Language plays an inevitable role in responding to major public emergencies and national emergency language capacities have increasingly attracted much attention. However, due to the absence of the perspectives of language planning, current studies fail to effectively improve national emergency language capacities. Informed by the theory of language planning, there are three types of orientations in language planning in the development of national emergency language capacities: languageastool, languageasright and languageasresource. This paper classifies the fundamental contents of language planning for the development of national emergency language capacities into eight groups: language corpus planning, language status planning, language acquisition planning, language prestige planning, discourse planning, language usage planning, translation planning and language technology planning.

major public emergencies; language planning; national emergency language capacities; national language capacity; emergency language