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Language politics is the way language and linguistic differences between peoples are dealt with in the political arena. This could manifest as government recognition, as well as how language is treated in official capacities.
The topic covers many related issues. As such, this page serves as a central resource for multiple articles relating to the topic of language and politics. Below are some categories dealing with the overlap between language and politics, along with examples and links to other relevant pages.
Language planning refers to concerted efforts to influence how and why languages are used in a community. It is usually associated with governmental policies which largely involve status planning, corpus planning and acquisition planning. There are often much interaction between the three areas. Status planning involves giving a language or languages a certain standing against other languages [1] and is often associated with language prestige and language function. Corpus planning often involves linguistic prescription as decisions are made in graphization, standardization and modernization of a language. [2] Acquisition planning fundamentally involves language policies to promote language learning. [3]
Corpus planning consists of three traditionally recognised forms: graphization, standardization and modernization. Graphization involves the development of written scripts and orthography of languages. [5] Standardization involves giving a selected variety of a language precedence over the other varieties as the "standard" form for others to emulate. [6] Modernization often involves expanding the lexicon of a language as a result of language shift over time.
Language is also utilised in political matters to unify, organise and criticise in order to unify a political group.
Acquisition planning often manifests in education policies after the status and corpus planning policies have been introduced. [9] These policies can take in the form of compulsory language education programmes, enforcing a specific language of instruction in schools or development of educational materials. In some countries, mainstream education is offered in one language: English in the United States, Italian in Italy, Russian in Russia, just to name a few. In some countries, mainstream education provide education in several languages. This is especially common in countries with more than one official languages. Some countries promote multilingualism in their policies: bilingual policy in Singapore, three-language formula in India, just to name a few.
Linguistic discrimination, or linguicism, refers to unequal treatment of speakers of different languages or language varieties. It can be observed with regard to spoken language, where speakers may be discriminated against based on their regional dialect, their sociolect, their accent, or their vocabulary. In terms of language planning, linguistic discrimination can occur at different stages, such as the choice of one or more official languages, choosing the language of instruction, the availability of essential services such as health care in minority languages, and the protection or lack thereof of minority languages and dialects.
In the United States, speakers of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) often experience linguistic discrimination. A study, published in 1982, of attitudes towards AAVE at Martin Luther King Junior Elementary school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, revealed that black students who primarily spoke AAVE received less help from their teachers in comparison to their white peers. [10] One social worker observed that these AAVE-speaking students faced a significant linguistic barrier to academic achievement and success in the predominantly White American society at that time. This is one example of a larger controversy surrounding African-American Vernacular English in education. [11]
Colonialism is a significant context in which linguistic discrimination takes place. When territories were colonized for the purpose of settlement buildling, indigenous languages became gravely endangered because the native speaker groups were either destroyed by war and disease, or had undergone a partial language shift to speak their master's language. [12] In exploitation colonies however, colonizers would usually only teach their language to a select group of locals. [13] In postcolonial states like India, it was observed that the difference in language education had widened the socioeconomic class divide. [14] Thus, access to education, social mobility, and economic opportunities were deprived of the locals who had not learnt the colonial language of before. [14]
Approximately 1.35 billion people in the world now speak English, with about 360 million native English speakers. [15] As of 2015, more than 75% of all scientific papers were published in English. [16] English is also the most commonly studied foreign language in the world. [17] This global prevalence of English can be attributed to many developments that have occurred in recent history, namely, the expansion of the British Empire, which has resulted in the establishment of English as an official language in at least 75 countries. [18] David Crystal gives a detailed explanation about the spread of English worldwide in Chapter 9 of A History of the English Language (ed. Richard M. Hogg). [19] Robert Phillipson has posited this is an example of linguistic imperialism. [20] However, this notion is contested in the field of applied linguistics. [21]
Linguistic imperialism refers to the dominance of one language over another on a national (and sometimes international) scale as a result of language policy and planning. According to Robert Phillipson, it is a variant of linguicism and is enacted through systemic changes and language attitudes, resulting in unfair treatment of non-dominant language groups. [22] This form of discrimination works in ways similar to racism, sexism, and classism, on a national administrative scale.
As an example, a case study on the usage of Irish Sign Language (ISL) in Ireland revealed unfair treatment of a deaf community in Ireland. [23] The study observed the enforcement of English over ISL in the educational system, as well as the prohibition of ISL among deaf children who were deemed capable enough to learn oral language (oralism). The study also highlighted anti-ISL language attitudes among school officials, unequal pay of ISL teachers, unequal status given to ISL in the education system, and the systemic marginalisation of ISL users. Efforts to elevate the usage of English over ISL also entailed the teaching of Manually Coded English (MCE) to deaf students, a signed language based on the grammatical structure of English. Unfortunately, MCE and other manually coded languages are often difficult and slow to use for communication among signers. [24] Despite this, such language policies have influenced members of the deaf community (especially older members) to internalise the belief that ISL is inferior to spoken language.
Toponymy is the study of place names (from Ancient Greek: τόπος / tópos, 'place', and ὄνομα / onoma, 'name'). According to Lawrence D. Berg and Jani Vuolteenaho, traditional research into place names has focused more on describing their origins in an empirical way. [25] : 6 However, they note that there are 'power relations inherent in geographical naming', [25] : 1 because to have the power to name something is to have the 'power of "making places"'. [25] : 9 Their book, Critical Toponymies, is, according to them, the 'first interdisciplinary collection published in English that tackles explicitly place naming as "a political practice par excellence of power over space"', and gathers research from various scholars about the politics inherent in the naming of places.
As an example, the powers-that-were in Norway began strictly regulating Sámi place names in the 1870s, replacing them with Norwegian names in official documents, [26] : 260 even suggesting that if no Norwegian name had yet been made for a certain place, a Norwegian translation of the name ought to be used on maps. [26] : 262 This 'toponymic silence' gave the impression that Norwegians had settled in places where the Sámi historically lived; [26] : 260 and the silence lives on till the present—Norwegians may believe that Sámi place names which have not been recorded on maps etc. are not in common use (even though they are); alternatively, since Sámi names for natural features have remained but not names for settlements, Norwegians may believe that Sámi people only reside in otherwise uninhabited areas. [26] : 263 Now, even though Sámi place names can be restored to official status, they must still be proven to actually be in use among the community. This is not the case for Norwegian names, which will remain official even if few people in the locality use that name. [26] : 264 With these observations, it can be concluded that the Sámi have not received full 'decolonisation' yet - the colonisation being in the Norwegian power to rename Sámi places. [26] : 265–6
In places where native names have been reclaimed in writing, there is a secondary issue of pronunciation. With reference to New Zealand, Robin Kearns and Lawrence Berg note that how a place name is pronounced also has a political meaning. Letters to the editors of New Zealand newspapers sometimes complain about newscasters' choice to pronounce place names in a more Māori-like way. [27] : 167–9 Even if Lake Taupo maintains an ostensibly Māori-derived name, some argued against a Member of Parliament telling others to read it 'toe-po' ([ˈtoʊpɔː]; see Taupo). [27] : 199 Kearns and Berg note that the written forms of Māori place names give no hints as to how they should be pronounced, and so even some Māori speakers might not know the 'true' pronunciation. These people might not be trying to make any political statement by reading the names their own way. [27] : 164 Even so, their utterance of the name becomes situated in a wider political context of 'a resurgence of Maori cultural forms, and increasing calls for self-determination', which 'presents a threatening and uncertain environment for members of the status quo'. [27] : 161–2 In this way, language in the form of place names becomes part of politics - part of the 'contest over the symbolic ownership of place' in New Zealand. [27] : 162
Even across states, agreement on a single name is difficult. This can apply to places which a state does not own: for example, see the Sea of Japan naming dispute or the Persian Gulf naming dispute. Mapmakers often acquiesce by creating two versions of the same map, but with the names of geographical features swapped out depending on which state the maps are sold in. [28] : 85 Notably, Greece objected to the use of the name 'Macedonia' by the then newly-independent Republic of Macedonia. According to Naftalie Kadmon, the Greek government was worried that '[c]laims of the South Yugoslavians to the name Macedonia might in time lead to political demands towards Greece, and finally to military aggression.' The case was escalated to the UN and it was decided that the new state would be referred to as Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). [28] : 85 The naming dispute was resolved in 2019, with the latter being renamed to North Macedonia.
These conflicts between states regarding names still nevertheless indicate a conflict over ownership or belonging. For example, the Bay of Piran between Croatia and Slovenia began being referred to by Croatian official sources as the Bay of Savudrija (Savudrijska vala) around the early 2000s. [29] : 73 In both cases, the names of the bay are taken from towns (Piran is in Slovenia, and Savudrija is in Croatia). This recent Croatian insistence on a new name linked to Croatia 'represents a transfer of the identity of the bay elsewhere - to another place far from Piran', and stakes 'Croatia's ownership of this part of the bay'. [29] : 73–4
The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) set up the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) and the United Nations Conferences on the Standardization of Geographical Names (UNCSGN). The UNCSGN has three main objectives:
The UNCSGN occurs every five years, and the UNGEGN 'meets between the Conferences to follow up the implementation of resolutions adopted by the Conferences and to ensure continuity of activities between Conferences'. [31]
The politics applied to naming places can also applies to naming ethnic groups. For example, it is generally offensive to use words which are considered by some to have negative implications (pejorative exonyms) to describe a group of people: e.g. 'Gypsies' (or even more negatively, 'Gypos') instead of 'Romani', or indeed using the term 'Gypsies' to cover Traveller peoples as well as Romani people.
As another example, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy writes that although they have been 'called the Iroquois Confederacy by the French, and the League of Five Nations by the English, the confederacy is properly called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy meaning People of the long house.' [32] The rejection of the exonym 'Iroqouis' (which is still the name used in, for example, the Wikipedia page) is inherent in the statement that the confederacy (and the people) are properly called 'Haudenosaunee'.
Dialect refers to two distinctly different types of linguistic relationships.
African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
A standard language is a language variety that has undergone substantial codification of grammar and usage, although occasionally the term refers to the entirety of a language that includes a standardized form as one of its varieties. Typically, the language varieties that undergo substantive standardization are the dialects associated with centers of commerce and government. By processes that linguistic anthropologists call "referential displacement" and that sociolinguists call "elaboration of function", these varieties acquire the social prestige associated with commerce and government. As a sociological effect of these processes, most users of this language come to believe that the standard language is inherently superior or consider it the linguistic baseline against which to judge other varieties of language.
In linguistics, diglossia is a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety, a second, highly codified lect is used in certain situations such as literature, formal education, or other specific settings, but not used normally for ordinary conversation. The H variety may have no native speakers but various degrees of fluency of the low speakers. In cases of three dialects, the term triglossia is used. When referring to two writing systems coexisting for a single language, the term digraphia is used.
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the Chinese languages or dialects, and parts of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families in Europe. Terms used in older literature include dialect area and L-complex.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians.
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, an age group, or other social group.
A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several interacting codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian. In some cases, the different standards of a pluricentric language may be elaborated until they become autonomous languages, as happened with Malaysian and Indonesian, and with Hindi and Urdu. The same process is under way in the Serbo-Croatian family.
In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige. In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical constructs, which may not be distinctive enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form among speakers of a language or languages.
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is the prescriptive practice of defining or recognizing one variety of a language as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties. Linguistic purism was institutionalized through language academies, and their decisions often have the force of law.
Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10.23 million inhabitants of the country. It is a North Germanic language and quite similar to its sister Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian, with which it maintains partial mutual intelligibility and forms a dialect continuum. A number of regional Swedish dialects are spoken across the country. In total, more than 200 languages are estimated to be spoken across the country, including regional languages, indigenous Sámi languages, and immigrant languages.
Linguistic insecurity comprises feelings of anxiety, self-consciousness, or lack of confidence in the mind of a speaker surrounding their use of language. Often, this anxiety comes from speakers' belief that their speech does not conform to the perceived standard and/or the style of language expected by the speakers' interlocutor(s). Linguistic insecurity is situationally induced and is often based on a feeling of inadequacy regarding personal performance in certain contexts, rather than a fixed attribute of an individual. This insecurity can lead to stylistic, and phonetic shifts away from an affected speaker's default speech variety; these shifts may be performed consciously on the part of the speaker, or may be reflective of an unconscious effort to conform to a more prestigious or context-appropriate variety or style of speech. Linguistic insecurity is linked to the perception of speech varieties in any community, and so may vary based on socioeconomic class and gender. It is also especially pertinent in multilingual societies.
Linguistic rights are the human and civil rights concerning the individual and collective right to choose the language or languages for communication in a private or public atmosphere. Other parameters for analyzing linguistic rights include the degree of territoriality, amount of positivity, orientation in terms of assimilation or maintenance, and overtness.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been the center of controversy about the education of African-American youths, the role AAVE should play in public schools and education, and its place in broader society.
Linguistic discrimination is unfair treatment of people which is based on their use of language and the characteristics of their speech, including their first language, their accent, the perceived size of their vocabulary, their modality, and their syntax. For example, an Occitan speaker in France will probably be treated differently from a French speaker. Based on a difference in use of language, a person may automatically form judgments about another person's wealth, education, social status, character or other traits, which may lead to discrimination. This article will explore the prejudice behind linguistic discrimination, its origin and history, its impact, and a look into linguistics across varying countries.
Linguistic profiling is the practice of identifying the social characteristics of an individual based on auditory cues, in particular dialect and accent. The theory was first developed by Professor John Baugh to explain discriminatory practices in the housing market based on the auditory redlining of prospective clientele by housing administrators. Linguistic profiling extends to issues of legal proceedings, employment opportunities, and education. The theory is frequently described as the auditory equivalent of racial profiling. The bulk of the research and evidence in support of the theory pertain to racial and ethnic distinctions, though its applicability holds within racial or ethnic groups, perceived gender and sexual orientation, and in distinguishing location of geographic origin.
Dialect levelling or leveling is the process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects. Typically, this comes about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language standardization. It has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialisation and modernisation of the areas in which they are spoken.
In sociolinguistics, covert prestige is a type of scenario in which nonstandard languages or dialects are regarded to be of high linguistic prestige by members of a speech community. This is in contrast to the typical case of linguistic prestige, wherein only the standard varieties of a speech community are considered prestigious.