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A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. With a total number of 196 sovereign states recognized internationally (as of 2019) [1] and an estimated number of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, [2] the vast majority of languages are minority languages in every country in which they are spoken. Some minority languages are simultaneously also official languages, such as Irish in Ireland or the numerous indigenous languages of Bolivia. Likewise, some national languages are often considered minority languages, insofar as they are the national language of a stateless nation.
There is no scholarly consensus on what a "minority language" is, because various different standards have been applied in order to classify languages as "minority language" or not. [3] According to Owens (2013), attempts to define minority languages generally fall into several categories:
In most European countries, the minority languages are defined by legislation or constitutional documents and afforded some form of official support. In 1992, the Council of Europe adopted the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe. [7] For the purposes of the Charter, it stipulated the following definitions: [8] : 1–2
- a.
- "regional or minority languages" means languages that are:
- i.
- 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
- ii.
- different from the official language(s) of that State;
- it does not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the State or the languages of migrants;
- b.
- "territory in which the regional or minority language is used" means the geographical area in which the said language is the mode of expression of a number of people justifying the adoption of the various protective and promotional measures provided for in this Charter;
- c.
- "non-territorial languages" means languages used by nationals of the State which differ from the language or languages used by the rest of the State's population but which, although traditionally used within the territory of the State, cannot be identified with a particular area thereof.
The signatories that have not yet ratified it as of 2012 are Azerbaijan, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, North Macedonia, Malta, and Moldova.[ citation needed ] Refraining from signing or ratifying the Charter is also caused by the refusal (for instance, in Estonia or Malta) to recognize such postimperial world languages as English, French or Russian as minority languages, even if they are spoken by minority populations. [9] The symbolic, cultural and political power vested in such world languages empowers any demographically minority population to such a degree that any additional rights (for example, the status of a minority language) granted to their given world language may precipitate the rapid decline of the state (national) language in favor of the world language. That is the situation in Belarus, where after 1995 Russian empowered as an 'equal co-official language' marginalized the use of Belarusian. The Charter was employed to achieve the same effect in Ukraine after 2010 by marginalizing Ukrainian through empowered Russian, a scenario which was only prevented by the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. [10]
In Canada the term "minority language" is used in the Constitution of Canada, in the heading above section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms , which guarantees educational rights to official language minority communities. In Canada, the term "minority language" is generally understood to mean whichever of the official languages is less spoken in a particular province or territory (i.e., English in Québec, French elsewhere).[ citation needed ]
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Minority languages may be marginalised within nations for a number of reasons. These include having a relatively small number of speakers, a decline in the number of speakers, and popular belief that these speakers are uncultured, or primitive, or the minority language is a dialect of the dominant language. Support for minority languages is sometimes viewed as supporting separatism, for example, the ongoing revival of the Celtic languages in the British Isles and France (Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton). The dominant culture may consider use of immigrant minority languages to be a threat to unity, indicating that such communities are not integrating into the larger culture.[ citation needed ] Both of these perceived threats are based on the notion of the exclusion of the majority language speakers. Often this is added to by political systems by not providing support (such as education and policing) in these languages.[ citation needed ]
Speakers of majority languages can and do learn minority languages, through the large number of courses available. [11] It is not known whether most students of minority languages are members of the minority community re-connecting with the community's language, or others seeking to become familiar with it.[ citation needed ]
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Views differ as to whether the protection of official languages by a state representing the majority speakers violates the human rights of minority speakers. In March 2013, Rita Izsák, UN Independent Expert on minority issues, said that "protection of linguistic minority rights is a human rights obligation and an essential component of good governance, efforts to prevent tensions and conflict, and the construction of equal and politically and socially stable societies". [12]
In Slovakia for example, the Hungarian community generally considers the 'language law' enacted in 1995 to be discriminatory and inconsistent with the European Charter for the Protection of Regional or Minority languages. The Majority Slovaks believed that minority speakers' rights are guaranteed, in accordance with the highest European standards, and are not discriminated against by the state language having preferential status. The language law declares that "the Slovak language enjoys a preferential status over other languages spoken on the territory of the Slovak Republic." As a result of a 2009 amendment, a fine of up to €5,000 may be imposed for a misdemeanor from the regulations protecting the preferential status of the state language, e.g. if the name of a shop or a business is indicated on a sign-board first in the minority language and only after it in Slovak, or if in a bilingual text, the minority language part is written with bigger fonts than its Slovak equivalent, or if the bilingual text on a monument is translated from the minority language to the dominant language and not vice versa, or if a civil servant or doctor communicates with a minority speaker citizen in a minority language in a local community where the proportion of the minority speakers is less than 20%.[ citation needed ]
Sign languages are often not recognized as true natural languages, although extensive research supports the case that they are independent languages.[ citation needed ]
Speakers of auxiliary languages have also struggled for their recognition. They are used primarily as second languages and have few native speakers.[ citation needed ]
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These are languages that have the status of a national language and are spoken by the majority population in at least one country, but lack recognition in other countries, even where there is a significant minority linguistic community:
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Linguistic communities that form no majority of population in any country, but whose language has the status of an official language in at least one country:
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A treasure language is one of the thousands of small languages still spoken in the world today. The term was proposed by the Rama people of Nicaragua as an alternative to heritage language, indigenous language, and "ethnic language", names that are considered pejorative in the local context. [20] The term is now also used in the context of public storytelling events. [21]
The term "treasure language" references the desire of speakers to sustain the use of their mother tongue into the future:
[The] notion of treasure fit the idea of something that had been buried and almost lost, but was being rediscovered and now shown and shared. And the word treasure also evoked the notion of something belonging exclusively to the Rama people, who now attributed it real value and had become eager and proud of being able to show it to others. [20]
Accordingly, the term is distinct from endangered language for which objective criteria are available, or heritage language which describes an end-state for a language where individuals are more fluent in a dominant language. [22]
There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) is a European treaty adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe. However, the charter does not provide any criterion or definition for an idiom to be a minority or a regional language, and the classification stays in the hands of the national state.
The European Union (EU) has 24 official languages, of which three – English, French and German – were considered "procedural" languages but this notion was abandoned by the European Commission. In fact English and French are used in the day-to-day workings of the institutions of the EU. Institutions have the right to define the linguistic regime of their working but the Commission and a number of other institutions did not do this as indicated by several Court judgments
In Belgium, there are 27 municipalities with language facilities, which must offer linguistic services to residents in Dutch, French, or German in addition to their single official languages. All other municipalities – with the exception of those in the bilingual Brussels region – are monolingual and offer services only in their official languages, either Dutch or French.
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.
Beyond the official Romanian language, multiple other languages are spoken in Romania. Laws regarding the rights of minority languages are in place, and some of them have co-official status at a local level. Although having no native speakers, French language is also a historically important language in Romania, and the country is a member of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.
Minorities in Greece are small in size compared to Balkan regional standards, and the country is largely ethnically homogeneous. This is mainly due to the population exchanges between Greece and neighboring Turkey and Bulgaria, which removed most Muslims and those Christian Slavs who did not identify as Greeks from Greek territory. The treaty also provided for the resettlement of ethnic Greeks from those countries, later to be followed by refugees. There is no official information for the size of the ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities because asking the population questions pertaining to the topic have been abolished since 1951.
Serbia has only one nationwide official language, which is Serbian. The largest other languages spoken in Serbia include Hungarian, Bosnian and Croatian. The Autonomous Province of Vojvodina has 6 official languages: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, Croatian, Rusyn; whilst Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, which Serbia claims as its own, has two: Albanian and Serbian.
The languages of Austria include German, the official language and lingua franca; Austro-Bavarian, the main dialect outside Vorarlberg; Alemannic, the main dialect in Vorarlberg; and several minority languages.
The official language of Greece is Greek, spoken by 99% of the population. In addition, a number of non-official, minority languages and some Greek dialects are spoken as well. The most common foreign languages learned by Greeks are English, German, French and Italian.
The languages spoken in Hungary include Hungarian, recognized minority languages, and other languages.
Languages and dialects spoken in the Serbian province of Vojvodina include South Slavic languages, West Slavic languages (Slovak), East Slavic languages (Rusyn), Hungarian, Romanian, Romani, and others.
The official language of North Macedonia is Macedonian, while Albanian has co-official status. Macedonian is spoken by roughly two-thirds of the population natively, and as a second language by much of the rest of the population. Albanian is the largest minority language. There are a further five national minority languages: Turkish, Romani, Serbian, Bosnian, and Aromanian. The Macedonian Sign Language is the country's official sign language.
The geographical distribution of speakers of Macedonian refers to the total number of native speakers of Macedonian, an East South Slavic language that serves as the official language of North Macedonia. Estimates of the number of native and second language speakers of Macedonian varies; the number of native speakers in the country ranges from 1,344,815 according to the 2002 census in North Macedonia to 1,476,500 per linguistic database Ethnologue in 2016. Estimates of the total number of speakers in the world include 3.5 million people. Macedonian is studied and spoken as a second language by all ethnic minorities in the country.
Linguistic discrimination is unfair treatment of people based upon their use of language and the characteristics of their speech, such as 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 has led to public debate surrounding localisation theories, likewise with overall diversity prevalence in numerous nations across the West.
A cross-border language or trans-border language is a language spoken by a population that lives in a geographical area in two or several internationally recognized countries that have common land or maritime borders.
The Constitution of Croatia in its preamble defines Croatia as a nation state of ethnic Croats, a country of traditionally present communities that the constitution recognizes as national minorities and a country of all its citizens. National minorities explicitly enumerated and recognized in the Constitution are Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, Rusyns, Bosniaks, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Russians, Bulgarians, Poles, Romani, Romanians, Istro-Romanians ("Vlachs"), Turks and Albanians. Article 12 of the constitution states that the official language in Croatia is Croatian, but also states that in some local governments another language and Cyrillic or some other script can be introduced in official use.
The various regional and minority languages in Europe encompass four categories: