Emakeele Seltsi keeletoimkond ja keelekorraldus - Vaateid eesti keelekorralduse arenguloole
Language committee of the Mother Tongue Society and corpus planning - Views on the development of Estonian language planning

Summary/Abstract: The article provides an insider’s personal view on the satus, composition and operating principles of the language committee of the Mother Tongue Society, and summarizes its decisions. The language committee does not deal with language learning or teaching, nor with issues of language status: its sole concern is corpus planning. In an advanced democracy, the purpose of such activity is to guarantee, on the one hand, the comprehensibility of Estonian texts over time and all over Estonia and, on the other hand, the unambiguity and clarity of business communication at a certain point in time (for more details see, e.g., Kerge 2022: 33−46). This is how the ever changing language (note also the stylistic aspect!) is kept up to date by favouring and recommending some changes and holding back some others. The committee understands standard language as an inevitable attribute of a democratic country, which is guaranteed by continuously updated dictionaries and grammars. Such updating entails a systematic study of texts with a view to picking out and analysing parallel signifiers (to ascertain which speech forms are more common, in what contexts they occur and to what extent), applying, if necessary, codification by establishing a preference of one parallel form over another as a denotational or interpretational option and/or giving some context-based recommendations for the parallel forms under discussion (this mainly concerns business communication) and, last but not least, conscious usage (drawing attention to standard language as a “no one’s language”, whose orthography and the stylistic nuances of whose speech forms need to be learnt at school, while the linguists’ recommendations should either be deliberately followed or deliberately ignored considering the optimal balance between the individuality and acceptability of expression). What can be codified is mainly orthography, sometimes also declension and conjugation, which may change due to phonological processes. The committee’s decisions and recommendations are always based on research, which in recent decades have largely benefitted from access to corpora and comparison of subcorpora. The article is mainly focused on changes in the usage of standard Estonian, including online communication, in the 21st century, and discusses the relevant individual decisions.

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