Languages In the World (25 page)

Although we credit Europe with exporting to the rest of the world the idea of the monolingual nation-state, we note that in the twentieth century, official multilingual policy took shape in several European nations. We look first at Belgium then at Switzerland.

The modern country of Belgium was created through a disagreement over language policy, namely whether Dutch would be made an official language in regions where French was also widely spoken, and this disagreement sparked the Belgian Revolution in 1830. The result of the revolution was the separation of the Dutch- and French-speaking Kingdom of Belgium from the Dutch-speaking Kingdom of the Netherlands. With the political separation, the language Dutch was now dubbed Flemish. The linguistic problems did not, however, end with the creation of a new nation-state. Following independence the Belgian Constitution stipulated freedom of languages, which meant that government officials could use the language they saw fit with citizens, but not necessarily the other way around. Because French was the language of the elite, French gradually became the language of administration and instruction in schools. Among the Dutch-speaking Flemish, tensions mounted until the dawn of the twentieth century, when the Law on Equality named Flemish and French as official languages. In practical terms, this meant that Flemish and French were equally valid in legal texts and that bilingual signage would become mandatory in certain cities, such as Flemish-speaking Flanders. In 1970, the Constitution was changed to acknowledge Belgium's four linguistic regions: Flemish, French, German, and the Flemish/French bilingual city of Brussels. Because Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union, the 24 official languages of the union can also be heard across the city among the diplomats and government officials of the member states.

Switzerland's official language policy is reflective of its geographic location, boxed in as it is by France to the west, Germany to the north, Austria to the east, and Italy to the south. The Federal Constitution written in 1999 establishes four official
languages: German (mostly Swiss German), French, Italian, and Romansch, a Romance language spoken mostly in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. The Swiss constitution stipulates that the government is required to communicate in the official languages, and parliamentary proceedings are simultaneously translated in three of them: German, French, and Italian. These provisions are remarkable in that some 85% of the Swiss citizenry speak either German (65%) or French (20%), while Italian is spoken as a first language by only 5% of the population, and Romansch by less than 1%. In actual practice, the government only provides some of its printed materials in Ro- mansch, but it is required to communicate directly with Romansch speakers in Ro- mansch if the speaker so desires. The constitution also stipulates that students should learn a national language other than their mother tongue, which means high levels of functional bilingualism are the norm in Switzerland.

The compromise pattern is best illustrated by the language policy in Paraguay where the indigenous language Guaraní and the colonial language Spanish share co-official status. Paraguay is a landlocked country the size of California, flanked by South America's two economic powerhouses: Portuguese-speaking Brazil to the east and Spanish-speaking Argentina to the south and west. Paraguay also shares a border with Bolivia to the north. In countries of Andean South America, indigenous languages are widely spoken in large communities, and they are usually considered socially inferior to Spanish, which is spoken by a majority of the population, including by social and political elites, making Spanish the language of prestige. In Bolivia and Peru, for example, Quechua (25% in Bolivia, 16% in Peru) and Aymara (17% in Bolivia, 3% in Peru) are spoken by sizable populations, but these languages are considered socially inferior, even where they have co-official status with Spanish, as is the case in Bolivia. In Bolivia and Peru, indigenous languages tend to be spoken only by indigenous people and not by political elites who tend to be of European or mixed ancestry. Many indigenous speakers are also bilingual in Spanish.

The case of Guaraní offers a remarkable contrast. The move to designate it as a co-official language in the Paraguayan Constitution of 1992 was uncontroversial not only because Guaraní had already been considered a symbol of national identity for some time but also because it is a national language with widespread use among nonnative speakers. More than 90% of Paraguayans speak Guaraní, including many in the middle and upper classes and people of European and mixed ancestry. This degree of fluency is remarkable considering the fact that the overall indigenous population in Paraguay is just 5%. Paraguay is the only country in the Americas to have successfully promoted a pre-Columbian indigenous language as a national and official language with such a high degree of functional use. Needless to say, Guaraní is no more or less worthy of preservation than any other native language, and we would like to emphasize that the
lack
of controversy around the promotion of an indigenous language by a nation-state in late modernity is, as ever, the result of particular contingencies, and its success was ensured through a series of historical events through which Guaraní and its speakers gained status.

In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries translated books into Guaraní, thereby giving the language material presence. Following Paraguay's independence from Spain in 1811, an unusual ally to the Guaraní rose to power. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, known as
El Supremo
, was both a fan of the ideals of the French Revolution and an opponent of the Spanish class system. He was therefore interested in creating a centralized nation but did not want to do so by promoting the Spanish elite, whom he banned from marrying one another. Spaniards could only legally marry people of African descent, indigenous people, or people of mixed ethnicity, with the goal of weakening European power in the country. At the same time, Francia spoke Guaraní, which won him support with native Guaraní speakers, and thereby integrated Guaraní into mainstream society. Thus, by the time Paraguay became a Constitutional Republic at the end of the twentieth century, Guaraní had already been established as a natural choice for being declared one of the official languages.

Elsewhere in South and Central America when indigenous languages have been given official status, the designation is mostly symbolic. This is certainly the case for present-day Mexico, where, in the early sixteenth century, some 150 indigenous languages were spoken vibrantly. In the early nineteenth century, when Mexican officials established an independent nation-state, the language they were most interested in was Spanish, particularly a variety of Spanish they could identify as totally legitimate and uniquely Mexican. They chose to promote the one nation, one language ideology with and through this variety.
⁴
The documentation of indigenous languages was an important part of the efforts to create a sense of national identity and a common national past, even though no efforts were made to promote the use and maintenance of indigenous languages as such. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the development of the Mexican economy and the growth of major cities, both of which were oriented toward Spanish, had further alienating effects on indigenous communities and their languages. Participation in the new market required Spanish, even though Spanish had not been a hard and fast requirement for indigenous subjects under the Spanish crown in the preindependence period.

The Mexican Constitution of 1917 stops short of designating any official languages of the state, including Spanish, which is today a de facto official language, although it does recognize the right of Mexico's indigenous communities to preserve their languages, including through bilingual education programs. The indigenous languages won more protection in 2003 with the passage of a law to preserve the linguistic rights of indigenous peoples, which designates indigenous languages as national languages and ensures the rights of indigenous communities to use their languages in any government dealings. The Mexican government now officially recognizes 68 indigenous languages, including the Uto-Aztecan language Nahuatl, which is the only indigenous language of Mexico with more than one million speakers, along with Maya, Mixtec, Tzeltal Maya, Yucatec, and Zapotec.

The protection for indigenous languages in Mexican language policy, however, comes at a time in which over 90% of the population speaks Spanish as the first language, and only about 6% of the total Mexican population speaks a pre-Columbian language. This stands in stark contrast to the time of the first Mexican Constitution in 1812 in which only about 35% of the total population spoke Spanish. In other words, recognition and protection for pre-Columbian languages come after 200 years of
language policy effectively eradicating the power of the indigenous communities, which was preceded by about 300 years of Spanish colonial rule.

The neutral language pattern is most clear in Indonesia, where postcolonial language planning efforts naming Bahasa Indonesian (BI) as the official language were conflict free. The ease of this decision is especially remarkable in light of the fact that many ethnic groups and some 500 languages are spread across some 17,000 islands. BI, which is essentially the same language as Malay and which is spoken in Malaysia and elsewhere in the region, was originally selected as the national language in 1928 while Indonesia was still under Dutch colonial rule. The choice of Malay at that time is remarkable for several reasons: (i) many of the young Indonesian nationalists who advocated for Malay were actually more proficient speakers of Dutch, the colonial language; (ii) Malay was mostly relegated to the status of lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago, with few native speakers relative to other groups; and (iii) some more widely spoken languages, such as Javanese, already had long literary traditions. Yet when Indonesia achieved its independence from the Netherlands in 1945, Malay was renamed BI and became the only official language in the Indonesian Constitution. The largest ethnogroup, the Javanese, accepted this choice without controversy.

The lack of controversy likely stems from the fact that the Constitution acknowledges the right to use the regional languages coupled with the value that Indonesian society puts on linguistic diversity. As a result, bilingualism is high, and people learn BI for formal interaction yet maintain ethnic languages such as Javanese, Balinese, and Sundanese for their personal interactions. A language academy was set up to oversee the promotion of BI as the national language and was charged with spelling reform and the expansion of BI vocabulary. Although Javanese has helped to flesh out BI lexical stock, BI has continued to face the problem of a lack of vocabulary in the areas of technology and business. For lexical items in these domains, it has relied on English and to such an extent that the government has tried to ban the practice, but with little success (Dardjowidjojo 1998).

When Pakistan first achieved independence from Britain in 1947, the selection of Urdu as the official language was not exactly a neutral selection, but it was nevertheless selected in favor of two much larger languages, Punjabi and Bengali. Pakistan was one of the first modern states, like Israel, to be set up primarily on the basis of religion. On the Indian subcontinent, two Muslim-majority regions formed the original Pakistan and were physically separated by the Hindu majority in India in the middle. This physical separation was known as The Partition, the nickname for this new state composed of two geographical regions, East and West Pakistan, separated by 1000 miles of Indian territory.

The problem for the new, partitioned state of Pakistan was the fact that the same languages were not spoken in the eastern and western portions of the country. Bengali, spoken by about half the population of Pakistan, was the most widely spoken mother tongue overall, but it was nevertheless
not
a clear frontrunner for official status, since its speakers were concentrated in East Pakistan. There, about 98% of the population spoke Bengali, but 1000 miles to the west, only an extreme minority did so. In contrast, some
70% of the population in West Pakistan spoke Punjabi, which was spoken only by a tiny minority in the East. Another contender for official language status was Urdu. It was spoken by a small minority but had the advantage of being spoken by roughly equal numbers of speakers in the East and the West. Moreover, Urdu was written with the Perso-Arabic script, which has symbolic associations with Islam as we saw in Chapter 5.

Advocates of Bengali emphasized the majority-rule dimension of democracy, while advocates of Urdu emphasized its Islamic connection. When Urdu was selected as the sole official language of Pakistan, two controversies followed. First, opponents of Urdu noted that it is essentially the same language as Hindi, which had been named an official language of India, and was therefore undesirable. However, proponents argued that the two languages are differentiated not only by script (Hindi uses Devanāgari, while Urdu uses Perso-Arabic) but also by vocabulary (Hindi relies on Sanskrit, while Urdu draws on Arabic). These arguments did not satisfy everyone. Second, the Bengali speakers as the majority in East Pakistan were angered that Urdu was chosen as the only official language, and they pointed out the success of states such as Canada and Switzerland with official multilingual language policies. After years of oftentimes violent protests, Bengali was named an official language of Pakistan in 1956. However, a new controversy ensued when the decision was taken to replace the Bengali script with the Perso-Arabic script used to write Urdu.

The vision of a unified Muslim state with a divided geography fell apart when East Pakistan separated from West Pakistan in 1971 and formed the modern state of Bangladesh. Bengali was designated the official language in the constitution. Disagreement about language policy, specifically whether Bengali would be granted co-official status with Urdu, resulted in the dissolution of biregional Pakistan. Thus, the unifying force of religion, in this case Islam, was superseded by questions about official language status and script choice.