 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2021) |
Language secessionism (also known as linguistic secessionism or linguistic separatism) is an attitude supporting the separation of a language variety from the language to which it has hitherto been considered to belong, in order for this variety to be considered a distinct language. This attitude was first analyzed in Catalan sociolinguistics [1] but it is attested in other parts of the world.
The Arab World is characterized by diglossia. The low-prestige varieties - local dialects dominate the sphere of daily communication, whereas Standard Arabic carries high prestige and is used in formal writing and speaking. [2]
This situation has important political and social implications. Standard Arabic, is the official language of all Arab countries. It enjoys the status of a global language. Standard Arabic is also the lingua sacra of Islam, which further increases its importance. However, a claim could be made that it is no one's first language, since Arab children acquire their local dialect in the natural process of generational language transmission, and learn Standard Arabic later, when they begin formal education. [3] Proficiency in Standard Arabic gives one an insight into a vast literary tradition spanning over 1,500 years. However, proponents of recognizing local Arabic dialects as official languages claim that the discrepancy between spoken vernaculars and Standard Arabic is just too wide, rendering proficiency in Standard Arabic unattainable for most.
Egyptian linguistic separatism is the most well-developed linguistic separatism in the Arab World. The most popular platform diffusing the idea of the Modern Egyptian Language (rather than the Egyptian dialect) is the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia also known as Wikipedia Masry or Maṣrī. It was the first Wikipedia written in one of the many Arabic dialects. Importantly, the idea of Egyptian linguistic separatism goes further back, to thinkers such as Salama Musa, Bayyūmī Qandīl, Muḥsin Luṭfī as-Sayyid, and the Liberal Egyptian Party. [4]
Egyptian linguistic separatism does not simply claim that Egyptian Arabic should become the official language of Egypt, which in and of itself is a matter decided by politicians, not linguists. However, proponents of Egyptian linguistic separatism, such as Bayyūmī Qandīl, substantiate their political demands with pseudoscientific claims. [4]
Linguistic separatism remains a fringe movement within Egyptian society. The idea remains particularly attractive to Coptic Christians and liberals, who see Egyptian nationalism as an alternative to Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism. [4]
In the Occitano-Catalan language area, language secessionism is a quite recent phenomenon that has developed only since the 1970s. Language secessionism affects both Occitan and Catalan languages with the following common features: [5]
In Catalan, there are three cases:
There are three cases in Occitan:
In Andalusia, there is a fringe movement aimed at promoting the Andalusian dialect as a separate language from Spanish. [8]
The national language of Pakistan and official languages in many parts of India, the Delhi dialect has become the basis of Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu. Grammatically, Hindi and Urdu are the same language, Hindustani, but they differ in their literary and academic vocabulary. Hindi tends to adopt Sanskrit words and purges literary words borrowed from Persian, while Urdu does the opposite. In essence, apart from their scripts, the lexicon is what distinguishes Urdu and Hindi. There are additional Indo-Aryan languages that are counted as Hindi but are not the same as Hindustani. They are considered Hindi languages but may not be close to the Delhi dialect.
The official standard language of Moldova is identical to Romanian. However, Vasile Stati, a local linguist and politician, has asserted his opinion that Moldovan is a separate language in his Dicționar moldovenesc-românesc (Moldovan–Romanian dictionary). [9]
During the Soviet era, the USSR authorities officially recognized and promoted Moldovans and Moldovan as a distinct ethnicity and language from Romanians. A Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the Moldavian ASSR and SSR to reinforce this claim. Since 1989, the official language switched to the Latin script and underwent several of the language reforms of Romanian.
Nowadays, the Cyrillic alphabet remains in official use only on the territories controlled by the breakaway authorities of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (most commonly known as Transnistria), where it is named "Moldovan", as opposed to the Latin script version used elsewhere, which the local authorities call "Romanian".
Serbo-Croatian has a strong structural unity, according to the vast majority of linguists who specialize in Slavic languages. [10] [11] However, the language is spoken by populations that have strong, different, national consciousnesses: Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs.
Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Serbo-Croatian has lost its unitary codification and its official unitary status. It is now divided into four official languages which follow separate codifications: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. This process has been accused of being grounded on pseudoscientific claims fueled by political agendas. [12] [13]
Indeed, linguists and sociolinguists have not ceased to speak of a common Serbo-Croatian. [14] [15] It is a pluricentric language [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] being cultivated through four voluntarily diverging normative varieties, [21] Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian, which are sometimes considered Ausbau languages. [22] However, Ausbau languages must have different dialect basis, [23] whereas standardized Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian have the same dialect basis (Štokavian, specifically the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect). [24]
The problems of the so-called Ausbau-languages in Heinz Kloss's terminology are similar, but by no means identical to the problems of variants. In Ausbau-languages we have pairs of standard languages built on the basis of different dialects [...]. The difference between these paired Ausbau-languages and standard language variants lies in the fact that the variants have a nearly identical material (dialectal) basis and the difference is only in the development of the standardisation process, while paired standard languages have a more or less distinct dialect base. [25]
Kloss contrasts Ausbau languages not only with Abstand languages but also with polycentric standard languages, [26] i.e. two variants of the same standard, such as Serbo-Croatian, Moldavian and Rumanian, and Portuguese in Brazil and Portugal. In contrast, pairs such as Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian, and Danish and Swedish, are instances of literary standards based on different dialects which, at a pre-literate stage, would have been regarded by linguists as dialects of the same language. [27]
On the contrary, the Serbo-Croatian kind of language secessionism is now a strongly consensual and institutional majority phenomenon. Still, this does not make it legitimate to say that such secessionism has led to "Ausbau languages" in the cases of Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian, because such diversion has not taken place: [28] [29] [30]
The intercomprehension between these standards exceeds that between the standard variants of English, French, German, or Spanish. [31]
The four varieties - Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian - are all totally mutually comprehensible [...] What there is, is a common, polycentric standard language - just like, say, French, which has Belgian, Swiss, French, and Canadian variants but is definitely not four different languages. [...] Linguistic scientists are agreed that BCSM is essentially a single language with four different standard variants bearing different names. [15]
| |
Portugal, a former southern county split from the Kingdom of Galicia and fief of the Kingdom of León, was created by Afonso I of Portugal in 1126 and expanded towards the Islamic south, like its neighbouring kingdoms. That part of Galicia, named Portugal, became independent while the northern part of the country remained under the Kingdom of León during the 12th century and early 13th century. Northern Galicia would later be ruled by the Kingdom of Castile, which would become the core and ethnic base for the future Spain; but the culture was the same on both sides of the political border. Galician-Portuguese culture attained great prestige during the Low Middle Ages. In the late 15th century, Castilian domination became more severe, banishing their language in all official uses, including the church.
Galician-Portuguese survived diglossically for the following centuries among the peasant population, but it experienced a strong Spanish influence and had a different evolution.[ citation needed ] Meanwhile, the same language (by the reintegrationist view) remained fully official in Portugal and was carried across the world by Portuguese explorers, soldiers and colonists.
During the 19th century a revival movement arose. This movement defended the Galician language, and created a provisional norm, with a Castilian orthography and many loanwords. When autonomy was granted, a norm and orthography (based in rexurdimento writers) (Galician literature) for a Galician language was created. This norm is taught and used in schools and universities of Galicia. But most writers (Castelao, Risco, Otero Pedrayo) did not support the traditional Galician forms;[ clarification needed ] some of them based on Spanish orthography even if they recognized the essential linguistic unity, saying that the priority was achieving political autonomy and being read by the population. Other writers wrote with a Portuguese-like orthography (e.g. Guerra da Cal and Carvalho Calero).
Reintegrationists claim that the official norm (released in 1982) was imposed by the Spanish government, with the covert intent of severing Galician from Portuguese. But this idea is rejected by the Real Academia Galega, which supports the official norm.
Reintegrationist and Lusist groups are protesting against this so-called language secessionism, which they call Castrapism (from castrapo , something like "patois") or Isolationism. Unlike in the case of Valencian Blaverism, isolationism has no impact in the scientific community of linguists, and it is supported by a small number of them but still has clear political support.
Galician-Portuguese linguistic unity until the 16th century seems to be consensus,[ citation needed ] as does both Galician and European Portuguese being closer to each other, and also closer in the 19th century than in the 20th century and now. In this period, while Galician for the most part lost vowel reduction, velarization of /l/ and nasal vowels, and some speech registers of it adhered to yeísmo , all making it phonologically closer to Spanish. For example, European Portuguese had splits that created two new vowel phonemes, one of them usually an allophone only in the case of vowel reduction and the other phonetically absent in any other variant. Some dialects had a merger of three of its oral diphthongs and another three of its nasal vowels, and together with Brazilian Portuguese absorbed more than 5000 loanwords from French as well as 1500 from English.
It seems that the debate for a greater integration among Portuguese-speaking countries had the result of a single writing standard (1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement), often shunned by some segments of Portuguese media and population but long waited and cheered by Brazilians despite occasional criticism to some aspects and that changed the spelling of between 0.5% and 1% of the words in both former varieties, with minor respect to major dialect phonological differences. The other debate, whether Galician should use the same standard of Portuguese (Lusism), a standard with minor differences (Reintegrationism), a re-approximation of both through another Lusophone spelling agreement that would give particular regional differences such as that of Galician as well as major diverging dialects of Portuguese (especially in South America) more room (Reintegrationism), or the present standard based on the Spanish orthography, still did not cast official attention of government authorities in any of the involved countries, even if Lusophone support is expected to be strong in any of the first three cases.
A point often held by minorities among both Reintegrationists/Lusists and Lusophonists is that Portuguese should have a more conservative and uniform international speech standard that at the same time respects minor phonological differences between its variants (such as a free choice between the various allophones of the rhotic consonant /ʁ/, [a~ɐ~ɜ~ə] for /a~ɐ/ or [s~s̻ʲ~ʃ~ɕ] for the voiceless allophone of /S/) that would further strengthen Lusophone integration (while sung European Portuguese is comprehensible to untrained Brazilians, this is not the case for even the media standard of Galician, let alone more colloquial varieties)[ citation needed ], but this is not especially welcomed by any party in Europe.
Republic Act No. 7104, approved on August 14, 1991, created the Commission on the Filipino Language, reporting directly to the President and tasked to undertake, coordinate and promote researches for the development, propagation and preservation of Filipino and other Philippine languages. [32] On May 13, 1992, the commission issued Resolution 92-1, specifying that Filipino is the
...indigenous written and spoken language of Metro Manila and other urban centers in the Philippines used as the language of communication of ethnic groups. [33]
Though the Commission on the Filipino Language recognizes that a lot of the vocabulary of Filipino is based on Tagalog, the latest definition given to the national language tries to evade the use of the term Tagalog.
According to some Filipinologists (people who specialize in the study of Filipino as a language), the main reason that Filipino is distinct from Tagalog is that in Filipino, there is a presence of vocabulary coming from other Philippine languages, such as Cebuano (such as bana – husband), Hiligaynon (such as buang – insane) and Ilocano (such as ading – little brother). They also maintain that the term Tagalog is the language of the Katagalugan or the Tagalog Region and puristic in a sense. It lacks certain phonemes like /f/ and /v/, which makes it incapable of producing some indigenous proper nouns Ifugao and Ivatan. [33] Curiously, proponents of language secessionism are unable to account for the glaring absence of long vowel, phonemic in Tausug, in Filipino phonology or for the absence of a schwa. Arguments for secessionism generally ignore the fact that the various languages of the Philippines have divergent phonologies.
Among Chinese speakers, Yue Chinese (Cantonese), [34] Hokkien and other varieties of Chinese are often referred to as dialects (Chinese :方言), instead of languages (simplified Chinese :语言; traditional Chinese :語言), despite the fact that those varieties are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, spoken by the majority of Chinese. However, the languages are reportedly significantly more mutually intelligible in written form as all varieties continue to use the same set of Hanzi (Chinese characters); i.e. Yue and Mandarin differ primarily in tonal differences and different pronunciations of various sounds which would be largely negated in writing.[ citation needed ]
In the Hokkien topolect (Chinese :閩南語), which is widely used in Fujian, Taiwan, and in the Chinese diaspora, it is debated that whether Taiwanese dialects (Chinese :臺灣閩南語) should be separated from the Hokkien language as the Taiwanese language (Chinese :臺灣話 or 臺語), [35] [36] although people from Fujian and Taiwan can communicate with each other despite some differences in vocabulary. Such debates may be associated with politics of Taiwan. [37]
In Taiwan, there is a common perception that Hokkien preserves more archaic features from Classical Chinese than Mandarin, thus allowing poetry from the Tang dynasty to rhyme better. Amongst Hokkien nationalists in Taiwan, this perception is sometimes elevated into stronger claims about the identity of Hokkien and Mandarin. One common name for Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwan, especially among elderly speakers, is Chinese :河洛話; pinyin :Héluòhuà, derived from a folk etymological reading of Hok-ló, Ho̍h-ló, or Hô-ló. [38] The character reading is interpreted to be a reference to the Yellow River Map and the Lo Shu Square and taken as evidence that the ancestors of Hokkien-speaking people came from the Central Plain, and in preserving their identity over the centuries, Hokkien speakers have also better preserved their language. Some fringe scholars claim that modern Hokkien is a faithfully preserved archaic variety of Chinese once used in the imperial courts dating back as early as the Shang dynasty. [39] Another claim based on folk etymology is that the word Mandarin is based on the Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese phrase Chinese :滿大人; pinyin :Mǎndàrén; lit.'important Manchu person or Manchu official'. This is taken as evidence that Mandarin has been corrupted by foreign influence from Manchu, Mongolian, etc. and is thus not fit to be the official language of a Chinese-speaking country. [40] This is in contrast to more mainstream views that Taiwanese Hokkien, as a variety of Southern Min, is a descendant of Proto-Min, a language that split from late Old Chinese, and Mandarin descended from Middle Chinese, and that it is not meaningful to say that one modern language is older than another.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)The debate about the status of the Serbo-Croatian language and its varieties has recently shifted (again) towards a position which looks at the internal variation within Serbo-Croatian through the prism of linguistic pluricentricity
Obwohl das Kroatische sich in den letzten Jahren in einigen Gebieten, vor allem jedoch auf lexikalischer Ebene, verändert hat, sind diese Änderungen noch nicht bedeutend genug, dass der Terminus Ausbausprache gerechtfertigt wäre.
Catalan, known in the Valencian Community and Carche as Valencian, is a Western Romance language. It is the official language of Andorra, and an official language of two autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. It is also an official language in Valencia, where it is called Valencian. It has semi-official status in the Italian comune of Alghero, and it is spoken in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France and in two further areas in eastern Spain: the eastern strip of Aragon and the Carche area in the Region of Murcia. The Catalan-speaking territories are often called the Països Catalans or "Catalan Countries".
Dialect refers to two distinctly different types of linguistic relationships.
Standard Chinese is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912‒1949). It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters.
Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
Southern Min, Minnan or Banlam, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian, most of Taiwan, Eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and Southern Zhejiang. Southern Min dialects are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Southern Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Southern and Central Vietnam, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Minnan is the most widely-spoken branch of Min, with approximately 48 million speakers as of 2017–2018.
Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language.
The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languages are a group of Romance languages that developed on the Iberian Peninsula, an area consisting primarily of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Andorra and southern France. They are today more commonly separated into West Iberian and Occitano-Romance language groups.
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, power 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.
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.
In sociolinguistics, an abstand language is a language variety or cluster of varieties with significant linguistic distance from all others, while an ausbau language is a standard variety, possibly with related dependent varieties. Heinz Kloss introduced these terms in 1952 to denote two separate and largely independent sets of criteria for recognizing a "language":
Montenegrin is a normative variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Montenegrins and is the official language of Montenegro. Montenegrin is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, more specifically on Eastern Herzegovinian, which is also the basis of Standard Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian.
A regional language is a language spoken in a region of a sovereign state, whether it be a small area, a federated state or province or some wider area.
Regionalism is a political ideology that seeks to increase the political power, influence and self-determination of the people of one or more subnational regions. It focuses on the "development of a political or social system based on one or more" regions and/or the national, normative or economic interests of a specific region, group of regions or another subnational entity, gaining strength from or aiming to strengthen the "consciousness of and loyalty to a distinct region with a homogeneous population", similarly to nationalism. More specifically, "regionalism refers to three distinct elements: movements demanding territorial autonomy within unitary states; the organization of the central state on a regional basis for the delivery of its policies including regional development policies; political decentralization and regional autonomy".
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.
A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several 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 to appear as separate languages, e.g. Malaysian and Indonesian, Hindi and Urdu, while Serbo-Croatian is in an earlier stage of that process.
A national language is a language that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a nation. There is little consistency in the use of this term. One or more languages spoken as first languages in the territory of a country may be referred to informally or designated in legislation as national languages of the country. National languages are mentioned in over 150 world constitutions.
The majority of languages of Spain belong to the Romance language family, of which Spanish is the only language which has official status for the whole country. Those also include Catalan and Galician as well as an additional number of languages and dialects belonging to the Romance language continuum.
There have been many languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula.
Hokkien is a variety of the Southern Min Chinese languages, native to and originating from the Minnan region, in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is also referred to as Quanzhang, from the first characters of the urban centers of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.
Supradialect is a linguistic term designating a dialectological category between the levels of language and dialect. It is used in two distinctive contexts, describing structural or functional relations within a particular language. As a structural category, supradialects designate the first level of dialectological subdivision within a language, as for example in the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language, which is divided into three basic supradialects, with each of them being further divided into several dialects. As a functional category, supradialect designates a predominant dialectal form within a particular language, referring to the most commonly used variant of that language, accepted in practice by the majority of its speakers as a basic tool of mutual interaction and communication. In that context, such supradialect also functions as an interdialect.