irreversible. Beginning, for example, with "fixed" communications
(signs, printed matter, recordings, etc.) and moving on to oral
communications which are more directly related to the public, etc.,
would be an example of a gradual strategy but one which, at the same
time, would have maximum impact on the population's definitions of
 reality with the resulting potential influence on individual behavior.
Identifying the optimal criteria for prioritisation - the degree of
acceptance according to sectors, geo-social areas, age, socio-economic
groups, etc. - and being able to see how they relate inside the ecosystem
is a necessary task and one which cannot be transferred mimetically
from one society to another (see Bastardas, 1991).
The complexity of human society - as the Catalan case shows -
LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR CHANGE... 35
demands language management strategies based on an eco-dynamic and
interdisciplinary perspective that integrates micro and macro social
sciences approaches. Both locally and globally, we need to move
towards the creation of explanatory models leading to a theory of
language planning in which hypotheses will form a network of testable
assumptions and a unified body ofcumulative and objective knowledge
open to future refinements (Cobarrubias, 1983:25).
BANDURA, Albert
ALBERT BASTARDAS BOADA
UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA

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1995 "Política i planificació lingüístiques: perspectives i preguntes per
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1989 Tria i alternança de llengües entre joves de Barcelona: normes d'ús
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MACKEY, William F.
1994 "La ecología de las sociedades plurilingües," in: Bastardas &
Boix,op. cit., pp. 25-54.
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 Albert Bastardas Boada
University of Barcelona, Spain
LINGUISTIC SUSTAINABILITY FOR A MULTILINGUALHUMANITY2

Summary
.
Some believe that it is necessary for members of minority linguistic groups to abandon their he
ritage languages in favor of national or global codes of communication in Order to advance
economically and socially, while others favour the preservation of linguistic diversity and the
maintenance of distinct collective identities. This paper applies the concept of ‘sustainability’ –
originally derived from the viewpoint that economic development should be carried out with
respect for and integration with the dynamics of the natural environment – to the notion of
‘linguistic sustainability’, arguing that expansion of dominant languages without regard for the
maintenance of linguistic diversity can have repercussions that are potentially as devastating,
from a social and cultural perspective, as the damage caused by economic expansion without
regard for the environment. The author argues for the need for policymakers, institutions, and
members of both majority and minority language groups to take responsibility for the
preservation of sociolinguistic diversity, offering a set of priorities for ensuring lingu istic
sustainability.

Keywords:
multilingualism, linguodiversity, ecolinguistics, language shift, language maintenance, language
abandonmen

From ‘Sustainability’ to ‘Linguistic Sustainability’ Transdisciplinary analogies and metaphors

are potential useful tools for Thinking and creativity. The exploration of other conceptual
philosophies and fields can be rewarding and can contribute to produce new useful ideas to be
applied on different problems and parts of reality (Holland, 1998). The development of the so
Called ‘sustainability’ approach allows us to explore the possibility of translate and adapt some
of its main ideas to the organisation of human language diversity.
The concept of ‘sustainability’ clearly comes from the tradition of thinking that criticises the
perspective of economic development that overlooks almost
Totally the natural environment the precise context where this development takes place
and which thus leads it to a final end devoid of resources and clearly harmful for the
life of human beings. To anend, that is to say, which is clearly unsustainable. Against this
economicist view, which is blind to its very important side effects, some academic and activist
enclaves have proposed the perspective of ‘sustainable development’ or‘ lasting development’.
In other words, they have theorised, constructed, and begun to practice an economic and
urbanistic development respectful of, integrated into, and in keeping with the dynamics of
nature. Such perspective provides a way of improving the
material aspects of human life while at the same time not damaging other environmental aspects
still more necessary and fundamental for the quality and even for the simple possibility of
human existence. In fact, the view is a synthesis of possible o pposed patterns. It does not
renounce material and economic improvement, but nor does it exclude a fully healthy
environment that is appropriate for the continuation of the species. As a concept, ‘sustainability’
was born at the end of the 1980s. It foundworld
wide resonance at the conference of the United Nations in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The document
known as the Bruntdland report’ defines the term as a form of sustainable development which
meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs. Today the term ‘sustainability’ is
already being used in many not exactly equivalent senses and by many highly distinct
and even opposed social actors, a situation which makes it necessary to go to the r oot of the
problem and attempt to conceptualise it more basically and in greater depth.
Therefore, we believe that, from a general perspective, the sustainability philosophy would seek
the integral development of the human being, with a humanist
Approach and not a purely economistic social ‘progress’. The aim would not be to
Have more but to live better. By way of example, Ramon Folch
One of the most representative promoters of sustainability philosophy in Catalonia
supports an ability to imagine an‘economy without growth’ (Reales, 1999). Other thinkers in the
movement also explicitly claim to be against
what they call ‘the disease of growth’. From this take on reality, sustainability
 A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics Sixth Edition
David Crystal

Preface to the Sixth Edition

When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious
without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view,
there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice
was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle
of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity;
and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages
of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.
Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface’ to A Dictionary of the English Language
One sign of immaturity [in a science] is the endless flow of terminology.
The critical reader begins to wonder if some strange naming taboo attaches
to the terms that a linguist uses, whereby when he dies they must be buried
with him.
Dwight Bolinger, Aspects of Language, p. 554
It is over twenty-five years since the first edition of this book, and the plaint
with which I began the preface to that edition remains as valid as ever. What is
needed, I said then, is a comprehensive lexicographical survey, on historical
principles, of twentieth-century terminology in linguistics and phonetics. And
I continued, in that and the subsequent four prefaces, in the following way.
We could use the techniques, well established, which have provided dictionaries
of excellence, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. The painstaking scrutiny
of texts from a range of contexts, the recording of new words and senses on
slips, and the systematic correlation of these as a preliminary to representing
patterns of usage: such steps are routine for major surveys of general vocabulary
and could as readily be applied for a specialized vocabulary, such as the present
undertaking. Needless to say, it would be a massive task – and one which, for
linguistics and phonetics, has frequently been initiated, though without much
progress. I am aware of several attempts to work along these lines, in Canada,
Great Britain, Japan and the United States, sometimes by individuals, sometimes by committees.
All seem to have foundered, presumably for a mixture of
organizational and financial reasons. I tried to initiate such a project myself,
twice, but failed both times, for the same reasons. The need for a proper linguistics
dictionary is thus as urgent now as it ever was; but to be fulfilled it requires a
combination of academic expertise, time, physical resources and finance which
so far have proved impossible to attain.
But how to cope, in the meantime, with the apparently ‘endless flow of
terminology’ which Bolinger, among many others, laments? And how to deal
with the enquiries from the two kinds of consumer of linguistic and phonetic
terms? For this surely is the peculiar difficulty which linguists have always had
to face – that their subject, despite its relative immaturity, carries immense
popular as well as academic appeal. Not only, therefore, is terminology a problem
for the academic linguist and phonetician; these days, such people are far
outnumbered by those who, for private or professional reasons, have developed
 more than an incidental interest in the subject. It is of little use intimating that
the interest of the outside world is premature, as has sometimes been suggested.
The interest exists, in a genuine, responsible and critical form, and requires a
comparably responsible academic reaction. The present dictionary is, in the first
instance, an attempt to meet that popular demand for information about linguistic
terms, pending the fuller, academic evaluation of the subject’s terminology which
one day may come.
The demand has come mainly from those for whom a conscious awareness of
language is an integral part of the exercise of a profession, and upon whom the
influence of linguistics has been making itself increasingly felt in recent years.
This characterization includes two main groups: the range of teaching and
remedial language professions, such as foreign-language teaching or speech and
language therapy; and the range of academic fields which study language as part
of their concerns, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism
and philosophy. It also includes an increasing number of students of linguistics
– especially those who are taking introductory courses in the subject at
postgraduate or in-service levels. In addition, there are the many categories of
first-year undergraduate students of linguistics and phonetics, and (especially
since the early 1990s) a corresponding growth in the numbers studying the
subject abroad. My aim, accordingly, is to provide a tool which will assist these
groups in their initial coming to grips with linguistic terminology, and it is this
which motivated the original title of the book in 1980: A First Dictionary of
Linguistics and Phonetics. The publisher dropped the word First from later
editions, on the grounds that it had little force, given that there was no ‘advanced’
dictionary for students to move on to; but, though my book has doubled in size
during the intervening period, it still seems as far away from a comprehensive
account as it did at the outset. Bolinger’s comment still very much obtains.
Coverage
Once a decision about readership had been made, the problem of selecting items
and senses for inclusion simplified considerably. It is not the case that the whole
of linguistic terminology, and all schools of thought, have proved equally attractive
or useful to the above groups. Some terms have been used (and abused) far more
than others. For example, competence, lexis, generate, structuralism,
morphology and prosody are a handful which turn up so often in a student’s
early experience of the subject that their exclusion would have been unthinkable.
Preface to the Sixth Edition vii
The terminology of phonetics, also, is so pervasive that it is a priority for special
attention. On the other hand, there are many highly specialized terms which
are unlikely to cause any problems for my intended readership, as they will
not encounter them in their initial contact with linguistic ideas. The detailed
terminology of, say, glossematics or stratificational grammar has not made much
of an impact on the general consciousness of the above groups. While I have
included several of the more important theoretical terms from these less widely
encountered approaches, therefore, I have not presented their terminology in
any detail. Likewise, some linguistic theories and descriptions have achieved far
greater popularity than others – generative grammar, in all its incarnations,
 most obviously, and (in Great Britain) Hallidayan linguistics and the Quirk
reference grammar, for example.
The biases of this dictionary, I hope, will be seen to be those already present
in the applied and introductory literature – with a certain amount of systematization and filling-
out in places, to avoid gaps in the presentation of a topic; for
example, whereas many introductory texts selectively illustrate distinctive
features, this topic has been systematically covered in the present book. I
devote a great deal of space to the many ‘harmless-looking’ terms which are
used by linguists, where an apparently everyday word has developed a special
sense, often after years of linguistic debate, such as form, function, feature,
accent, word and sentence. These are terms which, perhaps on account of
their less technical appearance, cause especial difficulty at an introductory level.
Particular attention is paid to them in this dictionary, therefore, alongside the
more obvious technical terms, such as phoneme, bilabial, adjunction and
hyponymy.
Bearing in mind the background of my primary readership has helped to
simplify the selection of material for inclusion in a second way: the focus was
primarily on those terms and senses which have arisen because of the influence
of twentieth-century linguistics and phonetics. This dictionary is therefore in
contrast with several others, where the aim seems to have been to cover the
whole field of language, languages and communication, as well as linguistics and
phonetics. My attitude here is readily summarized: I do not include terms whose
sense any good general dictionary would routinely handle, such as alphabet and
aphorism. As terms, they owe nothing to the development of ideas in linguistics.
Similarly, while such terms as runic and rhyme-scheme are more obviously
technical, their special ranges of application derive from conceptual frameworks
other than linguistics. I have therefore not attempted to take on board the huge
terminological apparatus of classical rhetoric and literary criticism (in its focus
on language), or the similarly vast terminology of speech and language disorders.
Nor have I gone down the encyclopedia road, adding names of people, languages
and other ‘proper names’, apart from in the few cases where schools of thought
have developed (chomskyan, bloomfieldian, prague school, etc.). Many of
these terms form the subject-matter of my companion volume, The Penguin
Dictionary of Language (1999), which is the second edition of a work that
originally appeared as An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages
(Blackwell/Penguin, 1992).
In the first edition, to keep the focus sharp on the contemporary subject, I was
quite rigorous about excluding several types of term, unless they had edged their
way into modern linguistics: the terminology of traditional (pre-twentieth-century)
viii Preface to the Sixth Edition
language study, comparative philology, applied language studies (such as language
teaching and speech pathology) and related domains such as acoustics, information theory,
audiology, logic and philosophy. However, reader feedback over
the years has made it clear that a broader coverage is desirable. Although the
definition of, say, bandwidth properly belongs outside of linguistics and phonetics,
the frequency with which students encounter the term in their phonetics reading
 has motivated its inclusion now. A similar broadening of interest has taken
place with reference to psychology (especially speech perception), computing
and logic (especially in formal semantics). The first edition had already included
the first tranche of terms arising out of the formalization of ideas initiated by
Chomsky (such as axiom, algorithm, proposition), the fifth edition greatly
increased its coverage in this area, and the sixth has continued this process, with
especial reference to the minimalist programme. Recent decades have also brought
renewed interest in nineteenth-century philological studies and traditional
grammar. The various editions of the book have steadily increased their coverage
of these domains, accordingly (though falling well short of a comprehensive
account), and this was a particular feature of the fifth edition.
The new edition is now not far short of a quarter of a million words. It
contains over 5,100 terms, identified by items in boldface typography, grouped
into over 3,000 entries. Several other locutions, derived from these headwords,
are identified through the use of inverted commas.
Treatment
I remain doubtful even now whether the most appropriate title for this book
is ‘dictionary’. The definitional parts of the entries, by themselves, were less
illuminating than one might have expected; consequently it proved necessary to
introduce in addition a more discursive approach, with several illustrations, to
capture the significance of a term. Most entries accordingly contain an element
of encyclopedic information, often about such matters as the historical context
in which a term was used, or the relationship between a term and others from
associated fields. At times, owing to the absence of authoritative studies of
terminological development in linguistics, I have had to introduce a personal
interpretation in discussing a term; but usually I have obtained my information
from standard expositions or (see below) specialists. A number of general reference
works were listed as secondary sources for further reading in the early editions
of this book, but this convention proved unwieldy to introduce for all entries, as
the size of the database grew, and was dropped in the fourth edition.
My focus throughout has been on standard usage. Generative grammar, in
particular, is full of idiosyncratic terminology devised by individual scholars to
draw attention to particular problems; one could fill a whole dictionary with the
hundreds of conditions and constraints that have been proposed over the years,
many of which are now only of historical interest. If they attracted a great deal
of attention in their day, they have been included; but I have not tried to
maintain a historical record of origins, identifying the originators of terms,
except in those cases where a whole class of terms had a single point of origin
(as in the different distinctive-feature sets). However, an interesting feature of
the sixth edition has been a developed historical perspective: many of the entries
Preface to the Sixth Edition ix
originally written for the first edition (1980) have seriously dated over the past
25 years, and I have been struck by the number of cases where I have had to add
‘early use’, ‘in the 1970s’, and the like, to avoid giving the impression that the
terms have current relevance.
I have tried to make the entries as self-contained as possible, and not relied on
 obligatory cross-references to other entries to complete the exposition of a sense.
I have preferred to work on the principle that, as most dictionary-users open
a dictionary with a single problematic term in mind, they should be given a
satisfactory account of that term as immediately as possible. I therefore explain
competence under competence, performance under performance, and so on.
As a consequence of the interdependence of these terms, however, this procedure
means that there must be some repetition: at least the salient characteristics of
the term performance must be incorporated into the entry for competence, and
vice versa. This repetition would be a weakness if the book were read from
cover to cover; but a dictionary should not be used as a textbook.
As the book has grown in size, over its various editions, it has proved
increasingly essential to identify major lexical variants as separate headwords,
rather than leaving them ‘buried’ within an entry, so that readers can find the
location of a term quickly. One of the problems with discursive encyclopedic
treatments is that terms can get lost; and a difficulty in tracking terms down,
especially within my larger entries, has been a persistent criticism of the book.
I have lost count of the number of times someone has written to say that I
should include X in the next edition, when X was already there – in a place
which seemed a logical location to me, but evidently not to my correspondent.
The biggest change between the fifth and earlier editions was to bite this bullet.
That edition increased the number of ‘X see Y’ entries. All ‘buried’ terminology
was extracted from within entries and introduced into the headword list.
Within an entry, the following conventions should be noted:
The main terms being defined are printed in boldface. In the fifth edition,
I dropped the convention (which some readers found confusing) of including
inflectional variants immediately after the headword; these are now included in
bold within an entry, on their first mention.
I also increased the amount of guidance about usage, especially relevant to
readers for whom English is not a first language, by adding word-class identifiers
for single-word headwords, and incorporating an illustration of usage into the
body of an entry: for example, the entry on inessive contains a sentence beginning
‘The inessive case (‘the inessive’) is found in Finnish . . .’ – a convention which
illustrates that inessive can be used adjectivally as well as nominally.
Terms defined elsewhere in this dictionary are printed in small capitals
within an entry (disregarding inflectional endings) – but only on their first
appearance within an entry, and only where their technical status is important
for an appreciation of the sense of the entry.
x Preface to the Sixth Edition
Acknowledgements
For the first edition, prepared in 1978, I was fortunate in having several colleagues
in my department at Reading University who gave generously of their time to
read the text of this dictionary, in whole or in part, advised me on how to
proceed in relation to several of the above problems, and pointed out places
where my own biases were intruding too markedly: Ron Brasington, Paul Fletcher,
Michael Garman, Arthur Hughes, Peter Matthews, Frank Palmer and Irene
Warburton. Hilary, my wife, typed the final version of the whole book (and
 this before word-processors were around!). A second edition is in many ways
a stronger entity, as it benefits from feedback from reviewers and readers,
and among those who spent time improving that edition (1984) were K. V. T.
Bhat, Colin Biggs, Georges Bourcier, René Dirven, DuRan GabrovRek, Gerald
Gazdar, Francisco Gomez de Matos, Lars Hermerén, Rodney Huddleston, Neil
Smith, John Wood and Walburga von Raffler Engel. For the third edition (1990),
the need to cover syntactic theory efficiently required special help, which was
provided by Ewa Jaworska and Bob Borsley. During the 1990s, the arrival of
major encyclopedic projects, such as the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics
(OUP, 1992) and The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Pergamon,
1993) provided an invaluable indication of new terms and senses, as did the
series of Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics. As editor of Linguistics Abstracts
at the time, my attention was drawn by the systematic coverage of that journal
to several terms which I would otherwise have missed. All these sources provided
material for the fourth edition (1996).
The fifth edition benefited from a review of the fourth edition written by the
late and much-missed James McCawley, as well as by material from Lisa Green,
William Idsardi, Allard Jongman, Peter Lasersohn and Ronald Wardhaugh, who
acted as consultants for sections of vocabulary relating to their specialisms. It is
no longer possible for one person to keep pace with all the developments in this
amazing subject, and without them that edition would, quite simply, not have
been effective. I am immensely grateful for their interest and commitment, as
indeed for that of the editorial in-house team at Blackwells, who arranged it.
The fifth edition was also set directly from an XML file, an exercise which could
not have proceeded so efficiently without the help of Tony McNicholl. The sixth
edition has continued this policy of standing on the shoulders of specialists, and
I warmly acknowledge the assistance of William Idsardi and Allard Jongman
(for a second time), as well as John Field, Janet Fuller, Michael Kenstowicz,
John Saeed, and Hidezaku Tanaka.
As always, I remain responsible for the use I have made of all this help, and
continue to welcome comments from readers willing to draw my attention to
areas where further progress might be made.
David Crystal
Holyhead, 2008
xii Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Term Gloss Relevant entry
A adjective adjective
A adverb(ial) adverb
A argument argument
AAVE African-American vernacular
Vernacular English
abl, ABL ablative ablative
abs, ABS absolutive absolutive
abstr abstract abstract (1)
 THE INFLUENCE OF ECOLOGICAL THEORY IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE: A
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Teri Derksen

Abstract:

The purpose of this literature review is to explicate the meaning of

ecological theory and trace its influence in Child and Youth Care. The review
focuses on the work of Urie Bronfenbrenner and explores how his early ideas
have resonated through descriptions of the field, in efforts to prepare practitioners
for professional practice, and in actual practice itself. The review concludes by
questioning how Bronfenbrenner’s work could continue to inform Child and
Youth Care practice, particularly in the areas of policy and community work.
Since the 1990s, efforts have been made across North America to define,
formalize, and professionalize Child and Youth Care practice in North America (Krueger,
2002; Mattingly, Stuart, & VanderVen, 2002). One of the key initiatives in these efforts
has been the North American Certification Project or NACP (Mattingly et al., 2002) that
identifies foundational attitudes for Child and Youth Care professionals and defines
necessary competencies in the following five domains for professional practice:
professionalism; cultural and human diversity; applied human development; relationship
and communication; and developmental practice methods. Within the applied human
development competency domain, emphasis is placed on Child and Youth Care
practitioners being “…well versed in current research and theory in human development
with an emphasis on a developmental-ecological perspective” (Mattingly et al., 2002).
Ecological theory, in particular the pioneering work of Urie Bronfenbrenner, has
been influential in the field of Child and Youth Care. Ecological theory not only has deep
and far reaching roots in the field, but also has the potential to influence new directions
and development in Child and Youth Care. The goal of this literature review is to
investigate the vital link between ecological theory and Child and Youth Care. The
review explores the following questions: (a) What is ecological theory?; and (b) How has
ecological theory influenced Child and Youth Care Practice? It also challenges us to
consider the ways in which ecological theory could continue to influence Child and
Youth Care practice particularly in the areas of policy and community-based work. Literature
Search
This literature review was conducted using The University of Victoria’s databases
Academic Search Primer, ERIC, Psych Info, Social Work Abstracts, Web of Science,
Social Service Abstracts, Psychology, Psych Articles and Sociology. In addition, Google
327
Scholar and the table of contents from 1998 to 2008 for the journals Child and Youth
Care Services and Child & Youth Care Forum were searched. Key phrases such as
Ecology of Human Development, Ecological Theory, and Child and Youth Care and key
words such as Bronfenbrenner, Children, Family, and Community were used. In the event
of unwieldy search results, searches are normally limited to the last eight years. However,
given the significant emergence of ecological theory in the 1970s limiting searches in this
way was avoided. Although Child and Youth Care draws on knowledge from many
disciplines, efforts were made to include only literature specific to Child and Youth Care,
the subject that is the focus of this paper. Search results identified a number of texts and
in these cases individual chapters were used in addition to peer-reviewed articles. What is
Ecological Theory?
Historical Context
According to Tudge, Gray, and Hogan (1997), the term ecology was coined in
1873 by Ernest Haeckel, a German zoologist and evolutionist. Tudge et al. (1997) define
ecology as, “…the study of organism-environment interrelatedness” (p. 73), and
although the term originated in biology other disciplines such as geography, sociology,
anthropology, and economics have incorporated ecological approaches. The origins of the
study of human development in relation to the environment can be traced to Schwabe and
Bartholomai’s research of neighourhood influences on children’s development in
Germany in the 1870s (Tudge et al., 1997). Tudge and colleagues go on to acknowledge
that many scholars since that time have contributed to the development of ecological and
contextual approaches to human development but that the perspectives of these scholars
have “…never been at the forefront of psychology” (p. 75).
Indeed what Tudge et al. (1997) and Cole (1979) point out is that ecological
approaches, which were more descriptive in nature to understanding human development,
emerged in a scientific climate that was attempting to explain human behaviour through
quantitative empirical reductionist experiments. As Cole (1979) states, “What has been
lost in our textbook accounts of the history of psychology is the fact that a great many
other scholars who were around when psychology embraced the laboratory were not
especially moved by the new enterprise” (p. vii). This dichotomy between descriptive and
explanatory psychology had scholars from both movements in the early 20th century
engaged in discussions of the “crises” in psychology (Cole, 1979; Tudge et al., 1997).
According to Cole (1979), Urie Bronfenbrenner was one of a small group of scholars
dedicated to overcoming this “crisis” and developing “…a discipline that is both
experimental and descriptive of our lives as we know them” (p. ix).
Bronfenbrenner (1979) condemned developmental psychology of the time as
“…the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults
for the briefest possible periods of time” (p. 19). Bronfenbrenner has been described as a
pioneer who has made outstanding contributions and influenced the work and writing of
many scholars in the study of the ecology of human development (Barnes, Katz, Korbin,
& O’Brien, 2006; Brendtro, 2006; Cole, 1979; Moen, 1995; Pence, 1988; Lerner, 2005).
328
Bronfenbrenner’s work has also been influential in the field of Child and Youth Care and
it is this influence that will be the focus of the remainder of this paper.
 Bronfenbrenner – An Introduction
Bronfenbrenner (1979, 1995) points out that it was his experiences growing up on
the premises of a state institution in upstate New York, situated on over 3,000 acres of
farmland and natural landscapes that planted the seeds for his ecological concepts of
human development. His father, a neuropathologist with both a medical degree and a
Ph.D. in zoology, was a significant influence as Bronfenbrenner (1979) states his father
“…would alert my unobservant eyes to the workings of nature by pointing to the
functional interdependence between living organisms and their surroundings” (p. xii).
His mother was also an influence as he recounts memories of his early childhood in
Russia where his mother would speak reverentially of “great psychologists”
(Bronfenbrenner, 1995, p. 600). Later in life, Bronfenbrenner (1979) credits his work in
cross-cultural contexts such as small rural communities in the U.S., Canada, western and
eastern Europe, the U.S.S.R., Israel, and the People’s Republic of China as influential in
two significant ways. First, by examining lives in these various cultural contexts he
witnessed different environments producing differences in human nature, as he states
“…the process and product of making human beings human clearly varied by place and
time” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. xiii). Second, work in these various cultural contexts
drew his attention to the ways in which public policies created particular living
conditions, which ultimately influenced human development.
Bronfenbrenner went on to become Professor Emeritus of Human Development
and Psychology at Cornell University and a child psychologist who was world-renowned
and highly respected (Brendtro, 2006; Lerner, 2005). In 1994, Cornell University’s
College of Human Ecology Life Course Center was renamed the Bronfenbrenner Life
Course Center in his honour (Cornell University College of Human Ecology, 2009).
Bronfenbrenner was honoured by the American Psychological Association in 1993 as one
of the world’s most distinguished scientists. He coauthored, authored, or edited over 300
articles or chapters and 14 books. In addition, he co-founded the Head Start program in
the United States, an early intervention program designed to prepare children for school
success (Brendtro, 2006; VanderVen, 2006). Brendtro (2006) observes that “…before
Bronfenbrenner, psychologists, sociologists, educators, anthropologists, and other
specialists all studied narrow aspects of the child’s world” (p. 163).
Bronfenbrenner’s ecology of human development ties together and acknowledges
aspects of all of these fields of study with human development in context at its core
(Brendtro, 2006, Bronfenbrenner, 1979). As Bronfenbrenner (1979) states, “The ecology
of human development lies at a point of convergence among the disciplines of the
biological, psychological, and social sciences as they bear on the evolution of the
individual in society” (p. 13). Urie Bronfenbrenner died in 2005.

329
From an Ecology of Human Development to a Bioecological Paradigm – An Overview
 The contributions of Urie Bronfenbrenner span over 60 years (Lerner, 2005), with
some of the basic ideas of his ecological theory traced back to a series of articles written
in the 1940s (R. B. Cairns & B. D. Cairns, 1995; Bronfenbrenner, 1995). By the 1970s,
Bronfenbrenner began to explicitly articulate his model for understanding human
development as the “ecology of human development” or “development in context”
(Bronfenbrenner, 1988). He declares that although he is often credited as the originator of
this perspective, he is not. Rather, he acknowledges the influence of many scholars such
as Kurt Lewin, Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, and
others and suggests that the significance of his contribution is the manner in which he
conceptualized these ideas in a systemic form (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1988). This
“…new theoretical perspective for research in human development” (Bronfenbrenner,
1979, p. 3), is outlined in his groundbreaking book, The Ecology of Human Development:
Experiments by Nature and Design, which was published in 1979 and is “considered by
all scholars of human development a watershed contribution to the understanding of
human ontogeny” (Lerner, 2005, p. xiii).
The notion that development was influenced by the environment was familiar and
commonplace in science at the time according to Bronfenbrenner (1979). However, he
argued that despite this common understanding little attention was paid to research and
theory on environmental influences on human development. Bronfenbrenner’s theoretical
perspective was new in the way in which it conceptualized the developing person, the
environment, and the interaction between the two. As Bronfenbrenner (1979) states, there
“…is a marked asymmetry, a hypertrophy of theory and research focusing on the
properties of the person and only the most rudimentary conception and characterization
of the environment in which the person is found” (p. 16). He further offered a solution to
this asymmetry through his theoretical perspective of the ecology of human development
defined as:
The ecology of human development involves the scientific study of the
progressive, mutual accommodation between an active growing human being and
the changing properties of the immediate settings in which the developing person
lives, as this process is affected by relations between these setting, and by the
larger contexts in which the settings are embedded. (p. 21)
Bronfenbrenner (1979) conceptualized the settings and larger contexts in which
the settings are embedded as a set of nested structures or systems, with the microsystem
defined as “...a pattern of activities, roles, and interpersonal relations experienced by the
developing person in a given setting with particular physical and material characteristics”
(p. 22), at the innermost level. In his initial theoretical concepts, Bronfenbrenner (1979)
underscores the phenomenological nature of the microsystem and all the levels within the
ecological model, when he points out the significance of the environment as it is
perceived by the developing person as what matters for development and behaviour.
330
 In his subsequent writings, Bronfenbrenner (1988) points out that his earlier
emphasis on the significance of the phenomenological nature of development neglected
salient objective conditions and events occurring in the developing person’s life. He
highlights the significance of belief systems actualized in the behaviour of individuals as
they interact, cope, confront, alter, and create the objective conditions and events in their
lives. This shift in thinking is evident when Bronfenbrenner (1979) adds to Thomas’
dictum that “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (p. 23),
a companion principle to “Real situations not perceived are also real in their
consequences” (Bronfenbrenner, 1988, p. xiv).
The mesosystem, which is the next level of the model and along with the
microsystem has the most direct influence on the developing child, “…comprises the
interrelations among two or more settings in which the developing person actively
participates…” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 25). The next two levels, which have more
indirect influence on the developing person, have been coined the exosystem and
macrosystem. The exosystem “…refers to one or more settings that do not involve the
developing person as an active participant, but in which events occur that affect, or are
affected by, what happens in the setting containing the developing person” ; the
macrosystem “…refers to consistencies, in the form and content of lower-order
systems…that exist or could exist, at the level of the subculture or the culture as a whole,
along with any belief systems or ideology underlying such consistencies”
(Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 25). Fundamental to these nested systems is the
interconnectedness between them, as Bronfenbrenner (1979) argues what happens
between these systems can be as influential to development as what happens within them.
For example, he points out that a child’s ability to learn to read will depend upon not only
the lessons the child learns in school but also on the nature of the ties between the child’s
home and school.
It was only a few years after The Ecology of Human Development was published
that Bronfenbrenner (1988, 1995) began to question his original theoretical concepts as
outlined in the 1970s and alter his original ecological model. He was gratified at the shift
he witnessed over time from experiments in “strange places” like laboratory settings to
more commonplace approaches studying children in real life settings (Bronfenbrenner,
1988). Barnes et al. (2006) comment:
What has changed in the past few decades is the acknowledgement by a number
of disciplines concerned with child and family development, such as psychology,
sociology, anthropology, psychiatry and social policy, that parents and children
occupy systems beyond the family system, that they need to be understood in
context, and that their environment makes a difference to their health, well-being
and progress. (p. 1)
Lerner (2005) notes that what concerned Bronfenbrenner (1988) was that the
pendulum had swung too far toward context and that his original ecological framework
 and science at the time did not adequately examine the development of the individual.
Bronfenbrenner (1995) states, “In place of too much research on development ‘out of
331
context’, we now have a surfeit of studies on ‘context without development’.” (p. 616). In
Bronfenbrenner’s 1988 foreword to Ecological Research with Children and Families:
From Concepts to Methodology, he states that his original theory was imbalanced in its
emphasis on the environment to the neglect of equal emphasis on the developing
organism and the result has been research that has offered “…new knowledge about the
complex structure of an environment conceived in systems terms and the bidirectional
processes operating both within and across its constituent subsystems” but that has,
nonetheless, offered “far less new knowledge about the evolving complex structure of the
developing person” (p. xvii). Lerner (2005) points out that Bronfenbrenner recognized his
theory would be incomplete until he included in it the levels of individual structure and
function (biology, psychology, and behaviour) “fused dynamically with the ecological
systems he described” (p. xiv).
Bronfenbrenner and colleagues Ceci, Crouter, and Morris worked for over a
decade to integrate the developing person into the ecological systems he first described in
1979’s The Ecology of Human Development, with the result being what is now referred to
as the Bioecological Model of human development (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994;
Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Lerner, 2005). Bronfenbrenner (2005) emphasizes the evolving
nature of the bioecological paradigm for the study of human development and within this
newly formulated model defines development as “the phenomenon of continuity and
change in the biopsychological characteristics of human beings both as individuals and
groups”. He goes on to declare that this “…phenomenon extends over the life course
across successive generations and through historical time, both past and present” (p. 3).
Moen (1995) states that the bioecological paradigm, described as the person-processcontext-time
(PPCT) model “attends to the interplay between (a) characteristics of the
person and (b) the social context in affecting (c) developmental processes (d) over time”
(pp. 4-5).
Despite Bronfenbrenner’s prolific writing and the evolution of his original
ecological paradigm to a bioecological model, the only references to Bronfenbrenner in
the Child and Youth Care literature reviewed was limited to his groundbreaking 1979
book, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. What
follows is an attempt to explicate the influence of Bronfenbrenner’s work in the field of
Child and Youth Care. What is the Influence of Ecological Theory on Child and Youth Care?
Within the Child and Youth Care literature reviewed the influence of Urie
Bronfenbrenner’s theoretical perspective on the ecology of human development is
evident (Ferguson, Pence, & Denholm, 1993a; Krueger, 2000, 2005; Maier, 1991;
Mattingly et al., 2002; Phelan, 2003; Radmilovic, 2005; VanderVen 2006; White 2007).
Clearly, his ideas have resonated within Child and Youth Care and based on the literature
 reviewed ecological influences, as conceptualized by Bronfenbrenner, can be seen in
descriptions of the field, efforts to prepare practitioners for professional practice and in
practice.

332
Ecological Influences – In Descriptions of the Field
A developmental-ecological perspective frames Child and Youth Care practice
across North America and in Europe, and is evident in widely accepted descriptions of
the field (Ferguson et al., 1993a; Mattingly et al., 2002; European Bureau of the
International Association of Social Educators, 2006). In North America, the following
broad based description of Child and Youth Care given by Ferguson et al. (1993a) is now
widely accepted (see also Krueger, 2002; Mattingly et al., 2002) and clearly incorporates
key concepts from Bronfenbrenner’s seminal 1979 book:
Professional Child and Youth Care practice focuses on the infant, child and
adolescent, both normal and with special needs, within the context of the family,
the community, and the life span. The developmental-ecological perspective
emphasizes the interaction between persons and the physical and social
environments, including cultural and political settings. (p. 12)
Social Educators in Europe, essentially the European counterpart to Child and
Youth Care practitioners in North America, also pay particular attention to the influences
of ecological context on development and attempt to integrate the community through
social education. Social education is defined as, “The theory about how psychological,
social and material conditions and various value orientations encourage or prevent the
general development and growth, life quality and welfare of the individual or the group”
(European Bureau of the International Association of Social Educators, 2006, p. 378).
Across North America and within Europe, descriptions of Child and Youth Care practice
are consistent with Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological paradigm that acknowledges the
significance of varied contexts on the development of the child.
Child and Youth Care has also been conceptualized by Canadian scholars in
various models such as the umbrella model, the cube model, the ecological onion model,
and the web model (Ferguson et al., 1993a; White, 2007), which have to varying degrees
all been influenced by Bronfenbrenner (1979). The umbrella model developed in 1993
was the first and illustrates the broad scope of Child and Youth Care practice, the various
settings where Child and Youth Care practice takes place, and the various levels of
training and educational programs that are available to prepare practitioners to work in
the field (Ferguson et al., 1993a). The cube model was an extension of the umbrella
model that depicted the three-dimensional interaction between practice settings, age and
development of the target population, and core generic practice functions.
The onion model, developed in 1991 (Ferguson et al., 1993a), was the first model
that explicitly drew on the work of Bronfenbrenner. Ferguson and his colleagues state the
 onion model “…reflects an ecological perspective, wherein consideration is given to the
reciprocal interactions between human development and the multiple environments in
which it occurs” (p. 9). In the onion model, Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) nested interacting
ecological systems were depicted as layers of an onion, with each layer representing the
various systems within the child’s ecology such as the family, community, and culture.
The cube model is embedded in the onion model to “…show the interactions of the three
333
vectors within and across a variety of systems that provide an ecological context”
(Ferguson et al., 1993a, p. 10). Jennifer White in her 2007 article, Knowing, Doing and
Being in Context: A Praxis-oriented Approach to Child and Youth Care, offers a web
model of Child and Youth Care. White’s model (2007) moves away from ecological
systems being represented as concentric circles, which she argues is limiting in that it
isolates contextual influences, and uses instead the metaphor of a web to “…depict the
active, intersecting, embedded, shifting and asymmetrical qualities of everyday practice”
(p. 241). In the web model community, political, institutional sociocultural, interpersonal,
and organizational influences create a dynamic context for a praxis-based approach to
Child and Youth Care practice.
Although the onion and web models are the most explicit in their use of
Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecology of human development, the models clearly illustrate the
broad scope of Child and Youth Care work across various ecological contexts, the
interaction and intersections between these systems, the significance Child and Youth
Care workers place on contextual influences on children and youth, and the ability of
practitioners to work in the child’s natural environment. As Ferguson et al. (1993a) state,
“the ability to move easily within and across systems is one of the unique characteristics
of the child and youth care profession” (p. 11).
Ecological Influences – In Preparing for Practice
These models, which illustrate the centrality of an ecological perspective in Child
and Youth Care, provide not only visual descriptions of the field but also shape
curriculum within Child and Youth Care education and training. As early as 1979, the
School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria adopted an ecological
perspective (R. Ferguson, personal communication, November 3, 2008), upon which the
curriculum of the school is based (Kuehne & Leone, 1994; Ferguson et al., 1993a).
Current accreditation and certification efforts within the field will also contribute
to the continuation of an ecological perspective in Child and Youth Care. In 1990, the
Child and Youth Care Education Consortium, which represents post-secondary
educational institutions across North America, was formally established (Ferguson et al.,
1993a) and in 1991, the British Columbia Child and Youth Care Education Consortium
was formed (R. Ferguson, personal communication, November, 25, 2008). Currently,
these groups are working to establish accreditation for post-secondary education
programs in Child and Youth Care. In addition, as indicated earlier in the paper, core
 competencies for Child and Youth Care professionals across North America have been
articulated and a developmental-ecological perspective has been identified as one of these
core competencies (Mattingly et al., 2002). This competency document is guiding efforts
to establish certification for practitioners in the field. Through these efforts at
accreditation and certification, the ecological perspective will become even more deeply
embedded in efforts to prepare Child and Youth Care practitioners for the field. As
Ferguson, Pence, and Denholm (1993b) state, “…an ecological perspective is central to
the continuing development, understanding, and promotion of the field of child and youth
care” (p. 282).
334
VanderVen (2006) traces the patterns of career development in Child and Youth
Care and uses Bronfenbrenner’s micro, meso, exo and macro system framework to
identify the skills required at each level of practice. For example, at the microsystem
level, which is the child’s most immediate environment, practitioners need to be highly
skilled in direct caregiving, environmental design, and activity programming, to name a
few (VanderVen, 2006). At the mesosystem and exosystem strata, practitioners are
involved in indirect work with children and more direct work with adults. VanderVen
argues that these levels require radically different skills than at the microsystem level and
include policy design, organizational, coordination, financial administration, and political
skills. VanderVen further suggests that work at the macrosystem level requires the ability
to “…influence global attitudes and viewpoints about a culture or subculture...” and that
this is accomplished by very few individuals, who have not typically started their career
paths in group care of children (p. 244).
VanderVen (2006) argues that practitioners at each level are required for effective
care in children’s services and longevity in the field may be accomplished by facilitating
personal and professional development through these levels of practice. While it is
beyond the scope of this paper to conduct a thorough comparison of VanderVen’s (2006)
work to the NACP Competency document (Mattingly et al., 2002), it would however be
interesting to explore the ways in which the skills articulated by VanderVen, especially
those at the macrosystem and exosystem levels, are reflected in the NACP Competency
document.
Ecological Influences – In Practice
Child and Youth Care practice requires practitioners to work within and across the
varied ecological contexts that influence children and youth. Bronfenbrenner’s influence
on Child and Youth Care practice is evident in the ways in which practitioners navigate
these varied terrains. His influence can also be seen in some of the literature on family
work and research in CYC.
A key theme in the literature reviewed is the significance of interactions between
children/youth and those who care for them (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Krueger, 2000, 2002;
Maier, 1991). Maier (1991) in his exploration of basic foundational concepts in Child and
 Youth Care practice, argues that “there is a repertoire of substantive care tasks
underpinning child and youth care work” (p. 394). He traces a paradigm shift in how care
is conceptualized, from care-taking to care-giving to care-interactions, which he describes
as having a reciprocal nature as opposed to one directional nature as was found in earlier
conceptions of care. Maier builds on this theme of reciprocity as he suggests that Child
and Youth Care practice has shifted away from psychoanalytic, educational, and
behavioural approaches to an “interactional/attachment orientation” which, he points out,
has been influenced by “contemporary thinking” and Bronfenbrenner. Maier (1991) goes
on to opine that “An interactional/attachment orientation recognizes that basic to human
development is the existence of assured closeness (attachment) to another person…” and
that attachment is formed through “…ordinary daily care interactions” (p. 395).
335
Ferguson et al. (1993a), Krueger (2000, 2002, 2005), Phelan (2003), and White
(2007) also focus our attention on the relational nature of Child and Youth Care practice
and the significance of the “complex nature of daily interactions” (Krueger, 2002) in
practice. Maier (1991) argues that the significance of attachment for human development
is congruent with the perspectives of a number of theorists, Bronfenbrenner being one of
them. Bronfenbrenner (1979) underscores the significance of reciprocal activity occurring
within dyadic relationships for development and learning in the following hypothesis:
Learning and development are facilitated by the participation of the developing
person in progressively more complex patterns of reciprocal activity with
someone with whom that person has developed a strong and enduring emotional
attachment and when the balance of power gradually shifts in favor of the
developing person. (p. 60)
In practice, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological paradigm has not only influenced the
daily interactions between child/youth and practitioner but also the practitioner’s efforts
to work across the various ecological contexts that are significant in children’s lives. For
example, Krueger (2000, 2005) points out that youth workers not only directly work with
youth in their environments but that their presence in other ecological contexts such as
family and community can change these systems. Radmilovic (2005) acknowledges the
influence of Bronfenbrenner in her argument that systemic change is necessary in order
to support and sustain change in individuals. As VanderVen (2006) states, “…to
significantly influence the quality of human services delivered to children requires a
comprehensive ecological approach that can influence each of the environmental systems
that impinge on children and affect their lives” (p. 254).
Phelan (2003) in his article on a Child and Youth Care approach to working with
families suggests that Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems provide another lens to view
the family and a useful tool for assisting family members in understanding what he calls
“mutual influence processes” (p. 6) that occur within the microsystem and mesosystem.
Clearly, Phelan (2003) has been influenced by Bronfenbrenner. However, given
Bronfenbrenner’s (1986) interest in the ways in which interfamilial processes are affected
by extrafamilial conditions, including conditions in meso, exo and chrono systems, it is
surprising that Phelan’s (2003) conceptualization is limited to the microsystem and
mesosystem only. It is also surprising that within the Child and Youth Care literature
search, Phelan’s article was the only one that emerged on family work in Child and
Youth Care that referenced Bronfenbrenner.
Bronfenbrenner has also had a significant influence on research on human
development, including research carried out by scholars in Child and Youth Care
(Brendtro, 2006; Pence, 1988). As indicated earlier in this paper, Bronfenbrenner (1979)
criticized traditional psychological research carried out in laboratories for its study of
strange behaviour in strange situations with strange adults and, according to Brendtro
(2006), he “…tipped the balance of the research agenda toward naturalistic studies” (p.
165). An example of Bronfenbrenner’s influence on research in Child and Youth Care
336
can be found in the edited volume, Ecological Research with Children and Families:
From Concepts to Methodology (Pence, 1988). Pence explains that the volume emerged
from the Victoria Day Care Research Project, which “…sought to better understand the
impact of the interaction between care giving and family microsystems on children’s
development” (p xxii). Pence (1988) further points out that despite that the fact that
contributions in the book are diverse in their range of interests and approaches to
ecological research, they share an awareness of the interactive nature of behaviour and
development in proximal and distal social systems, the complex nature of naturalistic
research, and more meaningful descriptions of behaviour. Conclusions
Ecological theory has clearly influenced Child and Youth Care practice and
within the field the groundbreaking work of Urie Bronfenbrenner must be appreciated.
This literature review has explored Bronfenbrenner’s influence on widely accepted
descriptions of the field, efforts to prepare individuals for practice, and within practice.
There is much more to ecological theory than simply understanding that children are part
of a nested system of ecological contexts. Ecological theory also pays particular attention
to the ways in which reciprocal interactions between these systems influence
development. In addition, ecological theory informs the more minute interactional and
attachment formation processes that occur between children/youth and Child and Youth
Care workers. The review has also revealed some of the ways in which ecological theory
has influenced family work and research in Child and Youth Care.
A number of questions emerge as a result of this literature review. First, as noted
earlier, the influence of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, which is a more current
formulation of his ecology of human development paradigm, was not evident in the Child
and Youth Care literature reviewed and, as a result, the writer is left wondering how
Bronfenbrenner’s more recent concepts could influence the field. Second, how might
Bronfenbrenner’s work influence current efforts within Child and Youth Care to focus
more intentionally on policy as it relates to children and youth? Given Bronfenbrenner’s
(1979) argument that analysis of social policy is critical in developmental research as it
illuminates aspects of the environment including ideological assumptions found at the
macrosystem level that are critical for human development, this question is certainly
worth exploring. Finally, for Child and Youth Care practitioners working to support
children, youth and families, what kind of change do we need to create in community
contexts, how can we create this change, and in what ways can ecological theory inform
our efforts?
337 References
Barnes, J., Katz, I., Korbin, J. E., & O’Brien, M. (2006). Children and families in
communities: Theory, research, policy and practice. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley
& Sons.
Brendtro, L. K. (2006). The vision of Urie Bronfenbrenner: Adults who are crazy about
kids. Reclaiming Children & Youth, 15(3), 162-166.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of human development: Experiments by nature
and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1986). Ecology of the family as a context for human development:
Research perspectives. Developmental Psychology, 22(6), 723-742.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1988). Foreword. In A. R. Pence (Ed.), Ecological research with
children and families: From concepts to methodology (pp. ix-xix). New York:
Teachers College Press.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1995). The bioecological model from a life course perspective:
Reflections of a participant observer. In P. Moen, G. H. Elder, & K. Luscher (Eds.),
Examining lives in context: Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp.
599-618). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). On the nature of bioecological theory and research. In U.
Bronfenbrenner (Ed.), Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on
human development (pp. 1-15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Bronfenbrenner, U., & Ceci, S. J. (1994). Nature-nurture reconceptualized in
developmental perspective: A bio-ecological model. Psychological Review, 101(4),
568-586.
Cairns, R. B., & Cairns, B. D. (1995). Social ecology over time and space. In P. Moen, G.
H. Elder, & K. Luscher (Eds.), Examining lives in context: Perspectives on the
ecology of human development (pp. 397-492). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Cole, M. (1979). Preface. In U. Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of human development:
Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cornell University College of Human Ecology. (2009). Retrieved February 14, 2009,
from http://www.human.cornell.edu/che/BLCC/About/People/urie.cfm
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 European Bureau of the International Association of Social Educators. (2006). A
common platform for social educators in Europe. Child & Youth Care Forum, 35(5-
6), 375-389.
Ferguson, R., Pence, A., & Denholm, C. (1993a). The scope of child and youth care in
Canada. In R. Ferguson, A. Pence, & C. Denholm (Eds.), Professional child and
youth care (2nd ed., pp. 3-14). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Ferguson, R., Pence, A., & Denholm, C. (1993b).The future of child and youth care in
Canada. In R. Ferguson, A. Pence, & C. Denholm (Eds.), Professional child and
youth care (2nd ed., pp. 276-290). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Krueger, M. (2000). Presence, fear, curiosity, and other themes in community youth
work. Applied Developmental Science, 4(1), 21-27.
Krueger, M (2002). A further review of the development of the child and youth care
profession in the United States. Child & Youth Care Forum, 31(1), 13-26.
Krueger, M. (2005). Four themes in youth work practice. Journal of Community
Psychology, 33(1), 21-29.
Kuehne, V. S., & Leone, L. (1994). A framework and process for educating students to
apply developmental theory in child and youth care practice. Child & Youth Care
Forum, 23(5), 339-355.
Lerner, R. M. (2005). Urie Bronfenbrenner: Career contributions of the consummate
developmental scientist (Foreword). In U. Bronfenbrenner (Ed.), Making human
beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development (pp. ix-xxvi).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Maier, H. W. (1991). An exploration of the substance of child and youth care practice.
Child & Youth Care Forum, 20(6), 393-411.
Mattingly, M., Stuart, C., & VanderVen, K. (2002). Competencies for professional child
and youth work practitioners. Journal of Child and Youth Care Work, 17, 16-49.
Moen, P. (1995). Introduction. In P. Moen, G. H. Elder, & K. Luscher (Eds.), Examining
lives in context: Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp. 1-11).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Pence, A. (1988). Conclusion. In A. R. Pence (Ed.), Ecological research with children
and families: From concepts to methodology (pp. 222-226). New York: Teachers
College Press.
Phelan, J. (2003). Child and youth care family support work. Child and Youth Services,
25(1-2), 67-77.
 THE ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
EINAR HAUGEN

Most language descriptions are prefaced by a brief and perfunctory statement

concerning the number and location of its speakers and something of their history.
Rarely does such a description really tell the reader what he ought to know about
the social status and function of the language in question. Linguists have generally
been too eager to get on with the phonology, grammar, and lexicon to pay more
than superficial attention to what I would like to call the 'ecology of language.'
I believe we could profit from paying special attention to this aspect, which has been
explored in some depth in recent years by linguists working in cooperation with
anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists. Most linguists have
been willing to leave the field to the non-linguistic social scientists,but I believe that
there is a strong linguistic component in language ecology.
Language ecology may be defined as the study of interactions between any given
language and its environment. The definition of environment might lead one's
thoughts first of all to the referential world to which language provides an index.
However, this is the environment not of the language but of its lexicon and grammar.
The true environment of a language is the society that uses it as one of its codes.
Language exists only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these
users to one another and to nature, i.e. their social and natural environment. Part
of its ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the
minds of bi- and multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology is sociological:
its interaction with the society in which it functions as a medium of communication.
The ecology of a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use
it, and transmit it to others.
In writings of the nineteenth century it was common to speak of the 'life of
languages,' because the biological model came easily to a generation that had newly
discovered evolution. Languages were born and died, like living organisms. They
had their life spans, they grew and changed like men and animals, they had their little
First published in Tlie Ecology of Language: Essays by Einar Haugen (ed. Anwar S. Dil).
Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1972, pp. 325-39.
57
EINAR HAUGEN
ills which could be cured by appropriate remedies prescribed by good grammarians.
New species evolved in the course of their 'progress,' often as a result of competition
which ensured the survival of the fittest. Others looked on language change as a
degeneration from the perfection of a classical paradise, which in an imperfect world
could only be partially restored by eternal vigilance on the part of the guardians of
 good taste. I need hardly document the titles in which such metaphors are contained;
they are familiar to all of us.
Today the biological model is not popular among linguists. It was clearly a metaphor
only, which brought out certain analogues between languages and biological organisms,
but could not be pushed too far. Any conclusions drawn about language from this
model were patently false: a language does not breathe; it has no life of its own apart
from those who use it; and it has none of the tangible qualities of such organisms.
Other metaphors have replaced the biological one, generally in response to the strong
constructive aspect of our industrial civilization. Language is called a 'tool' or an
'instrument of communication,' by which it is compared to a hammer or a wheelbarrow or a
computer, each of which serves as a means to achieve a human goal that
might be difficult or impossible to achieve without it. But unlike these it has usually
not been deliberately constructed. It cannot be taken apart and put together again,
or tinkered with to improve its efficiency: to overlook this is to fall into the trap of
calling for greater 'efficiency' in language. Even the term 'structure' asused in linguistic
description is misleading, since it builds on the notion of language as an organized
entity in which (asMeillet put it) every part depends on every other. It should be,
but is not alwaysclear that when we speak of the 'structure' of French, we are speaking
of something quite different from, say, the structure of the Eiffel Tower.
Even if we reject the biological, the instrumental, or the structural metaphors, we
recognize the heuristic value of such fictions. Languages do have life, purpose, and form,
each of which can be studied and analyzedassoon aswe strip them of their metaphorical
or mystical content and look upon them as aspects of human behavior. We recognize
that behavior is always dual: it is outward action, performance, but it is also inward
potential, competence, which we infer from the performance and in turn use to explain
the performance. There is consequently no reason to ask whether language is an ergon,
a product, or an energeia, an activity. It is both: we study it in performance, but the
generalizations we draw from the performance constitute the competence. It appears
as action, like all behavior, but it exists in the mind as a potential, which can be treated
as a thing, a thing that implies the possibility of action.
In this paper I propose to treat the 'life' of language in the spirit which I take to
be that of the science of ecology. The term grew up as the name for a branch of
biology and may be defined as 'that branch of biology that embraces the interrelations
between plants and animals and their complete environments' (Part 1966). Sociologists
have extended the meaning of the term to the interrelations between human societies
and their environments, e.g. in A.H. Hawley, Human Ecology (1950). Language
ecology would be a natural extension of this kind of study and has long been pursued
under such names as psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology,
sociolinguistics, and the sociology of language. Linguists have been concerned with
it in their work on language change and variability, on language contact and
 bilingualism, and on standardization. In the United States recent work has been
58
THE ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
associated above all with the names of Uriel Weinreich, Charles A. Ferguson, William
A. Stewart, William Labov, John Gumperz, Joshua Fishman, Dell Hymes, Joan
Rubin, and Edgar Polome, to mention only a few.
The only previous use of'ecology' in relation to languages, which was unknown
to me when I first prepared this paper, is that made by the Voegelins and Noel W.
Schutz, Jr. in a paper entitled 'The Language Situation in Arizona as Part of the
Southwest Culture Area' (1967). The long-time concern of Carl Voegelin with
problems of this kind is well-known. Being in a position astraddle the fields of
anthropology and linguistics, it was natural for him to initiate the use of the term
in dealing with the complex interrelationships of the languages of the American
Southwest. He restricts the term to bilingual or trilingual societies (p. 405), but in
a later paper (Voegelin and Voegelin 1964, p. 2; actually written after the 1967 paper)
the Voegelins speak of an 'intra-language' as well as an 'inter-language' ecology. They
suggest that 'in linguistic ecology, one begins not with a particular language but with a
particular area, not with selective attention to a few languages but with comprehensive
attention to all the languages in the area.' While this is true, the choice of region
can be fairly arbitrary, asin the case of the American Southwest; one can equally well
speak of the ecology of a particular language or dialect, seeing the problem from
the point of view of its users.
The importance of having competent linguists working on topics of this kind is
evident when we turn to the now fifty-year-old tradition of research in human
ecology. It is rather shocking to find that most writers in this field failed to consider
language as part of this environment. Pioneers in the field like Park, Burgess,
McKenzie, and Hawley concentrated on the American metropolis with its
phenomenal spatial growth. In the spirit of Darwin they studied the 'struggle for
existence' in this environment, and only later realized that a person's membership
in an ethnic group (with its own language) might be a factor in his ecological behavior
(Hollingshead 1947). A classical study in this new spirit was Everett C. Hughes' French
Canada in Transition (1943); similar studies of ethnic groups in the United States
brought out the importance of shared values in determining spatial distribution
(Theodorson 1961). Very few, however, made it clear that the possession of a
common language might be one of the shared values in question. Since the rise of
a sociolinguistic school in the 1960s the role of language cannot be as totally neglected
as before. In 1964—5, Charles Ferguson brought together in the Social Science
Research Council's Committee on Sociolinguistics sociologists like Everett Hughes
and linguists like the present writer. There we were confronted with a younger
generation of scholars from various disciplines like Susan Ervin-Tripp,Joshua Fishman,
 Dell Hymes and John Gumperz, to mention only a few. This proved to be a meeting
of like-minded people who had previously been working in disparate areas.
The name of the field is of little importance, but it seems to me that the term
'ecology of language' covers a broad range of interests within which linguists can
cooperate significantly with all kinds of social scientists towards an understanding
of the interaction of languages and their users. One may even venture to suggest that
ecology is not just the name of a descriptive science, but in its application has become
the banner of a movement for environmental sanitation. The term could include also
in its application to language some interest in the general concern among laymen
59
EINAR HAUGEN
over the cultivation and preservation of language. Ecology suggests a dynamic rather
than a static science, something beyond the descriptive that one might call predictive
and even therapeutic. What will be, or should be, for example, the role of 'small'
languages; and how can they or any other language be made 'better,' 'richer,' and
more 'fruitful' for mankind?
We cannot here enter upon all the possible aspects of the ecological problems of
language. We shall have to take for granted certain familiar principles of the learning
and use of languages: that a child internalizes whatever language variety or varieties
it is functionally exposed to in the first years of its life; that the competence it acquires
is different from that of every other child; that it has a greater passive than active
competence, being able to receive and interpret signals which it would not normally
be able to reproduce; that maturation leads to certain restrictions on the adult's ability
or willingness to learn new languages; and that societies are so organized as to impose
other, more or less arbitrary restrictions on the actual learning of language, by the
reduction of contact from a theoretical infinity to a practical minimum.
Among the factors that recur in many parts of the world and are probably universal
are the partially independent factors of status and intimacy. We here use status to mean
association with power and influence in the social group. While status may be ordered
on one or several scales, in dealing with two varieties we may speak of one as
having [+ status], the other as [- status]. This marks the fact that the plus statusvariety
(H) is used by the government, in the schools, by persons of high social and economic
rank, or by city-dwellers, while the minus status variety (L) is not used by one or
all of these groups. Intimacy is used here in the sense of being associated with solidarity,
shared values, friendship, love, in short the contacts established through common
family and group life. Certain forms of address and behavior are appropriate between
interlocutors having high intimacy which would be resented or misunderstood
between strangers. Again we are dealing with a continuum, which would be
segmented differently in different cultures, but in most cases it is not difficult to locate
languages varieties along a scale of [+ intimacy] and [- intimacy].
 As shown by Brown and Gilman (1960) and Brown and Ford (1961), the use of
pronouns of address in European languages and of last names in American English
are describable in terms of these two factors. While Rubin (1968a) found that she
could not use the same two dimensions in ordering the use of Guarani and Spanish
in Paraguay, she did find that these factors were strongly present in the situations
she investigated. Her detailed questionnaire concerning such situations brought out
the importance of a series of choices made by potential interlocutors; these were
(1) location (rural: Guarani, urban: both); (2) formality (formal: Spanish, informality:
both); (3) intimacy (intimate: Guarani, non-intimate: both); From this series one must,
however, extract a factor to which she refers, which is fundamentalin language choice:
expectation (or knowledge) of the interlocutor's linguistic potential. Her question
21 asked which language one would speak to 'a woman in a long skirt smoking a big
black cigar.' It is not surprising that 39 of 40 answered Guarani, since only a rural
woman would appear in this situation and rural speakers are by definition speakers
of Guarani. The factor of location must therefore be discounted as being non-bilingual
in the case of rural Paraguayan: he speaks Guarani primarily because it is the only
language in which he feels at ease or even capable of communicating at all.
60
THE ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
The remaining factors clearly fall into the dimensions of status and intimacy: Spanish
is [+ status], while Guarani is [+ intimate], and for many speakers these are mutually
exclusive. Paraguayans, we are told, use Guarani abroad to emphasize their solidarity,
even if they might use Spanish at home (Rubin 1968b:523). Abroad, the status relation
among them is suspended, and solidarity grows in a hostile environment. Even, at
home, we learn that growing intimacy in courtship leads to the use of Guarani for
saying 'something which is sweeter' and in non-serious situations as well, because
jokes are more humorous' in Guarani.
There is no reason to see anything unique in the Paraguayan situation, except
insofar as every situation is historically unique. I have myself observed at first hand
the identical factors at work among Norwegian immigrants in America and have
reported on them in detail (Haugen 1953). The same scale of status relationships
applies to English among Norwegians in America as well as to Spanish among the
Guarani. The initial consideration is of course communicative potential: there is
no use speaking English to a monolingual Norwegian or vice versa. But even within
the bilingual group there is a clear differentiation between topics, occasions, and
persons which lead to the status use of English and those in which intimacy leads
to the use of Norwegian. Stewart (1962) has reported a similar set of attitudes among
the Creole languages in the Caribbean, which force a choice of either standard or
Creole according to the dimensions of status (which he calls 'public-formal') and
intimacy ('private-informal'). Among his examples of the former are 'official
 governmental activities, legal procedures, academic and other formal educational
activities, public speaking, the programmed part of radio and television broadcasts,
and ceremonies of introduction between strangers' (1962:39). The last is an example
of [- intimacy], while all the rest are examples of [+ status], as these are determined
by the power structure of the countries involved.
There is in this respect no difference between the standard-Creole relationships of
the Caribbean and the standard-dialect relationships of Europe. Moreover, the many
types of diglossia and bilingualism induced by the conquest of one language group
by another or the immigration of one group into the territory dominated by another
are of the same nature. What does differ is the degree of language distance between
the dominant and the dominated varieties, what one may call their autonomy. In
some cases, e.g. in Jamaica, there may be a continuous scale, while in others, e.g. in
Haiti, there may be a clear break, even where the varieties are related. The cleavage
is even greater where the languages are unrelated, as with Breton or Basque against
French. The extremity of [+ status]is the case in which a population (or a small segment
of the population) imposes on itself a language used almost exclusively in written form
and transmitted only through the school system, either for reasons of religious and
cultural unity and continuity, or for purposes of wider scientific and international
communication. This second language may be the standard of another country (as
when the Flemish accept Dutch or the Swiss accept German); it may be a unifying
religious language (Biblical Hebrew for the Jews or Classical Arabic for the Arabs);
or it may be simply an archaic version of one's own language, adopted for reasons
of cultural continuity, i.e. communication with the past (Katharevousain Greece).
From the point of view of the language learner, these situations represent varying
burdens of second language learning. If we assume that his infancy is blessed with
61
EINAR HAUGEN
a single vernacular used for all purposes, he may either grow up in a society which
permits him merely to add range and depth to his vernacular as he matures; or he
may grow up in a society which asks him to continue learning new grammars and
lexica or even to unlearn almost completely the one he learned first. Whatever
vernacular he learned first, if he continues to use it, is likely to remain the language
of intimacy. With minor additions in the form of a writing system and an expanded
vocabulary, it may also become a status language which he can use in all possible
life situations, with minor variations to express degrees of status or degrees of intimacy.
In most European countries this would only be true for children born in upperclass families,
where the spoken form of the standard is established as a vernacular.
It is generally true for middle and upper-class Americans, born into educated families
of white, Anglo-Saxon background. As things now stand, it is not true in most of
the countries of the world, where children face a status ladder that increasingly
 removes them from their language of intimacy.
Various interesting attempts have been made to establish a universal scheme of
ecological classification of languages. Ferguson (1959) characterized the situation
he called diglossia as having a high (H) and a low (L) variety of the same language.
His examples of L were Swiss German, Dhimotiki Greek, Spoken Arabic, and Haitian
Creole. These were a rather mixed bag, because Swiss German is a prideful symbol
of Swiss nationality, and Dhimotiki is the literary medium of radical Greek writers,
while Spoken Arabic and Haitian Creole appear to be looked upon with disdain
by most of their users. However, they all illustrate the situation of inverse correlation
between status and intimacy, already discussed. The special claim made, that no one
speaks the H languagesin daily, informal life, even among cultivated families, neglects
the fact that models are availableelsewhere for both German and French, well-known
to the educated classes. In any case, the general relation of H to L, with overlapping
due to the fact that status and intimacy are not direct contrasts (status differences
can exist among intimates, and intimacy differences among status bearers), is not
only characteristic of all standard-dialect relations, but also of vernacular-classic
relations (e.g. Yiddish vs. Hebrew, aspointed out by Fishman 1967). H then becomes
a shorthand expression for high status/low intimacy varieties in contrast with L for
low status/high intimacy varieties.
Ferguson (1962) has also characterized the state of the languages themselves in
terms of two parameters, writing and standardization. Writing is given three index
numbers (W° W1 W2) for 'normally not written,' 'normally written,' and 'used in
physical science.' 'Normal' use includes the production of letters, newspapers, and
original books. Standardization is similarly given three index numbers (St" St1 St2) for
'no important standardization,' 'conflicting standards,' and 'ideal standardization,' the
last being 'a single, widely accepted norm which is felt to be appropriate with only
minor modifications' (Ferguson 1962:10). Most of the world's languages fall into the
categories W" and St"; in fact, we may regard this as the 'normal' state of a language.
Writing and standardizationare imposed by governments, schools, and churches, inter
alia, and very few people speak 'according to the book.' Even though the countrymen
of Dalecarlia, Jutland, Bavaria, or Sicily understand the respective standards of
their countries, they do not often speak them except as status, non-intimate languages,
if at all.
62
THE ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
Another useful attempt to classify the possible situations of a language is that of
William Stewart (1968). He assigns four attributes to a language: (1)standardization;
(2) autonomy; (3) historicity; (4) vitality. Each of these is then taken as an eitheror quality
(plus/minus) and seven types are distinguished: Standard (plus 1-4), Classical
(plus 1-3), Artificial (plus 1-2), Vernacular (plus 2-4), Dialect (plus 3-4), Creole
 (plus 4), Pidgin (all minus). The classification is useful for some purposes, such as
making a compact sociolinguistic profile of a given region, particularly when
supplemented with specificationsfor functions (of which Stewart lists ten) and degrees
of use (in terms of percentage of the national population).
The real problem is that the four attributes are not independent of one another:
autonomy (as German vs. Dutch) is dependent on separatestandardizations.Vernaculars
are distinguished from dialects by having autonomy and both are distinguished from
Creoles by having historicity. Since all three types function as first languages in their
communities and lack the prestige that comes from standardization, it is hard to
see just what synchronic importance the differences have. Classical and artificial
languages are distinguished from standard ones by lacking vitality (i.e. native speakers);
but most standards also have few native speakers,while classical languages like Hebrew
have become vital in Israel and an artificial language like New Norwegian now claims
both historicity and vitality.
Another weakness of this classification is its exclusion of linguistic overlap among
speakers. It is of less interest to know that ten percent of the speakers in a country
use a language than to know whether they also use other languages and under which
circumstances. It is important also to know whether their bilingualism is stable or
transitional, i.e. what the trend in language learning is within the group of speakers.
A typical profile of a speech community (A) in contact with another (B) is that A,
if it is dominated by B, may change from monolingual A to bilingual Ab (A dominant,
B subordinate), AB (A and B equal), aB (A subordinate, B dominant), and finally
to monolingual B. These three types of bilingualism may be described as supplementary
(Ab: in which B is only an occasional Hilfssprache for specific purposes), complementary
(AB: in which the two alternate according to important functions in the speakers'
lives), and replative (aB: in which A has become only a language used with older
people while B fulfills all the important functions). Another set of terms might be
inceptive,functional, and residual, when these three types are seen as historically ordered
in a transitional bilingualism. But of course each one of them can also be stable, if
there is no incentive or possibility for change of group membership through learning
language B.
The analysis of ecology requires not only that one describe the social and
psychological situation of each language, but also the effect of this situation on the
language itself. As a starter it will be necessary to indicate the languages from which
influence presently flows, as reflected in the importations and substitutions now being
created in each. This is usually obvious enough, since current creations are often
the subject of discussion and even controversy. A fuller account would require
some description of the composition of the total vocabulary from this point of
view. For English, for example, it involves recognition of the existence of at least
two structural layers, the Germanic and the non-Germanic, mostly Mediterranean
 (French, Latin, Greek, Italian). Historically this means that at certain periods in the
63
EINAR HAUGEN
life of each language, influential men have learned certain languages and have enriched
(or in the opinion of some, corrupted) their languages by modeling their expression
on that of certain teacher languages. Similarly, Finnish and Hungarian have been
'Indo-Europeanized' by borrowing from their West European neighbors.
The whole notion of borrowing, however, is open to grave objection, and we
may say that the so-called 'cultural' loans are only islands in a sea of interrelationships
among languages. The concept of a language as a rigid, monolithic structure is false,
even if it has proved to be a useful fiction in the development of linguistics. It is
the kind of simplification that is necessary at a certain stage of a science, but which
can now be replaced by more sophisticated models. We are all familiar with certain
specific situations of linguistic symbiosis, in which language systems are stretched
almost out of recognition. One is that which is known as a 'foreign accent': in
effect this means that one can speak a language with an entirely foreign sound system.
A study of'Marathi English' by Ashok Kelkar (1957) has shown that speakers of
Marathi have their own well-established dialect of English, using the Marathi sound
system which may even make it difficult for native English speakers to understand.
We may call such a dialect a 'substratum' or 'contactual' dialect. Then there is what
may be called 'learner's dialect,' in which language learners struggle their way from
one language into another, replacing not only the sound system, but also the grammar
with novel creations unforeseen by native speakers. In stable bilingual communities
there is a further accommodation between symbiotic languages,such that they cease
to reflect distinct cultural worlds: their sentences approach a word-for-word
translatability, which is rare among really autonomous languages. I have observed this
process in immigrant American communities first hand (Haugen 1956:65). The result
was an immigrant language in which nearly every concept was American, so that
either a loanword or a semantic loanshift had aligned the modes of expression under
the pattern of the dominant language. Gumperz (1967) has made similarobservations
from India, in areas where informal standards of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages
have lived in centuries of symbiosis.
The key to this development is the possibility of switching or alternation among
languages. Psychologists have been deeply interested in the problem of how
languages are stored, whether as separate entities or as a single store of concepts
to which words are attached. It does not appear that either of these possibilitiesis
entirely true to the facts. Rather one can say that each item stored is somehow
tagged as belonging to one or the other language and is called up by a common
switching device that blocks out the items not so tagged. However, the similarity
between items in different languages leads to confusion: the tags fall off, and the
 items become available in both languages. This reduces the speaker's effort in
switching, and in time it leads to the homogenization of the two languages. Such
a reduction of difference goes on all the time between mutually comprehensible
languages and dialects.But it also goes on between mutually unintelligible languages
wherever there are bilingual speakers who are required to alternate between them.
Their systems quickly become intermediate systems (or as Nemser, 1969, has called
them, approximative systems) between the 'pure' forms of their languages, the latter
being those that are maintained either by monolingual populations or by rigid
regulation. However, even the pure systems are intermediate between the past
64
THE ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
and the future of their own language and intermediate between their neighbors
on all sides. They just happened to get frozen for a time, either by governmental
or by literary fiat.
For any given 'language,' then, we should want to have answers to the following
ecological questions: (1) What is its classification in relation to other languages? This
answer would be given by historical and descriptive linguists; (2) Who are its users'?
This is a question of linguistic demography, locating its users with respect to locale, class,
religion or any other relevant grouping; (3) What are its domains of use? This is a
question of sociolinguistics, discovering whether its use is unrestricted or limited in
specific ways; (4) What concurrent languages are employed by its users? We may call
this a problem of dialinguistics, to identify the degree of bilingualism present and
the degree of overlap among the languages; (5) What internal varieties does the language
show? This is the task of a dialectology that will recognize not only regional, but
also social and contactual dialects; (6) What is the nature of its written traditions'?
This is the province of philology, the study of written texts and their relationship to
speech; (7) To what degree has its written form been standardized, i.e. unified and
codified? This is the province of prescriptive linguistics, the traditional grammarians
and lexicographers; (8) What kind of institutional support has it won, either in
government, education, or private organizations, either to regulate its form or
propagate it? We may call this study glottopolitics; (9) What are the attitudes of its
users towards the language, in terms of intimacy and status, leading to personal
identification? We may call this the field of ethnolinguistics; (10) Finally we may wish
to sum up its status in a typology of ecological classification, which will tell us something
about where the language stands and where it is going in comparison with the
other languages of the world. REFERENCES
Brown, Roger and Albert Gilman. 1960. The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity: Style in
Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 253—76. New York: The Technology Press.
Brown, Roger and Marguerite Ford. 1961. 'Address in American English', journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 62. 375—85.
 Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. 'Diglossia'. Word 15. 325-40.
Ferguson, Charles A. 1962. 'The language factor in national development'. In Rice1962,
8-14.
Fishman, Joshua. 1967. 'Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without
bilingualism'. The Journal oj Social Issues 23. 29—38.
Fishman, Joshua, ed. 1968.Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague: Mouton.
GumperzJohnJ. 1967. 'On the linguistic markers of bilingual communication'. The Journal
of Social Issues 23. 48-57.
Haugeii, Einar. 1953. The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior.
2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (reprinted 1969,Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press).
Haugen, Einar. 1956. Bilingualism in the Americas: A Bibliography and Research Guide.
Publications of the American Dialect Society, No. 26 (reprinted 1964, 1968).
65
EINAR HAUGEN
Hawley, Amos H. 1950. Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York:
The Ronald Press Co.
Hollingshead, A.B.1947.'A reexamination of ecological theory'. Sociology and Social Research
31. 194-204 (reprinted in Theodorson 1961, 108-14).
Hughes, Everett C. 1943. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Kelkar, Ashok R. 1957.'"Marathi English": a study in foreign accent'. Word 13. 268-82.
Nemser, William. 1969.Approximative Systems of Foreign Language Learners: The Yugoslav
Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project, Studies B. 1. Zagreb: Institute of Linguistics.
Part, Orlando. 1966. 'Animal ecology'. Encyclopedia Britannica 7. 912-23.
Rice, Frank A., ed. 1962. Study of the Role of Second Languages in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Rubin, Joan. 1968a. National Bilingualism in Paraguay. The Hague: Mouton.
Rubin, Joan. 1968b. 'Bilingual usage in Paraguay'. In Fishman 1968, 512-30.
Stewart, William A. 1962. 'Creole languages in the Caribbean'. In Rice 1962, 34—53.
Stewart, William A. 1968. 'A sociolinguistic typology for describing national
multilingualism'. In Fishman 1968, 531—45.
Theodorson, George A., ed. 1961. Studies in Human Ecology. New York: Harper and Row.
Voegelin, C.F. and P.M., and Noel W. Schutz,Jr. 1967. The Language Situation inArizona
as Part of the Southwest Culture Area: Studies in Southwestern Ethnolinguistics, ed. by Dell
H. Hymes and William E. Bittle, 403-51. The Hague: Mouton.
Voegelin, C.F. and F.M. 1964. 'Languages of the world: native America Fascicle One'.
Anthropological Linguistics 6.6. 2-45 (Contemporary language situations in the New
World).
 SELAYANG PANDANG TENTANG EKOLINGUISTIK
Aron Meko Mbete

Mungkin jika kita mendengar kata linguistik, muncul dibenak kita hal-hal yang menyeramkan
dan sulit. Terbayang simbol-simbol aneh dan diagram-diagram yang gak jelas apa maksudnya.
Anda mungkin pernah bertanya kenapa se para ilmuan kok repot-repot melakukan riset, yang
seolah mempersulit diri sendiri, mengkaji tentang dan mencoba merumuskan sesuatu yang
mungkin kita anggap remeh?. Kalau kita merenung sejenak memang alam ini adalah jutaan ato
mungkin milyaran bahkan trilyunan data mentah yang tersedia untuk diteliti, alam ini berjalan
tidak dengan sendirinya tapi mengikuti pola-pola teratur, ato sekenario yang berjalan dengan
sangat rapi. Disinilah, otak manusia yang memang memiliki kecenderungan untuk 'ingin tau
lebih' tertantang untuk mengetahui pola-pola itu.

Kembali lagi ke bahasa, sebenaranya, memang tidak bisa dipungkiri kalau ilmu ini sulit-sulit
gampang untuk dipelajari, kalau bicara masalah teori dijamin pasti membuat pening kepala, tapi
jika melihat hal-hal disekitar kita, hampir semua aspek kehidupan bukan hanya manusia tapi
semua makhluk tidak lepas dari yang namanya bahasa, dari situlah pentingnya bahasa untuk
dipelajari. Jika ada orang bertanya kepada saya 'dalam dunia ini, apa yang paling penting untuk
dipelajar menurut anda? Terlepas dari masalah religi, karna menurut saya itu masalah individu
masing-masing makhluk, maka dengan mantap pasti saya akan menjawab 'linguistik', dan
pertanyaan itu pastilah berlanjut 'mengapa?' ya diatas tadi itu alasannya, manusia tanpa bahasa
seperti ikan hidup tanpa air, tidak bisa bertahan. Masak sih! Lha orang bisu kayak apa? Bahkan
orang bisu sekalipun berbahasa, walaupun mulut mereka bisu karna dalam istilah kerennya vocal
cord mereka bermasalah, mereka menggunakan indera lain untuk berkomunikasi dengan sesama,
dalam bentuk gerakan-gerakan ato isayarat-isyarat, lazimnya disebut body language/ gesture.

Banyak sekali aspek-aspek dari bahsa yang bias kita kaji, mulai dari hal yang paling kecil yaitu
bunyi (phone) sampai yang terbesar wacana (discourse). Sebelum kita masuk pada apa saja area
dari linguistic ini, ada baiknya kita mengetahui dulu ape se bahasa itu? oke.. banyak sekali para
sarjana yang mencoba memeberikan definisi tentang bahasa, dari banyak pendapat dapat
disimpulkan bahwa yang disebut bahasa adalah system lambang bunyi yang arbitrer (semena-
mena)yang digunakan oleh para anggota masyarakat untuk berkomunikasi antar sesama. Dari
pengertian ini kita dapat menggarisbawahi bahwa bahasa adalah sistem lambang bunyi yang
arbitrer dan alat komunikasi.

Apa pula sistem lambang bunyi yang arbitrer/ semena-mena itu? Begini.. dalam bahasa dalam
penamaan sesuatu bersifat semena-mena, tidak ada pola khusus yang mengatur hal ini, mengapa
benda yang terbuat dari kayu ato besi ato plastic yang pada umumnya mempunyai empat pasang
kaki dan terdapat sandaran di belakangnya yang fungsinya untuk tempat duduk disebut 'kursi',
kenapa tidak ''asbak, buku, ato kepala' ato yang lainnya? jawabannya mudah karena bahasa
mempunyai sifat arbitrer tersebut, that’s it. Tapi dalam bahasa tertentu, kita ambil contoh bahasa
 Indonesia, ada kata-kata tertentu yang seolah mempunyai kaitan dengan yang diwakilinya,
semisal, kata 'menggonggong' adalah kata yang digunakan untuk menyebut bebiasaan anjing
ketika mengeluarkan suara. Kata itu muncul karena memang suara anjing dalam telinga orang
Indonesia 'gong..gong..gong…' karenanya hal itu disebut gonggong. Ato suara air yang mengalir
di sungai ato tetes air yang jika jatuh mengenai benda lain, seperti batu, tanah dan sebagainya
mengeluarkan bunyi kricik..kricik.., disebut 'gemercik', juga 'mengaung', 'mengeong', semilir,
dan banyak lagi contoh yang lainnya. Fenomena apa ini? Seakan ada kaitan antara alam dan
penamaan suatu benda. Di sisi lain, disamping arbitrer sifat bahasa yang lain secara khusus
adalah onomatopoeia ato gema suara alam, lha..fenomena diatas masuk kategori yang kedua, lho
kok??? Katanya bahasa sistem lambang bunyi yang sifatnya arbitrer??

Memang, sejak dari jaman Yunani kuno, telah terjadi kontrofersi tentang apakan bahasa itu
arbitrer ato onomatopoeia, saat itu terdapat dua aliran yang berselisih pendapat mengenai hal ini,
aliran pertama menyebut dirinya phusis, mereka berpendapat kalau bahasa itu onomatopoeia,
bahasa adalah gema suara alam, terdapat kaitan yang kuat antara bahasa dengan alam, gema-
gema suara alam seperti yang telah dicontohkan diatas dipakai manusia untuk menamakan
konsep-konsep kebendaan yang ada di sekeliling mereka. Yang kedua adalah thesis,
kebalikannya, mereka berpendapat bahwa bahasa bersifat arbitrer, yang artinya penamaan
konsep-konsep kebendaan tidak mengikuti kaidah ato pola tertentu, tapi semena-mena. Pendapat
pertama memang tidak sepenuhnya tidak benar, karena sampai hari ini gejala-gejala tersebut
dapat kita temukan di hampir di semua bahasa yang ada di dunia, tapi khan tidak semua
penamaan konsep kebendaan mempunyai hubungan dengan benda yang diwakilinya ya nggak??,
yang ada malah kebanyakan konsep-konsep tersebut bersifat arbitrer, 'kenapa kursi?' 'kenapa
meja?', kasur, duduk, berdiri, lari' dan sebagainya adalah contoh-contohnya. Makanya para
linguis (sebutan untuk para ahli dan pengkaji linguistik) sepakat kalau sifat dasar bahasa itu
arbitrer.

Kata linguistik sendiri secara sederhana berarti ilmu yang mengkaji tentang bahasa. Sarjana
Perancis yang sangat tersohor, Ferdinand de Saussure, pernah denger nggak nama ini?? Sarjana
bidang linguistic yang sangat brilian, yang oleh sebagian mahasiswa-mahasiswanya, kumpulan
kuliah-kuliahnya yang terdiri dari tiga seri dibukukan dan di beri judul Cours de Linguistique
Generale yang menjadikannya terkenal sebagai peletak dasar linguistic moderen, oleh karenanya
dia disebut-sebut sebagai bapak linguistik moderen sekaligus bapak aliran strukturalisme dalam
hal kebahasaan, aliran yang menganggap bahwa bahasa tidak ubahnya seperti bangunan
(structure), bahasa menurut paham ini, dibangun dari kalimat-kalimat; selanjutnya kalimat
dibangun dari klausa-klausa; klusa dari frasa; dan seterusnya sampai unit terkecil dari bahasa
yaitu bunyi.

Saussure membagi bahasa menjadi tiga aspek, yaitu langage, langue, dan parole, ketiganya
berasal dari bahasa Perancis yang mengandung pengertian bahasa, tetapi yang cukup berbeda
 sehingga dimanfatkan oleh Saussure untuk mengungkapkan aspek-aspek bahasa. Perbedaan itu
memungkinkan dia untuk menggambarkan ato memposisikan bahasa sebagai benda atau objek
yang dapat diteliti secara ilmiah.
Kata pertama, yaitu langage, merujuk pada bahasa manusia secara umum, sebagai sistem
lambang bunyi yang arbitrer (semena-mena)yang digunakan oleh para anggota masyarakat untuk
berkomunikasi antar sesama. Jadi diantara ketiga istilah diatas cakupan langage adalah yang
terluas dan masih bersifat general, abstrak dan universal, tidak merujuk ke bahasa tertentu, tapi
bahasa manusia secara keseluruhan. Sedangkan kata yang kedua, langue, lebih sepesifik,
merujuk pada system bahasa tertentu secara keseluruhan, ato kita juga bisa menyebut bahwa
langue adalah kaidah bahasa suatu masyarakat tertentu. Jadi cakupannya lebih sempit daripada
langage. Yang ketiga adalah parole, secara sederhana berarti tindak bicara ato bahasa yang
diucapkan oleh anggota masyarakat dalam kehidupan sehari-hari, dalam hal ini berbentuk ujaran-
ujaran, jadi lebih konkrit dan lebih condong ke individu masing-masing, pengungkapannya
bersifat sementara dan heterogen (manifestasi individu dari bahasa). Kita bisa mengatakan
sebagai makhluk social, manusia mempunyai langue, dan sebagai makhluk individu manusia
mempunyai parole dalam bebahasa.

Menurut Saussure pengkajian langage terdiri dari dua bagian. Pertama, kajian yang berobyek
pada langue, yang pada dasarnya social dan tidak tergantung pada individu. Dan yang kedua
pada parole, tataran individual dari langage. Meskipun kedua obyek tersebut berkaitan erat dan
saling menunjang, dalam hal ini langue diperlukan agar parole dapat dipahami, karena seperti
disebutkan diatas, langue adalah kaidah ato aturan bahasa yang berlaku dalam masyarakat, ujaran
ato perkataan seseorang bisa dimengerti oleh orang lain karena di dalam masyarakat tersebut
mempunyai sebuah konvensi aturan tentang bahasa yang mereka gunakan, disisi lain parole
diperlukan untuk membentuk langue tersebut, kok bisa?? Pada kenyataannya kita belajar
mengerti bahasa ibu kita dengan cara mendengarkan orang lain berbicara, hal ini juga menjawab
pertanyaan mengapa di dalam ketrampilan berbahasa ketrampilan mendengar menenpati posisi
teratas, dan kenyataan bahwa kesan-kesan saat mendengarkan orang lainlah yang merubah
kebiasaan berbahasa kita, dalam hal pengkajiannya, antara langue dan parole sangatlah berbeda,
kita tidak bisa mempelajari bahasa dengan menggabungkan kedua aspek tersebut.

Pada kenyataannya, realita dari linguistic yang dapat dikaji secara ilmiah adalah langue, bukan
parole, karena parole itu sendiri yang bersifat perseorangan, bervariasi, berubah-ubah, dan
mengandung hal yang baru. Terlebih lagi di dalamnya tidak ada kesatuan system, jadi tidak dapat
diteliti secara ilmiah. Sedangkan langue adalah pola kolektif, yang dimiliki oleh setiap penutur.
That's it!!! Moga bermanfaat…….maju terus linguistik Indonesia!!!!!

References:.
01 Mei 2009

Makalah Seminar Nasional Budaya Etnik III edisi 1

Refleksi Ringan Tentang

PROBLEMATIKA KEetnikan DAN kebahasaan DALAM PERSPEKTIF
EKOLINGUISTIK[1]
Prof. Dr. Aron Meko Mbete [2]

1. Pendahuluan
Terminologi keetnikan (ethnicity, etnisitas) sebagai konstruksi budaya (Barker, 2004),
yang juga terkait dengan bahasa sebagai penanda dan pengikat, memang selalu menarik
untuk dibahas. Konsep keetnikan itu pun diartikulasikan dalam diskursus sosial bahkan
menjadi komoditas politik. Dalam renungan singkat ini, keetnikan atau etnisitas berkaitan
dengan kesadaran akan kesamaan tradisi budaya, biologis, dan jati diri sebagai suatu
kelompok (Tilaar, 2007:4-5) dalam suatu masyarakat yang lebih luas. Schemerhon dalam
Purwanto (2007) mendefinisikan kelompok etnik sebagai kolektiva yang memiliki
persamaan asal nenek moyang, baik secara nyata maupun semu, memiliki pengalaman
sejarah yang sama, dan suatu kesamaan fokus budaya yang terpusat pada unsur-unsur
simbolik yang melambangkan persamaan ciri-ciri fenotipe, religi, bahasa, pola
kekerabatan, dan gabungan unsur-unsur itu. Dalam konteks perenungan ini, dinamika dan
kompleksitas fenomena keetnikan dan kebahasaan khususnya, dipersoalkan dan dikaji
dalam perspektif linguistik ekologi dan ekolinguistik kritis (lihat Fill, 2004). Kendati di
dalam keetnikan itu termasuk pula sejumlah komponen terkait seperti asal-muasal, ras,
tradisi, dan budaya, namun bahasan ini dibatasi hanya pada relasi keduanya, etnik dan
bahasa, dalam dimensi ruang hidup dan gerak waktu (momen) yang terbatas pula.
Kajian dan renungan kritis tentang kedua aspek itu diupayakan untuk mencoba
memetakan kenyataan hidup keetnikan dan keindonesiaan dalam keutuhan bangsa
Indonesia yang majemuk. Dengan kekuatan budaya ilmu yang jujur, rasional, dan
objektif diharapkan akar permasalahan ketidakseimbangan, ketetidaksetaraan,
ketidakadilan, dominasi, dan hegemoni intraetnis dan antaretnis yang mengganggu hak
hidup keetnikan sebagai pilar penyangga keutuhan bangsa, (termasuk hibriditas lintas
etnik dengan diasporanya di pelbagai wilayah Nusantara yang menghadirkan pijinisasi
dan kreolisasi), dapat diatasi dengan penuh respek, toleransi, dan arif. Mobilitas sosial
lintas etnik, lintas daerah, pun gejala asimilasi yang membaurkan etnik-etnik Nusantara
di lingkungan kota khususnya, kian memperkuat karakter kemajemukan bangsa. Dengan
demikian, persoalan jati diri keetnikan yang ditandai dan diramu secara khusus oleh
bahasa etnik, atau bahasa lokal, menjadi fokus pembahasan ini.
Mensyukuri dan merayakan kemajemukan, keberagaman etnik, agama, tradisi, dan
bahasa sebagai realitas sosial-budaya Nusantara, menjadi suatu keniscayaan (lihat Azra,
2007: 5). Realitas itu penting diterima dan disyukuri, karena memang itulah
sesungguhnya makna dan nilai aksiologis ilmu pengetahuan budaya dalam memberikan
pencerahan makna di tengah kehidupan bangsa yang sedang berkembang. Dimensi
pragmatisme keilmuan memperlihatkan fungsi linguistik terapan (applied linguistics),
khususnya linguistik ekologi, ekolinguistik kritis, dan perspektif kajian budaya (cultural
studies). Kendatipun demikian, persoalan kritis keetnikan dan kebahasaan di Indonesia
yang memang memiliki karakteristik dan kompleksitasnya tersendiri (band. Geertz, 1996;
lihat Hardiman, 2003: ix-xii), tentu saja membutuhkan paradigma kejernihan berpikir
tersendiri, meski tetap dalam koridor ilmu budaya. Sehubungan dengan itu, pendekatan
interpretatif-kualitatifnya dimanfaatkan agar aspek-aspek ideografis dapat ditemukan.
Perlu disadari dan direnungkan secara terus-menerus, bahwa “ekologi asli” keetnikan
juga tidaklah sangat demarkatif batas-pisah dengan etnik-etnik lain di sekitarnya
sebagaimana juga ekologi bahasa etnik itu sendiri. Meskipun demikian tetap disadari
adanya faktor-faktor sejarah, tradisi, budaya, dan ciri-ciri tertentu yang membangun
kesadaran, imajinasi atau bayangan kebersamaan (lihat Anderson, 2002), merajut
“kesepakatan” ikhwal adanya keberbedaan jati diri yang khas-etnis dan pada nasional,
khas sebagai bangsa Indonesia yang sedang berproses. Dalam kenyataannya, ekologi
keetnikan itu diperluas karena daya sebar (migrasi) warga dengan diasporanya,
berhimpitan dengan ekologi etnik dan bahasa etnik lainnya. Ruang hidup yang “asli”
setiap etnik dengan kisah-kisah sejarah (ras, darah, keturunan, bahkan juga tanah
taklukan misalnya), dongeng, mitos, dan keterpencarannya, perlu dikaji dan perlu
dipelihara. Ekologi bahasa etnik, misalnya bahasa-bahasa: Melayu, Batak, Minang, Aceh,
Nias, Mentawai, Lampung, Jawa, Sunda, Madura, Bali, Sasak, Sumbawa, Bima,
Manggarai, Ngadha, Lio, Sikka, Lamaholot, Roti, Bugis, Muna, dan Biak, masing-
masing dengan dialek geografi dan dialek sosialnya, dengan ruang hidup keberagaman
bahasa, “membungkus” dan mencerminkan lingkungan geografi dan sosio-budaya
keetnikannya. Dengan demikian, aneka teks verbal (tuturan ataupun tulisan) bahasa-
bahasa etnik yang mereprentasikan realitas manusia, masyarakat, kebudayaan dan alam
sekitarnya, sangat penting dikaji. Dalam perspektif ekolinguistik, bahasa dan komunitas
penuturnya dipandang sebagai organisme yang hidup secara bersistem dalam suatu
kehidupan bersama organisme-organisme lainnya. Dengan demikian, dibutuhkan kajian
empiric untuk memahami kondisi hidupnya. Secara metaforis-biologis, daya hidup
(vitality) bahasa-bahasa etnik, juga bahasa Indonesia, atau juga sejumlah bahasa asing
yang hidup di Indonesia, didiagnosiskan sebagai: sehat, kuat, bertumbuh subur, ataukah
 sebaliknya dalam kondisi sakit, lemah, kerdil, bahkan menjelang punah. Kondisi gawat
darurat, secara khusus dicoba dipahami secara sekilas lintas dalam konteks ini.

2. Refleksi Ringan atas Perubahan Lingkungan Hidup Keetnikan dan Kebahasaan

Ekologi etnik atau ekologi manusia adalah lingkungan hidup buatan yang juga menjadi
ekologi bahasa dan ragam-ragamnya. Sebagai lingkungan hidup buatan hasil budaya dan
proses sosial, hubungan manusia dengan alam sekitarnya tercermin pula dalam struktur
bahasa sebagaimana tampak paling mencolok dalam dunia arsitektur antaretnik yang
memanfaatkan bahan-bahan bangunan di lingkungan itu. Kategori nomina nyata yang
melambangkan bahan bangunan dan pemukiman misalnya, atau juga verba proses
pemanfaatan sumber daya hutan untuk pembangunan rumah dan ruang pemukiman
misalnya, seperti juga budaya makanan-kuliner, terekam secara verbal (band. Preziosi,
1984:47-49) dalam bahasa etnik. Secara kreatif, bahasa memang merekam pengalaman
dan merefleksikan kenyataan yang ada di lingkungan (lihat Halliday, 2001).
Bagi bangsa Indonesia, lingkungan hidup keetnikan dan kebahasaan itu sedang
berkembang pesat menjadi lingkungan hidup yang dwibahasa, dalam arti lebih dari dua
bahasa (Romaine, 1995) dan dwibudaya (lihat Bell, 1976) yang hidup secara bersama,
berfungsi dan tentunya saling bersaing. Kondisinya juga sangat dinamis dan kompleks.
Kedudukan dan fungsi yang lebih kuat di ranah politik, kebudayaan, ekonomi, dan
IPTEK yang dimiliki oleh bahasa Indonesia, yang memang kurang bahkan tidak dimiliki
oleh sebagian besar bahasa etnik Nusantara, jelas mendasari dominasi bahasa Indonesia
atas bahasa daerah. Kenyataan juga menunjukkan bahwa secara sosio-psikologis telah
terjadi ketidakseimbangan kedwibahasaan di Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia, bahkan juga
bahasa asing, sangat kuat pengaruh dan lebih tinggi prestisenya, mendominasi kehidupan
kebahasaan sehingga bahasa-bahasa etnik yang menjadi simbol dan perekat jiwa
keetnikan, kian kerdil tumbuhnya, kian lemah daya tahannya karena kian jarang
penggunaannya secara mendalam, apalagi dikaitkan dengan dinamika kebudayaan
Indonesia dan derasnya arus budaya global.
Dalam konteks perbincangan ini, lingkup bahasan dibatasi. Selain pemetaan sekilas dan
pemahaman awal tentang makna di balik situasi hidup keetnikan dan kebahasaan dalam
perspektif ekolinguistik kritis, pembedahan kondisi hidupnya sangat diperlukan. Kondisi
hidup etnik dan bahasanya itu memang menyatu dalam diri komunitas penuturnya.
Betapa sesungguhnya kekuatan dan nafas hidup keetnikan direpresentasikan oleh fungsi-
fungsi sosio-ekologis bahasa etnik. Inilah sesungguhnya simpul kusut yang menjadi
fokus perhatian dan pokok persoalan. Tanpa mengganggu pertumbuhan dan
perkembangan bahasa Indonesia sebagai bahasa nasional dan bahasa negara, terutama
demi kesatuan dan keutuhan bangsa Indonesia yang multietnik, multimental (lihat
Hardiman, 2003: viii), dan multibahasa ini, kuat-lemahnya nafas hidup keetnikan dan
bahasanya, baik bahasa besar maupun bahasa kecil (lihat Ferguson, 1971), menarik,
bahkan mendesak untuk dibedah dan didalami makna di baliknya. Pembedahan
dimaksudkan untuk menjelaskan dan mencegah faktor-faktor dominan yang mengancam
keberadaan bahasa-bahasa etnik, baik dari dalam maupun dari luar komunitas etnik dan
komunitas bahasa. Setiap tahun banyak bahasa minor di benyak belahan bumi yang
punah dan terancam punah. Diduga, punahnya bahasa etnik berarti punah pula etnik atau
subetnik tertentu pemilik bahasa itu.
Linguistik klinis (lihat Halliday, 2001) yang dimanfaatkan dalam kerangka perencanaan
dan pemberdayaan kembali daya hidup bahasa etnik dengan sumber daya sosial dan
budayanya, merupakan obsesi akademis dan solusi pragmatis yang perlu dilakukan.
Itulah titik mula dan sasaran akhir telaahan ringan ini. Selanjutnya langkah-langkah
strategis unggulan di bidang penelitian kebahasaan dalam konteks keetnikan atau
sebaliknya keetnikan berbasiskan kebahasaannya, dapat dilakukan secara sistematis dan
berkesinambungan. Di atas fakta tentang lemahnya daya hidup bahasa dan etnik
pemiliknya, rekomendasi pemberdayaan bahasa (language empowering) menjadi
keniscayaan dalam kerangka kepedulian, pengembangan, dan penerapan linguistik
Indonesia.
Dalam perspektif ekosistem, termasuk ekologi manusia dan kebudayaannya, hak hadir
dan hak hidup setiap etnik dengan bahasa etniknya (dalam suasana keseimbangan dan
keharmonisan), harus dijamin oleh negara dan masyarakat dunia. Sejak tahun 1951
UNESCO telah mencanangkan (lihat Alwasilah, 1985:238-245) kepedulian, ikhwal
betapa pentingnya bahasa-bahasa vernacular, bahasa-bahasa etnik yang juga menjadi
bahasa ibu (mother tongue). Bahkan dalam kaitan dengan bahasa ibu, tanggal 21 Februari
ditetapkan oleh UNESCO sebagai Hari Bahasa Ibu Internasional. Eratnya kaitan antara
bahasa ibu dengan komunitas etnik, memang sangat disadari oleh negara dan banyak
pihak. UUD 1945 Perubahan, secara tersurat menjamin keberadaannya. Pasal 32 butir (2)
UUD 1945 Perubahan tertera: Negara menghormati dan memelihara bahasa daerah
sebagai kekayaan budaya nasional. Sejalan dengan rumusan itu, Pasal 28-I butir (3)
tertera pula: Identitas budaya dan hak masyarakat tradisional dihormati, selaras dengan
perkembangan zaman dan peradaban. Dalam UU Nomor 22 Otonomi Daerah juga
Menimbang (dalam butir b): bahwa dasar penyelenggaraan Otonomi Daerah, dipandang
perlu untuk lebih menekankan pada prinsip-prinsip demokrasi, peran serta masyarakat,
pemerataan, dan keadilan, serta memerhatikan potensi dan keanekaragaman daerah.
Potensi dan keanekaragaman di sini mencakupi sumber daya alam dan sumber daya
kebudayaan dan modal sosial masyarakatnya.
Jaminan konstitusi memang jelas. Akan tetapi implementasinya di banyak daerah masih
harus dipertanyakan secara terus-menerus. “Bhineka Tunggal Ika”, semboyan bangsa
yang terwaris sejak Kerajaan Majapahit pada abad XV dalam sastra Sutasomanya, diakui
sebagai adicita (ideology) perekat bangsa Indonesia yang multietnik. Disadari pula bahwa
memang di dalam konteks keetnikan itulah, nilai-nilai budaya keetnikan yang direkam
dalam bahasa etnik, perlu dipelihara, dimuliakan, dan diwariskan kepada generasi baru.
Dalam ekosistem kebahasaan pula, dialek-dialek, sosiolek, dan register-registernya
dijamin hak hidup demi keberadaan dan jati diri etnik pemiliknya.
Hak hadir dan hak hidup dialek, sosiolek, dan registernya, jelas bertautan secara
fungsional dengan hak hadir dan hak hidup komunitas penuturnya, kelompok dan lapisan
penuturnya, dan dengan fungsi sosio-kulturalnya (Bastardas-Boada, 2000:1). Dalam
konteks ini, kebijakan kebahasaan yang tepat secara nasional memang sangat penting.
Kendatipun demikian, adanya jaminan konstitusi atas hak hadir dan hak hidup saja
tidaklah cukup. Seperti yang dicanangkan oleh Saussure, sebagai fakta sosial dan suatu
sistem nilai (dalam Culler, 1996:38), bahasa yang benar-benar “hidup” itu selain harus
kokoh berada dalam kompetensi dan kognisi para penuturnya, dimensi produksi dan
kreasi penggunaannya secara berkelanjutan dan mantap (stabil) dalam ranah-ranah
kehidupan sosial-budaya etniknya, merupakan keniscayaan. Dalam perspektif
ekolinguistik, komunitas penutur bahasa tidaklah sebatas pengguna semata, melainkan
pemroduksi bahasa secara kreatif dan adaptif sesuai dengan perubahan sosio-ekologinya.
Dinamika dan perubahan socio-kultural, terjadi sangat cepat menusuk relung-relung jiwa
warga etnik di banyak wilayah Tanah Air. Masyarakat tradisional berbasis etnik di
Indonesia, setakat ini jauh lebih dinamis daripada yang diperkirakan oleh umum,
sebagaimana juga di negara-negara yang sedang berkembang lainnya (Dove, 1985).
Struktur permilikan, pola penggunaan lahan, dan kondisi lingkungan hidup telah berubah
mengiringi dinamika ekonomi-agraris yang ditopang infrastruktur transportasi,
komunikasi, dan teknologi informasi. Pengembaraan dan pemerkayaan mental dengan
fasilitas teknologi informasi (IT), mengubah ruang orientasi hidup terutama setelah
adicita (ideology) pembangunan (developmentism), semangat perubahan yang
“reformatif” sejak 1998, dan pertumbuhan (growing) ekonomi merebak, mengubah
tatanan sosial-budaya, termasuk konstelasi kebahasaan. Wacana sosioekonomi-ekologis
berkembang pula (band. Bastardas-Boadas, 2000: 2-4). Relasi sosial kekerabatan
melonggar, tata nilai berubah, dan fungsi komunikasi verbal, khususnya komunikasi
verbal keetnikan menyempit, digeser oleh media televisi berbahasa Indonesia yang
membius kuat generasi muda. Hingga batas-batas tertentu, media telah menggantikan
fungsi edukasi orangtua. Kerenggangan relasi yang seharusnya lebih bermakna edukatif-
pedagogis Orangtua-Anak-anak, menggejala pula pada masyarakat perkotaan dan
perdesaan. Fungsi koordinasi bahasa diganti pula oleh media-media seperti uang dan
kekuasaan yang menjadi pengendali tindakan komunikatif (Habermas, 2007:505). Selain
kurang lebat dan kurang bermakna lagi interaksi verbal berbahasa etnik, di sisi lain
perubahan wacana, penyusutan fungsi dan perubahan makna, serta dinamika aspek
leksikogramatika dalam berbahasa etnik, menengarai betapa perubahan bahasa dan
perilakuberbahasa menggambarkan perubahan sosioekologis (Beard, 2004: 6-8).
Perubahan bermakna yang menunjukkan kerusakan ekosistem secara ragawi (phisically),
antara lain rusaknya kawasan atau daerah aliran sungai, DAS, tercemarnya air sungai,
danau dan laut, atau mungkin juga gersangnya lereng gunung dan tepian Danau Toba,
Danau Singkarak, Danau Beratan, Danau Segara Anakan, Danau Tempe dan Sidenreng,
 Danau Ranamese, ataupun Danau Sentani, di Papua misalnya, jika itu terjadi karena
tingkah manusia, dapat dibedah secara ekolinguistik kritis. Penyalahgunaan “energi
wacana” pembangunan, dan disfungsi bahasa-bahasa etnik yang kaya makna konserfasi
ekologi dan sosial, memang telah terjadi. Bukankah, leluhur kita telah menanamkan dan
mewariskan narasi agung yang menjadi adicita (ideology) kolektif etnik? Adicita tentang
kelestarian dan pemuliaan lingkungan hidup dengan segala biodiversitasnya, tentang
sumber daya hutan dan sumber air yang harus dijaga, adalah amanat luhur yang hadir
dalam bentuk-bentuk ungkapan-ungkapan adat. Sumber daya dan modal sosial-kultural
inilah yang mulai sirna karena memang ditelantarkan.
Bahasa sangat sentra posisinya bagi guyub tutur karena hanya dengan bahasalah adicita
(ideology) itu hadir. Adicita itu pun akan sangat berenergi hanyalah jika dituturkan dan
atau ditulis sebagai kode lingual yang kaya makna (Volosinov, 1971: 9-10), termasuk
amanat pelestarian lingkungan. Dalam konteks ini pranata dan institusi tradisional
menjadi sangat penting. Ketidakserasian relasi manusia dengan lingkungan hidup
memang sedang menggejala kuat. Adicita pembangunan ekonomi yang “tamak” dengan
energi green grammar-nya yang salah kprah dalam diskursus sosial, telah menguras,
menggeser, dan memusnahkan aneka biota yang ada di lingkungan tertentu. Aneka biota
itu umumnya terekam dalam memori lingual warga etnik. Secara bathiniah,
sesungguhnya terjadi “konflik” serius antara manusia dengan lingkungan alam tempat
hidupnya, seperti juga aneka konflik antarwarga etnik dan antaretnik di suatu kawasan
karena nafsu kuasa.
Ketidakserasian hubungan juga terjadi dalam lingkungan hidup sosial-budaya. Banyak
warga etnik dan relasi kekerabatan yang retak. Keretakan dan kerengganan relasi insani
berdimensi kekerabatan antarwarga etnik, sedang merebak kuat pula. Dalam lingkup
komunitas basis terkecil keluarga, relasi ketetanggaan di perkotaan, bagaimanapun juga
berkaitan dengan gejala disfungsi sosio-kultural bahasa etnik khususnya sebagai gejala
yang tidak sulit dapat disimak. Disfungsi socioekologis bahasa etnik sebagai sarana
primordial (Masinambow, 1999:11) itu merupakan gejala lingkungan hidup kemanusiaan
dan kemasyarakatan yang perlu diprihatinkan. Bahasa, dalam hal ini bahasa etnik yang
seyogyanya berfungsi mengonstruksi makna sosio-kultural (lihat Barker, 2004:74) dalam
jaringan infrastruktur komunikasi verbal para pendukungnya, dalam perkembangannya
dapat saja tidak menjalankan fungsinya karena memang tidak digunakan secara lebih
sering dan lebih “mendalam”. Kesenjangan nilai antargenerasi penutur bahasa dan
pendukung etnik, antara lain dikarenakan juga oleh faktor penyusutan fungsi
interpersonal bahasa etnik. Padahal, fungsi tersebutlah yang antara lain membangun relasi
kemanusiaan dalam kehidupan masyarakat. Situasi multilingual dan multicultural telah
menggeser bahasa etnik dan nilai-nilai ketnikan.
3. Beberapa Persoalan Khusus Keetnikan dan Kebahasaan Kita yang Perlu Dikaji
Arus global memang terasa menggoyang jati diri sebagai bangsa Indonesia. Goyangan
kultural global yang menggelisahkan generasi tua terhadap keberlanjutan tata nilai lokal
itu menyadarkan warga untuk menggali, menemukan, dan memperkokoh jati diri dengan
rajutan nilai-nilai lokal. Baik jati diri keetnikan di jenjang lokal maupun jati diri sebagai
bangsa Indonesia sedang berada dalam tantangan. Jika gejala pasangnya semangat
nasionalisme mempertebal rasa keindonesiaan kita yang majemuk, sebaliknya gejala
surutnya semangat nasionalisme menipiskan rasa keindonesiaan kita sebagai bangsa yang
multietnik. Keadaan itu menggelitik warga etnik untuk mengidentifikasi kembali
kekuatan jati diri keetnikan demi kekuatan jati diri keindonesiaan.
Dalam konteks perbincangan ini, komponen pengikat dan penanda (marker) keetnikan
dalam praktik budaya dan diskursus sosial, yang tiada lain adalah bahasa-bahasa etnik,
semisal bahasa Batak, bahasa Minang, bahasa Melayu, bahasa Aceh, bahasa Lampung,
bahasa Jawa, bahasa Sunda, bahasa Bali, bahasa Madura, bahasa Sasak, bahasa Bima,
bahasa Sawu, bahasa Roti, bahasa Sika, bahasa Lamaholot, bahasa Bugis, bahasa Bajo,
bahasa Biak Numfor, dan sebagainya, masing-masing dengan sejumlah dialeknya,
menjadi fokus kajian akademis yang sangat penting. Kekayaan bahasa dalam pelbagai
tatarannya, adalah gambaran tentang kekayaan budaya dan kekayaan lingkungan
alamnya. Sebelum bahasa-bahasa etnik yang kecil mati, dan sebelum punah pula sumber
daya alam yang disimbolisasikan secara verbal itu, perekaman khazanah budaya
keetnikan dan kekayaan sumber daya lingkungan secara ekoleksikografis, menjadi sangat
mendesak dan strategis.
Terlalu derasnya arus budaya dan arus bahasa global dalam arti luas, dan terlalu
dalamnya pengaruh budaya modern yang melumuri “wajah” masyasrakat Indonesia,
seperti juga terlalu mendominasinya subetnik tertentu atas subetnik-subetnik lainnya pada
tingkat lokal dan nasional, atau juga dominasi etnik mayoritas atas etnik-etnik minoritas
atas nama pembangunan dan kekuasaan dalam makna tertentu, dapat saja “memudarkan
bahkan menghancurkan” tatanan sosial-budaya etnik di Indonesia, khususnya etnik-etnik
yang memang kecil dan tanpa peran politiknya. Keadilan dan kesetaraan, dengan
demikian menjadi persoalan serius. Sehubungan dengan itu, diskusi mengenai keetnitkan
(ethnicity) dalam ekolinguistik kritis, akan menjadi lebih bermakna jika topik hangat itu
kembali dikaitkan dengan kondisi setakat ini: keterdesakan dan ketererabutan akar local
keetnikan. Gejala itu dapat dibedah melalui fenomena kebahasaan dalam perspektif
ekolinguistik kritis. Terdesak dan tercerabutnya pijakan lokal dan akar keetnikan jelas
menggoyahkan jati diri (identity) dan tentunya berdampak negatif pula terhadap semakin
melemahnya kekuatan pilar-pilar kebangsaan dan rasa nasionalisme.
Membedah gejala keterdesakan dan ketercerabutan akar keetnikan anak bangsa, dapat
dibahas dalam beberapa pilahan persoalan. Pertama, sedalam dan sekuat manakah
sesungguhnya nilai-nilai kelokalan dan keetnikan dipahami oleh komunitas etnik yang
juga menjadi warga komunitas bahasa etnik. Kedalaman dan kekuatan permilikan dan
penghayatan nilai-nilai lokal keetnikan ini tidak hanya di kalangan generasi muda
melainkan juga generasi tua. Kedua, bagaimanakah sesungguhnya nilai-nilai sosial-
budaya kekerabatan, adicita (ideology), fungsi dan makna mitos misalnya, hadir secara
 bermakna dalam kehidupan nyata kelokalan, terlebih dalam proses pendidikan formal dan
informal bagi generasi muda sebagai pewaris nilai? Persoalan ini juga sangat penting
untuk dibedah. Modal sosial-kultural itu masih layak digali dan diberdayakan, tanpa
harus mengerdilkan keindonesiaan mereka. Ketiga, bagaimanakah derajat kegandrungan
dan apresiasi komunitas etnik, tua atau muda, terhadap tradisi lisannya, terhadap karya-
karya sastra, juga mutu daya cipta sastra etnik mereka? Jawaban atas ketiga persoalan itu
menjadi tanda penting kehidupan dan atau sebaliknya menengarai ancaman kepunahan
bahasa dan komunitas etnik.
Dalam perspektif fungsi sosioekologis bahasa etnik, tradisi, adicita, dan jabaran nilai-
nilai keetnikan diwadahi, dikemas dalam dan dipresentasikan dengan bahasa etnik.
Kemasan verbal, di sisi nonverbal, dan isinya itulah yang merajut jati diri, membangun
ciri pembeda, menjadi modal sosial dan sumber daya kultural-lingual masyarakatnya.
Bagaimana keunikan dan cara “Orang Batak, Orang Aceh, Orang Minang, Orang Nias,
Orang Mentawai, Orang Jawa, Orang Bali, Orang Madura, Orang Sunda, Orang Betawi,
Orang Kupang, Orang Ambon, Orang Manado, Orang Bugis, dan Orang Papua, bertutur
dengan bahasa etnik mereka, atau juga dengan bahasa Indonesia, itulah sesungguhnya isi,
kekuatan, dan warna jati diri keetnikan, karena di balik bahasalah terekam isi jiwa dan
kekayaan mental mereka. Masalahnya, bagaimanakah sesungguhnya tingkat dan mutu
kompetensi dan performansi kebahasaan bahasa local kalangan generasi muda baik di
perdesaaan maupun di perkotaan khususnya, dalam praksis hidup keetnikan mereka?
Mempersoalkan daya hidup bahasa, dalam hal ini bahasa-bahasa etnik, tiada lain
mempermasalahkan dan menggugat sikap, perilaku, dan terutama tingkat kecerdasan
lingual-kultural keetnikan generasi muda sesuai dengan ruang dan lahan fungsionalnya
dalam kehidupan sosioekologis keetnikan. Bahasa yang hidup, tidak hanya di dalam
memori atau kognisi semata (sebagai buah penghafalan demi lulus ujian lokal-nasional),
tidak hanya sebagai “kompetensi” melainkan harus berwujud “performansi” yang
komunikatif, produktif, dan kreatif, baik lisan maupun tulisan dengan kekayaan ranah
pakai bernuansa etnis. Jika individu disimak keberadaannya sebagai salah satu
organisme, ia hanya dapat berbicara dan memahami tuturan hanya karena ada individu
sebagai organisme yang hadir di sekitarnya sebagai mitra tutur, yang memperlihatkan
fenomena relasi antarorganisme pula (Halliday, 1978:10). Bahasa hidup secara faktual
melalui “mulut-telinga” , penutur dan pendengar, dalam perwujudan tuturan yang sarat
makna kultural kelokalan, dan melalui kelincahan tangan dalam membangun tulisan.
Tuturan selalu berdimensi sosial langsung dan lebih mendekatkan relasi antarindividu
dibandingkan tulisan. Dengan demikian kelisanan tetap diperlukan di samping
keberaksaraan.
4. Politik Identitas Keetnikan, Potensi Kebahasaan, dan Kesenjangan Sosioekologis
Politik identitas keetnikan di Indonesia, dengan demikian perlu ditata kembali tanpa
harus mengganggu sendi-sendi Negara Kesatuan RI sebagai negara-bangsa. Untuk itu,
bahasa-bahasa Nusantara dalam perspektif ekolinguistik kritis layak dikaji dan
diberdayakan sebagai ciri fungsional penanda dan pengungkap jati diri keetnikan. Dalam
kaitan dengan otonomi daerah yang memang menuntut peran serta komunitas etnik,
sesungguhnya komunitas etniklah yang paling bertanggung jawab untuk memelihara dan
merevitalisasinya. Bukankah sejarah leluhur, mitos, tradisi keetnikan, terutama
lingkungan hidup bahasa etnik, yang setakat ini juga harus memberi ruang dan peluang
hidup bagi bahasa Indonesia, bahasa-bahasa etnik lainnya, dan bahasa-bahasa asing,
merupakan Tanah Asal Leluhur. Tanah leluhur dengan kehidupan bahasa, budaya, etnik,
dan aneka sumber daya alam itu, yang di antaranya juga hasil “taklukan” dan buah
perjuangan jiwa-raga, tumpahan darah dan keringat para leluhur mereka, harus tetap
dijaga, dimuliakan, dan diwariskan antargenerasi. Kesadaran sosioekologis ini penting
dalam melabeli dan mengidentifikasi diri sebagai warga etnik, sekaligus juga warga
Indonesia.
Tanah atau wilayah itulah lingkungan hidup etnik-etnik dengan bahasa-bahasa Nusantara,
seperti bahasa Batak, bahasa Minang, bahasa Melayu, bahasa Aceh, bahasa Jawa, Bali,
Madura, Sasak, dan sebagainya, masing-masing dengan dialek-dialek, subetnik dan
subkulturnya. Bahasa-bahasa itu adalah wadah kebersamaan, sarana interaksi dan
komunikasi verbal, sekaligus simbol dan sarana pemahaman mereka tentang diri mereka,
kekerabatan mereka, tata nilai dan tata norma hidup mereka, gagasan dan adicita
(ideology) yang harus tetap hadir, tumbuh, dan berkembang. Bahasa yang hidup, tumbuh,
dan berkembang adalah bahasa yang digunakan secara intens dalam sejumlah ranah
pakai. Metafora inilah sesungguhnya ekspresi kebahasaan penunjang jati diri keetnikan
yang menjadi bagian dari pemahaman bahasa secara ekolinguistik.
Berkaitan dengan fungsi kode-kode lingual bahasa etnik itulah, lingkungan sosial dan
lingkungan alam dengan segala sumberdayanya, layak dikaji secara kritis. Pengkajian
ditujukan untuk memahami daya hidup, nafas budaya lokal warisan leluhurnya, secara
khusus di kalangan generasi muda dari etnik-etnik Nusantara. Dalam perspektif
ekolinguistik, bahasa yang diberi ruang hidup adalah bahasa yang digunakan. Lebih khas
lagi, secara biologis, sosiologis, dan ideologis (lihat Bastardas-Boada, 2005:1), bahasa
yang tumbuh dan berkembang secara berimbang dengan bahasa-bahasa lainnya dalam
masyarakat yang multilingual, demikian juga dialek dan register yang hidup dan
berfungsi secara seimbang dengan dialek-dialek dan register-register lainnya, menjamin
keberlanjutan bahasa itu.
Keberlanjutan dan keberdayaan bahasa secara fungsional dalam dinamika kebudayaan,
Ilmu pengetahuan, dan teknologi, disangga oleh daya adaptasi dan kreasi komunitas
tuturnya. Adaptasi dan kreasi secara leksikogramatika sangat menentukan daya hidup
bahasa. Dalam konteks ini, daya cipta leksikon yang digali dari khazanah asli dengan
pemerkayaan makna, diciptakan secara baru, atau juga dari sumber luar dengan
penyesuaian gramatikal bahasa etnik, pengembangan metafora, pemanfaatan daya
morfosintaksis, ungkapan-ungkapan lokal, mewarnai jati diri kebahasaan seraya
memperkaya khazanah kata dengan leksikon baru bernuansa IPTEK. Semuanya itu
 berpangkal pada kompetensi kebahasaan dan kebudayaan etnik generasi penerusnya.
Salah satu kendala adaptasi bahasa melalui penuturnya adalah “rendahnya” mutu
penguasaan (kompetensi) dan rendahnya kelincahan verbal berbahasa lokal, sementara
bahasa Indonesia juga masih memrihatinkan. Bukankah masih banyak warga bangsa
yang buta bahasa Indonesia dan buta huruf latin? Secara biolinguistik keetnikan, bahkan
juga keindonesiaan, sebagian (besar) anak bangsa, secara verbal berada dalam kondidi
“sakit dan gamang”. Ada jarak yang renggang dengan lingkungan sosio-ekologis, namun
sangat akrab dengan budaya multimedia. Sistem pembelajaran bahasa yang “dihegemoni”
oleh pragmatisme politik adalah situasi keterbelengguan atau keterjebakan yang sangat
merugikan. Sikap hanya demi keberhasilan ujian nasional, bukannya keterampilan dan
kelincahan verbal (tuturan dan tulisan) sebagai ciri kecerdasan intelektual dan emosional,
sangat mengganggu perkembangan sumber daya insani dan perkembangan jati diri
sebagian (nesar) generasi muda bangsa.
Kemampuan mengungkapkan hasil penalaran dan perasaan terdalam para peserta didik
khususnya atas realitas kehidupan sosioekologis kelokalan berbasis etnik dan
keindonesiaan dalam proses pembelajaran dan pendidikan, justru sangat penting dalam
membangun kesadaran akan hakikat dan fungsi lingkungan hidup, sekaligus mencegah
keterasingan. Di beberapa daerah di Indonesia, ditemukan fakta yang sangat
memrihatinkan. Sejumlah anak bangsa yang setiap hari menikmati pangan-kuliner
Indonesia asli (nasi, jagung, singkong, kacang-kacangan, sagu, daging sapi, kerbau,
aneka unggas, ikan dan udang, serta beragam sayur), justru tidak lagi mengenal biota,
apalagi varietas-varietas padi, jagung, dan kacang yang hidup di sawah atau ladang, tidak
pula mengenal sapi atau kerbau, tidak mengenal lagi jenis-jenis burung, dan tidak lagi
mengenal jenis-jenis sayuran dalam bahasa etnik mereka. Sebaliknya, anak-anak kota
sangat akrab dengan makanan instan produk asing. Kesenjangan lingual-kultural ini
merupakan masalah pendidikan lingkungan (lihat Kompas, 13-14 April 2009) yang
sangat penting untuk dikritisi dan ditata ulang. Termasuk di dalamnya adalah pendidikan
multikultural untuk tulus menghormati, menerima, menghargai, dan membangun
kebersamaan dalam perbedaan (band. Blum, 2001). Pendidikan dan pembelajaran bahasa
lokal atau bahasa daerah, demikian juga pembelajaran bahasa Indonesia, dan bahasa-
bahasa asing di Indonesia, secara kontekstual sudah seharusnyalah bersumber,
berbasiskan, dan menyatu dengan lingkungan hidup, masyarakat, dan kebudayaan di
sekitar mereka.
5. Catatan Akhir
Renungan sekilas tentang dunia keetnikan dan kebahasaan dalam perspektif ekolinguistik
ini mengajak warga etnik sekaligus guyub tutur bahasa etnik untuk menyadari eratnya
hubungan antara bahasa dengan lingkungan hidup, baik lingkungan sosial-budaya
maupun lingkungan alam. Di satu sisi bahasa merekam secara simbolis kekayaan alam
dan modal sosial-kultural komunitas tutur bahasa. Dunia keetnikan berkaitan dengan
bayangan dan kesadaran akan kesamaan leluhur, asal-muasal, tradisi, adicita (ideology)
tanah teritorial, simbol-simbol, dan juga kesadaran akan keberbedaan dengan kelompok
etnik lain. Kemudian, keberbedaan itu diperkuat pula oleh bahasa etnik. Ini berarti bahasa
etnik sangat penting dipelihara dan digunakan antaranggota warga etnik sebagai
perwujudan jati diri.
Ketidakserasian hubungan dalam komunitas etnik yang juga komunitas tutur dengan
lingkungan alam, berakar pula dari “penyalahgunaan” energi bahasa dan juga bertautan
dengan disfungsi bahasa secara sosioekologis karena di balik sistem kode kebahasaan
tersimpan makna dan nilai kultural dan natural. Fungsi simbolis dan makna referensial
kode-kode lingual menjadi kabur oleh waktu, terutama oleh gerusan arus budaya global.
Keterpinggiran dan ketercerabutan akar lokal berdampak pada kegoyahan jati diri
kolektif, baik pada jenjang lokal keetnikan maupun jati diri sebagai bangsa Indonesia
yang plural.
Bahasa tidak mesti hanya dipahami sebagai alat semata. Bahasa hidup dalam kompetensi
dan performansi antaranggota guyub tutur itu, harus dipandang dan diposisikan sebagai
organisme yang hidup dalam suatu ekosistem, dimanfaatkan sebagai sumber daya, energi,
dan modal sosial-kultural. Sebagai masyarakat yang multietnik dan multilingual, secara
fungsional bahasa itu selayaknya hadir secara adil, berimbang, serasi, dan merata
antarguyub tutur dan guyub kultur. Dominasi perlu dicegah. Berkaitan dengan kerusakan
ekosistem, termasuk lingkungan hidup manusia, energi bahasa dalam penggunaannya,
jikalau tanpa kendali moral, dapat saja merusak tatanan alam dan tatanan sosial yang
menjaga keseimbangan. Misi ekolinguistik kritis, dengan demikian perlu diemban demi
pemulihan kembali hak hidup alam dan sesama dalam relasi yang harmonis, melalui
pemberdayaan bahasa-bahasa etnik.
Dalam perspektif ekolinguistik, keetnikan dan kebahasaan dapat dipahami sebagai satu
kesatuan, sebagai dua sisi mata uang, hadir bersebelahan dalam keutuhan. Jikalau bahasa
boleh ditempatkan di sisi luar, ia berfungsi untuk merepresentasi dan mengemas isi jati
diri keetnikan. Dalam perspektif ini pula, keredupan penggunaan atau daya hidup bahasa
etnik, mencerminkan keredupan jati diri kolektif keetnikan pula. Sebaliknya, kelebatan
penggunaan dan daya hidup kebahasaan yang bergairah, menengarai daya hidup
keetnikan, seperti juga kebangsaan Indonesia, yang energik dan lestari. Fakta tentang
daya hidup kebahasaan dalam konteks keetnikan, jelas sangat membutuhkan penelitian
yang teratur, terfokus, dan berkesinambungan. Secara khusus, kaji tindak (action
research) dengan memanfaatkan konsep, kerangka teori, dan metodologi ekolinguistik
dapat digunakan, sehingga pemuliaan bahasa, etnik, dan lingkungan hidupnya dalam
jalinan keterkaitan satu dengan yang lainnya, dapat diupayakan.

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Halliday, M. A. K.

Language policy and planning has become a major concern of applied linguistics. Most language
planning is institutional and not systemic, planning not the forms of the language but the
relationship between the language and the individuals who use it. Institutional language
planning, policy formation, provides the context for systemic language planning, whose
objective is to expand language's potential for meaning. Language does not reflect reality, rather
it actively creates reality. The role of grammar in this system is complex; it is the meaning-
making potential of language. While any language can create new terms, its semantic base
changes very slowly, resulting from material changes in the culture. Major upheavals in human
history have been critical in semohistory. A significant component in these upheavals is a change
in ways of meaning. Changing language can change the existing order. When planning language,
applied linguists are not forging an ideologically neutral instrument for carrying out policy; they
are creating an active force in shaping people's consciousness. A significant change in the human
condition is the depletion of resources. Language planning can replace war discourse with peace
discourse, the discourse of borrowing with that of saving, and the discourse of building with that
of repair. (MSE)