What processes are usually part of reviving a language?

In the following section I argue that revival is one type of language planning, with its own specific difficulties and considerations. Haugen's overall model for language planning is useful here as it provides concepts to understand the revival process. It describes which steps may be taken in language planning, and distinguishes between linguistic aspects of planning (corpus planning) and societal aspects (status planning). He further distinguishes policy planning and language cultivation, although these may be much more wrought up than he suggests. All of the categories and most of the steps outlined in the framework also apply to revival of a language, as I will demonstrate below. They are not necessarily followed in the order given; rather all of them are often ongoing at the same time through different initiatives.

Haugen's language planning model as revised by Kaplan (1997: 29). 

Selection
The selection of languages as understood by Haugen is a top-down decision as to which languages should be used in a society. The problem identification stage consists of considerations made by the political leaders in choosing what languages to promote. These considerations may include: 

• the wish to modernise or to participate in the world economy (which may for instance lead to the promotion of colonial languages in post-colonial states), the wish to retain or promote a distinct identity (such as the promotion of Estonian over Russian in Estonia),
• the connotations of a competing language (such as the rejection of colonial languages in post-colonial states e.g. German in Namibia),
• the actual vitality of competing languages or dialects in the country, the variety favoured by the leaders themselves (such as the spread of the Parisian dialect of French),
• the resources needed to implement and elaborate a language (i.e. a language is more attractive for nation-wide promotion if good teaching materials are already available, meaning a lot if not all countries in the world now opt to teach English at least as a second language),
• and other situation-specific considerations.

Based on these considerations the allocation of norms follows, meaning the decision of which languages are granted what kind of official status and where which language should be used, e.g. which languages official documents will be published in; which languages can be used to communicate with government officials; which languages will be used as a medium and which taught in schools. 

In revival situations, the language may have been promoted from the bottom up before it gains official recognition. The considerations often include a notion that a part of culture will be lost if the language is allowed to die; the rights of minority language speakers whose access to services may be impaired by the lack of recognition of their language, as well as their sense of an identity that they are allowed to feel proud of; and a wish to mobilize aspects of ethnic identity in reaction to or to serve certain political views or goals. 

The crucial difference between the considerations listed above and those of a revival movement is that those listed above pertain to multiple competing languages, whereas revival movements focus on one language that they want to promote. As such the question is not, "which language should be used where", but "how can the usage of this language (in as many domains as possible) be achieved?"

Standardisation / Codification

The standardisation and codification of a language are considered necessary in order to promote and teach the language; they consist of the decision on one correct way of speaking and writing the language. This includes deciding on a writing system and an ortography, in the framework called graphisation; a standard grammar (grammatication) and inventarising the vocabulary of the language (lexication), which to an extent overlaps with terminological modernisation as mentioned in the "Elaboration" category; it may include lexical innovation in order to prepare the language for usage in new domains or in order to emphasize the distinctiveness of the language (for instance in the adoption and promotion of dialectal terms for existing concepts during the synthesis of Nynorsk). The new standards are subsequently codified in spelling guides, grammars, dictionaries and teaching materials.

Which steps are more and which less relevant for the revival of a language depends very much on the extent of deterioration of the language, the amount of written records and the amount of speakers that still speak some variety of it. The attitude of the speakers to the correctness of their own use is also crucial for the outcome. For the formation of the writing system revivalists may draw upon written records of the language, as in Irish, which cultivated a rich literary history until well into the 17th century. They may also consider the way that the language is actually spoken by its community, or which writing system is most likely to be easily understood by the potential learners. Dorian explains that some communities are more prescriptive or conservative about what the language should be like; for instance after the independence of India, Hindi language reformers disapproved of the many loanwords from Persian and English that had started to be commonly used by Hindi speakers, and pressed for grammatical and lexical standards based on Sanskrit. Other communities are more permissive of transformation of the language; they may accept loanwords as a suitable solution to the need to create words for all the new concepts that are created by the world's rapid modernisation ('mp3-player', 'to update', etc.) Although not a language in a revitalisation process, an example would be Dutch, which draws heavily upon English for terms related to new technologies, leaving the English spelling and pronunciation intact but integrating the words into the Dutch morphological system (e.g. 'gedownload'). Dorian argues that purism or heavy reliance on archaic forms of the language may be an obstacle to revitalisation as it can alienate speakers from the language they actually speak, or make them feel that their usage is inferior or not up to standards, thus resulting in a move away from the language rather than renewed vitality. This is in line with the conclusions of Bentahila and Eirlys (1993) who argue that while language revivalers often hope to restore the language to a previous, healthier state, they are more likely to achieve transformation of the language to suit new roles. 

Implementation

The next step is the implementation of the policies that have been decided upon in the previous steps; the adoption and spread of the language by the community. Correction is the (somewhat vague) term used by Haugen for specific measures taken to implement the social aspects of a language plan. In practice this means planning how exactly the language will be disseminated through education and otherwise; the considerations at this stage are how to organise teacher training, how to promote the language to students and parents, what the specific objectives of study should be, and how to fund it all. The implementation has to be evaluated and monitored; how does the population react? Are the teaching materials well-received and effective? Are the study objectives realised?

For languages that are subject to revival, education is often an important target, either to ensure that minority language speakers do not experience disadvantage (for instance if they speak a different language at home than they have to use at school, thus impairing their ability to understand what is being taught - this can lead to a model where children speak their mother tongue in their early primary school years, but transfer to a more widely used language at a later stage of their education); or to ensure the vitality and usage of the language in the future. Some languages are however still very far away from being viable for use in the classroom, for instance due to a lack of available teaching materials, a lack of teachers, or a lack of enthusiasm from within the community. In this case the implementation may consist of awareness campaigns to promote the language and privately arranged language courses rather than ones integrated into the national curriculum. Evaluation may take place in the form of, for instance, questions on censuses to find out how many people use the language at home, or fieldwork by linguists who investigate usage of the language by interviewing speakers.

Elaboration

It is crucial to the maintenance of a language that it is actually used and kept up to date with modern developments in terms of the range of registers available, words for new concepts, and styles to suit different purposes. In the framework this is called "functional development", which reflects the need to adapt the language to new roles and functions. Terminological development is done on a large scale in all living languages, mostly by individual writers and speakers though it may be controlled and regulated by language academies. Words may be borrowed from other languages, coined, for instance by the producer or inventor of a new product or through recombination of existing terms, or archaic terms may be reintroduced to serve new meanings. Sometimes newly introduced words may be very controversial or considered ugly or ridiculous by speakers - see the inkhorn controversies in 18th Century English. However, as the inkhorn terms show, such controversies may not always mean that the changes are halted.

Stylistic development entails that genres and styles are developed in the language. This is the work of poets, authors, television broadcasters, parlementarians, academics and really anyone who puts the language to new purposes; however the government may often grant funding specifically to support this goal. Jean Ure (1982) writes about possibilities for what she calls "developing register range". When a new purpose calls for a new register, the contemporary repertory may be drawn upon, extending the applicability of existing registers, then gradually modifying and differentiating the style to suit the new purpose. She gives the example of video messages of soldiers in the second world war for the people back home, which were shown on cinema newsreels. The soldiers would talk in letter form, starting and ending with letter greetings: "Now bye-bye and love to everyone at home from Johnny." A second possibility is when forms from an earlier period are preserved, either oral or written; these provide patterns that may be activated to meet new needs. Finally, other languages can provide models on which new registers may be based. Here her example is Tok Pisin, which has a narrative register influenced by speaker's original mother tongues and an official register influenced by English.

Kaplan has added internationalisation to the steps listed in this section, as he argues preparing the language for use abroad means it faces new challenges; for instance where subtle cultural differences in writing practises may obstruct interlingual understanding even if the language is the same. However, these are problems for languages in a far stage of development, rather than for minority languages that are struggling to even be spoken in their region of origin. However, terminological development and stylistic development are very important for languages that are being revived, and will be practised more or less in the way described above, with the difference that they are often just starting out on this endeavour and that they still have to develop fairly basic registers (such as appropriate styles to talk to one's teacher, bank teller or doctor), whereas more developed languages such as Italian or Polish can already be used for a wide variety of purposes and already have a long literary history, that they merely need to maintenance.


Perhaps one important aspect has been left out of Haugen's framework, which is nonetheless quite important especially for languages subject to revival; namely the work of linguists in mapping out the grammar and lexicon of a language, or salvaging what is left of a language in far stages of deterioration. An example would be the extensive fieldwork of 19th century linguists on native american languages, which has been crucial in promoting awareness of the languages and in some cases preserving enough of them to allow for a revival later on, as in the case of the Yurok language which is now being taught at schools again. This could be grouped in the codification category, as writing a language down and inventarising it is closely related to codifying it; with the difference that the former aims to be descriptive where the latter is essentially prescriptive.