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Language and Identity : 24/01/02
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Europeans
speak a hundred different languages, some on the verge of
extinction. How much should we preserve our linguistic heritage?
Jan Repa looks at some of the challenges present by Europe's
minority languages - large and small.
UNESCO
- the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation - lists over 100 European languages it describes
as "endangered" or which have disappeared entirely in modern
times. Sami, Sorbian, Friesian, Kashubian, Istro-Romanian
cling on in various corners of Europe. But how long before
they go the way of Gothic, Old Prussian, Polabian, Judaeo-Spanish,
Manx, Cornish and a host of others, which have become extinct
in the past couple of hundred years?
"Languages are the pedigrees of nations", said Samuel Johnson
- 18th century writer, critic and compiler of the first English
dictionary. When a language dies, a way of seeing and interpreting
the world dies with it. But new languages emerge as well.
Political imperatives have split Serbo-Croat into Serbian,
Croatian and Bosnian. Macedonian is still thought of by many
Bulgarians as a Bulgarian dialect. So when DOES a dialect
become a language? Alistair MacPhail of the European Commission's
Language Policy Unit:
"It's a slightly flexible thing. As language is very closely
linked to identity - as people's sense of their group identity
changes - their perception of their language as being a dialect
or a separate language tends to change also. So we see new
languages emerging."
One
of the great literary languages of Europe - though the chances
are you've never even heard it. Occitan - the traditional
language of southern France, and of the medieval troubadours,
whose poetry of courtly love had a formative influence on
the literary languages of Italy, Germany, England and Spain.
Suppressed by a succession of centralising French governments,
and degraded to the status of a peasant patois, it lingers
on in outlying country areas:
"This
speech, which sounds so mellow on our maidens' lips, Once
was the language of the troubadours. Now our maidens are ashamed
to speak it."
European states, from ancient Rome onwards, have been great
destroyers of languages - usually in name of ideas like national
unity or cultural progress. Bertrand Merciassi, comes from
Brittany, at the other end of France. Breton - a Celtic tongue,
related to Welsh - is enjoying a revival. Before the Second
World War, schools in Brittany displayed signs saying, "Do
not spit or speak Breton" - and teachers were instructed to
beat children for using it:
"There
is no minority problem - there is a majority problem. If we
compare the French Revolution with the Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia. This revolution wanted to change the people itself,
the mentality, the human beings themselves. The Russian culture
would represent the Bolshevik culture. The French culture
would represent human rights, democracy - the credo of the
French revolutionaries. But most of the time it is just a
way to disguise national imperialism, such as the Russian
or the French one."
Margret
Oberhofer comes from South Tyrol - a former Austrian region
acquired by Italy at the end of the First World War:
"Imagine
yourself growing up. You can't express yourself. It's as simple
as that. I strongly agree with Bertrand. It's not the minority
that's causing the problem. We are asking for a basic right,
that's all. In the case of South Tyrol, it was not allowed
to speak German at all. You were really beaten up for speaking
German in the street."
Demonstrators
in Spain's northern Basque country, demanding language rights
and self-government soon after the death of the Spanish dictator,
General Francisco Franco, in 1975. Franco's slogan - "One,
Great and Free" - implied the suppression of all Spain's languages,
except the dominant Castilian. Basque, an ancient tongue believed
to pre-date the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, was to be stamped
out of existence. The Basque region today enjoys considerable
autonomy - but the violent legacy of separatist terrorism
lives on. Do linguistic minorities want too much? Over the
water, in Canada, the once despised French-speakers of Quebec
province are getting their own back. Marc Angenot, is a francophone
professor who teaches at Montreal's anglophone McGill University:
"The most ludicrous law is about the size of letters that
you can use on posters. In Quebec, English must be one third
the size of letters used in French. And the colour, of course.
The hue of the colour must be also more prominent in French.
That means that all the time people are in front of the courts,
challenging such and such aspects of laws that are not applicable
in many ways, because they are contrary to the Charter of
Rights in terms of freedom of expression".
Laurence
McFalls, meanwhile, is an anglophone professor at the francophone
University of Montreal:
"The
only thing that's keeping Montreal from losing its French
face is the official protection given to the French language.
If the city were officially biligual, the forces of assimilation
to English would be even greater. The language laws which,
for example, force immigrants to send their children to school
in French, end up with the result that their children at least
know some French by the time they're adults because they learn
English anyway. At least the bilingual character of the city
is maintained - as certain anglophones would say - by ramming
the French language down people's throats."
None
of which stops the Metropolitan French from sneering at French
Canadian linguistic barbarisms like "changez le tire" - "change
the tyre" - or "cul de sac" instead of "voie sans issue".
Insecurity is a feeling which many linguistic minorities -
or communities that straddle national boundaries - have to
live with. Eva Blaessar belongs to Finland's once influential
Swedish-speaking community. Her experience is not unlike Margret
Oberhofer's:
"I grew up speaking Swedish in school, with friends, at
home. Everywhere it's completely Swedish-speaking. But by
heart I'm Finnish. I'm definitely not Swedish."
"Has a Finnish-speaker ever pointed you out and said, 'Look,
you're not a real Finn, are you, because you come from a Swedish-speaking
background?'
"Oh yes, it happens constantly. Finnish people might call
Swedish-speaking Finns bad names etc. Finnish-speaking people
actually have to study Swedish for a certain number of years
at school - and this they protest against regularly."
"Outside of South Tyrol you always have to explain your
situation. If you go to Firenze (Florence) or somewhere, you
have to say, 'I'm Italian but my mother-tongue is German'.
If you go to Austria, they will say, 'Ah, you are a kind of
Austrian'. If you go to Germany you also have questions like,
'Oh, is South Tyrol belonging to Germany?' It's sometimes
very annoying that you always have to justify yourself."
But speaking two major European languages like German and
Italian also has its advantages:
"In the case of South Tyrol, there are actually companies
coming to South Tyrol because they know it's bilingual. The
people there can communicate with Italians but also with the
big German-speaking market. So South Tyrol is one of the wealthiest
regions in Italy and it's always ranking in the top five in
everything."
But
how much effort, realistically, should be expended in saving
lesser-used languages? Gaelic - the official language of the
Irish Republic. A century ago, English-speaking Irish intellectuals
believed that a nation aspiring to independence should revive
its old native language. Yet today, barely 20,000 people speak
Gaelic on a regular basis - proving that you don't always
need a separate language to have a sense of national identity.
The Swiss have four languages - three of which they share
with their neighbours - without feeling any the less Swiss.
For the fledgling democracies of Central and Eastern Europe,
their West European neighbours do NOT provide any obvious
models.
The
Council of Europe's "Charter for Regional or Minority Languages"
talks of the "value of multiculturalism and multilingualism"
- but France and Greece refuse to ratify it. Advocates of
"major" European languages, like French, German or Italian,
often claim to be defending their own heritage against an
encroaching tide of English: not the language of Milton and
Shakespeare, so much as the international "demotic" of mass
consumer culture. A trawl of European language websites turned
up the following proposed solution:
"I am sure that Latin, better than other languages, can
help the peoples of Europe rediscover their roots and traditions".
Theoretically
a nice idea - after all, Latin was traditionally the international
language of Europe - but almost certainly a lost cause. Eva
Blaessar and Bernard Menciassi maintain that liguistic diversity
is one of the glories of Europe - and can be accomodated within
the "European project":
"I
think evolution will take its course no matter what you do.
You're hearing us with our experiences of being minority speakers.
I think the question of when is it worth preserving a minority
language - that is very individual and very much up to each
country and each population. What unifies Europe today are
the different cultural identities and languages. This actually
unifies Europe - it does not divide. When you are here in
Brussels, for instance, you hear all the languages of Europe
on the streets every day. And here it is very common that
you meet people who speak four or five languages fluently."
"I
don't have a crystal ball. But I would see something like
the full application of the subsidiarity principle regarding
the language aspect. We could image that French and Breton
would be official in Brittany. Then at the European level
we could maybe think that there would be three-four official
languages. The European 19th century decided that we should
be monolingual human beings. Now I think we should have to
get rid of this stupid idea, develop our natural skills and
then the problem will be solved. In fact, we should forget
about the concept of language itself, and just speak."
The
European Union is a unique experiment, whose final outcome
- if such there will be - remains unclear. Some would obviously
like to see a "Europe of communities", in which the nation-state
- with its organising and corecive powers - is diluted away.
In fact, this itself is one of the major areas of controversy,
which the EU will have to address in the coming years - and
the future status and viability of Europe's many languages
could be strongly influenced by whatever solution is eventually
arrived at. But after a couple of centuries of existence,
the nation-state is unlikely to surrender easily.
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