Free English Language Dissertations - Language Planning: With A Focus On Korea Identify The Functions That
Language Planning: With a Focus on Korea
Identify the functions that language-planners consider a language to fulfill insociety. Explain how the consideration of these functions affected the process and outcome of language planning policy in one named country or region of the world.
The first function of language for society is communication: written language communicates ideas (of theology, philosophy, history) across time and thus language preserves for a people their literary, philosophical and religious heritage. One consideration of language-planners then is how to promote total literacy so that all people have access to the written wisdom of their language. Literacy too is necessary for contemporary education and news about politics, international news, war etc., when this is recorded in written forms such as newspapers, journals, academic books or novels. A second function of language is to communicate these ideas as well as commerce, diplomacy and technology to other nations and continents. For both functions language-planners must refine their language so that it is as clear as possible for both internal and international dissemination of ideas. Written language depends upon the alphabet, and it is refinements and improvements to the alphabet and to grammar that have consumed the attention of language-planners throughout history, and which continue to do so today. Another major historical aim of language-planners such as Leibniz, Dalgarno, and Zamenhof has been to invent an artificial international language that would be used as a second language by all world-citizens in addition to their own native tongue so as to eliminate the confusion and wars that are caused because of imprecise communication between peoples of different languages. This essay however is a short one, and it examines how the communicative peculiarities of the Korean language and alphabet have affected the policies of Korean language-planners. In Korea language-planning always focuses upon the Korean script hangul and this makes it fascinating sociologically.
Before the invention of the hangul script, transferring spoken Korean into written form was cumbersome and imprecise because Koreans had to rely upon a convoluted alphabetic script inherited from the Chinese. Korean is a polysyllabic language and Chinese monosyllabic and the Koreans dependence upon an alien script adversely affected their ability to communicate and preserve Korean thought properly. Korean language-planners therefore needed to invent a script of their own: to improve communication within the nation. What the Koreans achieved was an immense simplification of the Chinese script so as to fit the idiosyncrasies of sound and meaning of the Korean language something they named idu (official reading).
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