Minority Language Protection Legislation: A Sobering Note

Perspectives on preserving the use of languages that are not official in a given state are limited. Nowadays, each state is a culturally and linguistically homogenizing polity, especially the nation-states in central Europe and in east and southeast Asia that are ethnolinguistic in their character. Communities that speak (and sometimes write) minority, regional and other non-official languages have two basic options of preserving their languages. First, they can make sure to stay isolated from the homogenizing state’s structures and institutions, especially from schools. Compulsory universal elementary education teaches (in other words, imposes) the official language to successive generations of children, ensuring that minority groups’ children are compelled to un-learn their community languages. Another possibility open to minority groups for preserving their languages is a struggle for their own autonomous or fully independent ethnolinguistic nation-states. None of these two options is appealing. The latter entails violence and even bloodshed, while the former means conscious disengagement from advantages (alongside disadvantages) of modernity. Hence, unless the strictures of the current legitimating model of modern statehood (that is, the homogenizing in its nature nation-state) are dramatically altered, then each of the still surviving non-state languages will become endangered in the span of three to five generations.

Bulgaria: Between [a], [u], or Maybe [ı]?

Transliteration from one script to another is always fraught with the danger of ambiguity. Oftentimes a reader knowing both scripts and languages written in them is unable on the basis of a transliterated text alone to faithfully reproduce a word, title or sentence in the original script. It is so because the equivalence between graphemes (letters) in different scripts is usually established on the basis of the same or similar phoneme which a letter designates in the source language written script A and another in the target language written in script B.

A Terminological Conundrum: Nation, State, Nationality, Citizenship

Any analysis of the concept of nation – of so much import for the late modern period – is often complicated in English or French by the fact that in these two languages this term commonly functions as a synonym for the word ‘state.’ Hence, the academic and juridical neologism ‘nation-state’ tends to sound to the uninitiated English-speaker’s ear quite superfluous as some confusing ‘state-state.’ This difficulty does not arise, for instance, in German or Polish. In the former language ‘state’ is Staat and ‘nation’ is Volk (or in some specialized meanings Nation), while in the latter – państwo and naród, respectively. Neither in German nor in Polish these languages’ terms for ‘nation’ understood as a group of people (that is, Volk and naród, respectively) could be normally used to mean ‘state.’ In Polish the term nation-state is rendered as państwo narodowe and in German as Nationalstaat, so speakers of these languages are not flabbergasted by the term, and find it rather meaningful.

The Central European distinction between state and nation at work in today’s Spain

Czech Spelling and Slavic Languages

Slavic and Germanic languages have considerably more sounds (phonemes) than Latin. It caused technical problems when at the beginning of the second millennium the Latin alphabet was employed for writing these vernaculars. The initial makeshift strategy was to use two or three letters (diagraphs and trigraphs) for the extra sounds. Czech was the first written language among Catholic and Protestant Slavs. Not surprisingly in the 14^th century the diagraph [cz] was employed for writing the phoneme /tʃ/, the diagraph [rz] for /r̝/, or the diagraph [ſſ] for /ʃ/. With his 1406 work De orthographia Bohemica, Jan Hus changed this system by introducing diacritical letters for the extra Slavic phonemes. As a result, in today’s Czech orthography each phoneme is reflected by a single letter, for instance, /tʃ/ is written as [č], /r̝/ as [ř], or /ʃ/ as [š]. The sole exception to this rule is the grapheme [ch] retained to denote the sound /x/.

A page from the Czech-language Kronika trojánská [Chronicle of Troja] published in c 1478

The Fallacy of National Studies

The studies of national specificity, usually focused on this or that national language originated in the 19^th-century central Europe. They grew out from two kinds of pursuits. On the one hand, philologists discovered languages, that is, national languages, or speech communities that were quickly equated with nations. While on the other hand, folklorists (ethnographers) discovered peasantry, seen as the forgotten soul and the true body of the nation. Philologists put themselves to the task of endowing their (usually native) languages with ‘scientific’ dictionaries and grammars, while folklorists were collecting a given peasantry’s songs and customs which they saw as equal in quality or even transcending the ancient Homeric tradition. Both groups of scholars soon propounded that the language of an elite (nobility) was ‘impure,’ due to ‘foreign’ influences, usually from Latin, French or German. But an ethnically correlated peasantry’s speech extolled as an epitome of the ‘pure’ national language posed a problem of easily observed spatial variability. The ‘peasant language’ differed from village to village, from region to region, and not at all was free of ‘foreign impurities,’ either. These problems was ‘explained away’ by nobles’ long-century oppression of peasants through the system of serfdom. As a result, the supposedly pristine culture and language of peasantry were corrupted, and the putative early medieval or even ancient nation was fragmented, as serfs were not allowed to leave their villages or parishes. Simultaneously nobility ‘unjustifiably’ separated themselves from their ethnically kin ‘peasant brethren’ (‘betrayed the people’), by allowing a succession of (nationally) foreign monarchs to assume the throne of the (national) kingdom, and by marrying foreign nobles.

On the Open-Ended (Never-Ending) Character (Nature) of Language Politics

Once I aspired to compose a dictionary of language politics, but then I understood that as languages are constructed by people, functions are conferred or imposed on languages by humans and their groups, as well. Apart of the nowadays  usual fare of national, official, state or constitutional languages; such ones as ancestral, interethnic or indigenous languages make an appearance, too. Basically, as many symbolical or function statuses may be attached to languages as humans and their groups desire or find necessary. Hence, the potential variety is endless, limited only by human imagination and the sheer number of human groups.

Human Languages Are a Single Language

All human languages are mutually comprehensible through a prolonged exposure (‘full immersion’) to their speakers, from a couple of days or weeks to at most a couple of months.

Earth and Earthese

Is Linguistics a Science?

Only rarely is the question posed about the scientific character of linguistics. When it is asked, it is usually with the aim of ‘proving’ that linguistics is a science, or in order to overhaul it into a ‘proper science.’ The latter is the case of Leonard Bloomfield’s seminal 1926 article ‘A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language’ (Language, Vol 2, No 3, pp 153–164). ‘Scientific’ in this case means governed by general and unchangeable laws of ‘nature’ (Universe, the material reality), as in the case of laws of matter, which are discovered by physicists or chemists. Furthermore, such scientific character of a research subject may be limited to a system smaller than the Universe, for instance, to life on Earth, when researched by biologists. Only recently did they find the scientific basis of their discipline of biology in DNA and the theory of evolution.

Linguistics and the Social Reality

The Social and Political History of the Polish Language in the Long 19th Century

The Polish language originated as the sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, which meant that its standardization was not steeped in a regional dialect, like that of French in the Romance dialect of Paris, or German in the language of Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible (in other words, the Germanic dialect of the Electorate of Saxony). In the pre-written period of this language, prior to the 16^th century, highly mobile nobles of various ethnic origins from all corners of the Commonwealth of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania either contributed to this sociolect from various Slavic dialects or just adopted this coalescing social koine when they happened to be non-Slavophone. Polish continued as the sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility well into the 19^th century, after the erasure of Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe in the late 18^th century. In the early 16^th century, Polish achieved the status of co-official language in the Commonwealth’s Kingdom of Poland, alongside Latin. At that time, Polish was modelled on the pre-Hussite (Catholic, ‘non-heretic’) Bohemian (Czech), both in terms of spelling and vocabulary. The Commonwealth’s political and economic might caused aspiring Orthodox boyars (nobles) from Moldavia and Wallachia (or today’s Romania and Moldova) to adopt it as a language of wider communication. In 1697 the Cyrillic-based Ruthenian (Ruski, seen today as the source of Belarusian and Ukrainian) was banned in the Commonwealth’s Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and replaced with Polish, which became the polity’s main official language, and thus consolidated the cultural Polonization of its nobility (who nevertheless persisted to identify themselves as ‘Lithuanians,’ or the Grand Duchy’s ruling elite). Specifically, the ban applied to the use of ‘Cyrillic letters’, which were ideologically associated with Orthodox Christianity (by the same token, in Muscovy – as Russia was known prior to 1721 – the Latin alphabet and language were disparaged as ‘Catholic’). Hence, Ruthenian written in ‘Polish’ or ‘Catholic’ Latin letters, with an addition of numerous Latin phrases, was perceived as Polish in Poland-Lithuania. As a result, the Polish language at that time straddled, what since the early 19^th century has been imagined as, an ‘impassable’ classificatory divide between the ‘West Slavic’ and ‘East Slavic’ languages. (In observed sociolinguistic reality on the ground, both groups of languages actually belong to the North Slavic dialect continuum.)

Samuel Linde. 1807. Słownik Języka Polskiego [Dictionary of the Polish Language] (Vol 1)

Does Israel Intend to Follow Central Europe’s Sad Example?

I have spent the last two decades studying the rise and implementation of the idea of ethnolinguistic nationalism across Central Europe, or the home region of the majority of the world’s Jews for over a millennium until the Holocaust. The gradual establishment of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Italy, Romania, Germany and Bulgaria as ethnolinguistic nation-states during the 19^th century was followed after World War I by the enshrining of the ethnolinguistic nation-state as the sole legitimate model of statehood in Central Europe. It meant the destruction of the polyglot, multiethnic and polyconfessional empires: Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, and also the detaching of similarly multiethnic borderland areas from Germany and the Russian Empire (soon overhauled into the Soviet Union in 1922). In their place the brand-new ethnolinguistic nation-states were founded, namely Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Albania, together with only briefly independent Belarus and Ukraine that were soon annexed by Bolshevik Russia.

 

Ethnolinguistic nationalism defines all the speakers of a language as a ‘proper’ nation. In turn, the territory compactly inhabited by the speakers of this language should be made into such an ethnolinguistically defined nation’s nation-state. The language now dubbed as ‘national’ is elevated to the rank of the nation-state’s sole official language. Ideally, no other languages should be allowed in official use and education, and the national language should not be shared with any other state or nation. These onerous conditions of ‘proper’ ethnolinguistic national statehood were successfully implemented across interwar Central Europe, much to the exclusion of speakers of languages other than the national one, but especially to the exclusion of Jews, even if they happened to speak a given national language. Interwar anti-Semitism, hand in hand with ethnolinguistic nationalism, additionally precluded assimilation of Jews, due to their ‘foreign’ religion, which – in line with the ‘science of race’ (Rassenkunde) and its application in the form of ‘racial hygiene’ (Rassenhygiene) – was construed as the biologized marker of the ‘Jewish race,’ and as such the ‘undeniable proof’ of their ‘irreducible Semitic racial foreignness.’