A Study On The Evolution Of Language Planning And Language Policy Since The 21^st Century

Language planning and language policy is a relatively new discipline with a history of no more than 60 years. It originates from the end of the Second World War during which period many former colonies of Western capital states got independence from their mother countries. Those post-colonial countries had to face numerous social problems left over by colonists, amongst which language was one of the most prominent and urgent issues to be handled. Consequently, the field of language planning emerged in response to the proper time and conditions. A number of linguists and philologists were recruited to those under developing countries with the aim to solve their language problems in order to promote the process of social modernization.However, language planning is no longer geographically concentrated on those post-colonial states in that nearly sixty years have passed since the establishment of language planning as a self-independent discipline. The field is becoming much more complicated in the new millennium with the contextual change, such as globalization and rapid migration. In other words, language planning research in the 21st first century presents certain characteristics of change. Therefore, it is of necessity to summarize what changes have taken place during the past, especially for the past ten years in the field of language planning.Differently from previous studies, the present thesis employs a relatively new method-corpus-based approach to investigate the evolution of language planning in the past decade. Through retrieving and presenting large quantity of data based on DIY corpus, the thesis concludes that there are three specific findings:1. Language policy research lacks a consistent and unified theory to support its further development; 2. Language policy research is no longer a merely language-related subject but presents the feature of combining multidisciplinary approach; 3. Language policy research should be raised to a higher level in social science since "to plan language is to plan society" to some degree.The innovation of this thesis lies in that it builds a DIY corpus which is rarely to be seen in language planning research. Besides, the large quantity of data extracted from the corpus will be pervasive enough to argue for changes taken place in language planning during the past decade.