Languages In the World (27 page)

Although nation-states may be imagined to be monolingual, very few actually are, and this is where language planning and the legal apparatus of the state come into play. Language planning refers to the policies, laws, and programs designed to change the language behavior of people in a given language community and/or the language itself. Language-planning efforts often fall under the aegis of language academies, discussed above. All language-planning efforts, whether or not they come from official language academies or are inscribed officially in law, are ultimately about social control. Examples of one group controlling and/or curtailing the language rights of another group abound the world over. Some efforts are in response to old grievances. In Slovakia, a law was passed in 2009 prohibiting the use of Hungarian by state officials and in state institutions. Slovakia was once subjugated under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the recent ban reflects ongoing tensions between Slovaks and Hungarians, and conflict over national sovereignty and national identity.

In certain of these cases, language inspectors actually monitor how language laws are enacted and enforced. Two examples will suffice. The first concerns the small Baltic nations of Latvia and Estonia, which have struggled since the post-Soviet era to balance competing realities: on the one hand, the need to promote their own national languages, Latvian and Estonian, which were subjugated under Soviet rule; and on the other hand, the sociodemographic reality in which Russian speakers make up a large percentage of the overall population. In Latvia, where about one third of the population speaks Russian as a first language, ethnic Russians have claimed linguistic discrimination, while ethnic Latvians have claimed their language needs strict protections after centuries of marginalization by Russian in Tsarist and Soviet Russia. A proposal to make Russian an official language was put to popular vote in 2012 and was overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

A similar sociodemographic situation with a different political solution is found to the north, in Estonia. About one third of the Estonian population speaks Russian as a first language, and most of these speakers are concentrated in parts of the country where Russian is the main language. At the same time, Estonians are interested in preserving the Estonian language, a Finno-Ugric language spoken by barely more than one million people and which nearly disappears in comparison with Russian, which has about 150 million native speakers worldwide, and nearly as many more second-language speakers. Estonia has handled the situation by establishing a National Language Inspectorate, a government agency charged with monitoring the use of Estonian by government employees, including teachers, who can be reprimanded, fined, or fired for not speaking Estonian.

The second situation concerns Quebec. There, language inspectors are also at work, acting to uphold the provisions set in a law requiring children in Quebec to attend French-medium schools. Until recently, the law was understood to apply only to the classroom setting, with no particular provision for the hallways, cafeterias, and playgrounds. However, in 2011, the School Commission of Montreal proposed an extension of a bill known as
Loi 101
now requiring French to be spoken throughout the school grounds, including the playgrounds. The chairperson of the commission
explained to the local press how the law would be enforced, namely by monitors who would gently tap children on the shoulder, and not on the head, to remind them to speak French. The tap is a nonverbal way to say, “Remember, we speak French. It's good for you.”

Language inspectors in Quebec have moved into the realm of linguistic purism, which we, the authors, often think leads to ultimately unproductive activities. An often-cited definition of linguistic purism is provided by linguist George Thomas who describes it as “the manifestation of a desire on the part of a speech community (or some section of it) to preserve a language form, or to rid it of, putative foreign elements or other elements held to be undesirable. Above all, purism is an aspect of the codification, cultivation, and planning of standard languages” (Thomas 1991:12). The language inspectors in Quebec are concerned not only that people are speaking, reading, and hearing French but also that all of the words they speak, see, and hear are French. They ensure that international corporations conform to local expectations for the use of French. For example, a large United States clothing store could be fined for running an English language ad campaign that would pour English words through Quebec stores. The inspectors also monitor language on a much smaller scale. Controversy broke out when the Quebecois Office of the French Language sent a letter to the owner of an Italian restaurant informing him that he had broken the law by including too many non-French words on his menu, including
pasta
and
bottiglia,
rather than the French
pâtes
(pasta) and
bouteille
(bottle). Clearly, the language inspectors in Quebec are reacting to a perception of threat as if it were coming from all quarters and not just from the main competitor, English.

Efforts to purify a language of foreign elements are, of course, not simply about language but also about cultural identity and power, and, mostly specifically, asymmetries in power relations. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, throughout the twentieth century the Pure Tamil movement has sought to cleanse Tamil of words derived from Sanskrit. Today, the Tamils' concern is with words borrowed from English (Ramaswamy 1997). In North and South Korea, efforts have been taken by language planners to restrict the use of words of Japanese origin, which were thought to have flooded Korean during the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945 (Park 1989). Today, concerns about language purity are directed, once again, toward borrowings from English. Taiwan has been open to borrowings from English, Japanese, and other languages, while the People's Republic of China has a strict policy of limiting borrowings into Mainland Chinese. It allows only those words approved by the national Xinhua News Agency (Li 2004).

The control of language behavior around sensitive topics comes in many forms and from various sources. In Israel, the Arabic word for the 1948 creation of the state of Israel is
nakba
‘catastrophe.' This word has been officially removed from Arabic language textbooks. In New South Wales, Australia, the state health department has informally banned the use of the words
darling
,
sweetheart
,
honey
, and
mate
in interactions with patients. These particular words were seen as too informal. In 2003, the United States Congress changed the name
French fries
to
Freedom fries
in all congressional restaurants as a form of protest against the French who did not back the United States-led war in Iraq. While so-called Freedom fries will likely go the way of the term
liberty cabbage
, given to sauerkraut during the World War I era of anti-German anxiety,
the point holds: proposals to modify language, as ephemeral as they may be, reflect the political and cultural sensitivities of a society, and constitute a form of social control.

The case of Persian, also known as Farsi, in Iran shows how investments in language purism change with political winds. Prior to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, efforts were made to purify Farsi of foreign elements, especially borrowings from Turkish and Arabic. This involved the creation of new words using Farsi morphology as well as the revival of historical Farsi words long replaced by Arabic borrowings. After the Islamic Revolution, the orientation toward Arabic shifted from one of hostility to one of reverence, and anxieties about Arabic influence correspondingly dissipated. What was once considered corrosive to the language was now considered among its purest elements. The situation in Iran illustrates that attitudes about what constitutes the so-called pure form of a language are ideological in nature and depend on the political, social, and cultural conditions present in a given time at a given place.

Government agencies do not always react in negative and limiting ways toward changing global conditions that result in new multilingual situations. When it comes not to the language police but to the real police in the United Kingdom, they have started to learn basic phrases in important immigrant languages. As travel among European Union member states has become easier, new patterns of immigration have resulted in new situations of language contact. In the town of Bedfordshire, England, Polish has emerged as an important immigrant language, and police officers are able to sign up for 10-week-long courses to learn basic Polish phrases such as
Jak Pan ma na imię?
‘What's your name?' and
Czy Pan mówi po angielsko?
‘Do you speak English?' The decision to offer Polish courses to British police officers was pragmatic, in the sense that the police need to have a way to communicate effectively with the Polish immigrant community. It was also symbolic, in showing that effort was made to accommodate a new immigrant group and to break down barriers between the English-speaking and Polish-speaking communities.

Similarly, in Los Angeles County, the Department of Motor Vehicles has decided to offer exams in 31 languages including American Sign Language, Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, and Welsh. California law requires only that state materials be translated into languages spoken by 5% or more of the population, which means that only translations into Spanish are technically required. The Los Angeles County Department of Motor Vehicles has decided to be accommodating to increase the efficiency of its operation. The DMV saves money and time by accommodating linguistic diversity rather than insisting on monolingual language policy. It is clearly possible for governmental agencies to demonstrate great flexibility in accommodating the multilingual populations they serve. We, the authors, applaud both the pragmatism and the symbolism of this embrace of linguistic diversity.

The situation in Tibet raises important questions about language laws, language rights, and linguistic diversity. What role, if any, should states play in promoting national languages? To what extent, if any, should ethnolinguistic minority languages be supported with legal protection and governmental policy? Who gets to decide what
language or languages will be used in education? What is the effect of language laws – both those that promote certain languages and those that limit or even outlaw others – on the world's linguistic diversity? These are big, overarching questions, ones for which we, the authors, do not have definitive answers for every case in the world.

However, the situation in Tibet does allow us to answer the more punctual question about what happens to speakers who are negatively impacted by language planning and language laws. The headquarters for the Government of Tibet in Exile is currently in Dharamshala,
⁸
India. The fourteenth Dalai Lama, the one who was born in Quinhai/Amdo, fled the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, in 1959 when the Chinese cracked down on their occupation, and he has been in exile ever since. Fifty years later, in the Tibet Autonomous Region under Chinese control, Tibetans are feeling enough loss of control and despair that since 2009, over 100 young Tibetans – some monks, some not – have engaged in a form of protest that is difficult for many people to imagine: self-immolation.

There is another way. In Dharamshala, young Tibetans who have fled Chinese Tibet have chosen life over death, and they have established a new way of protesting. Now there is the Lhakar Movement,
lhakar
meaning ‘white Wednesday,' which is the Dalai Lama's “soul day.” Every Wednesday, Tibetans in exile celebrate Tibetan culture by watching Tibetan movies and listening to Tibetan music. Most importantly, they protest by speaking Tibetan and only Tibetan, with no switching to Mandarin, Hindi, or English. Recall from Chapter 4 that in eighteenth-century France, Abbé Grégoire advocated annihilating language differences in the service of creating the nation-state France. Over 200 years later, in most nations, language policy with respect to ethnolinguistic minority groups has continued along the path of annihilation of the minority languages and the promotion of the sole standard. We, the authors, think the Lhakar Movement – in choosing life over death – is wholly to be supported. Mostly, however, we would like to live in a linguistic world where such a choice was not necessary in the first place.