Language Packaging in Multi-Lingual Communities

Abstract  Facing the multi-lingual challenges brought up by globalization, everyone, being it either a country, a region, a society, a family, or an individual speaker, has to make a painful choice，they have to do their best to package up their basket of language or languages to maximize their strengths and to minimize their weaknesses. The so-called “language packaging” articulated in this article refers to a language planning action by a social group or an individual speaker to choose one or a group of languages as their target languages from languages possibly available to them on the basis of a conscious or unconscious evaluation of their current needs and their plans for the future. Language packaging should take place at social and individual levels, whereby the former often results in several languages with different functions being selected, and the latter in bilingualism with one of the two languages being a common language, and another being a variable language chosen on the basis of various personalized situations.

Keywords  globalization; multi-lingual; language packaging

（徐杰、罗堃  澳门大学人文学院中国语言文学系）