Someone walks up to you and asks, "What is your ethnicity?"

Defining ethnicity is a really difficult task, as evidenced by our discussion on Thursday. Also, have you seen Wikipedia’s list of ethnic groups? It’s ridiculous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ethnic_groups. I’d like to try to propose a working definition though.

An ethnic group can be defined by more than one element of a complex matrix, including language, race, religion, ideology, shared history or experience (heritage), geographic proximity, among others. I think ethnicity is kind of a grab bag word used to explain why any group of people identifies with each other. For the most part, I think the word has been associated with characteristics of people that seem immutable, or are assigned to them. For instance, I consider my ethnic identity to be Hoklo Taiwanese because my ancestors are from the Fujian and we speak Taiwanese. These identifiers are things that I could not voluntarily change if I wanted to. That said, I think the way ethnicity is used and can be used in the modern context is changing. In many parts of the globalized world, there are more and more interracial marriages, mixed ethnicities (often due to migration), and individuals who find themselves checking the “other” box under ethnicity on censuses. Ideology has become the more dominant catalyst for group formation—this seems to be the case in the Arab world.

I have a question for you guys: how do you think globalization has changed our definition of ethnicity? If things like race become deemphasized, will people start associating sports team loyalties with ethnicity? How about language? How crucial do you think language will remain as an ethnic delimiter?

Language Policy in State-Nations

Since we have clarified this distinction between nation-states and state-nations in a way that I think makes a lot of sense, I wonder how official language policy is set in state-nations. In trying to connect disjointed states, like African tribes, into one single nation, which language of the many is used as the state’s official language? And how is this language chosen? If the language of the elite is chosen, I think there would be considerable backlash amongst speakers of the less powerful languages, but were an ambiguous local language chose, I could envision similar levels of anger among both the elites and the other language speakers.

A large majority of the readings so far have hit upon the idea that a unified language is often key to national identity, and that language planning and language policy are the means to achieve those ends. Yet it is still not clear, to me at least, how those languages are really chosen, and how effective the chosen languages are. Maybe a few case studies would shed some light on this?

Language Glory and Language Domains

I wanted to respond to your attempt to divide up the glorification of language, Jo. It seems that you put Languages A, B and C into different domains, (literary, political, media, etc.) but that you thought this would all be very problematic unless the languages were mutually intelligible. Blommaert actually comments upon the concept of linguistic domains in the case of Tanzania. Politics was the domain in which Swahili was dominant, and “for other domains people continued to use local languages or other newly emerged forms of communication” (248-249). This was a failure of Tanzanian policy that envisioned one national identity and thus the ideology of an ideal citizen who is a monoglot, a speaker of the national language Swahili. Thus, as Blommaert asserts if this (monoglot nationalism) is your aim then language glory cannot be divided. Your model of different domains, Jo, is most certainly not the single-identity asserted by most nationalist movements. Perhaps there could be a model of nationalism that promotes a “repertoire of (domain-bound) identities” (Blommaert 249). The different languages for each domain might not even have to be mutually intelligible as long as children are taught them all at an early age through the education system. However, once again the danger lies if one domain is perceived as more dominant than the other. The political, literary and other domains would have to be perceived as equal. Therefore I don’t see the problem to be which languages are used and whether they are mutually intelligible, but the beliefs people have about different domains and their inherent prestige.

English instruction a result of changing global education systems?

For another class, I have been doing a lot of research on the effects of globalization on education. An interesting thing I have found that I think ties in very well to the idea of language planning and language policy is that as countries interact more and more on a global rather than a local level, many countries (especially developing ones) choose to simply throw out their existing education systems and adopt the systems of more powerful countries. This includes teaching the language of the education system adopted, and I could see how this would certainly "wreak havoc" on the education system, to borrow a quote.

For example, Islamic education is traditionally focused on "holistic" education that combines religion and science. But a recent phenomenon is for the elite Muslims in the middle East and other Islamic areas to send their children to private schools that feature "western" educations and are taught in English. Though there are many critiques, including from the governments of some of these countries, for not having as "holistic" as an education, they are growing in popularity.

Just thought it might be interesting to think about language spread under the framework of educational changes, which can be part of government language planning and policy, but isn't necessarily.

English Instruction and Policy

Inspired by Max's last post, I went online in search of a site that commented on the connection between language instruction and policy with regard to "power" languages.  We had spent the past week in class talking about European languages dominating Africa during the colonial and post-colonial eras, and we speculated about the current prowess of English.

Well it turns out that the world outside Duke is also interested in these kinds of issues.  One blog post describes the difficulties in teaching English today.  I was particularly interested in his discussion of English in the Soviet Union, where he describes the "havoc" that teaching English to younger and younger students wreaked on the educational system as a whole.  Instead of teaching students fundamental skills in their local languages, instruction of the most economically viable language often takes away from students' other courses while adding a marginal amount if "power language" [my words] instruction.

So, should a government promote power-language instruction to increase the economic viability of its young citizens, or should a government promote multilingualism? To me, the answer falls somewhere in between either extreme (didn't we agree that binary models never really work?).  To respond to my own question with an example by Haarman, I think that while a country like the Soviet Union should have promoted Russian language acquisition, I feel they failed at adequately supporting local languages, and therefore promoted an "us vs. them" mentality.  In the same way, I don't think English should dominate schools abroad at the cost of creating a regional, ethnic, or cultural divide.

WORD OF GOD RANKINGS

I knew I remembered something from my late-night Wikipedia ramblings concerning ranking languages using some elaborate statistical construct. Well, I'm in luck, because a Mr. (Dr.?) George Weber took it upon himself to do just that.

Thus, with a certain degree of satisfaction, I present to you: the "Top Ten" languages of the world.

1. English

2. French

3. Spanish

4. Russian

5. Arabic

6. Chinese

7. German

8. Japanese

9. Portuguese (Brazilian)

10. Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu)

Well, I'm glad that this has been settled once and for all. If you are the type of person who simply must know what sort of statistical methodology was used to construct this clearly definitive list, check out the link.

on horowitz

Careerist, particularly an extreme careerist, is often used in reference to a person who employs short-term strategies of personal career advancement rather than thinking about the long-term success of an organization. I think the double linkage Horowitz refers to is the idea that language is used to advance the interests of a group of homogeneous speakers, as well as the interests of the individual. The group might use language as a political resource to demarcate itself from other groups (e.g. nation-building, claiming sovereignty/independence from another nation), or as a centripetal strategy to bring those within the group closer to each other. Both cases relating to what Horowitz calls, “political claims to ownership”. Likewise, the individual uses language as both an inclusion and exclusion tool that affirms the worth of the group to which he or she belongs, while undermining the worth of other groups.

I don’t think I quite understand what dividing up the glorification of a national language would look like, but I’ll give it a shot. If I’m way off, please call me out on it. To divide up the “glorification” might imply a scenario in which we grant the glory of a literary language to Language A, that of a political language to Language B, and that of a language used in the media to Language C. This would indeed be very problematic. Not only does this undermine the “glory” and utility of a single national language, society would become a linguistic zoo with communication bottlenecks all over the place...Unless these languages were mutually intelligible, in which case, we would have a multiglossia?

In class, we haven’t gone too much into technical linguistic components of language policy. I wonder how much the way a language actually ‘sounds’ might contribute to its perceived worth by those who do not speak the language. I know we all love urban sociology, so I’ll end my post with this example. I’ve spoken to a number of my friends, who seem to all agree that Cantonese is less pleasing to the ear than Mandarin. Granted, they didn’t comment on how this affected their perception of group worth—so my example might have no connection to our discussion of language as a symbol of group worth. However, in the U.S., many would say that a British accent automatically adds a touch of sophistication to one’s speech. In this case, the sound of a language/dialect does seem to affect the status of the group of speakers.

Language as a Symbol of Group Worth

Hello everyone!

After our last reading, "A politics of language: language as a symbol in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its aftermath" by David Marshall, I think it would be really interesting to discuss language as a symbol of group worth, especially in relation to ethnic groups and relative group worth. I'm reading Horowitz, to whom Marshall refers frequently, in my Ethnic Conflicts class, and Horowitz asserts that language is "a potent symbolic issue because it accomplishes a double linkage. It links political claims to ownership with psychological demands for the affirmation of group worth, and it ties this aggregate matter of group status to outright careerism, thereby binding elite material interest to mass concerns" (Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 222).

Following this, I wonder how language policy and planning can attempt to address linguistic claims, which symbolize group worth. As Horowitz asks, "how does a policymaker divide up the "glorification" of the national language?" Can we split symbols? Is there a policy that the USSR could have adopted that would have appeased all of ethnic groups and their divergent languages?

Just some food for thought.

- Caitlin

Where are we at?

Hello all,

I promised a haphazard lurch through language and politics, which I think I'm delivering on. So - where are we at right now? I feel like we have a bunch of interesting ideas and concepts to work with, most of which you've organically produced (instead of rehashing or regurgitating them). Where do we go next?

Gareth