While the news seems to highlight the mounting

external and internal pressures that are driving language

endangerment. not all languages are endangering. Many languages have 【M1】__________

well-establishing oral and literary traditions and are being used for a 【M2】__________

wide variety of functions in society. Many other communities, which

have not achieved that status for their languages, are therefore taking 【M3】__________

steps to preserve the vitality of their languages by finding new ways of

using them. Ethnologue records and reports data about these aspects of

language use under the rubric of language development.

The term language development can be used in both an individual

and a societal sense. It is commonly used among psychologists and

educators with inference to individuals to refer to the phenomenon of 【M4】__________

child language acquisition. Charles Ferguson who defined language 【M5】__________

development at the societal level as primarily dealing with three areas of

concern: graphization, standardization and modernization. These

development activities are now generally known as language planning

activities, subsumed specially within what is called “corpus planning”. 【M6】__________

More broadly, Ethnologue defines language development as follows:

Language development is the result of the series of on-going planned

actions that language communities take to assure that they can 【M7】__________

effectively use their languages to achieve their social, cultural, political,

economic, and spiritual goals.

As Ferguson proposed, those planned actions most often consist in 【M8】__________

the development of writing systems and the elaboration of terminology

designed to expand the functions of language in a society. Language 【M9】__________

development activities may also go well within corpus planning and cover 【M10】_________

a broad range of activities including advocacy on behalf of minority

languages and other actions outside of the realm of linguistics proper.

【M1】