After our discussions on immigrants in both the United States and in Europe, I decided to take a quick look for research on Turkish immigrants in Germany. I came across a dissertation entitled “Turkish Language Provisions in Berlin” by Lucy Hottman from the University of Manchester. Hottman states in her abstract that she looked beyond the Turkish community to the Berlin public sector to ascertain if Turkish, and therefore multilingualism, was institutionally promoted in Germany. Her conclusion?

“The observations reveal a clear lack of any linguistic policy at state or federal level other than that of ignoring languages other than German. A host of provisions can be observed but these are rather random measures often initiated by individuals. They are not aimed at promoting multilingualism but rather at facilitating communication for citizens who do not speak German. Furthermore minimal provisions in the area of education appear to be more decorative than substantial. Clearly Berlin's increasing multilingualism is not recognised as something to be protected. On the contrary, in spite of the fact that Germany is obviously an immigration nation, public services reflect the still prevalent monolingual ideology: In Germany we speak German” (Hottman 7).

http://languagecontact.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/McrLC/casestudies/LH.html.

Accessed March 20th, 2011

This echoes the article about whether the U.S. has a language policy, or just civil rights. Essentially, even in the U.S. we don’t have an official policy, and even the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (and now expired) was instituted “to teach English to children from non-English speaking backgrounds” (Spolsky 100). Thus, in Germany and the U.S., German and English respectively are seen as the languages of success, and while both are multicultural states, the unofficial policy is assimilation through lack of support for foreign/migrant language teaching.

This brings us back to the question of whether or not the state has a responsibility to provide bilingual education. Another complication is at what level? Education in both German and the United States is under jurisdiction of the states. Should the United States and Germany issue federal policies on bilingual education? What would be the pros and cons of such a policy?

Very cool video

I was thinking of something to post then I came about this marvelous video

Minority Language Rights

I think one of the biggest things that we have assumed in this class, and that linguists seem to assume in general, is that everyone has an inherent right to learn and use their language and that every language and thus, language speaker, is equal. Therefore, we shouldn't discriminate against someone just because they speak a different language or especially because they speak a minority language.

But why is this true? I am not contesting that it is true or not- just asking why we assume it to be so. In my view, the reason it's wrong to discriminate against gender or race or sexual orientation is because they aren't conscious choices that people make. They are born with their gender or race or sexual orientation and cannot change it because they are biological features. However, language is not the same deal. People are not born with a certain language, though to some extent it is determined by the family they are born into and where they are born. Also, people have the ability to learn new languages throughout their lives. You do not have to be a baby, learning in an immersive environment, in order to pick up a new language. Therefore, is it really discrimination if employers don't want to hire people who don't speak the same language as the rest of their employees? Or if they can't receive certain political benefits because they cannot understand the language that political documents are written in? After all, they do have the choice to learn that language if they want to.

The universality of language rights, and some other considerations

In thinking about the language rights that ought to be guaranteed, it is important to consider a couple things. First, what rights actually fall under the umbrella of language rights? Is it simply the legal right to speak one’s own language? Or does it extend to the right to be understood? One might equate language rights with the freedom of speech. But really, the freedom of speech doesn’t require that others understand you. The right to use your language, on the other hand, requires help from those on the receiving end. In other words, guaranteeing language right might require that the State and civil servants to use the language and understand it. Second, would language rights be able to address the distributive inequalities that currently exist with official languages? What kind of equitable solution would give people the right to use their own language but not trade of things like efficiency and practicality? Third, do different political systems require different language rights? Certainly, the right to use one’s own language and be understood is more essential in a democratic state than in a totalitarian state. A democracy involves more than just a ballot and the formal right to cast a vote. It is about participating in democratic discussions. Yet to do that, one must have a strong grasp on the language used in the political sphere. Therefore, I think advancing democracy requires us to think deeply about language policy and language rights. Different political systems have different needs for language rights, which makes me think that language rights are perhaps universal human rights.

The Definition of a Minority Language

I think it would be interesting to determine a working definition for a minority language in our class. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages defines a “regional or minority language” as “traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population; and different from the official language(s) of that State” (2). I highlight the emphasis on numerical here because Stephen May, in Language Policy and Minority Rights, states that a minority group “is based not on numerical size, but on clearly observable differences among groups in relation to power, status, and entitlement” (255). He doesn’t offer any further definition of a minority language, but continues to expand on the theme of socio-political power differentials between minority and majority languages.

Let’s focus for a second on the concept of whether or not a minority language can be numerically defined. It seems practical to say that if only a small part of the population, or a less than majority amount, speak a language, than that could be a minority language. However, it is possible for a powerful minority to impose their language on the majority of the populace. The charter takes this into consideration, though, by stating that a minority language must be different than the official language. I agree with May in that many other factors such as power and status need to be observed, but I think that for practical purposes numbers can be used to define a minority language in a state. This runs into problems with how people will be counted – what if there is no census in the country?

The second part of the Charter’s definition is more problematic. It states that a minority language “does not include other dialects of the official languages of the State or the languages of migrants.” Who defines what is a dialect or not? What happens if they are mutually unintelligible? Turkey used to say Kurdish was “Mountain Turkish” even though it is linguistically very distinct. Furthermore, I find the qualification about the language of migrants disturbing. Is this position altered when many of the migrants become nationalized, such as with Hispanics in the United States? Obviously a state cannot make provisions for language instruction and education for all of the different migrants with the nation, but I certainly think that translation services need to be offered for many of them.

Ultimately, I think the definition of a minority language should be any language that is not the official language of the state, but this runs into major problems of practical implication. No state has the money to provide services in all of the different languages there are present. There must be a numerical cut off somewhere, by someone. This is where we sink into arbitrary decisions and questions of political, social and cultural capital.

Why I Like May

I was a huge fan of the reading from Stephen May because, unlike other selections we've seen, he finds a way to incorporate idealism, realism, and language all into one coherent argument.  While the second reading was emotional and intentionally provocative, I felt that May instead chose to follow the rational route.  He focuses on creating language education programs and using language in the civic realm in hopes that this will allow for greater tolerance of LHR.  While we can certainly argue with him about whatever "sufficient number of other-language speakers" may mean, I feel that any solution is a positive one.  Even if he makes an arbitrary choice that 20% of the nation must speak a language for it to be used on a driver's test, it would be the "least-bad" solution for protecting LHRs.  While, unfortunately, not everyone's language can be accommodated in this solution, the fact of the matter is that most languages will be.

The biggest problem I see with implementing this strategy in the United States is that it is incredibly difficult for the federal government to handle all of this.  Individual polling places in California may require Vietnamese, while one county over the voters may need information in Spanish.  In the US, at least, where there is so much linguistic diversity, the problem them becomes how to best implement the solution.  With so much access to the internet, though, I feel like it should be surprisingly easy to have an online database for multi-lingual government documents.  When someone requests, as per my last example, a voter registration form in Vietnamese, then a civil servant should easily be able to find it, print it, and expedite the process....which leads to another problem: how does that civil servant then register the voter if they can't read the voter registration form?

language death - not so bad? (please don't ostracize me linguistic community)

I think that the negative effects of language death are overstated, and due at least four factors.
The first is presentism: we take a "snapshot" of the world as it appears now and assume that it is the natural, permanent order and the status quo must be preserved. When one reads documents like the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, it is clear that some non-majority or non-official languages are perceived to belong, whereas others are not. The reasons are normative and seem to relate to the concept I brought up in class of "squatters rights". English "belongs" in the United Kingdom because it has been there for hundreds of years, whereas Hindi has only been spoken in the UK for perhaps half a century, so it is not afforded any sort of protections. While this case may seem clear-cut, in other areas, it is highly prone to political manipulation. Based on history, should Turkish be a protected minority language in the Balkans or should Arabic be a protected minority language in Southern Spain? Obviously political contingents in both these settings would disagree. What about Romani? Do the Ronani people "belong" in Europe, given their long history but ultimately non-European origins? Should Tahitian be protected in Europe because it is spoken in French Polynesia?
The second factor, as I see it, is due to attributional biases. Due to technology, global scholarship, and a variety of other influences that make global communication possible, we are able to see linguistic shift as never before. Because we can observe it, we assume that we are in some way responsible. An environmental analogy may help here, borrowing from the discourse of ecolinguistics. Yes, in some cases, a species may go extinct due to explicit human interaction. The tree frog dies because its environment was destroyed, an artificial constraint on the species not due to natural selection. Yet the tree frog could just as easily go extinct because of a change in weather or other animals predation patterns, for instance. Or, it could evolve over generations (while we generally think of evolution as occurring over millions of years, if you go back and think about Darwin's finches it can occur over a much shorter time frame as well) to be the point where its evolutionary line may split or it may not even be considered the same species. It is perhaps worthwhile to note that scientific classifications of animals are also somewhat normative just like linguistic distinctions (though perhaps more grounded in hard science, i.e. DNA than linguistic distinctions). The difference between the moose and the elk has less to do with genetic differences than whether it resides in America or Europe. Similarly, whether one speaks Moldovan or Romanian has to do with what side of the border one lives on.
Ultimately, though, the ecological comparison fails. Language is a purely human phenomenon, so any human influence on language is not artificial in the same way as, say, a bulldozer in the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, this distinction between "human" and "natural" is a bit fuzzy. If we were to nuke the Yucatan peninsula and cause the extinction of an entire class of animals, we would say it was an artificial human occurrence. Yet that is effectively what happened 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs.
The third factor is a bias among linguistics to assume that language death is bad. Given what linguistics do, obviously language death is something to be feared. A linguist is no more likely to accept the fact that some languages should be allowed to die than a doctor is likely to accept the proposition that a patient with cancer should be refused treatment. Yet ultimately, the patient will die. Similarly, although linguistics can protect languages, language shift is inevitable.
Finally, the language that we use to describe language shifts has clearly negative connotations. "Language death," "linguistic genocide," and "linguistic social Darwinism" all have more-or-less unpleasant connotations. "Language extinction" is more clinical but still negative. I use the term "language shift" to reflect the fact that languages evolve over time, but this term fails to capture the fact that sometimes languages do abruptly seek to exist when the last speaker dies.
Another thing worth considering is the relationship between "language" as a living phenomenon - continuing an ecological metaphor - and language as a static concept - i.e. English, with a dictionary and a uniform set of rules. Codifying a language in essence removes it from its competitive environment of natural selection, akin to raising and animal in captivity. How does this relate to language shift? Does a language that is no longer spoken but still written down - for example Latin or Sanskrit - "die"? Is it still "alive"? Are we looking at the unliving skeletons of the Latin language, codified and preserved in museums, or is its essence still around?

Whose fault is it if a language dies?

I thought it was interesting when we were talking about language death that usually it is spoken of in a passive term- i.e. "it died." However, I can see the reason why this is done- removing the agency from this sentence avoids the touchy subject of whose fault it is that the language died. Is it the policy makers' fault for not allowing for the minority languages to be as important as the majority ones? Or the minority speakers' fault for not choosing to speak their native language in every day life and not teaching it to their children?