Language, Ethnic Identity and the State

William Safran, J.A. Laponce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317983835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new study powerfully asserts the pivotal importance of the interplay between language and ethnicity, which is often underestimated as a component for political stability.

These leading scholars present five key case studies of South Africa, Algeria, Canada, Latvia and Senegal. All five countries are multilingual nations where language has been a central political issue that has challenged their unity and stability.

These studies are underpinned by two general, comparative and theoretical discussions, which analyse how scholars consider social class and economic factors to be the primary sources for political cohesion or of malcontent with the system and the new avenues opened by a focus on issues of langauge.

This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of linguistics, language, politics and sociology.

This is a special issue of the leading journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE

WILLIAM SAFRAN

University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado

Language is a marker of ethnic identity; a vehicle for expressing a distinct culture; a source of national cohesion; and an instrument for building political community. Yet the relationship between language and ethnonational identity is a contested matter. There is no question that language is one of the elements defining collective consciousness, the others being religion, history, common descent, and territory. In the 19th century, language was considered the major defining factor of a nation, at least in Europe; and it was almost taken for granted that each linguistic community deserved to have its own state. The German language was a crucial element in politically mobilizing a number of kingdoms, duchies, and city-states in central Europe toward a national state, the fight against Napoleon being the proximate mobilizing event. However, pan-Germanic unity—the unification of Germany and Austria—was blocked by dynastic and religious rivalries, and its achievement under Hitler was short-lived. Language was the most important force for Italian political unity; but the imposition of standard Italian has not prevented the survival of regional idioms, nor has it been sufficient for overcoming the economic, social, and cultural divisions between northern Italy and the Mezzogiorno. Conversely, the collapse of unity in post-Tito Yugoslavia must not be attributed entirely, and perhaps even primarily, to linguistic divisions, for the conflicts among the components of that state also had religious, historical, and other translinguistic causes.

In the opinion of T.R. Gurr, “language issues alone are not a common source of deadly rivalries, because language differences, unlike racial and religious ones, are subject to individual and collective compromises. Individuals in heterogeneous societies can and ordinarily do speak several languages, but they cannot be both black and white or both Hindu and Muslim.”¹

Many political scientists consider language secondary compared to other factors of identitive demarcation and the formation of national consciousness. This is particularly true of constructivists and “rational choice” instrumentalists, such as Hobsbawm, Gurr, and Brass.² Most of them stress class and economic determinants; and they tend to have a common theme: the competition for scarce resources. Thus, the competition between majority and minority language groups is essentially a competition for economic power.

David Laitin, a proponent of the “rational-choice” thesis, minimizes the importance of language, arguing that for reasons of practical adaptation, e.g., getting a job or civic rights, an ethnic group will adopt the language of the majority, even to the point of giving up its language. Often, however, minorities do not give up their linguistic heritage without a fight, even if the payoff is significant. During the Soviet period, only a relatively small number of non- Slavic peoples in the federal republics of the Soviet Union switched to Russian, despite the political advantages of doing so.³ One explanation is the official legitimation of “national” languages and the institutional support structure (e.g., parallel school systems); but there are two other explanations: the existence of a regional system of patronage, and the association of selected languages with old traditions, including religious ones. Since the Baltic countries regained their independence, many Russians are said to have switched to the local language because of promises of political and economic payoffs,⁴ as well as restrictive language laws. Yet despite these carrot-and-stick incentives, others have maintained their Russian language—either as the primary language or the household idiom, whether for cultural reasons or because of nostalgia for the Soviet system.⁵

There is no doubt that the economic dimension—and that of the related element of social class—figures heavily in the language struggles in most of the countries dealt with in this volume. Economics has played a role in Anglophone dominance in Canada; in the Tamil struggle for ethnolinguistic recognition; in the pressure on the Russian-speaking minority in Latvia to give up Russian in order to obtain privileges of full citizenship; in the threat presented to the middle-class status of speakers of Assamese by the claims of speakers of Bengali in the Indian federal state of Assam; and in the fact that in India, English is increasingly becoming the language of the national as well as regional economic elite. In Norway and Greece, language differences are correlated with regional differences and urban-rural distinctions, but even in those countries, the economic element is undeniable. The Alsatian, Basque, and Breton languages in France and the regional dialects in Germany survived longer in rural areas than in the cities; in India, it is primarily the poor and uneducated who continue to speak regional ethnic languages.

Nevertheless, if economic advantage were decisive, a number of ethnic minorities—the speakers of Breton, Basque, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Yiddish, for example—would not be fighting to preserve their language. Some members of ethnic minorities have given up the fight, of course, but others have not, and there is no point in arguing that the latter are less “rational.” Moreover, official policies aimed at linguistic uniformization may reinforce, or create, cultural resistance and exacerbate interethnic friction. Examples are numerous: they include the policy of the Turkish authorities government of forbidding the use of the Kurdish language (at least until the early 1990s); the Slovak policy forbidding the public use of Hungarian; legislation enacted in Sri Lanka in 1956 to make Sinhalese the only official language, which generated massive demand by Tamils for autonomy; the legislation in the 1960s to make Assamese the official language of the Indian federal state of Assam at the expense of Bengali; and the linguistic Arabization policy of the Algerian government, which has provoked strong opposition by the Berbers, a minority ethnic group in Kabylia; the language policies of post-Soviet Ukraine, under which the use of Russian in instruction has been discouraged and underfunded; the policies of Latvia, which have made citizenship—and privileges connected with it—dependent on proficiency in Latvian and made life difficult for Russian speakers, a situation described in the analysis of Fredrika Björklund.⁶ In 1982, a television channel using the Welsh language was introduced after a strike by the leader of the Welsh Nationalist Party (Plaid Cymru). The language law in Moldavia in 1989, which made Romanian the only official language and required officials serving in Gagauz and Russian-speaking (Transdniester) areas to be proficient in Romanian—a policy originally intended to facilitate future unification with Romania—led to the creation of a Gagauz Khalk Movement and the declaration of an independent Gagauz Republic. This was declared illegal; but negotiations for some form of autonomy are still going on. The language issue in Afghanistan—the quest for equal status of Uzbek with Pashto and Dari—might well be a stumbling block in the efforts at creating a democratic constitution for a unified state.

As the essays in this collection show, this competition is not only an interethnic rivalry but also a conflict between elites and masses, religion and secularism, and “official” and de facto languages. Languages are not only tools of nation-building but also means of political control. That is why ethnic minorities use language—for example, the demand for bilingualism—as a political strategy—as “a form of protest against political domination.”⁷

Most of the debates by political scientists about language center on its relationship to the state; this debate constitutes the focus of the case studies in this volume. All have a “systemic” approach which is also, to some extent, chronological; and all go beyond political science—as they must, because the explanation for adapting to language policies or resisting them are economic, geographical, psychological, and cultural. These cases are all different, but they are illustrative of situations in many other countries.

The debate about the relationship between language and state is sharpened by the fact that there is no congruence, and no uniform causal direction, between the one and the other.⁸ Germany, Italy, and Assam are pre-political language communities; Arabic, English and Spanish are more or less independent of the state; Irish Gaelic, Hebrew, and the two Norwegian languages preceded the formation of the state but their development has been heavily influenced by it; and the relationship of French and Afrikaans to the state is ambiguous. Tito’s Yugoslavia represents an instance of the state not only providing the official definition of the national language—i.e., Serbo-Croatian, referred to by many as the “Yugoslav” language—but of defining and, indeed, creating an ethnic community, as in the case of the Bosnians, who were endowed with an identity distinct from that of their neighbors, who spoke the same language. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, a reverse process began to take place: an attempt to create a separate Bosnian language to demarcate the speakers of a newly-independent region from those of another. Conversely, as Nancy Johnson shows in her discussion of Senegal, people who adopted the Wolof language proceeded gradually to embrace a Wolof ethnicity—which suggests that ethnicity is a cultural construct rather than simply a “primordial” reality. Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, India, Russia, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland each constitute a single political community in which several languages are spoken. Conversely, Arabic, English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Swahili are spread throughout several countries, although there are significant “national” variations in these languages.

The vast majority of states are formally unilingual but contain more than one language community. Multilingual countries in which language has been a political issue have included Assam, Belgium, Cameroon, Canada, Estonia, India, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Malaysia, Norway (if Nynorsk and Bokmål are considered two distinct languages), Singapore, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, South Africa, and Ukraine. In some cases, such multilingualism tends to be a largely formal matter, which may or may not imply equality. In other cases, language pluralism has real meaning, as, for example, in Belgium, Canada, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland. But even in these countries, equality is not absolute: in Switzerland, German, or rather Schwyzerdütsch, is far more widely spoken than French or Italian; in Spain, Castilian is the lingua franca of the whole country whereas Basque, Catalan, and Galician are confined to specific regions; in Norway, Bokmål occupies a somewhat more favored position compared to Nynorsk;⁹ and in Belgium, bilingualism is far more widespread among the Flemings than among the Walloons. Nevertheless, in these countries there are translinguistic values and interests—both among the elite and the population as a whole—that make political unity possible: geography, common historical experiences, and economic interests. In Canada, as Linda Cardinal demonstrates, the battle of Francophones for practical equality with Anglophones is a continuing one.

Languages are not equivalent when it comes to cultural weight, literary allusions, sentiments associated with them, size of vocabulary, religious meaning, or elite preferences. Nor are all languages equally useful for wide communication. Most languages have the potential of becoming transethnic languages, if their vocabularies are appropriately developed. Such development, however, is normally undertaken by institutions tied to the state, and therefore has a specific “national” orientation.

The state cannot relate equally to all languages within its borders, especially if they are numerous. There are more than 170 languages in Sudan, more than 250 in Cameroon, more than 300 in Nigeria, and several dozen languages in India. Because many of these languages have significant cultural legacies it is not desirable to eliminate them in the interest of building a unified nation; nor is it possible, given the fact that these languages are spoken by many people. It is conceivable that a state could persuade all inhabitants to use a common language, but that is a very gradual process; or it could pursue a policy of rapid linguistic assimilation, but that would require authoritarian methods. In order to depoliticize the problem in India, 13 languages were declared to be “official”; but in order to have a medium of transethnic communication needed for nation-building, the federal authorities decided to adopt English as a superordinate language, despite the fact that it was the language of the former colonial power, because it had become a transethnic or “postethnic” language. Similarly, the language conflict was depoliticized in Cameroon by the use of both French and English; and in post-apartheid South Africa by the legitimation of the use of the Xosa, Zulu, and other indigenous languages as well as English and Afrikaans.

What happens to national or ethnic languages, and, for that matter, to their speakers is often attributed to the state and to its leaders. For Eric Hobsbawm, languages are basically products of the state.¹⁰ He is of course aware of the fact that national languages are not created ex nihib by elites; they are based on existing vocabularies, folklores, and literary or oral traditions. (Esperanto, an artificially constructed linguistic pastiche, has been successful neither as a national nor international medium). This is true of all the languages dealt with in the various chapters of the present volume: Afrikaans, Arabic, Berber, English, French, Latvian, Russian, Wolof, and others. But to Hobsbawm, these are mere dialects rather than national languages if they do not serve to mobilize people for statehood. National languages are products of state action, and, more specifically, political elites and institutions. That is not to say that states invent languages; but they react to their preexistent reality in various ways—by reforming them or leaving them alone; legitimating or denigrating them; granting them institut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction The Political Aspects of Language
• 2. Minority Languages and Globalization
• 3. The Rise and Possible Demise of Afrikaans as Public Language
• 4. Language and Politics in Algeria
• 5. The Limits of Bilingualism in Canada
• 6. Ethnic Politics and the Soviet Legacy in Latvian Post-Communist Education: The Place of Language
• 7. Senegalese "into Frenchmen"? The French Technology of Nationalism in Senegal
• Index