Política i planificació lingüístiques: cap a una perspectiva ecosistèmica [Language policy and language planning: Towards an ecosystem perspective]

Abstract

One of the errors that can be frequently spotted in the study of the policy and planning of language matters is the fragmentary perspective in which they are created. Reality is, on the contrary, interrelated and overlapping. This is why the ecological perspective stresses the importance of the study of the contexts of the phenomena, that is to say, of their external relations. The direction to be followed is towards an understanding of reality as a set of open systems with a continuous interchange with the ecosystem of which they are part, being aware of the fact that the apparent stability is always the result of a dynamic balance. The advance towards an interdisciplinary mode is therefore necessary and peremptory. Headings such as status / normative / institution vis-à-vis others such as solidarity / normal / individual seem to imply a basic distinction of the definition of sociocultural reality. To discover and understand the dynamics of the interaction between these two great categorical orders is, in fact, one of the most important subjects waiting to be addressed by language planning and political strategies, and, in general, by sociolinguistics, as well. The fundamental macroquestion of the field could thus be stated in the following terms: WHAT GROUP OR ORGANIZATION, AND WITH WHAT AIM, WANTS TO OBTAIN WHAT, WHERE, HOW, WHEN, AND OBTAINS WHAT AND WHY? This way, even if how they obtain the desired goal -that is, the actual intervention- is included as one of the main elements, the research does not exclusively devote itself to this topic, but rather frames it and interrelates it with all the other elements that globally participate in this phenomenon, trying to establish a clear theoretical understanding of the corresponding events and processes.