Language Planning

Abstract

This entry traces the development of language planning as a field of inquiry in intersection with disciplinary shifts within linguistic anthropology. It focuses on the emergence of early language planning work, with attention to its conceptualization as a modern developmental model during the colonization and decolonization processes of the 1960s, as well as to subsequent criticisms and their impact on the rise of critical and ethnographic approaches during the 1990s. It also pays attention to existing controversies vis‐à‐vis a more recent semiotic turn in linguistic anthropology. The entry ends with a discussion of work in progress and future directions that articulate more fully the points of connection between ethnographic, critical, and semiotic approaches to language planning, under the shifting economic conditions of the contemporary world.