Examines the place of Arabic in language education and language planning activities in Nigeria, highlighting its uses from the nineteenth century to present, methods and content of Arabic education, contributions to historical documentation in pre-colonial Nigeria and lexical expansion of Nigerian languages, and decline in its status and role. (34…

Three sociolinguistic perspectives are considered in a study focusing on the rationale of Israeli linguistic policy toward Arabic. These include (1) school language programs as a matter of linguistic policies of political centers; (2) the relationship of linguistic resources to group boundaries (principally ethnicity); and (3) language resources…

Discusses the independent Namibian government's goal of making English (currently the mother tongue of less than 5 percent of the population) the official language to unite various race and speech communities into one national entity, and proposes a systems approach to enable language planners to see the relationships between plans and other…

Describes two major events--mass migration to New Caledonia in the 1950s and the conversion from a protectorate to a French overseas territory in 1961--that have confronted Wallis and Futuna (Central Polynesia) with the same sociolinguistic problems that have beset other Pacific islands for decades. (Author/CB)

Discusses the failed attempt to cultivate Oriya as a modern language and to make it the official language of Orissa, India, in the 19th century. The reasons for this failure are a lack of language consciousness among the Oriyas, the pro-English attitude of the Oriya bureaucrats, and an irresolute corpus planning exercise. (eight references)…