The concept of [little language] seems to be echoed and amplified in the concept of Language Oriented Programming:

Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Oriented_Programming] says "Language oriented programming is a style of programming in which, rather than solving problems in general-purpose programming languages, the programmer creates one or more domain-specific programming languages for the problem first and solves the problem in those languages."

This paper [http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/articles/04/10/lop/mps.pdf] seems to define and promulgate the term.  This [http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/] describes a particular approach to implementing LOP.

The concept of [Language Workbench] for processing [Domain Specific Languages] [http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html] is another conceptual approach.

[http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2005/01/language_orient.html] and [http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t19155.html] are just some links I haven't yet processed [CMcC]