The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities

The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities Edited by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun Bernadette O’Rourke

The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities “This Handbook is, quite simply, a tour de force. Offering far greater breadth, depth and analytical heft than ever before, the handbook extends the fields of minority language studies and multilingualism conceptually, disciplinarily, geographically, and pragmatically. It is sure to be a key reference for years to come.” —Stephen May, University of Auckland, New Zealand “This truly informative and expert Handbook offers detailed accounts of the history and contemporary context of minority language communities on every continent. The overall effect is a stunning testament to the resilience of minority language policy actors and community identities in the face of migration, mobility and globalizing forces in every corner of our world.” —Nancy H. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, USA “This is an outstanding collection of perspectives, analyses and views of the dynamic role of minority languages in the public life of communities all across the world. The Handbook makes a signal contribution to practical understanding and intervention in legal, educational and policy fields. Expertly edited to produce coherence of focus and consistency of treatment, the Handbook as a whole and its individual chapters provide excellent coverage of a diverse range of settings across the world. It is clear from reading the volume that our ‘science’ of multilingual studies has been premised on too few cases, too few histories, and too narrow a range of experience. The Handbook is a consolidated resource that rewards regular reading and deep study.” —Joseph Lo Bianco, University of Melbourne, Australia

Gabrielle Hogan-Brun Bernadette O’Rourke Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities

Editors Gabrielle Hogan-Brun School of Education University of Bristol Bristol, UK

Bernadette O’Rourke Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-54065-2    ISBN 978-1-137-54066-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953783 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Christopher Corr / Ikon Images / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Acknowledgements

This Handbook could not have been written without the efforts and dedication of a considerable number of people. First and foremost, our thanks go to each of the contributors. From our initial invitation to the production of their final chapter, their responses have been marked by courtesy, timeliness, and commitment. With their deep knowledge of international law, policy studies, sociology, anthropology, education, and sociolinguistics, they have contributed to a rich volume in this diffuse field of study. The reviewers of each chapter are the unsung heroes. Here at least we are able to publicly thank them for their detailed comments on the initial drafts. We would also like to acknowledge the speakers of minority languages and the challenges they face around the planet. The themes explored in this Handbook reflect their lived realities. The Handbook has grown from the book series Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Many thanks go to the people at Palgrave Macmillan for their long-standing support: Cathy Scott, Beth Farrow, Judith Allan, Chloe Fitzsimmons, Libby Forrest, Olivia Middleton, Rebecca Brennan, Esme Chapman, and Jill Lake who took on the series well over a decade ago. Finally, we are indebted to Bill Dale and Terry Jones for their careful proofreading of parts of the script and to John Hogan for his generous support throughout. Gabrielle Hogan-Brun Bernadette O’Rourke

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Contents

1 Introduction: Minority Languages and Communities in a Changing World  1 Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and Bernadette O’Rourke

Part I Minority Language Rights, Protection, Governance

  19

2 Minority Language Rights and Standards: Definitions and Applications at the Supranational Level 21 Fernand de Varennes and Elżbieta Kuzborska 3 Minority Language Rights in the Russian Federation: The End of a Long Tradition? 73 Bill Bowring 4 Minority Language Governance and Regulation101 Colin H. Williams and John Walsh

Part II Recognition, Self-Determination, Autonomy

 131

5 The Recognition of Ethnic and Language Diversity in Nation-­ States and Consociations133 Christian Giordano vii

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6 Linguistic Recognition in Deeply Divided Societies: Antagonism or Reconciliation?159 Philip McDermott and Máiréad Nic Craith 7 National Cultural Autonomy and Linguistic Rights in Central and Eastern Europe181 Federica Prina, David J. Smith, and Judit Molnar Sansum 8 Sign Language Communities207 Maartje De Meulder, Verena Krausneker, Graham Turner, and John Bosco Conama

Part III Migration, Settlement, Mobility

 233

9 Changing Perspectives on Language Maintenance and Shift in Transnational Settings: From Settlement to Mobility235 Anne Pauwels 10 Arctic Languages in Canada in the Age of Globalization257 Donna Patrick

Part IV Economics, Markets, Commodification

 285

11 Minority Languages and Markets287 Sari Pietikäinen, Helen Kelly-Holmes, and Maria Rieder 12 Language Economics and Issues of Planning for Minority Languages in Africa311 Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu 13 Language Minorities in a Globalized Economy: The Case of Professional Translation in Canada333 Matthieu LeBlanc

 Contents 

Part V Education, Literacy, Access

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 355

14 Indigenous Children’s Language Practices in Australia357 Samantha Disbray and Gillian Wigglesworth 15 Minorities, Languages, Education, and Assimilation in Southeast Asia383 Peter Sercombe 16 Literacy in My Language? Principles, Practices, Prospects405 Clinton Robinson

Part VI Media, Public Usage, Visibility

 431

17 Minority Language Media: Issues of Power, Finance and Organization433 Tom Moring 18 Minority Languages and Social Media451 Daniel Cunliffe 19 Linguistic Landscapes and Minority Languages481 Durk Gorter, Heiko F. Marten, and Luk Van Mensel

Part VII Endangerment, Ecosystems, Resilience

 507

20 Resilience for Minority Languages509 David Bradley 21 Minority Contact Languages, Small Islands, and Linguistic Ecology531 Joshua Nash

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22 The Yiddish Conundrum: A Cautionary Tale for Language Revivalism553 Dovid Katz Index589

Notes on Contributors

Bill Bowring  is Professor at Birkbeck College, London, where he has been teaching International Law and Human Rights since 2006. He is also a practising barrister. He has represented applicants at the European Court of Human Rights since 1992, against Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. He has more than 100 publications including two monographs, the most recent of which is Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the Destiny of a Great Power (2013). David Bradley  is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University, Australia, and President of the UNESCO Comité International Permanent des Linguistes. His articles have appeared widely on sociolinguistics and historical linguistics within the Tibeto-Burman group, notably two dictionaries, three books of texts, and a forthcoming grammar of Lisu. His new book Language Endangerment summarizes many years of theoretical and practical research on language endangerment and language reclamation. John Bosco Conama  is Director of the Centre for Deaf Studies at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. His doctorate focused on equality issues affecting Deaf communities. His research interests focus on how equality and social policy issues affect Irish and international Deaf communities. He teaches Deaf studies-related modules. He is also on the World Federation of the Deaf ’s Expert Group on Sign Language and Deaf Studies. Daniel Cunliffe  is Reader in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science at the University of South Wales. He is a member of the Welsh Government’s Welsh-­ Language Technology Board. Since 2001, his research has applied insights and methods from fields such as computer-mediated communication, human-computer interaction, and user experience design to the study of minority language use in information and communications technology.

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Maartje De Meulder  is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the research group on multilingualism of the University of Namur, Belgium. Her research interests are in sign language planning and policy and multilingualism. Her articles have appeared in Language Policy, Human Rights Quarterly, and Language Problems and Language Planning, and she has co-edited a volume on Innovations in Deaf Studies. Her most recent research has focused on ‘new signers’ and the vitality of sign languages. Fernand  de Varennes  is United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Extraordinary Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria, and Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Renowned as one of the world’s leading experts on the human and language rights of minorities, de Varennes has some 200 publications in 30 languages on these issues, as well as on the prevention of ethnic conflicts and the rights of Indigenous peoples. Samantha  Disbray is a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Languages in Canberra. She has extensively researched Australian Indigenous languages, child language development, and Indigenous languages in education, including the Northern Territory Bilingual Education Program. Christian  Giordano  is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Doctor Honoris Causa University of Timisoara (Romania), and Ilia University Tbilisi (Georgia). Guest professorships include the University of Bucharest, Murcia, Bydgoszcz, University Sains Malaysia at Penang, Kuala Lumpur, University of Malaya, Asia-Europe Institute. Research cooperation has been with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and University College London. His main fields of expertise include political anthropology, ethnocultural diversity, network analysis, and informality. Durk  Gorter  is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU in Donostia-San Sebastian. He is leader of the Donostia Research Group on Education and Multilingualism (DREAM) and editor of Language, Culture and Curriculum. His research focuses on multilingual education, linguistic landscapes, and comparative studies of European minority languages. Gabrielle Hogan-Brun  is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, the UK.  Her main research interests are language policy and practices in multilingual settings and the economics of multilingualism. Among her publications are Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks – Status – Prospects (ed. with S. Wolff, 2003) and Linguanomics: What is the Market Potential of Multilingualism? (2017). A Salzburg Global Fellow, she has worked with various European organizations on aspects of language policy. She is Founding Editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Nkonko  M.  Kamwangamalu  is Professor of Linguistics at Howard University, Washington, DC. He is Co-Editor of Current Issues in Language Planning; author of The Language Planning Situation in South Africa (2004); author of Language Policy

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and Economics: The Language Question in Africa (Palgrave, 2016); and author of numerous articles on language planning and policy, multilingualism, code switching, World Englishes, and African linguistics. His articles have appeared in Chicago Linguistic Society, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Multilingua, World Englishes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language Problems and Language Planning, and Applied Linguistics. Dovid  Katz  is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Creative Industries, at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU), Vilnius, Lithuania. His articles have appeared extensively in the fields of Yiddish linguistics and literature, Lithuanian Jewish culture, and East European Holocaust studies (and current debates). He is editor of DefendingHistory.com and is preparing his Yiddish Cultural Dictionary. Helen Kelly-Holmes  is Professor of Applied Languages in the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics and also Director of the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research concerns sociolinguistics, and she focuses on the interrelationship between media and language and on the economic aspects of multilingualism with a particular interest in minority languages and the global political economy of English. Kelly-Holmes is Co-Editor of Language Policy and of Palgrave’s Language and Globalization series. Kelly-Holmes is also Adjunct Professor in Discourse Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Verena Krausneker  is a Sociolinguist at the University of Vienna, Austria, where she has been a lecturer and researcher since 2002. Her main research focus is on language policies and sign language rights, especially in Deaf education. From 2001 to 2007 she served as board member of the Austrian Deaf Association. From 2009 to 2015 she served the World Federation of the Deaf as an expert. Her latest research project produced an overview of bimodal bilingual education in Europe: www.univie.ac.at/ map-designbilingual. Elżbieta  Kuzborska is a Human Rights Expert on minorities. She was senior minorities fellow at the Office of UN High Commission for Human Rights in Geneva in 2014 and has collaborated as a legal advisor and trainer on human and minority rights issues with various NGOs, including the European Foundation of Human Rights. She has also been a Law Lecturer at the University of Białystok in Vilnius, the sole foreign university in Lithuania teaching in Polish. She is a board member of the Association of Polish Academics in Lithuania, as well as a member of the Association of Polish Lawyers in Lithuania. Matthieu LeBlanc  is Full Professor in the Department of Translation and Modern Languages and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Université de Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada. A former professional translator, he holds a PhD in sociolinguistics. His research focuses on the translator’s status and translation practices in an increasingly automated working environment, as well as on language policies and the role of translation in bilingual settings.

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Notes on Contributors

Heiko F. Marten  is Director of the DAAD Information Centre for the Baltic States in Riga. He holds a PhD from FU Berlin and has worked as Lecturer and Researcher in German Studies and Applied Linguistics at Tallinn University, Rēzekne Academy of Technologies, and University of Latvia. His research fields include language policy, linguistic landscapes, multilingualism in the Baltic states, and motivation and practices in language learning. Philip McDermott  is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. His research focuses on cultural and linguistic diversity and its implications for policy. McDermott has received research funding from sources such as the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Department for International Development. From 2015 to 2016, he held a prestigious Charlemont Scholarship from the Royal Irish Academy. He has conducted work relating to cultural diversity and minorities for external bodies such as the European Commission and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural heritage in Washington, DC. Tom Moring  (Dr Pol. Sc.) is Professor Emeritus in Communication and Journalism at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has worked as a journalist, radio director, and Chair of the Board of a Swedish newspaper publisher in Finland. Moring has also served as part-time Professor at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences and as an expert for the OSCE and the Council of Europe. His articles have appeared widely on linguistic minorities and the media. Joshua  Nash  is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research intersects ethnography, the anthropology of religion, architecture, pilgrimage studies, and language documentation. He has conducted linguistic fieldwork on Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island, South Pacific, Kangaroo Island, South Australia, and New Zealand; environmental and ethnographic fieldwork in Vrindavan, India; and architectural research in outback Australia. He is concerned with philosophical and ontological foundations of language and place. Máiréad Nic Craith  is Professor of European Culture and Heritage and Director of Research, School of Social Sciences (SoSS), in Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, Malaysia, Dubai). Language, power, and cultural policy have been a sustained focus of interest throughout Máiréad’s academic career and she has acted as a consultant for the UN on heritage and human rights. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she has held visiting positions in several universities in Ireland, the UK, Germany, and the US.  Her current research focuses on an Irish-language memoir from the west of Ireland. Bernadette  O’Rourke is Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies in Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. She is Chair of the European Co-operation in Science and Technology (COST) Action IS1306 entitled New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges (2013–2018). Her research focuses on the dynamics of multilingual

  Notes on Contributors 

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societies, language policy, and minority language communities. She holds a Fellowship at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She is conducting an ethnographic case study of grass-roots revitalization efforts in Galicia as part of its interdisciplinary research programme on Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe (SMiLE). She is editor of the Small Languages and Small Language Communities section of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Donna Patrick  is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. Her research in linguistic anthropology focuses on Indigenous and minority language politics, rights, and practices and has included work on language endangerment, language socialization, language education policy and practice, critical literacies, and social semiotics. Her Arctic-focused research includes, most recently, work that involves participatory action research with Inuit in Ottawa and Montreal; this explores Inuit identities, life histories, literacies, and the construction of place in transnational contexts through objects, food, stories, and community radio. Anne Pauwels  is Professor of Sociolinguistics at SOAS, University of London. Her research areas of interest include transnational multilingualism, language policy in higher education, and language and gender. Her publications cover these fields with the most recent book being Language Maintenance and Shift (2016). Sari Pietikäinen  is Professor of Discourse Studies at the Department of Language and Communication, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses on discourse, identity and social inequalities, multilingualism in transforming peripheries, and language in expanding Arctic economies of tourism, nature resource extraction, and sports. Her recent co-authored publications include Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods: Studying Language Issues that Matter (2018) and Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances (2016). She is the Principal Investigator of an Academy of Finland (SA) research project called Cold Rush: Language and Identity in Expanding Arctic Economies (2016–2020). Federica  Prina  is  a Research Associate at the Department of Central and East European Studies (CEES), University of Glasgow, Scotland, and former researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg. Her work focuses on national cultural autonomy in the Russian Federation and cultural and linguistic rights of national minorities. She cooperates with various human rights organizations. Maria Rieder  is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research focuses on social and economic inequality, minority communities and languages, language in the media, social movements, and intercultural ­communication, with a specific focus on the role of language in the production of power and social conflict. Her articles have appeared in books and journals, and she is preparing manuscripts on the Irish Traveller Cant, Economic Inequality in the Press, and the Irish Water Charges Movement.

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Notes on Contributors

Clinton Robinson  is an Independent Consultant in education and development, undertaking strategy development, programme evaluations, and research across Asia and Africa and at a global level. He previously spent six years with UNESCO and ten years in Africa in NGO work. With a focus on the role of education in local and national development, he has a particular interest in sociocultural dimensions, as well as in basic education, language in education, literacy, and adult learning. Judit Molnar Sansum  is Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her work focuses on national cultural autonomy in Hungary, Romania, and Serbia. She has also researched processes of immigrant integration and was involved in various projects on borderland studies (University of Miskolc, Queen’s University Belfast, and University of Washington). Peter Sercombe  is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, the UK. He has taught mainly in Brunei, Malaysia, Turkey, and the UK. An applied linguist, his research interests include cultural maintenance and adaptation, multilingualism, and the sociolinguistics of language use and language change, with particular reference to minority groups. David  J. Smith  is Professor and Alec Nove Chair in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His main research interests are ethnic politics and the governance of diversity in Central and Eastern Europe, in both contemporary and historical perspectives. He is Co-Editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Graham Turner  is Director of the Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies in Scotland at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has worked as an academic on applied and social aspects of sign linguistics since 1988. Luk Van Mensel  is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Namur, Belgium, and a visiting lecturer at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His articles on a variety of subjects in SLA and sociolinguistics, including the economic aspects of multilingualism, language education policy, multilingualism in the family, and linguistic landscapes, have been published. John Walsh  is Senior Lecturer in Irish at the School of Languages, Literature and Cultures, National University of Ireland, Galway. He teaches sociolinguistics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and is the Co-Director of MSc in Multilingualism. Previously he has served as Vice Dean for Research in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies (2012–2015) and as Head of the Discipline of Irish (2014–2015). His articles have appeared extensively on the sociolinguistics of the Irish language, language policy, language ideology, minority language media, and language and socioeconomic development. From 2013 to 2017, he was a leading member of the European Co-operation in Science and Technology (COST) Action—‘New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Challenges and Opportunities’ (IS1306).

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Gillian  Wigglesworth  is Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and chief investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Languages. Her research focuses on the languages Indigenous children living in remote communities are learning as their first language and how these interact with English once they attend school. Colin  H.  Williams is Honorary Professor, Cardiff University, Wales, a Senior Research Associate of the Von Hűgel Institute, and Visiting Fellow, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge University. He is also an Honorary Professor of Celtic Studies at the University of Aberdeen and the University of the Highlands and Islands, the UK.  His prime research interests focus on multilingual jurisdictions and minority rights, official language strategies and policy, while he has secondary interests in the field of peace and reconstruction in post-conflict societies.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 15.1 Fig. 18.1 Fig. 18.2

Fig. 18.3 Fig. 18.4 Fig. 22.1 Fig. 22.2

Number of armed conflicts by type of conflict, 1946–2016. (Dupuy, K., Gates, S., Nygård, H., Rudolfsen, I., Siri, A., Strand, H. and Urdal, H. (2017). Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2016. Conflict Trends, 2. Available at: https://www.prio.org/utility/ DownloadFile.ashx?id=1373&type=publicationfile [Accessed 2 Apr. 2018]) 58 Map of the four Inuit land-claim regions in Canada. (Source: Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami) 262 Places named in the chapter. Map created by Brenda Thornley 360 Southeast Asian nations (except for East Timor). (DMaps: Map of Southeast Asia. http://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=5268 &lang=en Accessed 18 June 2018) 385 Schematic Language Choice Model for Frisian and Dutch on social media. (Jongbloed-Faber [2015], translation provided by Lysbeth Jongbloed-Faber)462 Point density maps of geo-tagged tweets in English and Welsh by users who tweet in Welsh. (Unpublished analysis by G.  Higgs, University of South Wales, on data provided by K. Scannell, Saint Louis University, 2014) 472 Irish language Twitter conversations, among top 500 tweeters (Scannell 2013) 472 Welsh language Twitter conversations, among top 500 tweeters (Scannell 2013) 473 150 years in the life of Yiddish 576 The two kinds of contemporary Yiddish 577

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List of Tables

Table 9.1 Stages of reversing language shift Table 15.1 Patterns of language use in Sukang Primary School

241 396

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1 Introduction: Minority Languages and Communities in a Changing World Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and Bernadette O’Rourke

According to recent accounts ‘one half of our planet’s population speaks one or more of the 23 “top” languages, the other half speak the remaining 7,074’.1 In other words, most of the world’s languages are to some degree threatened. Under the effect of globalization, the pressure of dominant languages on minority languages is relentless, partly because many users of smaller languages can see more opportunities if they switch to a dominant one. Such homogenizing trends are also at play in countries, where cross-border migrants are expected to become proficient in their host language. However, from the Arctic to Latin America, through Europe to New Zealand, there is also considerable resilience among minority language speakers, who wish to reclaim their own language in spite of prevailing global pressures. Given these conflicting and overlapping forces, the time is ripe to assemble the latest research from a wide range of different relevant disciplines, in order to explain and understand the challenges to both minority policy actors and community identities in the face of migration, mobility, and globalizing influences. It is an immense privilege to have been able to assemble in this Handbook’s perspectives by renowned scholars in international law, social anthropology, G. Hogan-Brun (*) School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. O’Rourke Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK e-mail: B.M.A.O’[email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_1

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history, linguistics, education, and economics. Among the topics covered are the politics of recognition and autonomy, the role of economic and linguistic markets, the potential of social media and new speakers, language revitalization and shift, and the continuing debate over the use of minority languages in education. These chapters offer a compelling treatment of the complexity of issues in the legal, educational, and policy fields that affect minority language communities around the world today. One of the problems facing those interested in this field of study is that a plethora of definitions is used to shape approaches to minority language speakers and their rights, as applied in instruments and standards at regional and international levels. Such differences are rooted in diverging attitudes towards minority language speakers. Varying concepts of justice and law have resulted from changing power dynamics. Unpeeling such different understandings on what constitutes a minority, by whom, where, and under what circumstances is the red thread that runs throughout this collection. For the most part, the concept of ‘minority language communities’ is used to describe numerically inferior groups of people who speak a language different from that of the majority in a given country, who are in a non-dominant position, and, to some extent, who seek to preserve their distinct linguistic identity. The term is based chiefly on factual criteria, which means a minority language community in a particular country (e.g. speakers of German in Hungary or Denmark) may constitute a majority in a kin state (i.e. Austria or Germany). This collection is divided into seven parts, as follows: Minority language rights, protection, governance (Part I); recognition, self-determination, autonomy (Part II); migration, settlement, mobility (Part III); economics, markets, commodification (Part IV); education, literacy, access (Part V); media, public usage, visibility (Part VI); endangerment, ecosystems,  resilience (Part VII). The Handbook’s 22 chapters that are summarized below present richly detailed accounts on the history and the current state of particular minority language contexts across the world. Our hope is that these chapters shine a critical light on broad areas of concern surrounding minority language communities today.

 art I: Minority Language Rights, Protection, P Governance The first set of chapters (2, 3, and 4) considers different definitions and applications of minority language rights and standards. Language is central to human nature and is an expression of identity. As such, issues surrounding language are particularly important to linguistic minority communities who

  Introduction: Minority Languages and Communities in a Changing… 

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seek to maintain their identity. Securing rights for the minority can require legislation and standards to be put in place in contexts where the minorities are subjected to marginalization, exclusion, and discrimination. Fernand de Varennes and Elżbieta Kuzborska set the scene by focussing our attention on the various (and at times almost contradictory) understandings of minority-­ related concepts involved in different supra-national regimes. The fundamental questions in their chapter are as follows: What are the minorities intended to be, the holders of language rights or the beneficiaries of state obligations? And what is the extent and nature of such rights? The authors show how the use of terms is fraught with uncertainties, disagreements, and contradictions from the perspective of international law. Examples include ‘national minorities’ versus ‘minorities’, ‘protection of linguistic-cultural diversity’ versus ‘protection of the human rights of minorities’, and designations such as ‘indigenous’ versus ‘autochtonous’ minorities. They unravel some of the disparate positions that underpin these notions ranging from divergent points of view as to what constitutes a minority, to the substance and objectives being addressed in international and regional instruments by the protection of minorities or minority rights. Taking a long look at ‘minority rights’ at the supra-national level, the authors also consider some of the challenges in the future. An example of such challenges is Russia. With its unusual federal, ethnic, and linguistic mixture this country has a history of compliance and conflict with international minority language rights standards. In his chapter Bill Bowring explores minority language legislation, rights, and practices within the Federation’s unique multilingual structure. He sketches developments in the Russian Empire and the USSR, traces the consequences of the collapse of the USSR and the ‘parade of sovereignties’ of 1990–1992, and then ­introduces the Constitution of 1993 and its radical provisions. Paying particular attention to the situation of the Volga Tatars in Tatarstan, he supplies a precise comparative analysis of the policy towards minority languages and communities in the state. He discusses the similarities and differences amongst the subjects of Russia’s constitutionally asymmetric Federation and explores the extent to which the situation in Tatarstan is different from that in the fellow republics. He goes on to show how there has been a significant shift away under President Putin from special status for ‘national’, ethnic languages in the context of the Federation. The chapter concludes with the dramatic events of the past few years and considers how matters stand at the time of writing, asking: Will these recent developments in language policy mean the end of diversity in Russia? Another complex language scenario is in Ireland. An uneven framework exists there that offers Irish mostly limited or symbolic protection. Whilst

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overtly, the pre-eminence of Irish is anchored constitutionally and is reflected in aspects of public discourse, covertly national policy promotes the dominance of English. Irish is practically treated as a minority concern. Colin H. Williams and John Walsh look into the manner in which minority language governance and regulation have been developed over the past generation from the perspective of international law, with particular focus on minority rights and the growth of the regulatory state. They argue that the government demonstrates limited practical engagement with current Irish policy, whose legislative and regulatory framework reflects a mixture of both the historical approach to Irish as the ‘national language’ and more contemporary ideological stances. Against this background they examine the role and general contribution of ombudsmen, commissioners, and regulators and offer a case study example of the potential impact of the International Association of Language Commissioners (IALC). Drawing out the implications of the IALC and Irish for minority language vitality, they suggest that even where supportive infrastructure for language promotion, protection, and regulation may be in place, their adequacy is demonstrated in the manner of their implementation within the relevant jurisdiction and their full incorporation into the machinery of government.

 art II: Recognition, Self-determination, P Autonomy The second group of chapters (5, 6, 7, and 8) moves away from a legal minority rights and protection perspective to focus on the recognition of language rights and the idea of (cultural) autonomy. These have become key elements in a much broader set of legal and policy tools to enable minority language speakers to be recognized and treated as equal members of societies. The chapters highlight the many different ways in which the right of self-determination can manifest itself in polities, ranging from antagonism to basic non-­ discrimination provisions and complex federal and autonomy regimes as in the case of devolution in Spain and the United Kingdom. In his contribution on the politics of recognition in polities, Christian Giordano distinguishes between nation-states (as models of culturally homogenized countries such as in France or Germany) and language plural ‘consociations’2 (as practised in Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, or Malaysia). In differentiating between classic and liberal polity types, he proposes that a liberal-oriented political agenda cannot necessarily be exported to plural societies nor can that of plural societies necessarily be transported to other societies. Moreover, he points out that

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practically all these diverse types of governance of multiculturality have a wide range of problems, especially regarding their recognition of ethno-cultural and linguistic diversity in a globalized world. As he sees it, this is because recognition of linguistic plurality is still rather problematic even though it is a matter of fact in most polities. In his view this challenges the soundness of universalistic models of interpretation. This explains his call for a differentiated politics of recognition in lieu of paradigms that see cultural conformity as a conduit to solidarity among citizens and multilingualism (often a feature of minority groups) as a threat to national social cohesion. There is a widening perception amongst international organizations and states that their application of language rights is crucial for the fostering of peace, stability, and security. Language rights might then be even more salient for those societies that are deeply fractured along ethnic lines but which are transitioning from a period of conflict to peace. Even after conflict, language can continue to be a symbolic marker of competing groups with differing political aspirations. Máiréad Nic Craith and Philip McDermott explore how language rights in deeply divided places have been integrated into formalized peace agreements, treaties, and/or new constitutions. They evaluate the routes of recognition in deeply divided societies along the spectrum from antagonism to reconciliation for minority languages, with emphasis on the effect on the utility of language rights as a peace-building tool. Their chapter presents a critical analysis of both the transformative and the disruptive potential of the politics of language with reference to their homeland Ireland and in regions such as Guatemala, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and the Ukraine. Beginning with the theoretical notion of recognition and how these debates are particularly relevant to post-conflict places, they move on to consider how language rights are applied or ignored at different levels in such wide-ranging political settings. They consider in their chapter the various schools of thought which champion the notion that recognizing linguistic minorities is crucial in the mitigation of conflict versus those which are more sceptical, who view such processes as responsible for further politicizing ethnic identities in already fragile circumstances. In Eastern Europe, especially in new states born out of the ashes of the multicultural empires, changes to restrictive attitudes as regards minorities were sought during the rising tide of linguistic nationalism to manage linguistic and cultural affairs at the national level. It was here where the concept of national cultural autonomy (NCA) was developed in the nineteenth century by Austro-Marxists.3 Based on the notion of the ‘personality principle’, the idea was that communities can be autonomous (and sovereign) within a multiethnic state, regardless of whether they have, or identify with, a particular

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territory. David Smith, Federica Prina, and Judit Molnar Samsun discuss in their chapter how this notion was rediscovered in the 1990s and incorporated into the law and practice of ethnic communities in four countries (Hungary, Estonia, Serbia, and Russia). They also go into how aspects of NCA were applied in Belgium and Canada and in arrangements for the accommodation of indigenous peoples. Using a comparative approach, they reflect upon the potential contribution of the NCA principle today in advancing the linguistic rights of national minorities. They propose that this approach may serve as a platform to articulate concerns of relevance to national minorities, encompassing minority participation and multilingual education, thereby also preserving linguistic pluralism. National and international policies for the recognition of the Deaf community’s right to self-ownership and support of their sign languages have undergone a protracted evolution. Since the European Parliament’s resolve in 19884 that member states should grant their indigenous sign languages equivalent status to that of the national spoken languages, countries have gradually begun to offer some degree of official acknowledgement. In their chapter, Maartje De Meulder, Verena Krausneker, Graham Turner, and John Bosco Conama catch up with recent developments and critically discuss how the twenty-first century has brought a unique dynamic for Sign Language Communities (SLCs) in response to threats and opportunities resulting from changes in both external and internal language environments. They scrutinize those changes, as well as policy and planning aimed at sign languages, and explain how linguistic rights of deaf signers heavily depend on interpreting services and why this is problematic. The current ideological climate means that linguistic human rights, educational linguistic rights, self-determination, and the right to physical integrity are at the top of the SLCs’ agenda. While many aspects that affect SLCs are similar to those faced by other linguistic minorities, some issues are more specific, since SLCs are also seen as people with disabilities. In particular, both the SLCs’ long history of dealing with attempts at medical normalization and the current genetic discourse that questions the signers’ right to exist raise concerns about the long-term vitality of various sign languages.

Part III: Migration, Settlement, Mobility The next chapters (9 and 10) deal with the effect of globalization and ensuing social mobility as contemporary phenomena on language use, maintenance, and shift. They examine the complex, multidimensional nature of

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globalization as it pertains to minority language communities in different parts of the world. As Anne Pauwels explains in her contribution, there is a growing sense that the ‘transition’—from migration and settlement to frequent mobility—forces researchers to rethink the classical approaches to language maintenance (LM) and language shift (LS) in the context of immigrant language communities, on the one hand, and indigenous language minorities, on the other hand.5 She begins with a review of the history of research on LM and LS in transnational (or migrant) contexts, covering its emergence, development, and expansion during the twentieth century. She then goes on to present the theories used to understand these processes and introduces the main approaches used to investigate and account for differences in the language practices of various ethnolinguistic groups. She considers how globalization has significantly altered what constitutes ‘migration’ today. Rather than seeing it primarily as a process resulting in ‘permanent’ (re)settlement elsewhere, she discusses how migration results in ongoing mobility, using examples of diasporic settings of communities moving from Europe to the ‘Anglophone’ world and of nonEuropean groups moving to Western Europe (post-1960). Her chapter outlines how in turn these changes in social mobility affect language practices in diaspora settings today and impact on our understanding of what constitutes LM.  In her conclusion she points to the challenges of this change for future work on LM and LS since classical approaches are less suited to deal with today’s greater fluidity of the linguistic scenarios, especially in urban settings. As Donna Patrick’s reminds us in her contribution, a complex set of factors is driving language change and decline in the far North. Her research in Canada’s Inuit homelands has over the years explored local, regional, national, and global influences on the languages used (among them Inuktitut and Inuvialuktun) and the challenges faced by speakers with regard to linguistic, cultural, and environmental sustainability. The effects of colonization, industrialization, and environmental degradation have accelerated this trend over the course of the twentieth century and are now compounded by global warming and the rapid rise of communication networks, scientific technologies, and extractive resource industries. All these developments are affecting the future of Arctic peoples and their languages. She shows how despite these challenges the Inuit communities are continuing to maintain and shape their languages as active agents through everyday interactions with their land and through channels that have opened up with globalization.

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Part IV: Economics, Markets, Commodification The role of minority languages in economics currently receives growing attention in the research literature and is treated in the next set of chapters (11, 12, and 13). As is evident in Wales and Catalonia, the health of a minority language is prone to improve when speakers become productive in the economic domain. If the revenue generated through ‘peripheral’ entrepreneurship flows back to the community, this can be empowering and aid regional economic development. Both Welsh and Catalan have the vitality and status to be included as languages within educational systems and to be deployed as a resource. Elsewhere however, for example, in parts of Africa, even the official recognition of selected indigenous languages does not necessarily translate into greater prestige, status, and usage for those languages.6 Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu sees such failure as lying in the planners’ lack of focus on the link between an education carried out through the medium of an indigenous language and the economic returns for the target populations. Examining the perennial question of the role in education of Africa’s indigenous languages, he argues that policies designed to promote indigenous languages in different social spheres must also demonstrate the demand for these languages. He proposes that to succeed, such policies must corroborate a language’s usefulness, not only in terms of it as a means of communication but also with explicit reference to the material benefits that speakers can expect.7 Drawing on theoretical developments in language economics8 and critical theory,9 he posits that the demand for indigenous languages can be established in the light of Bourdieu’s notions of social fields, capital, and markets, whose properties afford linguistic products with a certain ‘value’.10 This view sees language not solely as a means of communication but also as symbolic capital that can be gained and lost, which may be transformed to economic capital with impact on language vitality.11 The economic potential of minority languages has also been linked with processes of commodification, where language (skills) are seen as a resource that can be bought and sold.12 While global developments variously affect the role and position of many minority languages, many users find new opportunities through localizing forces that form part of the massively growing language industries. Sari Pietikäinen, Helen Kelly-Holmes, and Maria Rieder explore how selected minority languages figure in economic development and point to ways in which they can be invested with values of expertise, distinction, and authenticity. Drawing on their studies of minority and indigenous language practices and discourses in peripheral, multilingual Irish and Sámi

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sites, the authors discuss the changing and expanding role of minority languages in the key economic domains of advertising and marketing, tourism, media, and in job markets. They also reflect on the conditions and consequences of economic processes as indices of the exchange value of minority languages in changing markets. The effects of the globalized economy on the industrialization of translation are the focus of Matthieu LeBlanc. In his chapter he cautions against the risks of rapid rationalization and the utilitarian instrumentalism it engenders for linguistic minority communities. In particular, he explores the work of professional translators in minority language communities in Canada. A former translator himself, the author is more concerned here with cultures of production in the public domain than with cultures of reception. After reviewing some of the theoretical literature, he dissects the impact of translation on the shaping and dissemination of minority languages. He draws attention to the changing practices in professional (non-literary) translation as a result of increased technological automation and industrialization. Offering a case study of the transformations that have marked the government of Canada’s Translation Bureau since the mid-1990s, he shows how these changes put minority languages everywhere under pressure in terms of both access to translation resources and pressures on translators through shrinking deadlines, which has implications for the quality and legibility of texts. His chapter illustrates how translation is intrinsically linked with language ideologies, language policies, power relations, language rights, and identity and why translation activities figure as key tools in the (re-)construction and development of minority languages.

Part V: Education, Literacy, Access Chapters 14, 15, and 16 cover educational policy and practice for indigenous and immigrant minorities. Across the world, speakers of minority languages often have to make difficult choices between investing in language for social mobility on the one hand and preserving the cultural heritage of their community on the other hand. Often, language choices in education result in response to market-driven values. Such decisions about languages in education mean that children can grow up without knowing their own mother tongue and end up disenfranchised. In fact, an estimated 40% of people have no access to education in a language they understand.13 Being taught in a language that is not their own leaves many with a cognitive gap that they cannot bridge. Yet ample research evidence14 shows that this deficit will be

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reduced if pupils are taught in their mother tongue during the course of primary school or even beyond it. But the supply of teachers and materials is one of the many challenges to mother tongue-medium education in the context of small languages. Refreshingly, around the world, there are numerous local initiatives that serve as examples of good practice. Particularly successful are community-­ based education programmes such as those emerging in the Philippines, Mexico, parts of Africa, and in Australia where indigenous speakers are trained to teach in the community languages. In their chapter on the language practices of indigenous Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, Samantha Disbray and Gillian Wigglesworth review the considerable variety of studies on young Australian Aboriginals’ early language learning environments and processes. These are mainly youngsters from remote settings where English is taught at school, but it is neither their first language, nor the language of the community in which the children live. The authors also examine more recent investigations that show how pupils acquire some remaining traditional languages through child-directed speech styles and practices. In this complex linguistic environment, the development of new and emerging contact languages (both mixed languages and creoles) is found to influence the ways in which children and young people alter and innovate their language ecologies. The focus then shifts to language, education, and nation-building in Southeast Asia’s mainland and maritime areas. Peter Sercombe examines the deployment in states of language policies as instruments of controlling and assimilating indigenous populations. He uses a social justice perspective15 in tracing the key factors that affect the cultural, economic, and political marginalization of native minority groups. Presenting a case study of that of the Najib in Malaysia, he points out that mostly these indigenous people tend to be few in number and are frequently materially poor. They inhabit interior areas that are removed from centres of power. In terms of social organization, they are generally distinctive from politically major groups. Similar to many other native populations, they are egalitarian, with an accompanying a­ nimistic belief system, rather than being socially hierarchical and subscribing to a major religion. During the course of regional independence efforts, the socioeconomic position of these minorities has tended to decline. This chapter explores the manner in which this is happening, with specific reference to current language education policy and practices. We then turn to issues of literacy in minority languages and their relationship to current and future social and economic development. Clinton Robinson explores in his chapter the purposes and rationale of minority language literacy

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in relation to national and global forces in language use with a focus on language endangerment, preservation, and shift. He discusses approaches to literacy provision in  local minority or non-dominant languages, drawing on practice in Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, and Senegal. He examines similarities and differences in the three countries and compares policy and practice with respect to multilingualism, policy formulation, and programme structure. In his assessment of the prospects for literacy provision in local languages he sets out questions for multilingual policies and practices in the context of international education frameworks and with reference to issues of inequality, marginalization, and opportunity. He stresses the need to address policy considerations, community engagement, the nature of the learning process, and the fact that languages are simultaneously both instruments of communication and symbols of identity. The principal argument here is that literacy in non-dominant languages increases educational opportunity and cultural affirmation for those in minority communities and strengthens their equitable place in society.

Part VI: Media, Public Usage, Visibility Given the threat to many of the world’s languages, new technologies including digitization, electronic mapping, and social media can play an important part in supporting the future of many minority language communities. This role in their vitality of the media is explored in Chapters 17, 18, and 19. In the context of globalization, questions concerning the effect that the media might have on minority languages and their users have become more urgent. In his contribution, Tom Moring explores the impact of policies, power relations, and citizenship in a changing media environment and takes issue with existing financing and organization of media services for, of, and on minority language communities. Covering a range of existing international and national policies for minority media, he examines the effect of their implementation on users. He also discusses the complexities of lived citizenship in the context of an environment with changing, individualized media habits and the role of e-technologies for LM and revitalization. Concentrating on web-based communication technologies, Daniel Cunliffe provides insights into current understandings of the relationship between social media and minority LM and revitalization. He examines the extent to which social media provide permissive environments for minority language use. He also discusses the factors that influence the language behaviours of minority language speakers on social media and the potential impact of online

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media habits on the minority language itself. With specific reference to the Welsh context, he offers a comprehensive overview of what is known about the use of Welsh in social media, from policy perspectives down to individual user behaviour. Drawing on a range of academic and non-academic sources, he paves the way for methods and perspectives relevant to other minority languages on social media. Recent research has also focussed attention on public ‘(in)visibility’ of minority languages and their promotion, for example, through bilingual road signs, shop signage, and product packaging or instructions. The chapter by Durk Gorter, Heiko Marten, and Luk Van Mensel looks at minority language use in the linguistic landscape (LL). It is embedded in studies that investigate frequencies, functions, and power relations between languages and their speakers in the public space. This line of research aims to understand how the production and perception of signs reflect and simultaneously shape speakers’ realities and sense of belonging. In this sense, the LL is seen as a dynamic place where processes of minorization take place. The visibility or invisibility of minority languages and the functional and symbolic relationships to majority languages are in many ways directly related to negotiations of minorities’ place in society. The authors discuss which policy categories and domains of language use are of particular relevance for understanding minority languages in the LL. Issues of conflict, contestation, and exclusion scrutinized are illustrated with examples from Israel, Canada, Belgium, the Basque Country, and Friesland.

Part VII: Endangerment, Ecosystems, Resilience UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (1995–)16 lists 7097 languages currently spoken across the world, of which an estimated 2464 are at risk of falling out of use (or endangered). In appraising this situation, the Handbook’s concluding chapters (20, 21, and 22) consider minority ecosystems and issues of resilience. Language decline17 happens for multiple reasons, across our planet, and is often the result of speakers’ lacking status in society. Among the causal factors are environmental and social economic drivers. Researchers18 forecast that language-rich territories undergoing rapid economic growth, for example, in the tropics and in the Himalayas, will be the primary areas of small-language losses in the near future. They call for conservation efforts to focus on these parts of the world. In its linkage with language rights and minority rights considerations, minority language revitalization is

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a contested issue in some camps. As we shall see below, policies19 aimed at the protection and promotion of threatened languages vary. David Bradley’s chapter discusses the situation of endangered minority languages and the natural tendency to LS in different contexts of multilingual communities. In his native Australia, for example, an estimated two-thirds of indigenous languages have died out. He sees minority languages around the world at risk because, on the one hand, speakers who seek new opportunities often end up valuing their own languages less and, on the other hand, dominant national and international languages are taking over more domains of use, primarily in education. He observes how once the process of LS has started, it is difficult to reverse. Taking his cue from resilience thinking, he points to ways how minority communities can choose to halt or reverse LS, reclaim their language, and achieve a new equilibrium in parts of the world. He then considers the extent and effects of LS as well as some of the major factors that affect language endangerment. In conclusion, and suggesting possible means to prevent LS, he presents an overview of approaches to enable minorities to preserve and revitalize the use of their traditional language(s). Views differ on to what extent the numerous pidgins and creoles spoken in Australia, Oceania, and across the world are endangered languages, whether it is desirable to save them and what could be done to save or revitalize them. There is some uncertainty too as to whether these are indigenous or minority contact languages, which has repercussions on their recognition in many places. In his chapter Joshua Nash uses a language ecological approach to look into the whole context in which small contact languages function. In particular, he explores the role of the natural environment, small societies, and geographic isolation in the development and change of Pitcairn and Norfolk, the historically and linguistically related languages of Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island, respectively. A general summary is presented of more than a decade of research and thinking involving ecolinguistic relations and how such views relate to work on minority (island) contact languages and specifically contact ‘Englishes’ of the Pacific. The author then explores how such minority languages can be perceived in terms of their ecological embeddedness within requisite natural and sociocultural environments. The final chapter in this Handbook explores the shifting interplay of ideology and language planning, mainly in lexicon and orthography, from the late nineteenth century to the present, illustrating inter alia, some of the possibilities inherent to stateless languages that exhibit geographic and ideological fragmentation. Dovid Katz provides a narrative for the current conundrum of Yiddish, namely, the near-total alienation between a small group of language planning specialists and native speakers of the last generation of pre-­Holocaust

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speakers. The author contends that by adopting Heinz Kloss’s Ausbau theory (of developing and protecting smaller languages that are deemed ‘too similar’ to much larger, more powerful languages by way of normativist intervention) the language revivalists inadvertently developed an environment hostile to native speakers, while needlessly reviving pre-World War I debates about the relationship to German. This has led to a field of Yiddish that studies a partially artificial variety of the language while largely ignoring the empirically real varieties developing among hundreds of thousands of speakers. The author proposes reconciliation based on a shift to a more descriptivist stance. A brief summary of the 1000-year history of Yiddish is provided to place the more recent developments in context.

Further Directions As many chapters in this Handbook show, globalization has focussed our attention on how we define ‘linguistic minority’, moving beyond the rights of indigenous minorities and pointing to the need to include transnational migrants and their language rights. Overall, the spotlight has shifted to include both mobile and new speakers20 with complex language profiles in new spaces, the opportunities and challenges this brings, and the more fluid nature of virtual and digital communities. We get a sense in this collection of how scholars are rethinking existing theoretical approaches to better understand LM and LS in minority communities within the broader framework of language diversity and multilingualism. As suggested by one of our anonymous reviewers, the obvious question that now arises is: ‘How can the classical macro-models, used to understand why minority languages are maintained or not, be redesigned so as to better capture and harness the diversity we now see in many settings?’. Or, put another way, ‘how to move away from a focus on the methodological nationalism in which much work has hitherto tended to be caught up to re-thinking a sociolinguistics of mobility’21 that reflects the multiplicity of languages, social groups, and communities of practice which minority language research seeks to capture. Naturally, language diversity and migration are not new social phenomena. Our world has always been linguistically plural, and humankind has always found ways to get by. How we engage with the languages of minorities and of speakers on the move has to do more with how we value their languages and harness their potential as a resource. Ideally we need to foster inclusive societies that recognize the intrinsic value of languages and do not discriminate against speakers or signers of any languages. If this goal can be achieved, then

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the world would be taking a giant step towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals of ‘ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all’.22

Notes 1. In Lo Bianco, J. (2017) Resolving ethnolinguistic conflict in multi-ethnic societies, 28. April 2017, p. 1. 2. Giordano uses the typology developed by Michael Walzer (1997). 3. The notion NCA was developed by Austro-Marxists Karl Renner (2005) and Otto Bauer (2000). 4. European Parliament Resolution on Sign Languages (1988). 5. On models developed in the study of LM and LS phenomena, see, for example, Conklin and Lourie, in Clyne (2003, Chapter 2, pp. 53–54). 6. See Bamgbose (2000) and Koffi (2012); on prestige and status in language planning, see Haarmann (1990). 7. Kamwangamalu (2010, 2016). 8. On ways in which linguistic and economic variables influence one another, see Ginsburgh and Weber (2016a, b), Grin et al. (2010), and Hogan-Brun (2017). 9. See Tollefson (2013). 10. Bourdieu (1991). 11. For more information on language ‘vitality’, see UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment guide (2011), developed as a tool for Language Assessment and Planning. 12. On commodification see Heller (2010); on how language and culture are increasingly being associated less with rights and heritage (or ‘pride’) and more with economic benefits (or ‘profit’) see also Duchêne and Heller (2006). 13. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (2016). 14. Kathleen Heugh, Interview on 15 February 2017. 15. Cf. Piller (2016). 16. Language Atlas, UNESCO: http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/ 17. See footnote 11 on measuring language vitality and endangerment and also the Ethnologue’s EGIDS scale https://www.ethnologue.com/about/languagestatus 18. For calculations on language extinction risk, see Amano et al. (2014). 19. See Jones (2015a). 20. On the potentials of new speakers, see O’Rourke, Pujolar and Ramallo (2015). 21. Blommaert (2010). 22. See Salzburg Statement for a Multilingual World https://issuu.com/salzburgglobal/docs/salzburgglobal_statement_586

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References Amano, T., Sandel, B., Eager, H., Bulteau, E., Svenning, J.-C., Dalsgaard, B., Rahbek, C., Davies, R. G., & Sutherland, W. J. (2014). Global Distribution and Drivers of Language Extinction Risk. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 273, 2127–2133. Bamgbose, A. (2000). Language and Exclusion: The Consequences of Language Policies in Africa. Hamburg: LIT Verlag Munster. Bauer, O. (2000). The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. [Trans. from the French by G. Raymond and M. Adamson]. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clyne, M. (2003). Dynamics of Language Contact: English and Immigrant Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (2006). Language in Late Capitalism. Pride and Profit. London/New York: Routledge. Ginsburgh, V., & Weber, S. (Eds.). (2016a). The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ginsburgh, V., & Weber, S. (2016b). The Cambridge Handbook of Economics of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grin, F., Sfreddo, C., & Vaillancourt, F. (2010). The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace. London/New York: Routledge. Haarmann, H. (1990). Language Planning in the Light of a General Theory of Language: A Methodological Framework. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 86, 103–126. Heller, M. (2010). The Commodification of Language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114. Hogan-Brun, G. (2017). Linguanomics. What Is the Market Potential of Multilingualism? London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Jones, M. (2015a). Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamwangamalu, N.  M. (2010). Vernacularization, Globalization, and Language Economics in Non-English-Speaking Countries in Africa. Language Problems and Language Planning, 34(1), 1–23. Kamwangamalu, N.  M. (2016). Language Policy and Economics  – The Language Question in Africa. London: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers. Koffi, E. (2012). Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy: Game Theoretic Solutions. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Lo Bianco, J. (2017, April 28). Resolving Ethnolinguistic Conflict in Multi-ethnic Societies. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(0085), 1–3.

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O’Rourke, B., & Pujolar, J.  (2015). New Speakers and the Processes of New Speakerness Across Time and Space. Special Issue. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(2), 145–150. O’Rourke, B., Pujolar, J., & Ramallo, F. (Eds.). (2015). New Speakers of Minority Language: The Challenging Opportunity—Foreword. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 231, 1–20. Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renner, K. (2005). State and Nation. In E. Nimni (Ed.), National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics (pp. 15–47). London: Routledge. Tollefson, J. W. (2013). Language Policy in a Time of Crisis and Transformation. In J.  W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language Policies in Education  – Critical Issues (2nd ed., pp. 11–34). New York/ London: Routledge. Walzer, M. (1997). On Toleration. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

Online Resources Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. (2003). https:// ich.unesco.org/en/convention Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. (2005). http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. (1992). https://www.coe. int/en/web/european-charter-regional-or-minority-languages European Parliament Resolution on Sign Languages. (1988). http://www.policy.hu/ flora/ressign2.htm Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) Ethnologue. https:// www.ethnologue.com/about/language-status Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. (1998). https:// www.coe.int/en/web/minorities Mother Tongue Matters: Local Language as a Key to Effective Learning. UNESCO. (2008). http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001611/161121e.pdf Organization of African Unity (OAU). (2000). Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/culturalsurvival-quarterly/asmara-declaration-african-languages-and-literatures Salzburg Global Seminar. Interview with Kathleen Heugh, on 15 February 2017. http://www.salzburgglobal.org/topics/article/kathleen-heugh-this-is-not-a-gameany-longer-we-know-that-this-is-extremely-serious.html The European Year of Cultural Heritage. (2018). https://europa.eu/cultural-heritage/ about

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UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. (1995–). http://www.unesco. org/languages-atlas/ UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report. (2016). http://www.unesco.org/ new/en/media-services/single-view/news/40_dont_access_education_in_a_language_they_understand-1/ UNESCO’s Language Vitality guide. (2011). http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/ MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/unesco_language_vitaly_and_endangerment_ methodological_guideline.pdf

Part I Minority Language Rights, Protection, Governance

2 Minority Language Rights and Standards: Definitions and Applications at the Supranational Level Fernand de Varennes and Elżbieta Kuzborska

Introduction And one of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors; most surely there are signs in this for the learned. Qu’ran, Surah Ar-Rum [30: 22]

The world of minority and language rights at the supranational level is fraught with uncertainties, disagreements, and contradictions, ranging from quite divergent views as to what constitutes a minority to the substance and ­objectives being addressed in international and regional instruments for the protection of minorities or minority rights. This is true even within a single discipline such as international law. When one adds perspectives closely linked to other disciplines (sociology, sociolinguistics, linguistics, political science, etc.), one gets a tangle of widely differing, and at times inconsistent, approaches and understandings. This chapter tries to unravel some of these divergences by providing a framework to unpack two concepts that can be highly consequential in terms of minority language rights: firstly, who are the minorities intended to be the holders of language rights or the beneficiaries of state obligations, then secondly, what can be the extent and nature of such rights? The legal background F. de Varennes (*) Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland E. Kuzborska Association of Polish Academics in Lithuania, Vilnius, Poland © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_2

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of both authors means that their approaches will naturally tend to reflect this particular perspective. Before one considers the future, however, it is worthwhile to reflect on first how “minority rights” were dealt with historically at the supranational level with the brief experiment of the so-called minority treaties of the interwar period, which still impacts how these issues are perceived and treated today, before tackling the issues of what are the language rights of minorities.

 he Unfairly Unlamented and Misunderstood T Minority Treaties: Minority Rights in the Early Twentieth Century Does not the sun shine equally for the whole world? Do we not all equally breathe the air? Do you not feel shame at authorizing only three languages and condemning other people to blindness and deafness? Tell me, do you think that God is helpless and cannot bestow equality, or that he is envious and will not give it? (Constantine the Philosopher, ‘Saint Cyril’)

Human rights in general were absent from treaties prior to the Second World War, partially since the prevailing Westphalian doctrine of state sovereignty did not sit particularly well with any supranational intrusion on how state authorities treated their own citizens. One exception did exist, however, an exception not always widely acknowledged because it contradicts still widely held assumptions as to the nature and content of what were known in the interwar period as the “Minority Treaties”. To understand why there existed an exception to the absence of legal recognition of human rights in early treaties specifically for the protection of minorities, and why these have often been mischaracterised as treaties distinct from human rights instruments in general, one needs to contextualise how these documents emerged, and what they actually contained in substantive terms, a contextualisation deeply anchored in the antecedents and consequences of the First World War. While the factors for the conflict were numerous and had been in place for some time, the spark that led to the eruption of the global conflict was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by members of a Serbian minority terrorist group (“the Black Hand”) seeking separation from the empire and to join Serbia. This led to Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, with the domino effect of the Central Powers and Serbia’s allies declaring war on each other and starting the First World War. A number of

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other minority and nationalism issues created tense and dangerous conditions in the Balkan regions and other parts of the world. As a result, the League of Nations in the post-First World War period sought to avoid future troubles of this kind by requiring, mainly on the war’s defeated states, treaties and unilateral declarations by states applying for membership of the League of Nations. Despite various initial proposals, no provisions dealing with the protection of minorities, nor for that matter human rights, were incorporated in the treaty establishing the League of Nations itself at the end of the First World War, apparently to avoid subjecting all members of the future organisation to such provisions.1 This provoked criticism2 which led to a compromise of sorts: the treaties and unilateral declarations that together all became known as the Minority Treaties overseen by the League of Nations. These instruments thus included treaties imposed upon the defeated states of Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, as well as some new states born of the remains of the Ottoman Empire or whose boundaries were altered under the self-­ determination principle (Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia). Others were instruments containing special provisions relating to minorities in Åland,3 Danzig, the Memel Territory, and Upper Silesia, while a final series of five unilateral declarations were made by Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Iraq upon their admission to the League of Nations.4 The frequent interpretation after the Second World War that the Minority Treaties were “failures” because they were mainly concerned with protecting the collective rights of a few minority communities, is mostly an inaccurate— and unfortunate—characterisation.5 As mentioned earlier, there was no appetite during the Versailles peace negotiations to include universal human rights applicable to all members of the League of Nations, despite efforts by some states to this effect including an attempt by the Government of Japan to entrench a prohibition of racial discrimination which was shamefully torpedoed by British and Australian delegations.6 The compromise of sorts which was adopted instead was to limit human rights protection under the League of Nations to treaties and unilateral declarations that would only apply to defeated or new states and contained a few provisions to address specifically the minority situations which had visibly contributed to the eruption of the First World War. Victorious Western states would therefore not be subjected to the limitations to their sovereignty which human rights represented in these Minority Treaties. The rejection of the suggestion that human rights standards should be part of the Covenant of the League of Nations at the time was clear since, according to British delegate Robert Cecil, the race question could not be resolved “without encroaching on the sovereignty of States”.7

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Contrary to often-repeated views, the Minority Treaties were first and foremost human rights documents, though they also contained provisions in acknowledgement of the vulnerability of minorities in particular states and the timeliness of addressing, through a human rights approach, the grievances that had contributed to instability and to the eruption of war. Most of the substantive provisions of the Minorities Treaty Between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Poland,8 which served as a template of most of the other minority treaties, deal with various matters including customs, commerce, communications, the authority of the League of Nations in certain matters, and so on. Only 10 out of 19 deal with human or minority issues, and of these, slightly more than half should be acknowledged as mainly human rights provisions—and thus neither minority specific nor collective in nature: • Human rights provisions: Article 2 (protection of life and liberty of all inhabitants, without discrimination; freedom of religion or belief ); Articles 3 and 4 (right to nationality of all habitual residents or those born on the territory of Poland, though with some reference to minorities); Article 5 (no hindrance to those who have elected or not to be nationals of Poland); Article 6 (all persons born in Polish territory who would be otherwise stateless to become Polish nationals); and Article 7 (general prohibition of discrimination; free use of any language in private activities). • Minority-specific provisions: Article 7 (part of this provision without using the term minority does indicate that adequate facilities must be in place for “Polish nationals of non-Polish speech” for the use of their language, either orally or in writing before courts); Article 8 (equal treatment of minorities, including to their own institutions reflective of their language or religion); Article 9 (right to a proportionate use of minority languages in public schools for linguistic minorities; equitable share of state funding or educational, religious, or charitable purposes, including municipal and similar budgets, where minorities are a considerable proportion); and Articles 10 and 11 (specific provisions for Jewish minorities). Once this contextualisation is made, the full nature and content of these treaties become more obvious, including their positioning as human rights documents involving individual rather than collective rights for the most part. Most of these documents would include, for example, the recognition of the right of everyone to equality without discrimination, the protection of life, liberty, and the free exercise of religion for all inhabitants of a state, without distinction as to birth, nationality, race, religion, or language. All of these human rights were available whether or not the individuals involved were

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members of a minority. It is also noteworthy the central importance citizenship issues occupied in these instruments, particularly to avoid potential ­statelessness of those who were habitually resident or born in the countries covered by the Minority Treaties. This emphasis was largely due to the desire to make the changing national borders after the First World War as less traumatic as possible for those affected and to avoid individuals finding themselves needing to rely for their protection on a kin state because of the loss of any previously held nationality prior to the war. In simple terms, all traditional minorities under these treaties were to be entitled to citizenship, and therefore they were to be automatically considered as nationals. It is this issue of “national minorities” which continues to figure prominently in the European psyche to this day, and as a consequence continues to impact at the international level in ways which are not always helpful as explained in another section. There were thus in these treaties and declarations a relatively small number of provisions that only afforded protection to specified minorities in recognition in part of their vulnerability, and to the concerns over nationalism and the grievances which some of these minorities may have felt over the legacies of the First World War and some of the border rearrangements, among others. It is for these reasons that many of these instruments referred to the right of minorities to establish and control their own institutions, a state obligation to provide equitable financial support to schools in which instruction at the primary level would be in the minority language where warranted by sufficient numbers, and the recognition of the supremacy over other statutes of laws protecting minorities, as well as a certain degree of territorial autonomy for minorities in some states for historical or geopolitical reasons. Specifically on the issue of language, it has been pointed out that: As regards the use of the minority language, states which have signed the Treaties have undertaken to place no restriction in the way of the free use by any national of the country of any language, in private intercourse, in commerce, in religion, in the press or in publications of any kind, or at public meetings. Those states have also agreed to grant adequate facilities to enable their nationals whose mother tongue is not the official language, either orally or in writing, before the courts. They have further agreed, in towns and districts where a considerable proportion of nationals of the country whose mother tongue is not the official language of the country is resident, to make provision for adequate facilities for ensuring that, in the primary schools…instruction shall be given to the children of such nationals through the medium of their own language, it being understood that this provision does not prevent the teaching of the official language being made obligatory in those schools.9

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The treaties thus included two principal types of measures: (human) rights available generally to everyone and (human) rights to protect the essential “peculiarities and national characteristics” of minorities, including their languages. As the Permanent Court of International Justice, which was called on to interpret the provisions of these treaties, stated in one of its key opinions, the object of the measures involved: These two requirements are indeed closely interlocked, for there would be no true equality between a majority and a minority if the latter were deprived of its own institutions and were consequently compelled to renounce that which constitutes the very essence of its being a minority.10

The point to retain in the Permanent Court’s comment is that one of the core foundations of the provisions to protect minorities in these treaties is the right to equality—which would be described in more modern terms as the obligation to respect equality without discrimination on the basis of characteristics such as language, religion, or ethnicity. In other words, instead of an exception to general human rights standards, the specific provisions of the treaties that targeted minorities were in fact anchored in human rights principles, and particularly in this case to the right to equality without discrimination in fact. As a result, nationals belonging to linguistic minorities were to enjoy the same treatment in law and in fact as other nationals. In particular, they had an equal right to establish schools and institutions at their own expense. Such schools were distinct from state schools where the minority language was the language of instruction. Finally, in those towns and districts where the minorities constituted a considerable proportion of the population, they would be assured of an equitable share in the enjoyment and application of sums provided out of public funds under state, municipal, or other budgets for educational, religious, or charitable purposes. These examples are not situations of collective rights or exceptional rights only for minorities: what the Permanent Court seems to indicate is that these are concrete conditions where the right to equality without discrimination needs to be applied in relation to the language of minorities, such as in the choice of medium of instruction in public and private education. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to dwell in detail on the reasons why the human rights nature of the Minority Treaties has been largely dismissed or omitted from much of the mainstream analysis after the Second World War period, though it may be enough to point out that there was possibly some discomfort at the obvious double standards being applied between the mainly Western, victorious states—that had essentially no international human rights

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obligations—and the First World War’s defeated, weaker, or newly established states that were subjected to a large number of human rights obligations including in relation to minorities. It may also have something to do with how Nazi Germany leaders instrumentalised these Minority Treaties to rationalise their obligation to “protect” German-speaking minorities in some parts of Europe. Be that as it may, there was a gradual disenchantment with the League of Nations’ minorities system.11 In a sense, the Minority Treaties appear to have served as a convenient scapegoat, with an inexorable movement declaring the need for universal protection of basic human rights—even though to a large degree, the Minority Treaties had themselves been at their core human rights documents. For a few decades, minority rights in general and even the use of the word minority was largely avoided in the international instruments that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, this initial period even being described as one during which the “United Nations underscored the world community’s rejection of international minority protection”.12 Rumours of their demise were, however, vastly exaggerated.

 inority Rights After the Second World War: M With a Focus on Language Human rights involving language are a combination of legal requirements based on international human rights treaties and standards on how to address language or minority issues, as well as linguistic diversity within a state. Language rights are to be found in various provisions enshrined in international human rights law, such as the prohibition of discrimination, the right to freedom of expression, the right to a private life, the right to education and the right of linguistic minorities to use their own language with others in their group.13

The emphasis after 1945 was on universal protection of individual rights and freedoms in opposition, or so it was claimed, as opposed to the more “collective” minority approach under the League of Nations, even though the content of the Minority Treaties were as much focussed on general, individual human rights as indicated above: Throughout the discussions on human rights at the United Nations Conference on International Organisation, the Minority Treaties were not referred to, but a considerable amount of influence was brought to bear in favour of a “new covenant” and a fresh [and purely individualistic] approach.14

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In language matters, this would mean the initial absence of any reference to any minority or language right, although references to language itself as an important human dimension did not disappear completely. The Charter of the United Nations solemnly proclaims in Article 1(3) that one of the purposes of the new organisation is “[t]o achieve international co-operation…in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to…language”. Article 13 allows the General Assembly in the exercise of its functions to initiate studies and make recommendations for the purpose of assisting in the realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to language and other grounds, and Article 55 indicates that the United Nations (UN) is to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to language. Other international instruments incorporating provisions related to language came into being at an increasingly frequent pace. On 10 December 1948, the UN General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,15 with Article 2(1) indicating that “everyone is entitled to all rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as…language”. The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, signed at Rome on 4 November 1950, at about the same time included in Article 14 that the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in the Convention “shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as… language”.16 Until almost the end of the 1950s, no distinguishable minority language right in international instruments remains. Only the principle of equality without discrimination on the ground of language is enshrined in this early period as part of the protection of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all individuals, and language no longer figures in any measure designed especially to protect minorities.17 This, however, is not quite the full picture: some peace treaties concluded immediately following the Second World War included general human rights and some specific minority provisions. Indeed, these treaties could be described as “Minority Treaties Version 2.0”, in the sense that, just as in the case of their predecessors before the Second World War, they contained mainly human rights standards and a few specific provisions focussing on “resident” minorities. Thus the 1947 Treaty of Peace with Italy contained,18 in addition to the usual general provisions on human rights, provisions guaranteeing citizenship to all those normally residing in Italy who did not acquire nationality in a neighbouring state (and in the main targeting the largest affected minorities) and a few specific minority sections in Annex IV in relation to the German-­ speaking minority:

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1. German-speaking inhabitants of the Bolzano Province and of the neighbouring bilingual townships of the Trento Province will be assured complete equality of rights with the Italian-speaking inhabitants, within the framework of special provisions to safeguard the ethnical character and the cultural and economic development of the German-speaking element. In accordance with legislation already enacted or awaiting enactment the said German-speaking citizens will be granted in particular: (a) elementary and secondary teaching in the mother tongue; (b) participation of the German and Italian languages in public offices and official documents, as well as in bilingual topographic naming; (c) the right to re-establish German family names which were Italianised in recent years; (d) equality of rights as regards the entering upon public offices, with a view to reaching a more appropriate proportion of employment between the two ethnical groups. 2. The populations of the above-mentioned zones will be granted the exercise of autonomous legislative and executive regional power. The frame within which the said provisions of autonomy will apply will be drafted in consultation also with local representative German-speaking elements.19 Similarly, Article 6 of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 includes, like most Minority Treaties of the interwar period, a provision guaranteeing, without discrimination, “all measures necessary to secure to all persons under Austrian jurisdiction, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion, the enjoyment of human rights and of the fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression, of press and publication, of religious worship, of political opinion and of public meeting”.20 It is, however, Article 7 which is of greater interest in terms of minority language rights, since it grants to Austrian nationals who are members of the Croat and Slovene minorities in the parts of the country where they are concentrated (Carinthia, Burgenland, and Styria) “the same rights on equal terms” as other citizens “to their own organizations, meetings and press in their own language”. More important are the following minority language rights: 1. They are entitled to elementary instruction in the Slovene or Croat language and to a proportional number of their own secondary schools; in this connection, school curricula shall be reviewed and a section of the Inspectorate of Education shall be established for Slovene and Croat schools.

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2. In the administrative and judicial districts of Carinthia, Burgenland, and Styria, where there are Slovene, Croat, or mixed populations, the Slovene or Croat language shall be accepted as an official language in addition to German. In such districts, topographical terminology and inscriptions shall be in the Slovene or Croat language as well as in German. 3. Austrian nationals of the Slovene and Croat minorities in Carinthia, Burgenland, and Styria shall participate in the cultural, administrative, and judicial systems in these territories on equal terms with other Austrian nationals. 4. The activity of organisations whose aim is to deprive the Croat or Slovene population of their minority character or rights shall be prohibited. Two points should be retained from these early post-Second World War treaties: firstly, contrary to the views of those who saw the end of the Minority Treaties with the Second World War, it is obvious that the Treaty of Peace with Italy and the Austrian State Treaty were directly inspired by the human rights approach reflected in the content of the Minority Treaties: the minority rights they contain appear to be anchored to the principle of equality and they recognise general human rights for all—as did the Minority Treaties. The minority language rights they refer to are not simply “collective”: particularly in relation to education and access to services in minority languages, they are dependent on what is “reasonable and justified”, that is, in those parts of the country where most speakers of these languages reside and according to a “proportional approach”. As is discussed later, these factors figure prominently in the application of a non-discriminatory approach in relation to the use of languages. On this second point, it is no coincidence that the approach in the annex of the Treaty of Peace with Italy and in the Austrian State Treaty is echoed in later European treaties such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities21 and to a lesser extent in other documents such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.22 By the end of the 1950s, international law gradually shifts towards a more straightforward acknowledgement of the rights of minorities or language rights, starting with the International Labour Organisation’s Convention No. (107) Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Populations which,23 though avoiding the word minority,24 provided that indigenous populations have the right to be taught in their mother tongue or, where this is not practicable, in the language most commonly used by the group to which they belong. A few years later, the Convention Against Discrimination in Education of 1960 prohibits,25 under Article 1, “any distinction, exclusion or preference” based upon language or

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other grounds, which “has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing equality of treatment in education”, while making clear, in Article 2(b), that it does not constitute discrimination to establish or maintain, for linguistic reasons, separate educational systems or institutions. For the global human rights system, this United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) treaty is significant by being the first one to use the previously almost taboo word of minority in Article 5(1)(c), by indicating that it is essential to “recognise the right of members of national minorities to carry on their own educational activities, including the maintenance of schools and, depending on the educational policy of each state, the use or the teaching of their own language”, provided that “this right is not exercised in a manner which prevents the members of these minorities from understanding the culture and language of the community as a whole and from participating in its activities, or which prejudices national sovereignty”. In the 1960s, language continues to be referred to in the two UN covenants on human rights adopted on 16 December 1966, as impermissible grounds of discrimination, twice, in both Article 2(1) and Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).26 In recognition of the importance of language as part of the due process of law, Article 14(3)(a) and (f ) indicates that in connection with any criminal charge, an accused is to be “informed promptly and in detail in a language which he understands of the nature and cause of the charge against him” and is to have “the free assistance of an interpreter if he cannot understand or speak the language used in court”. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights finally casts aside any lingering resistance to a specific reference to a minority by providing that: In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language.

A few decades later, only one other UN treaty would entrench an almost identical provision, the Convention on the Rights of the Child.27 By the 1990s, however, any remaining reluctance to address and acknowledge minority language rights was gone with other regional or international treaties incorporating language or minority rights standards, such as the International Labour Organisation’s Convention (No. 169) Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages,28 and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. It is also at the end of the twentieth century that non-binding

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documents dealing with minority language rights or minority rights generally proliferated, with the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities,29 the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,30 the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights,31 and the Organisation on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension,32 among others, as well as guidance documents such as the Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities,33 the Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities,34 the Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life,35 and the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues’ Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation.36

In Search of Meaning: Defining a Minority Minority: The smaller number or part, especially a number or part representing less than half of the whole. […] A small group of people within a community or country, differing from the main population in race, religion, language, or political persuasion. (Oxford Dictionary)

In addition to a continuing unease that still seems to persist around the nature and extent of minority rights and their relationship within the human rights paradigm, another controversial issue remains the very meaning of the term “minority” in international law, and therefore the identity of those who can claim, inter alia, the right to use their own languages with other members of their group. In his Study on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities,37 Francesco Capotorti, Special Rapporteur for the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, first suggested his definition of what is a minority in the absence of any agreed upon understanding among member states of the UN, despite the adoption of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights a decade earlier which referred to linguistic, religious, and ethnic minorities. His report describes in great detail the inability among UN member states to reach any consensus on a definition, with frequent diverging and at times contradictory positions being discussed and the similar debates emanating when considering the absence of any agreed upon definition of a national minority in the contexts of European documents. As a consequence, he suggested a minority, for the purposes of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, should be understood to mean a “group

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numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-­dominant position, whose members – being nationals of the State – possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language”.38 It is this definition which is the most often circulated and referred to, including in more recent UN documents.39 The widespread invocation of the definition of Special Rapporteur Capotorti remains, however, problematic, and arguably today unsustainable, for four reasons: because the travaux préparatoires behind Article 27 do not support the requirements he proposed in his definition40; because both member states and the UN Sub-Commission did not approve his definition; because the very wording of Article 27 does not allow for the kind of limitations Special Rapporteur Capotorti’s definition contains; and finally, because the UN Human Rights Committee itself in recent decades has rejected many of the essential elements of his definition. It is undeniable that the absence of an agreed upon definition permeates the travaux préparatoires to Article 27 as Special Rapporteur Capotorti himself points out. Some state members did not consider immigrants or indigenous communities ought to qualify as minorities, while others did not support their exclusion; a number of state members suggested that only citizens could be considered to have minority rights, while others rejected such as narrow definition.41 Still others were of the view only non-dominant minorities should be able to claim rights as a minority and considered non-dominance as a fundamental requirement, but again this was far from the prevailing position. Special Rapporteur Capotorti’s definition therefore was proposed as his own preferred approach in the absence of any agreement, but it was also inconsistent with the views of most member states and from a plain reading of Article 27 itself. His definition is actually more restrictive than what the treaty provision provides for, since his definition suggests (1) only citizens (“nationals”) are entitled to rights under Article 27, whereas the provision contains no such restriction and (2) only non-dominant (leaving unclear if dominance is cultural, political, economic, or military, on a national or regional basis, etc.) minorities could claim a right under Article 27, though once again the provision itself is silent on any such limitations and this was not the consensus of state delegations involved in the drafting process. While the UN Special Rapporteur’s report was well received, it needs to be emphasised that his definition was never accepted by the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, nor was it

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approved by all member states. In addition, as pointed out earlier, his restrictive proposal contradicted the travaux préparatoires themselves. The reasons for the rejection of a narrow definition was made clear by the UN’s first independent expert on minority issues: … in 1979, the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities refused to endorse Special Rapporteur Francesco Capotorti’s suggested definition of a minority, as it included citizenship as one of its elements. Moreover, there is a risk, and State practice in Europe demonstrates, that such inclusion of citizenship as a criterion within States’ definitions of minorities, could lead to legitimizing the denial of minority rights to non-­ citizen minorities.42

The wording of Article 27 thus does not support the restrictive requirement of citizenship, since contrary to other human rights provisions which may limit a right holder to a country’s nationals, Article 27 does not refer to citizenship. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is unambiguous in identifying the holders of the minority rights under this provision as “all persons” belonging to a linguistic, religious, or ethnic minority. It is thus not limited to citizens, nor to historical or traditional minorities, nor to non-dominant minorities, and may include “new” minorities as confirmed in the Human Rights Committee’s own general comments. Indeed, the UN Human Rights Committee left little doubt that the restrictive definition proposed by Special Rapporteur Capotorti but not approved by the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities has little role to play in the proper and contemporary understanding and application of this provision. Consistent with the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities’ refusal to endorse Special Rapporteur Capotorti’s definition, the Human Rights Committee never required the necessity of demonstrating citizenship or non-­ dominance in any of the large number of cases it considered in relation to Article 27. Additionally, any lingering doubt on whether non-citizens as a group are excluded from the definition of a minority under Article 27 has been set aside in two of the Human Rights Committee’s general comments. Firstly, in its General Comment on the position of aliens under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,43 the Human Rights Committee directly contradicted the proposed definition of the Special Rapporteur by indicating that “aliens” in a state who can demonstrate membership in a numerically inferior ethnic, religious, or linguistic community were not de denied the rights

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provided in Article 27. This is consistent with the general background to, and the wording of Article 27, as explains one leading scholar: The United Nations General Assembly, when drafting and adopting Article 27 of the Political Covenant, already opted for a broader definition. The Third Committee did not accept a proposed Indian amendment aimed at replacing the word ‘persons’ with ‘citizens’. Both the travaux préparatoires and a systematic interpretation of the Political Covenant, which uses the term “citizens” only in Article 25, clearly indicate that Article 27 also applies to aliens.44

Secondly, the UN Human Rights Committee adopted in 1994 General Comment No. 23(50) on Article 27 which spells out the exact meaning of a minority under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: The terms used in Article 27 indicate that the persons designed to be protected are those who belong to a group and who share in common a culture, a religion and/or a language. Those terms also indicate that the individuals designed to be protected need not be citizens of the state party… A state party may not, therefore, restrict the rights under Article 27 to its citizens alone. Article 27 confers rights on persons belonging to minorities which ‘exist’ in a state party. Given the nature and scope of the rights envisaged under that article, it is not relevant to determine the degree of permanence that the term “exist” connotes. Those rights simply are that individuals belonging to those minorities should not be denied the right, in community with members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to practice their religion and speak their language. Just as they need not be nationals or citizens, they need not be permanent residents. Thus, migrant workers or even visitors in a state party constituting such minorities are entitled not to be denied the exercise of those rights… The existence of an ethnic, religious or linguistic minority in a given state party does not depend upon a decision by that state party but requires to be established by objective criteria.45

Finally, in the absence of a special meaning to the term minority in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 31(1) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties specifies that a treaty must be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning of its terms in their context and in light of its object and purpose. In those states where they exist, a linguistic, religious, or ethnic minority is, in the ordinary meaning of the term, “not a majority” numerically and objectively, by using the linguistic, religious, or cultural criterion. This is also how most members of the UN Human Rights Committee approached the determination of a minority in

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Ballantyne et al. v. Canada,46 where it rejected the view that members of the English-speaking linguistic majority in Canada could be considered a minority for the purposes of Article 27 in a part of the country. The UN Human Rights Committee has opted for a far less restrictive interpretation than the Capotorti definition, since any linguistic, religious, or ethnic minority in a state is entitled to claim the minimum obligations and rights guaranteed by Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, regardless of status, dominance, period of residency, etc. This is of no little consequence since minorities are at times clearly targeted and denied citizenship through discriminatory practices and policies: about 75% of the world’s stateless people are minorities according to recent figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees.47 Imposing other requirements such as “non-­ dominance”, or citizenship, or any other type of link to the state in which they find themselves can disenfranchise millions, as is the unfortunate and dramatic case for minorities such as the Rohingya and many others.

Are Language Rights “Only” Minority Rights? Language is the key to inclusion. Language is at the centre of human activity, self-expression and identity. Recognizing the primary importance that people place on their own language fosters the kind of true participation in development that achieves lasting results.48

This chapter began by suggesting the need to unravel problematic concepts affecting what might be described as minority language rights. This includes defining who are the individuals belonging to minorities who are the holders of language rights and why a proper understanding of what is a minority, in the sense of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights result in a less restrictive definition than the one often referred to by commentators and even state authorities. The nature of what were historically known as the rights under Minority Treaties was also challenged because it raises another fundamental and contemporary issue affecting the way minority language rights are dealt with at the supranational level. Until now, the focus has been on language rights as emanating in international law from human rights standards in the modern post-Second World War period. This would be both an incomplete and not entirely accurate portrayal if other perspectives were not mentioned. Especially from the point of view of other disciplines such as sociolinguistics and more generally the social sciences, references to language rights would obviously be focussed on lan-

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guages as objects of protection. From a human rights perspective, however, minority rights or language rights involve individuals affected as holders or subjects of rights, with languages obviously not “entitled” to any right but clearly in some cases being able to benefit or be protected because of c­ ompliance with these human rights standards. But in addition, overlapping in the sense that not all observers comment or acknowledge the different points of view that can simultaneously be involved, there may be language rights in international law that have no direct relationship with the human rights of minorities in language matters. At times, for example, the reference to language or linguistic rights bears no connexion to human rights standards but rather to linguistic diversity concerns. These differences in approaches need to be explained in greater detail in order to be aware of the dangers of misunderstandings connected to different meanings attributed to similar terminology when speaking about language rights, including those of minorities.

L anguage Rights, Language Obligations, and Linguistic Diversity [L]anguage constitutes a determining factor of identity… [and the] preservation of the linguistic diversity of the world’s societies contributes to cultural diversity, which UNESCO considers a universal ethical imperative and essential for sustainable development in today’s ever more globalizing world.49

Measures for the protection of linguistic diversity are not identical to minority language rights. Put differently, in international law, there are three different approaches to language issues: (1) the human rights approach which is the one mainly referred to when describing language or minority rights in this chapter, (2) the approach aimed at protecting or promoting linguistic diversity, and (3) an approach more narrowly focussed on only protecting endangered languages. In the first approach, individuals (and perhaps in some provisions communities) are subjects of international law. In the latter two approaches, languages are objects of protection with obligations on states to take certain measures rather than rights being held by individuals or communities. In theory, however, the three are not necessarily exclusive. Some international documents such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples arguably have elements of both. While most of the language-related provisions appear to be more directly related to a rights-based approach (such as Article 16(1) which indicates indigenous peoples have the right to establish

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their own media in their own languages), some such as Article 13 (1) and (2) include an acknowledgment of an obligation to correct past injustices and make amends in language matters by recognising that states have an obligation to take effective measures to ensure the right of indigenous peoples to revitalise, use, develop, and transmit to future generations their languages and writing systems, among others. However, in concrete terms, it seems most instruments largely follow one of the three approaches almost exclusively, which explains why the Council of Europe opted to adopt not one but two treaties almost simultaneously, both dealing with minority language matters—though one from a human rights approach and the other a language diversity point of view. The second and third approaches thus involve treaties oriented towards languages as objects of concern, with no enforceable rights for any individual (only imposing state obligations) and more timid enforcement mechanisms, if any, than human rights-oriented instruments. The second category aims to protect and promote linguistic diversity as such and therefore not only targeting endangered languages. These types of instruments cannot be the basis for any enforceable individual or collective right since it deals specifically with languages as objects of protection in international law and not with individuals or groups as holders of rights. They therefore only create obligations for state parties in favour of languages. This is where the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages fits in, as does the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions.50 Thus, while the former is a very detailed treaty which focuses on the protection and promotion of certain (but not all) regional or minority languages as part of Europe’s cultural heritage as a means of contributing to a Europe based on democracy and cultural diversity, no individual or minority can assert any right in international law under this instrument even though state parties have legally defined obligations. It is seen as complementing enforceable human rights since “by placing promotional obligations on the state, the European Charter complements the individual rights of minority language speakers ensuing from national and international minority protection”.51 The detailed nature of this à la carte treaty can at times give rise to misleading assumptions: firstly, despite its stated objectives, not all ­languages are protected since state parties are free to choose the languages to which the European Charter applies; Norway, for example, has entered a declaration to the effect the treaty only applies to the Sami language. Secondly, state parties are not obligated to adopt stronger measures to protect and promote languages that are in a more vulnerable position nor to adopt the measures with obligations proportionate to the degree of use, protection, or promotion of a

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language that reflects its demographic weight or the level of demand for such use of a minority language. In the case of the Ukraine, 13 minority languages are identified as all deserving protection and promotion and being subjected to the same provisions of the European Charter whether involving a tiny minority (Greek with around 5–6000) or one with more than 14 million speakers (Russian).52 The latter UNESCO Convention for its part only encourages translations and permits UNESCO to be involved in activities to promote linguistic diversity such as the International Mother Language Day. Treaties in relation to the protection of endangered languages are particularly few and largely symbolic: at most, only the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage and (possibly) the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity fall in this category. The former aims at developing safeguarding measures to ensure the survival of various forms of intangible culture, including language or music, for example.53 The latter, it has been suggested by some observers, might indirectly be useful in the protection of endangered indigenous languages by protecting the specific biodiversity relied upon by small indigenous communities closely connected to dwindling traditional territories. While many use the convenient shorthand of “language rights” or “minority rights” in relation to the provisions of these two latter approaches in international legal instruments, this is strictly speaking incorrect since clearly neither provide for rights in any legal sense. Indeed, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages makes this absolutely and unambiguously explicit when it is affirmed that the “charter does not establish any individual or collective rights for the speakers of regional or minority languages” although “the obligations of the parties… will have an obvious effect on the situation of the communities concerned and their individual members”.54 Only in the first, human rights-based approach, is it appropriate to speak of language rights or minority rights, though even here there are still a number of unsettled matters from an international legal perspective.

L anguage Rights in International Law: The Human Rights Approach A human rights-based approach to language can be framed as a ‘recognize-­ implement-­improve’ method for ensuring that state authorities effectively comply with their obligations. Laws, policies and processes must recognize language rights within a human rights framework i.e., authorities must integrate these into their conduct and activities, and mechanisms must be put in place to effectively address problem areas where they exist and improve compliance.55

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There remains a degree of confusion and a certain amount of contradiction as to what is actually meant by the expression “language rights” even from a human rights approach, in particular in relation to linguistic minorities. At its simplest, the division appears to be one which centres around the nature and provenance of minority language rights: are these limited to “minority-­ specific” or cultural provisions in human rights treaties such as Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities or can language rights also be anchored in other, more general human rights standards? Put another way, do only minorities have language rights, or are the sources of language rights, including minority language rights, to be found in a number of human rights provisions? Oddly, UN documents, with the exception of the recent 2017 UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues’ Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation, had never fully explored or explicated this rather fundamental dimension of language rights, though some regional documents such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, and the Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities seemed to more clearly make a link between language rights and human rights obligations. For these instruments, it would seem, language rights are human rights. It should be noted, however, that some regional treaties do not approach language issues as a human rights matter but from a linguistic diversity perspective.56 The affirmation that minority language rights and standards at the supranational level must be understood and applied within a mainly individual human rights framework requires a more precise explanation, beyond a consideration of their historical and treaty antecedents. It is also perhaps useful to keep in mind that in the same way that the “religion” rights of religious minorities rest on a series of human rights standards (especially but not exclusively freedom of religion and non-discrimination on the ground of religion) that go far beyond the rather isolated Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, so do the language rights of linguistic minorities (particularly but again not exclusively with freedom of expression and non-­ discrimination on the ground of language). Although there is no generally accepted categorisation of language rights at the supranational level, these can be divided in three broad categories (which can be described under the principles of linguistic liberty, fundamental fairness, and proportionality in relation to public services) with the applicable rights standards:

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1 . Linguistic liberty: The private use of minority languages 2. Fundamental fairness: Minority languages and criminal law 3. Proportionality and public services: The use of minority languages by authorities.

Linguistic Liberty: The Private Use of Minority Languages A State may choose one or more official languages, but it may not exclude, outside the spheres of public life, the freedom to express oneself in a language of one’s choice.57

Generally speaking, all private use of a language is protected by freedom of expression, since language is a form of expression protected under this human rights standard.58 It is therefore one of the most powerful language rights available to all individuals, though most often invoked in practical terms by linguistic minorities. It is nevertheless far from being the only relevant human rights provision, depending on the type of restriction or interference by state authorities in private linguistic choices and matters: • in religious activities, the use of liturgical languages is arguably also protected by freedom of religion; • Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (for minorities); • freedom of association; • the right to private life; and • the prohibition of discrimination on the ground of language (but potentially also on national origin, ethnicity, race or religion). From a practical point of view, there is no obstacle to the simultaneous invocation of a combination of these freedoms and rights: in other words, it is quite possible that a specific language issue could involve at the same time not only freedom of expression but also Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (if involving a linguistic minority) and the prohibition of discrimination, among a few others. State authorities must therefore be aware that regardless of the status of a particular language, or whether they are dealing with a person who belongs to a minority or is an indigenous person or a non-citizen, any intrusion in the language preferences of an individual in the private sphere is generally speaking more than likely contrary to a

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significant number of human rights standards—and to be avoided if a state wishes to avoid acting in breach of its supranational legal obligations. These language rights are in a sense the easiest to understand and implement since they require that state authorities not interfere with the private linguistic preferences and practices in the home and community. In other words, by staying away and not “interfering” in private activities—and the language(s) used in these—a government would be complying fully with the linguistic dimension of freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and so on. All individuals, including members of a minority, have the right to use their language of choice in private activities where they express themselves through their language. This can include a large variety of different areas such as: • private signs or writing visible to the public or used inside a private building, including a commercial one, such as a religious or cultural centre, shop, and so on; • the language used by members of a family or individuals at home or in private context; • language used by members of a minority in religious, political, or social events; and • language used in a private commercial or social setting.59 It may nevertheless be permissible for state authorities to require the use of an official language in conjunction with the language preferred by an individual in private matters, as long as the additional use of an official language does not exclude or impose an unreasonable burden on a minority’s language of choice. It has been fairly widely recognised that protecting an official language or promoting its use by private parties in a state involves legitimate interests,60 as long as it is a proportionate or reasonable requirement in pursuit of a legitimate state interest. The best approach in practical terms for state authorities to comply with the language rights of minorities (and all others) in private activities would therefore seem to be one of general laissez faire. Where it is legitimate to impose the additional use of an official language while respecting the choice of a private party using a minority (or any other) language, this must not amount to an unreasonable burden on the private party, individual, organisation, or business. On the issue of an individual’s name in a particular language, there are in fact two separate dimensions, though the two are closely intertwined: the right to private life within the sphere of linguistic liberty when it comes to the use by individuals themselves of the linguistic form or spelling of their names61 and official recognition and use of an individual’s name—or of the

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official transliteration of a person’s name written from one script to another—under the prohibition of discrimination. If state authorities were to prevent the use of a person’s name because it is in a minority language in private situations, it is arguable that this could be a concern in terms of freedom of expression, the right to privacy or private life, perhaps the right to a name, Article 27 of the ICCPR, and finally could potentially in some situations be contrary to the prohibition of discrimination. In practice, it has been found that since an individual’s name is a fundamental aspect of his or her identity, any state legislation or practice that restricts the use of an individual’s name in private activities may impede on that individual’s right to private life.62 Thus, a requirement that all citizens have their names registered in the official language runs the risk of being contrary to supranational standards if it prevents, obstructs, or seriously inconveniences a person attempting to use his or her name in a minority language in private life. Additionally, on a number of occasions, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has also linked any state interference in the language of a person’s name as constituting racial discrimination.63 The use of minority languages in private media is similarly a language right covered by “liberty-oriented” human rights: freedom of expression, the prohibition of discrimination (if it applies to only certain non-official languages), and Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Simply put, banning a private media from publishing or broadcasting in a minority (or any other language) could be deemed generally to be a violation of freedom of expression, would easily be seen as a breach also of Article 27 in relation to a minority language since it would prevent members of a linguistic minority from using their language with other members of their group, and would most likely be deemed discriminatory since such measures in the past have tended to target specific minorities or ethnic groups. Most states today generally comply with these linguistic rights. The main areas of concern today usually involve government policies which indirectly impact on minority private media. This can take various forms: allocation of broadcasting or rebroadcasting licences, frequency allocation, treatment of incorporation requests or registration of minority language media, even difficulties for minority language publishers obtaining paper for their publications. It is now extremely rare to have an outright ban on private media using a minority or non-official language.64 There is, however, no “right” for private media in a minority language to be awarded automatically, for example, a radio or television frequency or licence simply because they use a minority language. Nevertheless, authorities must

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keep in mind two important considerations: firstly, the prohibition of discrimination requires that minority media not be disadvantaged in an unreasonable way in the granting of frequencies or broadcasting licences and, secondly, the need to ensure a plurality of views, to reflect the diversity of society, and to reach the intended publics all suggest that private media in minority languages should actually be favourably considered by authorities. In other words, the “State should support broadcasting in minority languages. This may be achieved through, inter alia, provision of access to broadcasting, subsidies and capacity building for minority language broadcasting”.65 While in the past there may have been technological restrictions which limited the number of available frequencies in electronic media, this is increasingly no longer the case with new media and digital technology. Finally, there are some situations where persons who belong to a linguistic minority are prevented (“denied”) from using their language with other members of their group which goes beyond simple cases of freedom of expression because of its collective dimension. While freedom of expression might often be invoked in such cases, Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights may be more appropriate.66 For example, members of a linguistic minority cannot be prevented physically from speaking their own language among themselves.67 Public authorities cannot forbid the establishment or operation of private schools from teaching a minority language or using a minority language as medium of instruction. This has been recognised in ­treaties even before the creation of the UN.68 There is widespread recognition of this right in legal and political documents, despite some differences in the way it is formulated. One matter of debate is whether there is an obligation to support, fund, or recognise private minority schools and the education they provide. The prevailing consensus would seem to indicate that while currently human rights do not require the funding of private minority schools unless there is a situation which might be discriminatory,69 authorities must not prevent the establishment of such schools. Authorities would also have the obligation to recognise the qualifications obtained in such schools, subject to general national educational standards. Students in such schools must always have the opportunity to acquire fluency in the official language. Freedom of expression and other liberty-oriented supranational standards are not absolute, including in the situations where they result in language rights. There may be situations where state authorities have a legitimate public interest in requiring that private parties use an official language, including warning signs about a potential danger, health advisories or information on consumer products, or even in terms of promoting or protecting an official

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language.70 This would, however, not be sufficient to exclude the private use of minority (or any other) language.

Fundamental Fairness: Minority Languages and Criminal Law The starting point must be, according to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) that the defendant who has insufficient command of the language used in the court has the same right to information, to a hearing of both sides of the case and to a fair trial as the defendant who has command of the language used in the court. The defendant is entitled to take full part in the trial. There is no fair trial if no interpreter assistance is provided.71

Because of the significance of language to ensure “equality of arms” in and the fairness of a criminal trial and the integrity of legal processes, supranational standards enshrine certain language rights as minimum guarantees for a fair hearing of an accused.72 A European Union (EU) directive even confirms these language rights as a fundamental EU right which must be harmonised in the legislation of member states.73 An accused is entitled to the free assistance of an interpreter if he or she cannot understand or speak the language used in court, though it would be sufficient to provide this in a language understood by the accused and not necessarily in his or her own minority language. It also appears clear that to have a fair trial, the interpretation provided must be “adequate” and not perfect. The interpretation has to be practical and effective.74 This also includes translation of certain court documents.75 This also means that the language of court proceedings to be used by authorities is not affected by this individual language right. In cases where an individual only understands a minority language, however, the minority language will be used via interpretation and translation of necessary documents. Authorities are usually aware that there cannot be a fair trial if an accused does not understand what is being said. While this linguistic right is one of the most widely recognised human rights in international law, there are at times difficulties in implementation, as opposed to rejection of the right itself: interpretation or translation may not always be available when required; the quality of the interpretation may not be adequate; translated documents essential to enable suspects to exercise their right of defence is not always provided within a reasonable time or without charge; or even at times an accused is considered sufficiently fluent in the language of court proceedings so as not to require interpretation, when this is actually not the case.

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 roportionality and Public Services: The Use of Minority P Languages by Authorities The importance of language rights is straightforward: in addition to the obligation to respect human rights, there are important implications of language use that go to the core of inclusion and participation in a society with minorities.76

A more complex, contentious, and consequential language rights category involves obligations on state authorities to use a minority (or other) language in administrative, judicial, or other public services. On the one hand, there are legitimate concerns and limitations of practicality and expenditures for state authorities, as well as queries as to the status of official or minority languages in such situations; on the other hand, it can be extremely important in terms of access and inclusion for individuals belonging to linguistic minorities. In some contexts, the denial of these rights can result in widespread exclusion and marginalisation. These two last consequences are important because they help anchor these language rights to one of the most relevant human rights standard in this category: the substantive right to equality without discrimination. Contrary to what may at times be alluded to, there clearly is not an absolute right to education in one’s language in any regional or international treaty, as the European Court of Human Rights itself acknowledged in the well-­ known Belgian Linguistic Case.77 While some writers in this area tend to refer to non-binding documents as evidence of an “implicit” right, they unfortunately fail to distinguish between documents which may later form the basis of an emerging standard for “what the law ought to be” (lege ferenda),78 from the provisions of instruments which create clear legal obligations such as the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities. Thus, a number of contributions from sociolinguists and other non-jurists on education in a minority language79 suppose that there must be in international law an implicit right to identity which could be used to buttress claims to education in a minority language,80 even though no treaty actually spells this out. Even among jurists, a “traditionalist” stream holds the view that there is no basis for any right to minority language instruction in public schools nor can the denial of education in a minority’s mother tongue constitute discriminatory treatment on the basis of the reasoning of the European Court of Human Rights in the Belgian Linguistic Case. However, this traditionalist view is a somewhat misleading interpretation of that case, since on the one hand the European Court of Human Rights never actually concluded that there was no possible right of education in your own language by using non-­discrimination.

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It instead indicated that discrimination in education in connection to the language used as medium of instruction would only occur if (1) there is a differential treatment with no objective and reasonable justification having regard to the aim and effects of the measure under consideration and (2) there is no reasonable proportionality between the means employed and the aim sought to be realised. While there was factually a difference of treatment in the case of parents who could not have their children taught in their own language (French) in public schools in some parts of Belgium whereas other parents could receive instruction for their children in their own language (Dutch), it agreed that in general the restrictions in Belgium affecting a small area around Brussels that prevented students from being provided public instruction in French was not unreasonable or unjustified in the circumstances, and therefore were not discriminatory because the third requirement was not met in the particular circumstances.81 But that left open the possibility that in some cases, it may be possible that not to provide education in a language could be discriminatory if it is unjustified, unreasonable, or arbitrary: Article 14 does not prohibit distinctions in treatment which are founded on an objective assessment of essentially different factual circumstances and which, being based on the public interest, strike a fair balance between the protection of the interests of the community and respect for the rights and freedoms safeguarded by the Convention. In examining whether the legal provisions which have been attacked satisfy these criteria, the Court finds that their purpose is to achieve linguistic unity within the two large regions of Belgium in which a large majority of the population speaks only one of the two national languages. This legislation makes scarcely viable schools in which teaching is conducted solely in the national language that is not that of the majority of the inhabitants of the region. In other words, it tends to prevent, in the Dutch-unilingual region, the establishment or maintenance of schools which teach only in French. Such a measure cannot be considered arbitrary. To begin with, it is based on the objective element which the region constitutes. Furthermore it is based on a public interest, namely to ensure that all schools dependent on the state and existing in a unilingual region conduct their teaching in the language which is essentially that of the region. (…) the legislation has instituted an educational system which, in the Dutch unilingual region, exclusively encourages teaching in Dutch, in the same way as it establishes the linguistic homogeneity of education in the French unilingual region. These differences in treatment of the two national languages in the two unilingual regions are, however compatible [with Articles 2 and14].82

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What has emerged more recently is that differences of treatment between two languages, including where the privileged language is an official language, may be discriminatory in international human rights law if they are not in the circumstances demonstrated to be reasonable and justified preferences. In Diergaardt v. Namibia,83 the majority of the members of the UN Human Rights Committee concluded that non-discrimination may permit the use of other languages in addition to an official one where it is unreasonable and unjustified for administrative authorities not to use another language in addition to that country’s only official language at the time, English: 10.10 The authors have also claimed that the lack of language legislation in Namibia has had as a consequence that they have been denied the use of their mother tongue in administration, justice, education and public life. The Committee notes that the authors have shown that the State party has instructed civil servants not to reply to the authors’ written or oral communications with the authorities in the Afrikaans language, even when they are perfectly capable of doing so. These instructions barring the use of Afrikaans do not relate merely to the issuing of public documents but even to telephone conversations. In the absence of any response from the State party the Committee must give due weight to the allegation of the authors that the circular in question is intentionally targeted against the possibility to use Afrikaans when dealing with public authorities. Consequently, the Committee finds that the authors, as Afrikaans speakers, are victims of a violation of article 26 [non-discrimination] of the Covenant.

Similarly, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights concluded in 2009 that the almost exclusive use of one official language, French, in banking matters regulated by the Government of Cameroon so disadvantaged English-speaking citizens as to be unjustified, and therefore in violation of a substantive approach to equality and non-discrimination on the ground of language,84 suggesting therefore that the anglophone minority in that country is entitled to language rights anchored in this general human rights standard. The above more recent regional and international human rights decisions suggest that a state language preference—even if it relates to a country’s only official language—can constitute discrimination if it is unreasonable or unjustified. This is at times presented in terms of what is proportionate, practical and justified. Additionally, it would seem that public education not provided in a child’s language could be a breach of the right to education if students are imposed an unrealistic burden through the language choice of authorities,85 or excluded from the opportunity of learning the national language.86 The

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implications—although this is still far from universally accepted—are that the prohibition of discrimination on the ground of language can lead to situations where state authorities have an obligation to communicate with members of the public in a non-official language, often a minority language, where this is reasonable and justified. In relation to the right to education, there can, for example, be situations of a “denial of the substance of the right” if the language used as medium of instruction is not a child’s mother tongue for as long and as extensively as is reasonably practicable. Whereas for language rights in private activities, the defining principle would be a laissez-faire approach, the case of the use of minority languages by state authorities would seem to call for the use of a proportionality ­principle— based on what is reasonable or justified after consideration of all the relevant circumstances in order to comply with the prohibition of discrimination. This is essentially also the principle enshrined in treaties and documents dealing specifically with the human rights of minorities, such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. This tends to take the shape of a provision indicating, among others, an obligation for state authorities to use proportionally a minority language where the numbers, demand, and geographic concentration of its speakers make it a reasonable or justified use of a minority language.87 Beyond the legal principle itself at the supranational level, there is a fairly widespread understanding that a proportionate response is highly desirable for a number of very practical reasons: • For linguistic minorities to participate effectively in decision-making processes, information must be made available in appropriate languages.88 • Access to public services, particularly in areas such as health and social services, is most effective when offered in a minority’s language, particularly indigenous or traditional minorities. • Education in a minority’s own language results generally in better student retention and academic results, including in learning the official language particularly for vulnerable segments of society such as indigenous peoples and women.89 • Economic and employment opportunities increase significantly for minorities when their language is used proportionally by authorities. Studies and practices in many countries demonstrate that an appropriate and proportionate use of minority languages can increase inclusion, communication, and trust between members of minorities and authorities. This is not simply a matter of authorities using a minority language once a minority has reached a numerical or percentage threshold, since every

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country and situation is unique. Factors that may be considered in determining the appropriate scale of use of a minority language by public authorities, or as to what is a sufficient number or is justified in a particular case, will depend on the circumstances. Prominent among these would be the already existing use of a minority language by state authorities, the number of speakers of a minority language, the level of demand for the use of a minority language, the territorial concentration of the minority, a state’s available resources in light of any additional costs in training or materials, the type of service being requested in the minority language, and the relative ease or level of difficulty in responding to the demand. A useful reference point as to how to identify what is an appropriate proportional approach in different areas from a human rights approach in language matters can be extrapolated from the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, and the Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities. Studies around the world, including some published by the World Bank, UNESCO, and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), arrive at broadly similar results on the effects of education in a minority’s mother tongue,90 combined with quality teaching of the official language: 1 . Is more cost-effective in the long term. 2. Reduces dropout and repetition rates. 3. Leads to noticeably better academic results, particularly for girls. 4. Improves levels of literacy and fluency in both the mother tongue and the official or majority language. 5. Leads to greater family and community involvement and support. 6. The use of minority languages in a state’s administrative and other public activities thus involves fundamental issues of inclusiveness, participation, access, quality, and effectiveness.91 Children thus stay in school longer and increase their chances of overall obtaining on average better grades in school and a higher degree of fluency in both the official language and their own language.92 Put differently, minority students only taught in the official language will on average repeat grades more often, drop out of school more frequently, receive worse results, end up later in life with the lowest paying jobs and highest unemployment rates, and learn the official language less well than students who were taught in their own language. If persons belonging to linguistic minorities have a responsibility to integrate into the wider society, then it would seem that this can be best

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achieved through effectively teaching them in their own language because of generally better outcomes from education in one’s language, even in acquiring fluency in the official language.93 For public services, more generally, speakers of a minority language who are sufficiently numerous and concentrated at the national, regional, or local levels must be entitled to receive from authorities an appropriate degree of administrative and public services in their language. This is based partly on the need for effective, meaningful access to such services and the avoidance of unreasonable or arbitrary disadvantages because of linguistic barriers or preferences that could breach the prohibition of non-discrimination. Such a reasonable and proportionate use of a minority language could contribute to the integration of linguistic minorities through better communication, as well as related employment and other opportunities that result from the use, where practicable, of their languages by authorities. Factors that may be considered in determining the appropriate and practical scale of use of a minority language by public authorities, or as to what is a sufficient number or is justified in a particular case, will depend on the circumstances involved. Prominent among these would be the number of speakers of a minority language, the level of demand for the use of a minority language, the territorial concentration of the minority, a state’s available resources, the type of service being requested in the minority language, and the relative ease or level of difficulty in responding to the demand. There may also be other relevant considerations. Despite the lack of a fixed percentage or number of speakers needed to be entitled to the use of a minority language by public authorities, there are concrete examples of State practices that are useful to illustrate when this might occur. In Finland, members of the Swedish minority are entitled to have their language used by public authorities in a municipality designated bilingual where they constitute at least 8% of the population or number at least 3000 persons. The indigenous Sami language is also official in municipalities where at least 7% of the population speaks Sami. In the United States, hospitals, nursing homes, managed care organisations, state Medicaid ­agencies, home health agencies, health service providers, and social service organisations which receive federal funding must use a minority language, translation, or interpretation under non-discrimination legislation (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to ensure access of linguistic minorities “where it is reasonable”, based on four criteria: the number or proportion of the linguistic minority individuals, the frequency of contact with the service, the nature and importance of the service, and the resources available. Public media need to reflect cultural and linguistic diversity in a non-­ discriminatory way. By receiving and imparting information in a minority

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language which minorities can fully understand and communicate in, public authorities are contributing to their more equal and effective participation in public, economic, social, and cultural life. The presence of minority languages in public media also contributes to greater integration and social cohesion, since authorities are able to inform and engage minorities directly in their own language—thus reflecting an inclusive policy towards them. Other supranational human rights standards acknowledge that states have an obligation to “encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material” in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child’s educational goals, including the development of respect for the child’s own language.94 The application of the principle of proportionality in public media implies the use of minority languages to the degree that it is justified and reasonable in light of the number of speakers of a particular language, the demand, the available resources, areas of involvement of authorities, and so on. This involves all types of public media, whether public authorities are involved, including public radio or television broadcasting, printed, electronic, and new media. In some cases, special consideration must be given to a minority language’s position. In broadcasting, for example, it may initially be necessary to develop an adequate terminology and therefore to allocate additional funds for this purpose, such as in the case of indigenous languages. The nature and potential impact of public media also brings about distinct obligations to promote tolerance, respect for diversity, and social cohesion. Minority interests and concerns should not be relegated exclusively to minority programming or media but also mainstreamed into broadcasts in the official language. Persons belonging to linguistic minorities should also be consulted and participate in the development of minority language public media so that their interests and concerns be better reflected. Finally, it cannot be disregarded that for many, language is a central marker of identity, both for individuals and the political community represented by the state. While the choice of an official language (or languages) is a matter that falls within a state’s prerogative, and it is undoubtedly legitimate to promote and protect it as a component of national identity, this must be done in conformity with supranational standards, including respect for language and other human rights, while integration, including the sharing of an official language, is a legitimate aim for social cohesion that must be understood as one that takes into account and respectfully accommodates the actual diversity of a state’s population while promoting a shared sense of belonging in society. Some countries such as Bolivia have chosen to move away from a single—and potentially exclusive—national identity, asserting instead a “plurinational” identity, including the indigenous languages as

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official languages. Similarly, Switzerland’s identity is not based on a single culture or language, but on a confederation representing the country’s four main languages. The use of a minority language and social cohesion—the former as a response to an individual’s identity and the latter to a state’s choice of an official language as a means to cementing a cohesive society—are therefore not mutually exclusive. In most countries in the world, linguistic minorities are often bilingual, even multilingual. Generally speaking, linguistic minorities in most countries are more likely to acquire fluency in at least two languages, whereas monolingualism occurs more frequently among members of a linguistic majority. Still, the effective participation of linguistic minorities may at times be problematic because of language barriers. Where linguistic minorities, particularly those who are also indigenous peoples, have an insufficient command of the official language and where their linguistic rights, consistent with the supranational human rights standards, are not implemented, they run the risk of not being able to effectively participate in cultural, social, economic, or public life. There are thus two main areas of closely connected concerns: where minorities do not have the opportunity to acquire fluency in a state’s official language(s), and where state authorities do not use a minority language in a proportionate way. Both can combine and result in the exclusion or marginalisation of minorities in society—and have quite the opposite effect to their integration in society. Good policies for integration and inclusion of linguistic minorities thus involve recognising and balancing these multiple linguistic identities within society. Where the language of a minority is used in relations with administrative, judicial, and other public authorities, it often becomes a significant factor in increasing a minority’s participation in public life and provides for more effective means of communication on issues affecting minorities. However, if a country adopts an exclusive official language approach which disregards human rights standards such as the prohibition of discrimination in practical terms, minorities can find themselves severely excluded from participation in public life and even educational opportunities if no language rights are in place where reasonable and practicable. To encourage the effective participation of linguistic minorities in public life, examples abound of the usefulness of using minority languages in electoral advertisements, electoral public service television and radio programmes, and in electoral material where these minorities are concentrated. In all these areas, the language rights of linguistic minorities actually involve the concrete implementation of supranational human rights standards such as non-­discrimination to these various aspects of state policies and approaches.

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Human Rights, Language, and Conflicts Language rights at the supranational level are thus, for the most part, intimately connected to international human rights standards. It is also this connection that makes language rights a significant dimension of the close association between preventing ethnic conflicts and human rights, particularly at the UN and with regional organisations with a specific focus on conflict prevention such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

International Human Rights and the Prevention of Conflict: Avoiding Rebellion Against Tyranny and Oppression Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law […].

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 is a milestone document in the history of human rights drafted by state representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world. It is also a political and moral document that is a product of the fear of more world wars, coming as it did immediately after 1945. This is why the very first paragraphs in the preamble actually reflect the central concern of avoiding further violent upheavals by, first and foremost, acknowledging the close relationship between respecting legally enshrined human rights in order for individuals “not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression”. The third preambular paragraph thus makes the direct link between conflict prevention and human rights. This dimension

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may perhaps at times be neglected, since many may assume human rights are deeply ingrained in history or that they are exclusively a type of philosophical or moral view of the relationship between individuals and states. However, at the supranational level, international human rights were additionally clearly also portrayed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as central elements for a just and peaceful world necessary to avoid conflicts and rebellion. There is also another underlying assumption in the preamble of the Universal Declaration that needs to be highlighted, that breaches of human rights may constitute a significant, perhaps dominant, factor in the emergence of conflicts. As indicated in this chapter’s early description of the concerns addressed by the Minority Treaties in the interwar period, the fear of minority grievances being instrumentalised by kin states led to these first, albeit restricted, human rights instruments in international law. In a sense, they were recognising that avoiding violent “rebellion against tyranny and oppression” was necessary to ensure the supposedly new foundation of “freedom, justice and peace in the world”. A similar view can be seen in Europe’s regional organisation aimed at addressing security in Europe, the OSCE, and particularly the office of the High Commissioner on National Minorities that has the role of providing early warning and taking early action to prevent ethnic tensions from developing into conflict. As the title of the mandate makes unambiguous, this early warning mechanism directly and clearly makes similar connections between human rights, minorities, and preventing “rebellion against tyranny and oppression”: Wars in the former Yugoslavia give clear warnings about the cancer of intolerance in multi-ethnic societies. Such conflicts feature grave violations of human rights, the systematic exclusion and suppression of one or several groups by another. In some cases marginalization spawns frustration. In others, difference is perceived as threat, and the threat is confronted by violence. These phenomena are not limited to the Balkans. Xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism are alive and well throughout Europe.95

The OSCE institutional structure for conflict prevention evolved especially during the Cold War and the backdrop of escalating ethnic tensions in the successor states of the former Soviet bloc and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Among the initial steps is the 1990 Copenhagen Document, which linked minority protection to democratic values and the need for a concept of security that combines peace and security directly with democracy and the human

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rights of minorities,96 as does in a sense more generally the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is in this context that the mandate of the High Commissioner of National Minorities (HCNM) was established in 1993, to prevent inter-ethnic tensions and conflicts from erupting. From the 1990s, this resulted in the HCNM trying to elucidate what in concrete, practical terms are the human rights of minorities—and what are the supranational standards in relation to minority language rights—in order to avoid conflicts or, in the parlance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, rebellion against tyranny and oppression.

 yranny and Rebellion: The Contemporary Context T of Conflicts If minorities are adequately protected, this avoids the instrumentalization of minority issues, either by radicals in the minority community or by neighbouring states – which may even use violence to seek the world’s attention. States must support minority groups in expressing and preserving their identities, while promoting integration and equality before the law to strengthen social cohesion and prevent discrimination.97

Most conflicts in the world since the end of the Second World War are intrastate—rebellions in the sense used in the UN Universal Declaration. This is true of almost all of them in more recent years, as shown in Fig. 2.1 below, though an apparently increasing number of these internal conflicts have seen the involvement of external state actors, as many as in 18 out of 47 intrastate conflicts in 2016 (38%). Though these trends are generally acknowledged, what is perhaps not as widely appreciated is what they signify in relation to the actors involved in these conflicts. Though a matter of some debate among observers, it is arguable that the majority of contemporary, internal conflicts have an ethnic dimension, usually a “rebellion” implicating a minority. While undoubtedly instrumentalised by internal or external actors, a fertile environment can be expected for rebellion and violence where there are long-standing grievances of severe violations of human rights affecting large numbers of individuals belonging to minorities. Put another way, some of the main factors which contribute to the eventual eruption of violent conflicts worldwide are state policies and practices that breach the human rights of minorities to such an extent, and with such effects, that eventually violent rebellion is seen by members of the group as a viable way to react to and oppose a government.

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It is for these reasons that preventing or addressing these violations of the human rights of minorities are an important step—if not a stand-alone solution—to helping prevent conflicts.

L anguage Rights and the Prevention of Conflicts: Supranational Standards Ethnic tensions and conflicts within a state are more likely to be avoided where language rights are in place to address the causes of alienation, marginalization and exclusion. Since the use of minority languages helps to increase the level of participation by minorities, as well as their presence and visibility within a state and even their employment opportunities, this is likely to contribute positively to unity and stability. Conversely, where the use of only one official language discriminates dramatically against minorities, violence is more likely to occur.98

Human rights are the main supranational standards influencing the more detailed, practical guidance provided in documents for the prevention of internal conflicts produced by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, since “[the OSCE High Commissioner] employs the international standards to which each State has agreed as his principal framework of analysis and the foundation of his specific recommendations”,99 as do UN documents such as the above Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation. It is also no coincidence that among the first of a series of eight recommendations and guidelines produced by the HCNM, on how governmental policies needed to take into account and address the human rights of minorities in order to maintain peace and stability, dealt with language rights.100 The HCNM’s Oslo Recommendations on the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities were published in February 1998 during a period when language and ethnic tensions in the former Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc were increasingly threatening.101 It is likewise not a coincidence that during same period the UN adopted the 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities and the Council of Europe adopted the 1994 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. These documents thus combine, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conflict prevention and supranational human rights standards in language matters as potentially effective tools to avoid situations that could be presented as forms of rebellion against tyranny and oppression. Language

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60 50 40 30 20 10

Extrastate

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Fig. 2.1  Number of armed conflicts by type of conflict, 1946–2016. (Dupuy, K., Gates, S., Nygård, H., Rudolfsen, I., Siri, A., Strand, H. and Urdal, H. (2017). Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2016. Conflict Trends, 2. Available at: https://www.prio.org/utility/ DownloadFile.ashx?id=1373&type=publicationfile [Accessed 2 Apr. 2018])

rights so understood can therefore serve as reference points to guide state policymakers and lawmakers on their human rights obligations in relation to language issues affecting minorities. The flip side of this understanding of language rights as supranational standards is that policies and legislation which disregard or fail to respect these human rights standards may contribute to tensions and potential violent conflicts. Put differently, ethnic conflicts tend to erupt when the human rights of minorities are disregarded or discarded and when they result in widespread exclusion or discrimination, including with regard to language preferences and matters. It is with this understanding in mind that one can better understand the position of European institutions such as the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly when it stated that the effective protection of the human rights of minorities was of great importance for “stability, democratic security and peace in Europe”.102 Similarly, it is clear that the massive and systematic violations of the human rights of the Rohingya minority fuelled the eventual use of violence by Rohingya insurgents (the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army) in 2016, and the ensuing brutal repression and even ethnic cleansing and descent towards conflict, as recognised by the UN.103

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Conclusion: The Importance of Being Earnest I am under no illusions that all inter-ethnic conflicts can be solved. However, I do not believe inter-ethnic conflict is inevitable. We now have a better understanding of why conflicts erupt and how they can be prevented. Standards are in place to protect minority rights and there is a growing ‘toolbox’ of techniques to prevent conflict.104

Minority rights, in general, including the language rights of minorities, are often subject to a variety of misunderstandings and mischaracterisations going back through history to the interwar period and the Minority Treaties. For reasons that have been described, the legacy of the mid-twentieth-century era has been to treat minority rights as a “failure” and a somewhat suspect category of rights, alien to the individualistic nature of supranational human rights after the Second World War. Some of this legacy affects how the language rights of linguistic minorities have been and continue to be perceived in more recent years, with a reluctance in some circles to recognise how these rights fit in terms of supranational standards and a continuing uncertainty as what they involve in terms of the applicable standards and their implementation. This at times is reflected by the mistaken view among some commentators and state parties that minority language rights are either not “real” rights or that they are limited to specific, minority-related standards such as Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or in minority treaties such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. This chapter sought to discard these misperceptions by addressing core issues, such as how the Minority Treaties were early human rights instruments that focussed on minorities as a particular segment of society in the targeted states and following the concerns of that period to address some of the root causes of the First World War; how most of these early provisions were neither exclusively collective nor even restricted to minorities; and why perhaps the need for a convenient scapegoat lead to a demonising of the “minorities approach” that resulted in an initial reluctance to refer to minority rights generally in the early UN documents. This reluctance could not, however, remain in place as the UN and regional human rights systems started to address in greater detail the human rights of some of the world’s most vulnerable members of society in many parts of the globe, but it did seem to contribute to the absence of consensus of what constituted a minority and what was the nature or scope of their rights, for a fairly

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long period of time. Indeed, the continuing disagreements played a role in the absence of any legally binding definition of the former, a commonly referred to definition (Capotorti) holding sway until recently, despite its rejection within the UN system, including more recently with the committee of experts in charge of interpreting this standard under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Nevertheless, what more recent instruments and interpretation of the language rights of linguistic minorities lead to is the conclusion that language rights—including minority language rights—are human rights. This is the basis for, and nature of, the language rights that one finds in treaties and other documents which deal with this area, including the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the OSCE Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, the Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities, and the 2017 UN Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation. As this chapter shows, it is when understanding the nature of the supranational standards such as freedom of expression, non-discrimination on the ground of language, the right to private life, and the right for a member of a minority to use their own language among themselves within a human rights framework, that a proper understanding and appreciation can be had of the practical and concrete aspects of minority language rights at the supranational level.

Notes 1. Covenant of the League of Nations, opened for signature 28 June 1919, entered into force 10 January 1920. Amended English version [online]. Available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 2. See Smith, P., Koufa, K. and Suppan, A. (1991). Ethnic groups in international relations. New York: European Science Foundation, Page 13: “Those decisions, and particularly the atmosphere which accompanied their creation, greatly disappointed numerous advocates of the national principle as the foundation for the building of both the new Europe and the new world. The leaders of the victorious countries faced severe criticism coming from various directions. Thus, the idea of including in treaties the imposition of minority obligations on individual states, whether new or considerably enlarged, should be seen as a kind of compensation for the unfulfilled hopes evoked by the idea of national self-determination”.

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3. The case of the Åland Islands is interesting because the arrangement has survived to the present day and provides a precedent on the potential importance of self-determination and autonomy arrangements for linguistic populations. A study by the United Nations (UN) Secretariat concluded that the engagements entered into by states after the First World War under the Minority Treaties had ceased to exist, except for the Åland Islands agreement. See UN Document E/CN, 4/367 of 7 April 1950 and E/CN, 4/367 Add.1, 27 March 1951. 4. See Capotorti, F. (1983). Study on the rights of persons belonging to ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. New  York: UN, Dept. of Public Information. In the Advisory Opinion on Minority Schools in Albania, (1935) Permanent Court of International Justice, Series A/B, No. 64, 3, the Permanent Court of International Justice held that these declarations also had the legal status of a treaty. 5. For an in-depth study on this period and such views, see Fink, C. (2014). Defending the rights of others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6. Shimazu, N. (1998). Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919. London, New York: Routledge, Page 115. 7. Shimazu, p. 28. 8. Signed at Versailles 28 June 1919. Treaty [online]. Available at http://www. forost.ungarisches-institut.de/pdf/19190628-3.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 9. Study on the Rights of Persons belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, at pp. 18–19. 10. Advisory Opinion on Minority Schools in Albania. 11. For an excellent description of the background on the minority protection system after the First World War and the basis and debates pertaining to the disenchantment with the system see Study on the Rights of Persons belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, at pp. 14–45. See also Liebich, A. and Reszler, A. (1991). L’Europe centrale et ses minorités: vers une solution européenne? Paris: Presses universitaires de France, Page 45. 12. Fink C.  Minority Rights as an International Question. Contemporary European History, 9, 3 (2000), Cambridge University Press. Pages 385–400, Page 395. 13. UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues (2017). Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation. [online] http://www.ohchr. org/Documents/Issues/Minorities/SR/LanguageRightsLinguisticMinorities_ EN.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 14. McKean, W. (1983). Equality and Discrimination under International Law, Oxford: Clarendon Press, Page 53. 15. General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), UN GAOR, 3rd Session, Resolutions, Part 1, at p. 71 (1948). 16. Council of Europe, European Treaty Series, No. 5.

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17. Study on the Rights of Persons belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, at p. 27. 18. Treaty of Peace with Italy, signed in Paris on 10 February 1947. [online] Available at https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000004-0311.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 19. Annex IV (Provisions Agreed upon by the Austrian and Italian Governments on 5 September 1946, original English text as signed by the two Parties and communicated to the Paris Conference on 6 September 1946), in Treaty of Peace with Italy, supra. 20. State Treaty for the re-establishment of an independent and democratic Austria. Signed at Vienna, on 15 May 1955. [online] Available at https://treaties. un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20217/v217.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 21. Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe), [online] https://www.coe.int/en/web/minorities/text-of-the-convention [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. For a general description of the interpretation of the language rights provisions of this treaty, see Thematic Commentary no. 3 on the Language Rights of Persons Belonging to National Minorities under the Framework Convention (Council of Europe), [online] https://rm.coe. int/16800c108d [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 22. Adopted by General Assembly resolution 47/135 of 18 December 1992. 23. Convention Concerning the Protection and Integration of Indigenous and Other Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in Independent Countries, adopted 26 June 1957, [online] available at http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=N ORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C107 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 24. While indigenous peoples are a distinct legal category, factually indigenous peoples may simultaneously constitute a minority in countries where they live. Being a minority does not extinguish or diminish any indigenous rights. 25. Convention against Discrimination in Education, adopted 14 December 1960, [online] available at http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ ID=12949&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 26. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted 16 December 1966, [online] available at http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/ pages/ccpr.aspx [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 27. Article 30: “In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to profess and practise his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language”. Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted 20 November 1966, [online]

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available at http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 28. European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. English version [online]. Available at https://www.coe.int/en/web/european-charter-regional -or-minority-languages/text-of-the-charter [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 29. UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, [online] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ ProfessionalInterest/Pages/Minorities.aspx [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 30. UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, [online] http://www. ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IPeoples/Pages/Declaration.aspx [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 31. Vienna Declaration and Plan of Action, [online] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ ProfessionalInterest/Pages/Vienna.aspx [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 32. Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE, [online] http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/14304 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 33. Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities (OSCE), [online] http://www.osce.org/hcnm/67531 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 34. Hague Recommendations Regarding the Educational Rights of National Minorities (OSCE), [online] http://www.osce.org/fr/hcnm/32184 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 35. Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life (OSCE), [online] http://www.osce.org/hcnm/32240 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 36. [online] http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Minorities/SR/Language RightsLinguisticMinorities_EN.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 37. Study on the rights of persons belonging to ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. 38. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 39. See, for example, Minorities under international law [online] at http://www. ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Minorities/Pages/internationallaw.aspx [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 40. For an in-depth and comprehensive examination of the discussions and debates around the drafting of Article 27 of the ICCPR, see Duchêne, A. (2008). Ideologies across Nations: The Construction of Linguistic Minorities at the United Nations. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter, Pages 120–158. 41. See Wolfrum, R. (1993). The Emergence of ‘New Minorities’ as a Result of Migration. In C.  Brölmann, R.  Lefeber and M.  Zieck, eds., Peoples and Minorities in International Law, Dordrecht, Boston: Springer, Pages 153– 166, at Page 162. 42. Report of the independent expert on minority issues, Gay McDougall: Minorities and the Discriminatory Denial or Deprivation of Citizenship, HRC 7th ses-

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sion, 2008, A/HRC/7/23, [online] available at http://daccess-ods.un.org/ access.nsf/Get?Open&DS=A/HRC/7/23&Lang=E [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 43. General Comment 15(27), UN Document A/41/40, at p. 118. 44. Nowak, M. (1993). The Evolution of Minority Rights in International Law. In C. Brölmann, R. Lefeber and M. Zieck, eds., Peoples and Minorities in International Law, Dordrecht, Boston: Springer, Pages 103–118, at Page 116. See also Bossuyt, M. (1990). The United Nations and the Definition of Minorities. Plural Societies, XXI, pages 129–136, at p. 131: “If Article 27 contains mainly a negative obligation in the sense that governments are obligated to refrain from interfering with the culture, religion and language of minority groups, a definition becomes almost superfluous. It is also because Article 27 contains essentially only negative obligations that Article 27 may also be applied to aliens and to immigrants…”. 45. 6 April 1994, Document CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.5, at paragraphs 5.1 and 5.2. 46. Ballantyne, Davidson, McIntyre v. Canada, Communications Nos. 359/1989 and 385/1989, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/47/D/359/1989 and 385/1989/Rev.1 (1993). 47. See UNHCR report exposes the discrimination pervading the life of stateless minorities worldwide, 3 November 2017, [online] at http://www.unhcr.org/ news/press/2017/11/59fc27514/unhcr-report-­e xposes-discriminationpervading-life-stateless-minorities.html [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 48. UNESCO (2012). Why Language Matters for the Millennium Development Goals. [online] available at http://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommon SearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=09000016800c b5e5 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 49. UNESCO (September 2006). Language Matters. The Intangible Heritage Messenger, [online] available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/0 01471/147185e.pdf, Page 1 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 50. Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, adopted 20 October 2005. [online] available at http://en.unesco.org/ creativity/sites/creativity/files/passeport-­convention2005-­web2.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 51. The objectives of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages can be found online at https://www.coe.int/en/web/european-charter-regional -or-minority-languages/the-objectives-of-the-charter-[Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 52. Ethnologue, [online] available at https://www.ethnologue.com/country/ UA/languages [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 53. Convention on Biological Diversity, adopted on 5 June 1992. [online] available at https://www.cbd.int/doc/legal/cbd-en.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. This treaty only provides for support to short-term projects and specific aspects of heritage of international interest and only those proposed by gov-

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ernments occasionally. In other words, it does not create any rights to use endangered languages or even any direct entitlement to their protection since it is left to the discretion of national governments to submit occasionally some kind of proposal for specific action which can then be occasionally financially supported by a UNESCO fund for this purpose. 54. Council of Europe (1992). Explanatory Report to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. [online] available at http://rm.coe.int/ CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?document Id=09000016800cb5e5 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 55. Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation. 56. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of the Council of Europe neither recognises any enforceable right nor is it premised on human rights concerns. It is based on state obligations to protect and promote European linguistic diversity. 57. Ballantyne, Davidson, McIntyre v. Canada, Communications Nos. 359/1989 and 385/1989, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/47/D/359/1989 and 385/1989/Rev.1 (1993). 58. Ballantyne, Davidson and McIntyre v. Canada, UN Human Rights Committee Communications Nos. 359/1989 and 385/1989, 31 March 1993. 59. Ouranio Toxo and Others v. Greece, European Court of Human Rights, 74,989/01, 20 October 2005. 60. Ballantyne, Davidson and McIntyre v. Canada, UN Human Rights Committee Communications Nos. 359/1989 and 385/1989, 31 March 1993. 61. Name is used here as a generic term to include forenames (or first names) and surnames (last or family names). 62. Raihmanv.Latvia,UNHumanRightsCommittee,CCPR/C/100/D/1621/2007, 28 October 2010. 63. See Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Japan, 27 April 2001, CERD/C/304/Add.114, paragraph 18, and Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Morocco, CERD/C/MAR/Q/17–18, 8 July 2010, paragraph 12. 64. See Comments on Dominican Republic, U.N.  Doc. CCPR/C/79/Add.18 (1993): 7. The Committee exmathpresses its concern over the inadequate protection of the rights of ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities in the Dominican Republic. In this regard, the Committee notes that the prohibition of broadcasting in a language other than Spanish is not in conformity with article 19 [freedom of expression] of the Covenant.

65. OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (2003). Guidelines on the use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media. The Hague: Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

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66. Article 27: “In those States in which…linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group… to use their own language”. Article 30 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is similarly worded, though including indigenous children. 67. Lovelace v. Canada, UN Human Rights Committee Communication 24/1977, UN Document A/36/40. 68. See, for example, Advisory Opinion on Minority Schools in Albania, (1935) Permanent Court of International Justice, Series A/B, No. 64, 3, at p. 17. See also dissident opinion of Judge Kōtarō Tanaka, South West Africa (Liberia v. South Africa), (1966) International Court of Justice, judgment of 18 July 1966, at Page 310. 69. This can occur if state authorities unreasonably only provide financial support to some private minority schools, Waldman v. Canada, 3 November 1999. (Communication No. 694/1996), CCPR/C/67/D/694/199. 70. Following the conclusions of the UN Human Rights Committee that the Government of Québec breached freedom of expression by requiring the exclusive use of the official language (French) on commercial signs, state authorities adopted legislation that respected a private individual’s language of choice in his or her own private affairs by not restricting in a disproportionate way the use of a language of preference on private signs, while still requiring that these display the official language in a predominant position. This shows how a state can combine the legitimate goal of promoting and protecting an official language, while not preventing an individual’s human right to use the language of his or her choice in private matters, including on signs visible to the general public. 71. Van der Vlis, E. (2010). The right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings. The Journal of Specialised Translation. July (14). Pages 28–29. 72. See Chapter 4  in Namakula, C. (2014). Language and the Right to Fair Hearing in International Criminal Trials. New York: Springer. 73. Directive on the Right to Interpretation and Translation, DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU. 74. Kamasinski v. Austria, judgement of the European Court of Human Rights, 19 December 1989. 75. Article 14(3)(f ) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 76. Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation, at p. 7. 77. Case relating to certain aspects of the laws on the use of languages in education in Belgium v Belgium, Application no 1474/62; 1677/62; 1691/62; 1769/63; 1994/63; 2126/64, judgment of 23 July 1968, (Nos. 1 & 2). (No.1) (1967), Series A, No.5 (1979–80) 1 EHRR 241, http://minorityrights.org/wp-­

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content/uploads/old-site-downloads/download-223-Belgian-Linguisticcase-full-case.pdf 78. Thornberry, P. (1991). International Law and the Rights of Minorities. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, Chapter 7. 79. See generally Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and Phillipson, R. (1994). Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pages 71–110. 80. Smith, R. (2003). Mother Tongue Education and the Law: A Legal Review of Bilingualism with Reference to Scottish Gaelic. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 6:2, 129–145. Pages 130–132. 81. The European Court of Human Rights did conclude it was unreasonable and unjustified, and therefore discriminatory, to prevent children from having access to French-language schools in certain communes of Brussels, solely on the basis of the residence of their parents. This was not the case for Dutch-language schools and thus constituted discriminatory treatment. 82. At pp. 884–886. 83. J.G.A. Diergaardt et  al. v. Namibia. 25 July 2000. (Communication No. 760/1997), U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/69/D/760/1997 (2000). 84. Kevin Mgwanga Gunme et al. v. Cameroon, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Communication 266/2003, 27 May 2009. Available at http://caselaw.ihrda.org/doc/266.03/view/ 85. Cyprus v. Turkey, Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, judgment of 10 May 2001, (2002) 35 E.H.R.R. 30, 86. Catan and Others v. Moldova and Russia, Applications nos. 43,370/04 18,454/06 8252/05, judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, 19 October 2012. 87. Other documents containing the same general approach, though with some variations, include the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, the Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, the UN Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. 88. The Global Transparency Initiative (2009). Model World Bank Policy on Disclosure of Information, Page 1. [online] http://www.ifitransparency.org/ uploads/.../GTI_WB_Model_Policy_final.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 89. Benson, C. (2005). Girls, Educational Equity and Mother Tongue-based Teaching. Bangkok: UNESCO. [online] http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ 0014/001420/142049e.pdf [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]. 90. See generally, UNESCO (2008). Improving the Quality of Mother Tonguebased Literacy and Learning: Case Studies from Asia, Africa and South America. Bangkok: UNESCO. 91. For a list of some of these studies, see Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation.

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92. For example, in one 2013 ranking of France’s high schools (‘lycées’), the top educational facility for the whole country was the Lycée Diwan teaching in the minority Breton language rather than the country’s only official language. This school also had a higher average fluency in the French language than mainstream students, even though most of their instruction was in Breton. 93. Dutcher, N. in collaboration with Tucker, G.R. (1997). The Use of First and Second Languages in Education: A Review of Educational Experience. Washington D.C.: World Bank. 94. Article 17(a), Convention on the Rights of the Child. 95. Van der Stoel, M. (2001). Easing the Sisyphus Task: Preventing the Conflicts of the Future. Speech by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Max van der Stoel at the Verleihung des Hessichen Friedenspreises, Wiesbaden, Germany. Available at: http://www.osce.org/hcnm/42334?download=true. [Accessed 2 Apr. 2018]. 96. See: Packer, J. G. Siemienski (1999). The Language of Equity: The Origin and Development of the Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities. International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 6, pp. 329–350. At Page 330. 97. Turner, N. and Otsuki, N. (2010). The Responsibility to Protect Minorities and the Problem of the Kin-State. Policy Brief, 2, UNU Press. 98. Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation. Page 9. 99. Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities. 100. Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities, 1 October 1996; Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, 1 February 1998; Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life, 1 September 1999; Guidelines on the Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media, 10 October 2003; Recommendations on Policing in Multi-Ethnic Societies, 9 February 2006; Bolzano/Bozen Recommendations on National Minorities in Inter-State Relations, 2 October 2008; Ljubljana Guidelines on Integration of Diverse Societies, 7 November 2012; and the Graz Recommendations on Access to Justice and National Minorities, 14 November 2017. 101. Packer, J. G. Siemienski (1999). The Language of Equity: The Origin and Development of the Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities. International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 6, pp. 329–350. At Pages 329–330. 102. Recommendation 1492 (2001), Rights of national minorities, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/ Xref-XML2HTML-EN.asp?fileid=16861&lang=en

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103. See UN News Centre (2017). UN human rights chief points to ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing’ in Myanmar. [online] Available at: http://www. un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=57490#.WhryVjdrw2w [Accessed 2 Apr. 2018]. 104. Van der Stoel, M. (2001). Easing the Sisyphus Task: Preventing the Conflicts of the Future. Speech by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Max van der Stoel at the Verleihung des Hessichen Friedenspreises, Wiesbaden, Germany. Available at: http://www.osce.org/hcnm/42334?download=true. [Accessed 2 Apr. 2018].

References Books, Chapters and Articles Benson, C. (2005). Girls, Educational Equity and Mother Tongue-based Teaching, UNESCO, Bangkok, available at http://www.unescobkk.org/resources/e-library/ publications/article/girls-educational-equity-and-mother-tongue-based-teaching/ Bossuyt, M. (1990). The United Nations and the Definition of Minorities. Plural Societies, XXI, 129–136. Dutcher, N. in collaboration with G. Richard Tucker. (1997). The Use of First and Second Languages in Education: A Review of Educational Experience. Washington, DC: World Bank. Fink, C. (2004). Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938. New York: Cambridge University Press. L’Europe centrale et ses minorités: vers une solution européenne?, André Liebich and André Reszler (eds.), Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1993. Language Rights in the Minimum Guarantees of Fair Criminal Trial in Catherine S. Namakula, Language and the Right to Fair Hearing in International Criminal Trials, Springer International Publishing, 2014. McKean, W. (1983). Equality and Discrimination under International Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nowak, M. (1993). The Evolution of Minority Rights in International Law. In C. Brölmann, R. Lefeber, & M. Zieck (Eds.), Peoples and Minorities in International Law (pp. 103–118). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Shimazu, N. (1998). Japan, Race and Equality. Routledge. London and New York. Wolfrum, R. (1993). The Emergence of ‘New Minorities’ as a Result of Migration. In C.  Brölmann, R.  Lefeber, & M.  Zieck (Eds.), Peoples and Minorities in International Law (pp. 153–166). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.

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International Treaties Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960), United Nations Treaty Series, Vol. 428. Convention concerning the Protection and Integration of Indigenous and Other Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in Independent Countries, adoption in Geneva at the 40th ILC session, 26 June 1957., available at http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/ f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C107 Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989. Covenant of the League of Nations, Opened for Signature 28 June 1919, Entered into Force 10 January 1920, Amended English Version available at http://avalon.law. yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp Directive on the Right to Interpretation and Translation, DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU. Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, CETS No. 157, Strasbourg, Entered into Force 1 February 1998. International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (1966), United Nations Treaty Series, Vol. 999. Minorities Treaty Between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Poland, Signed at Versailles 28 June 1919., available at http://www.forost.ungarisches-institut.de/ pdf/19190628-3.pdf State Treaty for the re-establishment of an independent and democratic Austria, signed at Vienna, on 15 May 1955., available at https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/ UNTS/Volume%20217/v217.pdf Treaty of Peace with Italy, signed in Paris on 10 February 1947., available at https:// www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000004-0311.pdf U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989. U.N.  Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007, General Assembly, Resolution no. 61/295. UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities Adopted by General Assembly Resolution 47/135 of 18 December 1992. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), UN GAOR, 3rd Session, Resolutions, 1948. Vienna Declaration and Plan of Action, Adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna on 25 June 1993.

Judgments, Decisions and Views of International Courts and Bodies Advisory Opinion on Minority Schools in Albania, (1935) Permanent Court of International Justice, Series A/B, No. 64, 3.

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Ballantyne, Davidson and McIntyre v. Canada, U.N.  Human Rights Committee Communications Nos. 359/1989 and 385/1989, 31 March 1993. Catan and Others v. Moldova and Russia, applications nos. 43370/04 18454/06 8252/05, ECtHR, judgment of 19 October 2012. Comments on Dominican Republic, U.N. Human Rights Committee, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/79/Add.18 (1993). Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Japan, 27 April 2001, CERD/C/304/Add.114. Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Morocco, CERD/C/MAR/Q/17-18, 8 July 2010. Cyprus v. Turkey, Grand Chamber, ECtHR, judgment of 10 May 2001, (2002) 35 E.H.R.R. 30. J.G.A. Diergaardt (late Captain of the Rehoboth Baster Community) et al. v. Namibia, U.N.  Human Rights Committee, communication No. 760/1997, U.N.  Doc. CCPR/C/69/D/760/1997 (2000). Kamasinski v. Austria, ECtHR, judgement of 19 December 1989. Kevin Gumne and Others v. République du Cameroun, communication 266/2003, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Banjul, The Gambia, 45th Ordinary Session, 13–27 May 2009. Lovelace v. Canada, U.N.  Human Rights Committee, communication 24/1977, U.N. Document A/36/40. Ouranio Toxo and Others v. Greece, ECtHR, application no. 74989/01, judgment of 20 October 2005. Raihman v. Latvia, U.N. Human Rights Committee, CCPR/C/100/D/1621/2007, 28 October 2010. Waldman v. Canada, U.N. Human Rights Committee, 3 November 1999, communication no. 694/1996), CCPR/C/67/D/694/199.

Other Documents Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE, available at http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/14304 Francesco Capotorti, Study on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/384 (Rev1. 1979). General Comment 15(27) on the position of aliens under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, United Nations Human Rights Committee, UN Document A/41/40. General Comment No. 23(50) on Article 27, United Nations Human Rights Committee, 6 April 1994, Document CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.5. Hague Recommendations Regarding the Educational Rights of National Minorities (OSCE)., available at http://www.osce.org/fr/hcnm/32184 Improving the Quality of Mother Tongue-based Literacy and Learning: Case Studies from Asia, Africa and South America, UNESCO, UNESCO Bangkok, 2008.

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Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life (OSCE), available at http://www.osce.org/hcnm/32240 Model World Bank Policy on Disclosure of Information, The Global Transparency Initiative, May 2009. OSCE Guidelines on the use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Netherlands, October 2003. Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities (OSCE), available at http://www.osce.org/hcnm/67531 Report of the independent expert on minority issues, Gay McDougall: Minorities and the Discriminatory Denial or Deprivation of Citizenship, HRC 7th session, 2008, A/ HRC/7/23, available at https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ G08/113/51/PDF/G0811351.pdf?OpenElement Thematic Commentary no. 3 on the Language Rights of Persons Belonging to National Minorities under the Framework Convention (Council of Europe), available at http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/minorities/3_fcnmdocs/PDF_Commentary Language_en.pdf U.N. Document E/CN, 4/367 of 7 April 1950 and E/CN, 4/367 Add.1, 27 March 1951. UNHCR report exposes the discrimination pervading the life of stateless minorities worldwide, 3 November 2017., available at http://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2017/11/ 59fc27514/unhcr-report-exposes-discrimination-pervading-life-stateless-minorities.html

3 Minority Language Rights in the Russian Federation: The End of a Long Tradition? Bill Bowring

Introduction This chapter cannot present an overview of a developed and stable contemporary Russian approach to minority language rights, even if that was the objective. The reason is that from 2016 there has been a very significant shift away from special status for “national,” ethnic, languages in the context of an asymmetric federation. While Russia has a developed hierarchy of norms, consisting of international obligations which are part of Russian law, the Constitution of the Russian Federation of 1993, and relevant legislation, the latest fundamental changes have been brought about without amendments to the Constitution or to the relevant legislation. In order to engage with the issues posed by the dramatic events of the last few years, I outline a history of the development of minority language rights.

I am indebted to Tamara Borgoyakova, of the Khakas State University, Abakan, Russia, Institute of Humanities, and Sayano-Altay Turkology, for many of the Russian language references below, which appeared in our joint publication “Language Policy and Language Education in Russia,” Chapter 25 in the Encylopedia of Law and Language, Springer International Publishing AG, and to Mustafa Tuna and Michael Newcity of Duke University for inviting me with Sophie Roche of Heidelberg University to participate in the seminar “Preserving Culture at the Fringes in Authoritarian States” at Duke University on 15 February 2017, where a version of this chapter was presented and a rich discussion ensued.

B. Bowring (*) School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_3

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First I present Russia’s unusual federative, ethnic, and linguistic complexity. Second, I sketch developments in the Russian Empire and the USSR. Third, I trace the consequences of the collapse of the USSR and the “parade of sovereignties” of 1990–1992. Fourth, I introduce the Constitution of 1993 and its rather radical provisions. Fifth, I present the last report of the Advisory Committee (AC) for the Framework Convention for the Protection of Minority Rights (FCNM)1 in 2012, a continuing process. Sixth, I engage with the beginning of the present era. President Putin has now been in power since 2000, 18  years, and is just commencing a further 6 years in office. Finally, I discuss the dramatic events of the past few years and how matters stand at the time of writing.

Russia The Russian Federation (RF) has an unusually complex structure. Since the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, it now has 85 subjects (members) of the Federation, the most recent being the Republic of Crimea (illegally annexed by Russia in 2014), and its capital, the city of Sevastopol, as a city of federal significance. There are 22 ethnic republics, each with the constitutional right to an official language in addition to Russian.2 Russia’s population is falling, currently around 140 million.3 In September 2017, the Economy Minister, Maksim Oreshkin, said that Russia’s demographic situation is “one of the most difficult in the world”… “in the next five to six years we are going to lose approximately 800,000 working-age people from the demographic structure every year” (Balmforth 2017). Russia’s ethnic and linguistic diversity is also impressive if not unique. In the first periodical report4 of the RF, dated 8 March 2000, to the AC under the Council of Europe’s FCNM, a treaty which Russia ratified in August 1998 (Council of Europe 2000), Russia stated that, “The Russian Federation is one of the largest multinational states in the world, inhabited by more than 170 peoples, the total population being about 140 million.” Russia also reported that, “The education in Russia’s schools is now available in 38 languages… As many as 75 national languages are a part (including languages of national minorities) of the secondary schools curricula.” The annexation of Crimea means that there is one more “people,” the Crimean Tatars (Bowring 2018). I return in my conclusion to the latest engagement between Russia and the FCNM. Russia’s Fourth State Report was received by the Council of Europe on 20 December 2016 and has been published.5 Publication by the Council of Europe was prefaced by the following:

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The fourth state report submitted by the Russian Federation (ACFC/SR/ IV(2016)006) has been made public by the Council of Europe Secretariat in accordance with Article 20 of Resolution (97)10 on the monitoring arrangements under Articles 24–26 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. The report has been prepared under the sole responsibility of the Russian Federation. Being committed under the relevant Committee of Ministers decisions (e.g. CM/Del/Dec(2014)1196/1.8, CM/Del/Dec(2014)1207/1.5, CM/Del/ Dec(2015)1225/1.8) to uphold the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, the Council of Europe does not recognise any alteration of status of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol.

L anguage and Education Policies in the Russian Empire and the USSR There have been radical changes in language and education policy in the past two and a half centuries. During the Tsarist period (1721–1917), the Russian Empire’s policy in relation to many linguistic minorities was harsh, despite the surprising degree of autonomy enjoyed by non-Russian ethnicities (Bowring 2015). For example, from 1876 to 1905, during the reign of the reformer Aleksandr II, noted for his abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the Great Legal Reforms of 1864, the publication of any literature in the Ukrainian language was forbidden, and the Polish language was expunged from academic institutions and from all official spheres. At the same time this harsh policy was tempered by the very large number of users of minority languages. For many of them, this was also a time of developing national self-­consciousness (Alpatov 2014). Finns and Germans retained linguistic privileges, and the Volga Tatars, following the religious reforms of Catherine II in the 1780s, maintained their language along with their Muslim religion (Yemelianova 2007). I focus on the Tatars later in this chapter. Despite the fact that in reality the USSR functioned as a state with strongly centralized power, under the control of the Communist Party with its principle of “democratic centralism,” the formal, constitutional position was different—and quite different from the Tsarist Empire. The USSR presented itself as a confederation, a union of sovereign republics with the right of secession, and the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics (RSFSR) as a unitary state with strong elements of territorial autonomy (Khazanov 1997). Of course, the ethnic populations which did not receive their “own” territory, especially the indigenous peoples of the north, lost out in this competition.

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The goal of leaders of the “titular” nationality in a particular territory was to preserve as much as possible its ethnic character and territorial integrity. Dowley observed as follows: Elites in the ethnic autonomous republics and national level republics were appointed to represent the ethnic group interests in the larger state, and thus, their natural political base of support was supposed to be the ethnic group. Other political appointments in these regions were made on the basis of ethnicity, a Soviet form of affirmative action for the formally, institutionally, recognised ethnic groups referred to in the early years of the Soviet Union as korenizatsiya or nativisation. (Dowley 1998, 363)

The chairmen of the Supreme Soviets of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, both of which aspired to the status of “Union Republics,” were always members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, along with those of the Union Republics—the only two “autonomous republics” so represented (Shaimiev 1996a, 1). After 1905 this policy to some extent was mitigated but roused significant opposition from the ethnically orientated intelligentsia and opponents of Tsarist autocracy. The ideas of left liberals such as the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (in Russian, Boduen de Kurtene) and revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin were very close. In 1906 Boduen wrote that he preferred a form of the state in which “no one language should be considered the state language and compulsory for all educated citizens… Each citizen should have the right to engage with the central bodies of government in his own language. The task of such central bodies is to guarantee that translators in all languages should be found on the territory of the state” (Boduen-de-Kurtene 1906). Lenin wrote in 1914: “Russian Marxists say that there must be no compulsory official language, that the population must be provided with schools where teaching will be carried on in all the local languages, that a fundamental law must be introduced in the constitution declaring invalid all privileges of any one nation and all violations of the rights of national minorities” (Lenin 1914). After the 1917 revolution these ideas began to come to life. Russia, according to Russian commentators, was the first country in the world in which minority rights to language were guaranteed (Alpatov 2014). In February 1918, it was ordered that all local languages could be used in the courts. In the most bitter period of the civil war, in October 1918, the Narkomat (Peoples’ Commissariat) enacted a decree entitled, “On schools for national (ethnic)

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minorities.” At the same time the centralized production of literature began in a significant number of languages other than Russian. In 1921 the X Congress of the Communist Party adopted a special resolution on national (ethnic) policy, which set out the task of translating into minority languages documents of the courts, administration, economic bodies, theatres, and so on. However, achievements in the legal support for the functioning of languages was minimal. After World War II the USSR became a state with one de facto official language: Russian. A new turn of the screw of Russification took place under Nikita Khrushchev, when in 1958 the law, entitled “On strengthening the connections between school and life,” was enacted, giving parents the right to choose the language of instruction for their children. Teaching in the native language in many schools of autonomous republics and oblasts of the RSFSR was initially terminated in the fourth year, or instruction was completely changed to the Russian language, and the native language was treated as a subject to be taught rather than a language of instruction. In many regions the school system functioning in local languages was changed, above all in the territories of the RSFSR and such regions as Karelia, Marii El, Komi, and others. Significantly less literature in these languages was published and new mass media, radio and television, were for the most part in the Russian language (Zamyatin et al. 2012). In the succeeding decades the official ideology of the merging of the nations and peoples of the country in the framework of a united community, a Soviet people, and a sole common language for all, Russian, dominated. In many ethnic regions of contemporary Russia, the transition from local languages to the Russian language became stronger in the 1970s. The 1977–1978 Constitutions of the USSR and RSFSR preserved without change a quantity of legal regulation in the sphere of the official functioning of languages. At the same time the rights of the individual in the use of languages were broadened. These constitutional norms established the equality of citizens before the law independent of origin, race or ethnic belonging, and so on, as well as of language (Article 34). However, it should be noted that legal guarantees in the sphere of ethnic linguistic relations were strengthened, as before, only in the context of the rights of the citizen to education. Thus, for example, the following linguistic rights were established in the “Foundations of legislation of the USSR in union republics on peoples’ education”: freedom of choice of the language of instruction, the possibility of instruction in the native language, the choice of school with the corresponding language of instruction, and equality in

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receiving education independent not only of the social situation, of racial and ethnic belonging, and so on, but also from language. The list of languages of instruction, nonetheless, was not established by legislation at the union or republic level (Dorovskikh 1996). The 1977 Constitution of the USSR did not define the legal status of a language. It contained no linguonym or other indication of the special status of the Russian language. Nonetheless, in the chapter “The court and arbitrazh,” there was a hierarchy of languages and special status for the Russian language with reducing status for languages of the Union Republics, autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts (regions which are subjects of the RSFSR), and autonomous okrugs (districts within subjects of the RSFSR). The special status of the Russian language was manifested in the heraldic symbols of the USSR. For example, “Proletarians of all Countries, Unite!” was written on the state crest of the USSR in the Russian language at the centre and in bolder letters and in the languages of the Union Republics at the edge. The real language policy consigned native languages to the category of the languages of day-to-day communication, political decoration, and folklore events. A particularly noteworthy change took place in the system of education. Native languages more and more began to be studied only as subjects (e.g., Adigei, Ingush, Kabardino-Balkar, Karachaevo-Cherkess, Ossetian languages) or remained a language of instruction only to the third class in ethnic schools (Altai, Marii, Mordovian, Udmurt, Khakass, and the Komi languages). If at the start of the 1960s instruction in the RSFSR was conducted in 47 languages, by 1982 this was reduced to 17 (Belikov 2001). Vakhtin and Golovko evaluate the language policy of the Soviet period from the 1980s to 1990s in the following way: “In many senses the policy of Russification was successful: the proposed results were achieved” (Vakhtin and Golovko 2004). The results of the 1989 census confirm this view. According to this, 50% of Karelians, 30% of Bashkirs, Mordovians, Komi, Udmurts, and others did not consider their ethnic language to be their mother tongue. From 1970 to 1985 the numbers of people who did not know their ethnic language among Buryats, Tatars, Marii, Yakutians, and others grew twofold. Linguistic loyalty in the form of recognition as the language of one’s ethnos for the people of South Siberia was about 50% for Shors, 77% for Khakass, and 85% for Altai. However, if ethnic language use declined, the political strength of the “titular” ethnicity increased, and by the end of the 1970s, more than half of the professional cadre in half of the Union Republics and 11 of the 21 autonomous republics in the RSFSR were composed of members of the titular ethnic group. The social mobility of ethnic groups was higher than that of Russians

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(Drobizheva 1996, 2). As the Soviet Union weakened and finally collapsed, in December 1991, it is hardly surprising that the same leaders sought to turn symbolic authority into real power and had a strong base for doing so.

 he End of the USSR and the “Parade T of Sovereignties” The “parade of sovereignties” (Bowring 2010) in the last years of the USSR, in which most of ethnic autonomies in the USSR declared their sovereignty and in several cases sought the status of a Union Republic, giving them the right to secede, enabled the Republic of Tatarstan to emerge as the most autonomous subject of the RF, refusing to give up the status of its head as President. From 1996 there has also been the spectacular and paradoxical flourishing of National Cultural Autonomy (NCA),6 including NCAs of the Tatars living outside Tatarstan (Bowring 2007). I return later in this chapter to the question of the Tatars, the most numerous minority in Russia and its former rulers. The real threat of the transformation of Russia into a confederation provided the direct impetus for a draft Federative Treaty. On 31 March 1992, the RSFSR and most of the subjects signed the Federative Treaty, setting out a division of powers. The Treaty was incorporated into the 1978 Constitution of the RSFSR, going into effect on 10 December 1992. In the view of Umnova (1998, 63), Russia turned from a unitary state into a half-federation or quasi-­ federal state. She also considers that for the regions other than the ethnic republics, the Treaty “won” a status of autonomy similar to the regions of unitary decentralized states, such as Italy and Spain (both since the 1980s). I note later in this chapter a comparison of Tatarstan with Catalonia. One of the most important guarantees of autonomy was the principle, to be found in Article 84 of the Treaty and Article 84(9) of the amended 1978 Constitution, that the territories of these formations could not be changed without their agreement. It is notable that not all the subjects of the RSFSR agreed with the provisions of the Federative Treaty. Tatarstan’s Declaration of State Sovereignty of 30 August 19907 declared that state sovereignty was the “realisation of the inalienable right of the Tatar nation, of all people of the republic to self-­ determination” (Tishkov 1997, 56). President Shaimiev stressed the fact that the “people of Tatarstan” were not divided into ethnic groups (Shaimiev

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1996b). In a referendum of that time, no less than 62% of its population, Tatars and Russians, supported sovereignty. Tatarstan, like Chechnya, refused to sign the Federative Treaty in March 1992, but, unlike the Chechen leadership, whose intransigence led to armed conflict, Shaimiev entered into lengthy negotiations with the Russian government. Neither Tatarstan nor the Chechen-Ingush Republic signed the Federative Treaty. On 21 March 1992, Tatarstan, despite the decision of the Russian Constitutional Court of 13 March 1992,8 held a referendum confirming the status of Tatarstan as an independent republic and subject of international law, with its own relations with the RF and other republics and also with foreign states on the basis of treaties and legal equality.9 Linguistic assimilation, which posed a real threat to the majority of languages of the peoples of the Soviet Union, became one of the causes of its collapse in 1991. This is demonstrated by the fact that in almost all countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the first laws to be enacted were laws on language, making the relevant languages state languages. Russia was no exception. The law “On languages of the peoples of the RSFSR” was enacted in 1991, before the country’s Constitution of 1993. This was the result of the need to correct the errors made in state nationalities policy, and the regulation of questions of the state language of the country, on the one hand, and the creation of a legal mechanism for the protection of the languages of the peoples of Russia, on the other hand. A law “On education” was enacted in 1992 (Alpatov 2000; Belikov and Krysin 2001; Bowring 2012; Vakhtin 2001). The RSFSR Law on Languages of 1991 defined the languages of the peoples of the RSFSR as a national achievement of the Russian state, a historical and cultural legacy, under the protection of the state. Languages were recognized as the most important element of culture and the foundation for the appearance of ethnic and personal self-consciousness. Both Boris Yeltsin and Mintimer Shaimiev were democratically elected on 12 June 1991—the former as the first President of the RSFSR, the latter as the first President of Tatarstan (Shaimiev 1996b). One of the factors which precipitated the abortive putsch of August 1991 was the real threat of ethnic separatism. The putsch leaders, who were the leading officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, believed they were saving the Union.

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The 1993 Constitution The 1993 Constitution entrenched the fundamental principle of “the equality of the rights and freedoms of the person and the citizen independently of… race, ethnicity, language…,” and, developing this principle directly forbade any form of “limitation of the rights of the citizen on grounds of social, racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic superiority” (Article 29). Article 26 provided that: “each person has the right to the use of their native language, and to the free choice of the language of communication, upbringing, instruction and creativity.” The Constitution also designated a single state language on the whole territory of the RF. The state language of Russia became the Russian language (Article 68[1])—the language of the most numerous ethnic group in the country (about 80%) and one of the international languages of the world. The realization of the constitutional principle of equal rights and self-­ determination of peoples received its entrenchment in the linguistic sphere in Article 68(2), according to which the (ethnic) republics have the right to determine their own state languages. The Article further provides that these are used in the bodies of state power, the bodies of local government, and state institutions of the republic “side by side with the state language of the Russian Federation.” The Constitution also contained the collective linguistic rights of the other peoples of Russia. All peoples of the RF were guaranteed “the right to preservation of their native language, and to the creation of the conditions for its instruction and development” (Article 68[3]). In all (ethnic) republics except Karelia, the corresponding “titular” languages received legislative status as state languages. There are 34 such languages in the RF. In some republics two or several languages received such a status. The greatest number of state languages is to be found in the Republic of Dagestan, in which there are 13 such languages. The enactment of language legislation in the RF from 1991 represented a genuine step forward. Only the provision in Article 3(6) of the 1991 law “On languages,” forbidding the use of any alphabet other than Cyrillic for languages functioning in the RF, could be described as a violation of international law. It is a problematic aspect of Russian language legislation that a wide range of rights of free choice and use of languages is declared, but their implementation is made difficult in practice by the absence of concrete regulations. Thus, for example, definitions of the rights to the use of their languages by the peoples of Russia are generally qualified in the following ways: “taking into account the local population” (Article 21), “in necessary cases” (Article 16), “in cases of necessity” (Article 15), and so on. This lack of definition is also

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maintained at the (ethnic) republic level of language legislation, which influences practical activity in support of local languages in a negative way. However, Baskakov referred to the “obviously political motivation of the Federal legislation on languages,” the aim of which “in the first instance was not so much the protection and development of languages, but rather the enhancement of the sovereignty of the ethnic subjects (republics) of the Federation, and the raising of the social and political status of their “titular” peoples” (Baskakov 2003). In 1998, a federal law “On amendments and corrections to the Law of the RSFSR ‘On languages of the peoples of the RSFSR’” was enacted. The changes concerned the formulations prescribing the use of the state languages of the (ethnic) republics, which were changed from mandatory requirements to formulations of a permissive character (Articles 12, 13, 16, and 23).

Criticisms from the Council of Europe Adoption of the Constitution in 1993 was followed, also under President Yeltsin, by accession to the Council of Europe in 1996 (Bowring 2013). Russian signed the Council of Europe’s FCNM on 28 February 1996, ratified it on 21 August 1998, and it entered into force on 1 December 1998. I referred above to Russia’s First Report received on 8 March 2000. The AC of the FCNM adopted its Second Report on 11 May 2006.10 Russia’s Third Report under the FCNM was received by the Council of Europe on 9 April 2010.11 A delegation from the AC visited Perm Krai, Tyumen and Moscow Oblasts, as well as the city of Moscow, from 12 to 16 September 2011. In its Third Opinion on the RF, adopted on 24 November 2011, and published on 25 July 2012,12 the AC of the FCNM commented (para 12) that: Since the previous monitoring cycle, there has been no substantial legislative progress in the area of minority protection at federal level. Amendments to the federal education law could lead to fewer opportunities for minority language education. Existing guarantees contained in various federal laws related to, inter alia, minority media, education in and of minority languages, or the use of minority languages, continue to be in need of laws as well as relevant mechanisms at regional level to guarantee their effective implementation. This leaves considerable discretion to the regional authorities and results in different levels of protection at regional level, due to sometimes considerable differences between the various legislative acts in force in the subjects of the Federation.

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The AC added: However, few opportunities exist for access to secondary education in minority languages and the right to take the state examination in a minority language was removed in 2009. Federal legislative provisions concerning minority language education are too broad and often not effectively implemented at local level and there are no guarantees regarding weekly hours of minority language classes or quality standards in the curriculum. Moreover, the ongoing process of “optimisation” of schools has resulted in the closure of various schools with instruction in and of minority languages, even where parents have requested minority language education.

There were detailed critical comments in respect of Article 10 of the Framework Convention, “Use of minority languages in private and in public” (pp. 38–40), and the AC reiterated “… its strong recommendation to the Russian authorities to ensure that the rights contained in Article 10 of the Framework Convention are guaranteed and implemented effectively in all regions.” Russia’s response13 was (p. 3) that “… it should be noted that in most subjects of the Russian Federation the regional authorities pay close attention to these issues, and the existing approaches to the issue of instruction in languages of national minorities are continuously improved” and (p.  6) “According to the 2010 census, an overall number of languages and dialects used in Russia amounts to 277, with 89 languages used in children’s education, 39 of which are used for teaching and 50 are studied as school subjects….” On 20 December 2016, the AC received Russia’s Fourth Cycle Report, which had been due in December 2014. In its previous Reports, the AC had called on Russia to ratify the European Languages Charter, and Russia responded: In accordance with Decree of the President of the Russian Federation No. 90-рп of 22 February 2001, the Russian Federation signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages on 10 May 2001 and has considered the possibility to ratify it until now. In order to assess the possibility of implementation of the Charter in the Russian conditions, the joint project “National Minorities in Russia: Development of Languages, Culture, Media and Civil Society” was implemented during 2009–2011 in cooperation with the Council of Europe and the European Commission.

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I was myself an expert in this project, which cost nearly €3 million, and wrote papers and took part in numerous meetings in Moscow and Strasbourg. But Russia is no closer to ratification, and some Russian experts considered that even recognition for the purposes of the Charter of languages other than Russian could pose an existential threat to the integrity of the RF. And it is certain that the issues discussed in this chapter of the future and even survival of minority languages in Russia will be the subject of anxious examination by the AC. On 16–24 October 2017, a delegation of the AC visited Tyumen, Kazan, Krasnodar, Moscow, and Murmansk to evaluate progress made in the monitoring of the protection of national minorities in the RF. This was the fourth visit made by the AC to the RF.14

Developments Under President Putin Following his election in 2000 President Putin on several occasions declared his strong opposition to the bilateral treaties and his determination to bring them to an end. From 2000 onwards, Putin used administrative and judicial pressure to keep politically inconvenient governors and other leaders from seeking re-election. Hashim adds: “Only a few defiant regional leaders, like Republican presidents of donor and ethnic regions such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, have maintained sufficient autonomy in spite of increased federal intervention in order to strengthen the power vertikal” (Hashim 2005). On 19 December 2012, President Putin signed Decree No. 1666 confirming the new “Strategy of State National15 Policy for the Period to 2025” (hereinafter, the Strategy). The Strategy replaced the “Concept of State National Policy” confirmed by President Yeltsin’s Decree No. 909 of 15 June 1999. On 20 August 2013, by Order No. 718, the Russian government confirmed the Federal Strategic Programme “Strengthening the unity of the Rossian Nation and the Ethnocultural Development of the Peoples of Russia (2014–2020),” intended to implement the Strategy.16 Further insight into government strategy was given by President Putin’s introductory remarks to the meeting of the Presidential Council on Interethnic Relations on 19 February 2013. He insisted that the main task of nationality policy must be to “strengthen harmony and accord” among Russian citizens, so that they will see themselves as “citizens of a single country.”17 He outlined five key concepts of the new policy, the first of which was that the Russian language is “the fundamental basis of the unity of the country.” This was anathema to the leaders of Russia’s ethnic and linguistic minorities and their entrenched territorial autonomies.

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On 1 September 2013, the 1992 law “On Education” was repealed and replaced by the 2012 law “On education in the Russian Federation.” This continued a trend established in amendments of 2007 to reduce the ethnic component in education, with the abolition of the “national cultural component” and the recentralization and standardization of education (Prina 2011). Article 14 stipulates that education is guaranteed in the state language of the Federation, Russian, while the right to choose the language of instruction is provided “within the opportunities offered by the education system.” The same article states that, in schools situated in the (ethnic) republics, the teaching of and instruction in the state languages of the republics “can be introduced”; this, however, must be “in accordance with the federal state education standards” and “should not be to the detriment of the teaching and learning of the state language of the Russian Federation” (Prina 2015). The Ministry of Regional Development, founded just ten years earlier on 13 September 2004, was dissolved on 8 September 2014 by decree of President Putin, and announcing the dissolution,18 Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev said that its functions with respect to economic development, construction, and culture were to be distributed between three ministries: the Economic Development Ministry, the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities, and the Culture Ministry.19 This plainly did not work. On 31 March 2015, by the President’s Decree No.168, a new federal agency was created (Bowring 2017), the Federal Agency for Affairs of Nationalities20 (hereinafter FADN), with the function of realizing state national (ethnic) policy and the implementation of state and federal special purpose (tselevikh) programmes in the sphere of interethnic relations.21 The retired Colonel of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and former Soldier Igor Vyacheslavovich Barinov (of whom more is detailed later) was appointed Head of FADN. FADN’s remit includes “Taking measures directed to the strengthening of the unity of the multiethnic people of the Russian Federation (the Rossian nation), securing interethnic ­agreement, the ethnocultural development of the peoples of the Russian Federation, protection of the rights of national minorities and indigenous small in number peoples of the Russian Federation.” Functions were transferred to the new agency from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Justice of the RF. Mr Barinov,22 who is relatively young (49 years old, born on 22 May 1968), has an unusual background for such an important appointment. He graduated first in 1990 from the Novosibirsk Higher Military and Political All-­ Services College (VVKOU), then in 2003 from the Academy of the FSB, and finally from the Academy of the Economy and State Service in 2011. He is a retired colonel of the FSB (the former Committee for State Security (KGB)).

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His military career was as follows. From 1990 to 1992 he served in the Parachute Division in Vitebsk, in Belarus, and from 1993  in the Regional Section of the Spetsnaz (Galeotti 2015) Forces (Group Alpha) of the regional FSB for Sverdlovsk Oblast and rose to be the commander of the regional group. He fought in the internal armed conflict in North Ossetia and Chechnya and was wounded three times. On 2 April 2015, he was featured in an article in Vzglyad, entitled “I know the Caucasus quite well, its traditions, and elites.”23 That was, indeed, the limit of his knowledge of and engagement with Russia’s vast territory and at least 130 minorities—military service in North Ossetia and Chechnya. On 30 July 2015, Colonel Barinov gave an interview to the daily Kommersant.24 He told the reporters that his first task was to create a system of monitoring of the interethnic situation in the regions of Russia. He emphasized that he proposed to view ethnic policy from the point of view of securing national security. More controversially, he insisted that the “Russian question” could unify the country, if what was meant was the totality of the Russian language, Russian culture, and the role of the Russian (Russkiy) people (not, it should be noted, the Rossian, Rossiiskiy, people), in the history of the country. These developments were summed up by President Vladimir Putin in his address to the Joint Session of the Council for Interethnic Relations and the Council for the Russian Language on 19 May 2015 at the Kremlin.25 The discussion that followed Putin’s introduction highlighted the tensions created by the new policies. Pyotr Tultaev of the Association of Finno-Ugric Peoples of Russia pointed to the severe lack of textbooks and failure to prepare teachers for ethnic languages. Mikhail Khubutiya of the Georgian National Cultural Autonomy used stronger language, asking why schools with an ethnocultural component were being abolished. Ethnic culture was disappearing. Ildar Gilmutdinov of the Tatar National Cultural Autonomy also expressed alarm. Despite the fact that there are 5.5 million Tatars in Russia, 2 million live in Tatarstan, and 3.5 million in other regions of Russia, there are textbooks for Tatar language for primary schools but no textbooks at all for years 5–9. How then, he asked, can the Tatar language be taught in Ulyanovsk Oblast or Mordovia? Furthermore, no teachers were being trained to teach national languages; he gave as an example the Moscow State Pedagogical University, which previously had trained teachers in Tatar language and literature. At the same time, standards of Russian language in Tatarstan were constantly rising.26 The development of language policy has resulted in a number of measures, including some which promise improvement in the legislation on the use of languages of different status. One of these measures was the task of carrying out annual monitoring of the state and development of the languages ​​of

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Russia. The results of the 2015 monitoring confirmed a decrease by 1.6 times (238,900 people) of the number of children taught at school in their mother tongues compared with 2007. According to these statistics, in the 2014–2015 academic year, only 24 state languages of the republics of Russia were used as languages of instruction, and 73 languages of the peoples of Russia were taught as a subject.27 On 29 August 2016, it was announced that FADN had drafted a new state programme “Realisation of state ethnic policy for the period 2017–2025,” costing some 40 billion roubles.28 This would amend the existing federal targeted programme so as to strengthen the Rossiiskiy nation—civic Russian nation.

The Case of the Volga Tatars The Volga Tatars are the most numerous minority in Russia, some 5.5 million strong, with their own republic, Tatarstan. They have proved to be remarkably resilient. As the Golden Horde, they ruled what is now Russia for nearly 250 years from 1237, leaving many indelible legacies in the Russian language (Figes 2002). As a result of the departure of the Golden Horde at the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480, and the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan by Ivan IV in 1552, the Volga Tatars were subjected to Moscow, and in 1783 Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire, and the long tragedy of the Crimean Tatars began. However, in 1787, Catherine II ordered the printing of the Qu’ran and started the process of bringing Russian Islam into the orbit of the State in Ufa in 1788 (Crews 2006). Somehow the Tatar language and Muslim religion survived the changing policies of the Empire, and the Volga Tatars achieved autonomy in the USSR. The “parade of sovereignties” in the last years of the USSR enabled the Republic of Tatarstan to emerge as the most autonomous subject of the RF, refusing to give up the status of its head as President. On 15 December 2015, the State Council of Tatarstan considered the conception of language education which had been drafted by specialists of the Russian Academy of Science and the Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language.29 Particular dissatisfaction was aroused by points concerning teaching of the Russian language in schools of the ethnic republics. In yet another turn of events, Tatarstan had been obliged by 1 January 2016 to cease calling its head “president,” but faced with strong protests, President Putin appeared, in his press conference of 17 December 2015, to have retreated.30 On 17 January 2017, the All-Tatar Public Centre (VTOTs) called on the Tatar legislature and political movements to save the Tatar language and to

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retain in Tatarstan just one state language—Tatar. VTOTs is the oldest Tatar public organization, which came into being at the peak of perestroika, at the end of 1988. Its founding conference was held in February 1989. Its main goal at that time, as well as the rebirth and development of the Tatar language, was the proclamation of Tatarstan as a Union Republic, with the right to secede from the USSR. On the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the Union Republics (Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, etc.) became independent states. Tatarstan did not.31 The declaration was published in the national opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and widely reported in  local and national media.32 VTOTs declared that in Tatarstan there are fewer and fewer Tatars who are able to read books and newspapers in Tatar and express their thoughts in their native language. It recalled that 25 years ago the Constitution of Tatarstan consolidated two state languages with equal status in the republic—Russian and Tatar. However, in fact there is presently only one state language—Russian. In all these years the State Council of Tatarstan has not been able to hold even one session in the Tatar language, and in the Kazan City Duma the previous simultaneous translation has ceased. According to the declaration, 699 Tatar schools have closed in Tatarstan, and 4000 in Russia, and Tatar faculties have closed in 2 higher education institutions. It continued: “Is this proposal radical? Perhaps there is another proposal for saving the Tatar language? Is real bilingualism possible in Tatarstan? Let’s think about it!”33 On 31 January 2017, the young political scientist Ildar Garifullin of the Institute of History of the Academy of Science on Tatarstan wrote under the heading: “The last guarantee: how the treaty between Tatarstan and Russia has lost its real substance.”34 According to him it was necessary to look closely not only at the declaration but also at its context. As the VTOTs representatives themselves had admitted, surrounding this question was the fact that in 2017 the treaty between the RF and the Republic of Tatarstan was to run out. This document, along with the post of President of Tatarstan, is the last “splinter” of the epoch of the “parade of sovereignties” of 1990–1991, already so long ago. The existence of this status documents decides very little, as experience has shown. Although the treaty exists de jure, de facto Tatarstan and its rights and possibilities differ very little from other regions of Russia. His conclusion is that the main problem is that in the 1990s there was a powerful national movement, which was ready not only to ensure the legitimacy of the republic itself but also its special status. Now there is no such movement, Garifullin considered. As if to make Garifullin’s point for him, on 5 February 2017, Ildar Gilmutdinov, who represented Tatarstan in the State Duma of the RF, took it

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upon himself to explain the essence of the proposed law on the Rossiiskaya nation.35 Gilmutdinov has a Soviet background in the Komsomol, has been a member of the Duma since 2003, is a member of President Putin’s Party, United Russia, and is Chairman of the Duma Committees on Affairs of Nationalities and of the Accounts Commission.36 He said “I want everyone to calm down. There is no direct decree on creating a unified nation or enacting a federal law on that. Simply the President proposed preparing a ‘normative’ on the unity of the people, on preservation of the culture and the languages of the peoples, living in one country. Now a working group is working on it, and the results will only appear in the summer. But the ‘normative’ does not propose the merger of all peoples into one nation. Here the emphasis is on the formation of a united political nation with the goals of development and strengthening of the country.” Religion has also become an issue. A report published in February 2018 by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow entitled Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity of Russia37 states that while indigenous Muslim nationalities formed 10.4% of the population of the RF in 2010, the percentage may increase to 14.5% in 2030—a rise of almost 50%. The increase will come from the continuing rapid growth of Muslim nations in the North Caucasus rather than from Tatars and Bashkirs whose populations, like those of ethnic Russians, are falling.38 Paul Goble points out that these figures do not include Muslim gastarbeiters from Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. According to some estimates there may be as many as eight million of them, a figure that if true would add nearly 5% to the Muslim total—and thus they significantly understate the share of Muslims in the Russian population now and a decade from now.39 As an indication of what is taking place, on 5 February 2017, Ildar Gilmutdinov expressed his strong opinion on an increasingly controversial issue in Russia, the wearing of the hijab, or head scarf, by school and higher education students.40 He told tatar-inform that today each region of Russia determines for itself the standards for school uniform. If one speaks of school students who wear the hijab, then this is not a tradition of the Tatar people, in his opinion. I already spoke of this previously. Maybe I will be criticised, but for me girls should tie on a Tatar scarf and wear a closed dress. Tatars never wore a hijab.

The issue came to a head when in the neighbouring Republic of Mordovia, girls in the Tatar village of Belozeriye41 were forbidden to wear hijabs, and on 24 January 2016, Olga Vasilieva, the Russian Federation Minister of Education

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and Science, intervened to say that the question had been definitively decided by the Constitutional Court of the RF, banning the wearing of the hijab.42 This met with angry responses from the Head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the Mufti of Chechnya, Khadzhi Mezhiev, who the following day described it as discrimination.43 The national news aggregator newsru.com pointed out on 26 January 2016 that the Constitutional Court had never rendered such a decision.

The End of Language Rights? On 20 July 2017, President Putin held another meeting of the Council on Interethnic Relations in Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of the Republic of Mari El.44 The most controversial element of his address was his declaration that all non-­ Russians must learn Russian but that no ethnic Russian must be compelled to learn the language of a republic even if he or she lives in a non-Russian republic—one of the ethnic republics.45 Mr Putin declared that: [t]he Russian language for us is the state language, the language of inter-ethnic communication, and it cannot be replaced by anything else. It is the natural spiritual skeleton of all our multi-national country. Everyone must know it … The languages of the peoples of Russia are also an inalienable aspect of the unique culture of the peoples of Russia.

However, these non-Russian languages are only the languages of the peoples who bear them, so that studying them is “a right guaranteed by the constitution” but it is “a voluntary right” not an obligatory one. “To force someone to study a language which is not his native tongue is impermissible…. [it is] just as impermissible as reducing the level of instruction in Russia. I call on the heads of the regions of the Russian Federation to devote particular attention to this.”46 This dramatic announcement was greeted with enthusiasm by Russian nationalists.47 Equally, Russian ethnic minority media reacted with alarm.48 I mentioned above the special treaty status with the Federation which Tatarstan enjoyed from 1994, with its own laws, tax rules, and citizenship privileges. Tatarstan kept control over its resources and budget and could even participate in international affairs. However, on 24 July 2017, Tatarstan’s agreement with the Federation expired and with it the remains of its special status.49 On 23 August 2017, Professor Midkhat Farukshin, a leading Tatar intellectual, warned that the Kremlin would use the end of the agreement as an occasion to launch a broad new attack on the Tatar language and culture.50

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On 8 October 2017, Colonel Barinov visited Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, and took part in the youth forum “Gold of the Turks.”51 In conversation with the correspondent of “Tatar-Inform,” he spoke about the perspectives for developing a programme for the support and development of ethnic diversity in the RF. In his words, the key factor here was language. However, President Putin had already, on 31 August 2017, following his speech in Yoshkar-Ola on 20 July 2017, ordered a check by prosecutors on continuing compulsory education in the languages other than Russian which are the second official languages of the ethnic republics.52 On 29 November 2017, the Prosecutor-General of Tatarstan, Ildus Nafikov, said children in Tatarstan’s schools will study Tatar for two hours a week on an optional basis and with written parental consent. This contradicted the statement made by the President of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov, who had said on 8 November 2017 that Tatar language classes would remain mandatory but be scaled back from six hours to two hours per week. Minnikhanov said at the time that the federal authorities in Moscow had agreed with the plan. The change was certain to alarm supporters of the Tatar language who warned that it would violate the republic’s constitution, discourage learning of the language of the indigenous ethnic group, and undermine Tatarstan’s cultural identity. On 21 September 2017, the North Caucasus expert Ramazan Alpaut asked whether the prosecutors would come for the Chechen or Ossetian languages (Alpaut 2017). He warned that after Bashkortostan and Tatarstan it might be the turn of the North Caucasus. He noted that the Caucasian republics also have their own state languages. In this sense, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, and Chechnya are the most interesting. In North Ossetia the prosecutors had already “come” for the Ossetian language. Alpaut concluded by observing that the North Caucasus is witnessing a reduction in the number of speakers of regional languages. A commentator, referring to Tatarstan as Russia’s Catalonia (Galeev 2018), argued that: While the republic’s secular institutions have totally capitulated before the will of Moscow, religious authorities have tried to compensate for their failure, insisting on the wider use of national language, opening free courses of Tatar language and culture in mosques and switching all the preaching in Tatarstan mosques from Russian to the Tatar language.53 Samigullin, the Mutfi, published a declaration54 saying that “Islam as it had been in the hardest times for Tatar people again has to defend the Tatar language…even though the religion is separate from the state it lives in the soul of our people.” He added, “Words pro-

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nounced from the mosques’ minbars have more power than those said from political tribunes.” The muftii’s stubborn persistence reflects one of the main myths of Tatar national history—according to legend, the defense of Kazan during its siege by the Russians in 1552 was organized by imam Kul-Sharif (and not the political leader, the khan, who surrendered to the enemy). The republic’s main mosque in Kazan Kremlin is named after the imam. Now, as in the past, religious leaders may take initiative when the political ones fail to do so.

Conclusion It is much too early to say what consequences will follow from Mr Putin’s July 2017 and his August 2017 instruction to the prosecutors. It was a surprise to many commentators that the Tatar and Bashkir authorities acceded so swiftly and without protest to the new linguistic dispensation. The mass movement for the sovereignty of Tatarstan has significantly receded. It may well be that the Tatar language is fighting a losing battle (Kashin 2017). But it is plain that the question of religious observance, including the wearing of the hijab in schools, has now become more significant than issues concerning culture, language, and traditional Tatar dress. On such matters the Volga Tatars will be in the front line. On 7 May 2018, Mr Putin was once again inaugurated as President for a further six years, after an election on 18 March 2018 in which he faced no real opposition. And on 4 May 2018 the editors of the nazeccent.ru published an article (Nazaccent.ru 2018) asking whether FADN will remain an agency or become a ministry, or disappear altogether, in a return to the Soviet model of a special department within the President’s administration. What is certain is that promotion of the Russian language and downgrading of the status of the ethnic republics will remain high on the agenda.

Notes 1. See the chapter “Minority Language Rights and Standards: Definitions and Applications at the Supranational Level” in this collection. 2. Constitution of the Russian Federation 1993: Article 68—http://www.constitution.ru/en/10003000-04.htm 1. The Russian language shall be a state language on the whole territory of the Russian Federation.

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2. The Republics shall have the right to establish their own state languages. In the bodies of state authority and local self-government, state institutions of the Republics they shall be used together with the state language of the Russian Federation. 3. The Russian Federation shall guarantee to all of its peoples the right to preserve their native language and to create conditions for its study and development. 3. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rs.html Ethnic groups: Russian 77.7%, Tatar 3.7%, Ukrainian 1.4%, Bashkir 1.1%, Chuvash 1%, Chechen 1%, other 10.2%, unspecified 3.9%: nearly 200 national and/or ethnic groups were represented in Russia’s 2010 census (2010 est.). Languages: Russian (official) 85.7%, Tatar 3.2%, Chechen 1%, other 10.1%: data represent native language spoken (2010 est.). 4. “States are required to submit a report containing full information on legislative and other measures taken to comply with the principles of the Framework Convention within one year of the entry into force” https://www.coe.int/en/ web/minorities/fcnm-factsheet 5. ACFC/SR/IV(2016)006, at http://rm.coe.int/doc/09000016806fd935 6. See the chapter by Federica Prina, David Smith, Judit Molnar Sansum, “National Cultural Autonomy and Linguistic Rights in Central and Eastern Europe,” in this volume. 7. This still appears on the official website of Tatarstan: http://1997-2011. tatarstan.ru/english/00002028.html 8. Vestnik of the Constitutional Court of the RF 1993 No. 1, 40–52. 9. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/22/world/tatars-vote-on-a-referendumall-agree-is-confusing.html 10. https://www.coe.int/en/web/minorities/russian-federation 11. http://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMCo ntent?documentId=090000168008b7c3 12. http://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMCo ntent?documentId=090000168008c6a6 13. http://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMCo ntent?documentId=090000168008fa29 14. https://www.coe.int/en/web/minorities/-/russian-federation-fourth-cycledelegation-visit 15. By “national” is meant “ethnic,” and the two words are used interchangeably in Russian. 16. http://government.ru/media/files/41d4862001ad2a4e5359.pdf 17. “Putin on Rossian (Rossiissky) identity and Russian language,” at http://www. odnako.org/blogs/putin-o-rossiyskoy-identichnosti-i-russkom-yazike/

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18. See his meeting with President Putin at http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/46572 and his meeting with the government at http://government.ru/news/14661/ 19. “Putin liquidates Regional Development Ministry,” at http://en.itar-tass. com/russia/748551 20. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2778421 21. http://fadn.gov.ru// 22. Short biography: “What is Igor Baranov famous for?” at http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2699714 23. http://vz.ru/politics/2015/4/2/737777.html 24. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2778226 25. Putin, V. (2015) Address to the Joint Session of the Council for Inter-ethnic Relations and the Council for the Russian Language. Transcript at http:// kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49491 (accessed on 27 July 2016). Videos of Putin’s address and concluding remarks are also to be found at this address. 26. Ibid. 27. On monitoring (2015). Ob osuschestvlenii monitoring sostoyanija i razvitija jazykov narodov Rossii. (On monitoring of the state and development of the languages of peoples of Russia.) http://www.school58.edu.27.ru/files/documents/430_ob_osushchestvlenii_monitoringa_sostoyaniya_i_razvitie_ yazikov_narodov_rf_porucheniya_prezidenta_rf_ot_4_iyulya_2015_g_ pr_1310.pdf. Accessed on 25 July 2016. 28. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3075511 29. “Are the Tatar Authorities against the Linguistic Unity of Russia?” at http:// posredi.ru/vlasti-tatarstana-protiv-yazykovogo-edinstva-rossii.html, and http://www.evening-kazan.ru/articles/vlasti-tatarstana-grozyat-moskve-chtorusskiy-yazyk-do-ploshchadey-dovedet.html 30. http://nazaccent.ru/content/18774-putin-pozvolil-tatarstanu-samostoyatelno-reshit-vopros.html 31. http://www.idelreal.org/a/28262902.html 32. https://www.novayagazeta.ru/news/2017/01/17/128181-tatarskiy-yazyk-predlagayut-sdelat-edinstvennym-gosudarstvennym-yazykom-tatarstana; and see http://inkazan.ru/2017/01/17/vtots-predlozhil-ostavit-odin-gosudarstvennyjyazyk-v-tatarstane-tatarskij/; http://www.vz.ru/opinions/2017/1/19/854028. html; http://simcat.ru/news/32173; http://prokazan.ru/news/view/115072; http://v-chelny.ru/online/tatarskij-yazyk-predlozhili-sdelat-edinstvennym-gosudarstvennym-yazykom-tat/ 33. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3195058 34. http://www.idelreal.org/a/28262902.html; see also Paul Goble “Fate of All Non-Russians Rests on Future of Moscow-Kazan Federative Treaty, Analyst Says” at http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/fate-of-all-nonrussians-rests-on.html

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35. http://zpravda.ru/novosti/item/29625-ildar-gilmutdinov-ob'yasnil-sutzakona-o-rossiyskoy-natsii.htm 36. http://www.duma.gov.ru/structure/deputies/131481/ 37. http://nazaccent.ru/content/26537-izdana-monografiya-ob-etnicheskom-ireligioznom.html 38. http://nazaccent.ru/content/26570-uchenye-k-2025-godu-nency-vyjdut. html 39. http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/muslim-share-of-russianpopulation-will.html 40. http://www.tatar-inform.ru/news/2017/02/05/538178/ 41. According to press reports, Belozeriye has become known as the “Mordovian Califate” and is said to be under the control of the FSB. 42. https://www.business-gazeta.ru/news/335249 43. https://lenta.ru/news/2017/01/25/mordovia/ 44. http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/55109; in English http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/55109 45. https://www.business-gazeta.ru/article/352146 46. http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/putin-non-russiansmust-learn-russian.html 47. politikus.ru/v-rossii/print:page,1,97010-putin-ukazal-na-nedopustimostsokrascheniya-chasov-izucheniya-russkogo-yazyka-v-respublikah-rf.html; idelreal.org/a/28630266.html; ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/07/21/polozhitelnye_podvizhki_v_nacionalnoj_politike_sovpadenie_ili_tolko_nachalo/; stoletie.ru/na_pervuiu_polosu/putin_russkij_jazyk_nichem_zamenit_ nelza_998.htm. (Thanks to Paul Goble for these links). 48. turantoday.com/2017/07/russia-republics-indigenous-languages.html; idelreal.org/a/sotsseti-o-viskazivanii-putina-pro-russkiy-yazik/28630274.html; idelreal.org/a/reaction-tatarstana-na-slova-putina-o-russkom-yazike/28630471. html. (Thanks to Paul Goble for these links). 49. “Tatarstan, the Last Region to Lose Its Special Status Under Putin: Kazan looks on as a deal granting it special status expires” Moscow Times 25 July 2017 at https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/tatarstan-special-status-expires-58483 50. https://www.idelreal.org/a/midkhat-farukshin-dogovor-tatarstan-rossiya/28692206.html 51. http://www.tatar-inform.ru/news/2017/10/08/576494/ 52. https://www.business-gazeta.ru/news/356052. The instruction was published on the Kremlin website: http://www.kremlin.ru/acts/assignments/orders/55464. And see Paul Goble at http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/isputin-attacking-non-russian.html 53. https://realnoevremya.ru/news/48409 54. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3447795

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References Alpatov, V. (2000). 150 yazykov i politika. 1917–2000: sotsiolingvisticheskiye problemy SSSR i postsovyetskogo prostranstva [150 Languages and Politics. 1917–2000: Sociolinguistic Problems of the Soviet Union and of the Post-Soviet Space]. Moscow: KRAFT+IJ RAN. Alpatov, V. (2014). Yazykovaya politika v sovremennoi Rossii i mire [Language Policy in the Russian Federation and in the World]. In A. Bitkeyeva & V. Mikhalchenko (Eds.), Yazykovaya politika i yazykovye konflikty v sovremennom mire: Doklady i soobsheniya Mezhdunarodnoy konferentsii [Language Policy and Language Conflicts in the Contemporary World: Papers and Communications of the International Conference] (pp. 80–89). Moscow: Tezaurus. Alpaut, R. (2017, September 21). Pridyot li prokuratura za Chechenskym, Osetinskim i Ingushkim yazykami? (Will the Prokuratura Come for the Chechen, Ossetian and Ingush Languages?). At http://kavpolit.com/articles/pridet_li_prokuratura_za_ chechenskim_osetinskim_i-35811/ Balmforth, T. (2017). Another Worrying Sign For Russia’s Dire Demographics Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe at https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-population-declinelabor-oreshkin/28760413.html Baskakov, A. (2003). Tyuretskie yazyki: sudby i prikhoty [Turkic Languages: Fates and Whims]. Tatarskiy mir [Tatar World], No 15. At http://www.tatworld.ru/article. shtml?article=186§ion=&heading= Belikov, V., & Krysin, L. (2001). Sotsiolingvistika [Sociolinguistics] (pp. 332–414). Moscow: Rossijskiy gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi Universitet (Russian State Humanities University). Boduen-de-Kurtene, I. (1906). Proyekt osnovnykh polozhenii dlya resheniya polskogo voprosa [Draft Basic Guidelines for the Resolution of the Polish Question] (pp. 12–13). St. Petersburg. Bowring, B. (2007). The Tatars of the Russian Federation and National-Cultural Autonomy: A Contradiction in Terms? In K.  Cordell & D.  Smith (Eds.), The Theory and Practice of Cultural Autonomy in Central and Eastern Europe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Special Issue of Ethnopolitics, 6(3), 417–435. Bowring, B. (2010). The Russian Constitutional System: Complexity and Asymmetry. In M.  Weller & K.  Nobbs (Eds.), Asymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts (pp. 48–74). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bowring, B. (2012). Russian Legislation in the Area of Minority Rights. In O. Protsyk & B. Harzl (Eds.), Managing Ethnic Diversity in Russia (pp. 15–36). Abingdon: Routledge. Bowring, B. (2013). Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the Destiny of a Great Power. Abingdon: Routledge. Bowring, B. (2015). From Empire to Multilateral Player: The Deep Roots of Autonomy in Russia. In T. Malloy & F. Palermo (Eds.), Minorities and Territory: Rethinking Autonomy as a Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Bowring, B. (2017). National Developments – Russia. Emphasis on Crimea, Russian Language, and National Security. In European Yearbook on Minority Issues. Flensburg: Brill. Bowring, B. (2018, forthcoming). Who Are the “Crimea People” or “People of Crimea”? The Fate of the Crimean Tatars, Russia’s Legal Justification for Annexation, and Pandora’s Box. In Gnatovskyy, Sayapin, & Tsybulenko (Eds.), The Situation in Ukraine Since 2014: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, jus post bellum (pp.21–41). The Hague: T M C Asser Publishers. Council of Europe, First Report of the Russian Federation to the Advisory Committee under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, 8 March 2000, ACFC/SR(1999)015, at http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/ minorities/3_FCNMdocs/PDF_1st_SR_RussianFederation_en.pdf. Accessed 27 July 2016. Crews, R. (2006). For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dorovskikh, E. (1996). Pravo i natsionalniy yazyk: regulirovaniye yazykovykh otnoshenii v Rossiisskoi Federatsii [The Law and National Languages: Regulation of Languages Relations in the Russian Federation]. Moscow: INION. Dowley, K. (1998). Striking the Federal Balance in Russia: Comparative Regional Government Strategies. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 31, 359–363. Drobizheva, L. (1996). Power sharing in the Russian Federation: The view from the center and from the republics. In Preventing deadly conflict: Strategies and ­institution; Proceedings of a conference in Moscow, ed. G. W. Lapidus with S. Tsalik. New York: Carnegie Corporation. Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Institut vseobshchei istorii (Rossiiskaia akademiya nauk); Stanford University. Center for International Security and Arms Control. New  York: Carnegie Corp., 1998. http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/moscow/mosfr.htm, p.2. Figes, O. (2002). Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (p.  367). London: Allen Lane. Galeev, K. (2018, January 31). Fear and Loathing in Russia’s Catalonia: Moscow Fight Against Federalism at https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/moscows-fightagainst-federalism-fear-and-loathing-in-russias-catalonia/ Galeotti, M. (2015). Spetsnaz: Russia’s Special Forces. Oxford: Osprey Publishing details at https://ospreypublishing.com/spetsnaz-russia-s-special-forces. Golovko, E. (2016). Sovremennaya yazykovaya politika i problema sokhraneniya yazykovogo i kulturnogo raznoobraziya v Rossiskoi Federatsii [Contemporary Language Policy and a Problem of Preserving Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in the Russian Federation]. In T. Borgoyakova (Ed.), Sokhranenie i razvitie yazykov i kultur korennyh narodov Sibiri: 4 mezhdunarodnaya konferentsiya [Preservation and Development of Siberian Indigenous Languages and Cultures: 4 International Conference] (pp. 9–12). Abakan: KhSU Publishing House. (Abakan, 19–20 May 2016): Doklady i soobsheniya (Abakan 19–20 May 2014: Proceedings).

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Goryacheva, M. (2010). Rossiisskaya Federatsiya: funktsionirovaniye yazykov v sovremennom obrazovatelnom prostranstve [The Russian Federation: Functioning of Languages in the Contemporary Educational Field] (p.  100). Moscow: Noviy khronograf. Hashim, S. (2005). Putin’s Etatization Project and Limits to Democratic Reforms in Russia v.38 Communist and Post-Communist Studies, p. 36. Kashin, O. (2017). The Linguistic Factor: Kazan as the Russian Barcelona 10 November, at https://republic.ru/posts/87580 Khazanov, A. (1997). Ethnic Nationalism in the Russian Federation. Daedalus, 126, 121–142. Kutafin, O. (2006). Rossiyskaya avtonomiya [Russian Autonomy]. Moscow: Prospekt. Lenin, V. (1914, January 18). Is a Compulsory Official Language Needed? Proletarskaya Pravda, 14(32). Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 20, pp. 71–73). Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/ jan/18.htm. Accessed 26 Mar 2015. Nazaccent.ru. (2018, May 4). Sudba Minnatsa: byt ili ne byt? Gadaniya kofeinoi gushche o budushchem natsvedomstva [The Future of the Ministry of Nationalities: To Be or Not to Be? Reading the Coffee Grounds on the Future of the Nationalities Department], at http://nazaccent.ru/content/27167-sudba-minnaca-byt-ili-nebyt.html Prina, F. (2011). Localism or Centralism? Education Reform in Russia and Its Impact on the Rights of National Minorities. Cambrian Law Review, 42, 113–130. Prina, F. (2015). National Minorities in Putin’s Russia: Diversity and Assimilation. Abingdon: Routledge. Shaimiev, M. (1996a). Opyt vzaimootnoshenii Tatarstana i Rossii (Experience of the Interrelations of Tatarstan and Russia). Panorama-Forum, 6, 1. Shaimiev, M. (1996b). Conflict Prevention and Management: The Significance of Tatarstan’s Experience. In Preventing Deadly Conflict: Strategies and Institutions; Proceedings of a Conference in Moscow, ed. G. W. Lapidus with S. Tsalik. Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, https://www.carnegie. org/media/filer_public/16/e3/16e36da1-2281-4b4a-a6a3-87f727e7d620/ccny_ report_1998_strategies.pdf Tishkov, V. (1997). Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (p. 56). London: Sage. Umnova, I. (1998). Konstitutsionni osnovy sovremennovo possiiskovo federalizma [The Constitutional Foundations of Contemporary Russian Federalism] (p.  63). Moscow: Dyelo. Vakhtin, N. (2001). Yazyki narodov Severa v XX veke: Ocherki yazykovogo sdviga [Languages of the Peoples of the North in the 20th Century: Essays on Language Shift]. St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulavin. Vakhtin, N., & Golovko, E. (2004). Sotsiolinguistika i sotsiologiya yazyka [Sociolinguistic and Sociological Language] (p.  184). St Petersburg: IT “Gumantarnaya Akademiya”, Izdatelstvo Yevropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-­

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Peterburge. (“Humanitarian Academy”, Publishing House of the European University in St. Petersburg). Yemelianova, G. (2007). The National Identity of the Volga Tatars at the Turn of the 19th Century: Tatarism, Turkism and Islam. Central Asian Survey, 16(4), 543–572. Zamyatin, K., Pasanen, A., & Saarikivi, Y. (2012). Kak i zachem sokhranyat yazyki narodov Rossii? [How and Why Are the Languages of the Peoples of Russia to be Preserved?] (Y. Saarikvi, ed.). Helsinki.

4 Minority Language Governance and Regulation Colin H. Williams and John Walsh

Introduction The last two generations have witnessed a remarkable attempt to reverse the fortunes of selected minority languages within Western liberal democracies.1 The dominant trend in minority language analysis has been to focus on promotional efforts whereby new opportunities are created for speakers to exercise their language of choice in formal education, in the delivery of public services, and in dealings with the central and local state. More recently, ­following the greater specification of language rights and the legislative turn in language management, issues of governance and regulation have received more attention (Williams 2013a; Ahmed 2011; Brezigar 2010). However, as we argue, even when the legislative and public administrative supportive infrastructure is in place, it does not guarantee that the citizen has the full support of the state in respect of minority language use without let or hindrance.

C. H. Williams (*) School of Welsh, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Walsh School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_4

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Language and Governance Loughlin and Williams (2007) have traced the intellectual origins of the relationship between language and governance, arguing that while government relates to the forms associated with liberal representative democracy, that is, the traditional state, governance involves a much wider set of actors including elected politicians and public officials, official agencies one step removed from government, and various non-elected interest and pressure groups. Earlier works on governance by Kooiman (1993; Rhodes 1997) and on francophone language communities by Cardinal and Hudon (2001) demonstrate the salience of incorporating interest groups and active citizens into the deliberative discussions of policy formulation and implementation (Cardinal and Normand 2013). The main thrust of the argument of governance theorists is that, as society becomes more complex and differentiated, the traditional method of governing from above—government—becomes more difficult. This leads to governance, understood as steering rather than directing, which it is claimed supplements, or at times even replaces, government. Implicit in the arguments promoting governance is the notion of transformation: modes of governing go from simply government to a wider system of governance. Walsh (2012) has elaborated the notion of language policy proposed by Spolsky (2004, 2009) to include language governance. As a consequence of the dominance of neo-liberal discourse, greater attention has been given to the notion of governmentality, of which various adaptations go beyond Foucault’s (1991) original understanding. The Foucauldian concept of governmentality was concerned with how the state exercises control over its citizens and how people are taught to govern themselves, shifting power from a central authority like a state or institution and dispersing it among a population. Self-governing, from this perspective, may be understood as how conduct is shaped, and in the context of this chapter, it has some purchase in interpreting the implications of the rise of the regulatory state for citizen expectations and behaviour. However, a general criticism of this approach is that it relies too much on a top-down perspective within which individuals cannot escape from the hegemony of powerful institutions, and such selfgoverning as is allowed is always partial and incomplete. Governance is allegedly more bottom-up than top-down and involves a partnership between governmental and non-governmental elements of civil society, characterised by the active role of non-elected specialists in influencing, and at times delivering, public policy. We say ‘allegedly’ because the real power to determine large-scale projects rests with the dominant partner, namely, the state and, where relevant, the local state. However, a determined

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and well-organised community can wield influence. A robust example of partnership in action is provided by the investigations undertaken under the auspices of the research team entitled Les Savoirs de la gouvernance communautaire/ Knowledge-based Community Governance2 led by Linda Cardinal at the University of Ottawa, Canada, whose work has demonstrated that the mobilisation of Franco-Ontarian community institutions and networks can have a lasting impact on governmental agencies and the delivery of services (Cardinal et al. 2010; Cardinal and Forgues 2015). Léger (2013, 2015) has detailed how the francophone community has navigated a new pathway in rather difficult circumstances, given the new language regime instituted by successive conservative governments. Normand (2015, 2016) has analysed how the Canadian Federal Official Language Commissioner together with those for New Brunswick and Ontario have managed their dual roles of promoting and regulating French language services and government duties while also educating the francophone community on their rights. The work of the Canadian team has also argued that it is possible to enlarge the definition of governance once a working relationship between government and the target community has been established. Thus, Cardinal et al. (2015) have demonstrated how language roadmaps are best understood as policy instruments and as such constitute the fourth generation of official languages policy in Canada. Their analysis suggests that language roadmaps could serve to regulate and promote particular understandings of official languages. By broadening the conventional approach to language policy and governance, the “Conservative governments have been able to reframe official languages and incorporate them onto their political agenda focused on the economy, jobs and prosperity. Overall, language road maps have become the new norm in the governance of official languages in Canada” (Cardinal 2015: 19). Agency is a central issue, and it is intriguing to speculate if it makes a substantial difference to the outcome whether the official language strategy is formulated by a state government, regional government, a statutory body, or another public body at a slight remove from government. The conventional short answer is that the closer the agency is to the centre of power, the greater the authority it is able to wield and the greater the likelihood there is of an adequate allocation of government resources to fulfil the programme mandate and to discharge the statutory obligations. This is why language activists, and some public servants, in Catalonia and Wales were delighted when the machinery for implementing language policy was directly answerable to the Department of the Presidency and the First Minister, respectively, and less delighted when, following structural reform, the responsibilities of the General Directorate of Linguistic Policy (DGPL) were reassigned to the Catalan Department of Culture, and the Welsh

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Language Unit was made answerable to the Minister for Lifelong Learning and Welsh Language. In the case of Ireland, a commissioned report for government led by Peadar Ó Flatharta (RIP) as part of the preparation of the 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010–2030 recommended that the initiative be led by a specially created division (Programme Office) of the Department of the Taoiseach (prime minister) (FIONTAR 2009: Section 5). Ultimately, this did not come to pass and was a cause of disappointment for Irish-language activists. The reality is that the quality of the exercise of policy may not have changed one way or another, but the perception of where the language sits in the hierarchy of government priorities remains a vital consideration in the minds of both citizens and public servants alike. We argue later that this conventional interpretation masks a far more complex picture and that the acid test of the effectiveness of policy is not just structural organisation, but the degree of political conviction demonstrated by the responsible political authorities. While the high-level government commitments may be accepted as statements of political intent and policy vision for the language(s) in question, the crunch issue is: how does the body which creates the official language strategy get, and ensure, buy-in, from its own cognate government departments and the public-sector bodies which are easier to regulate than the non-state sector? Three interesting examples of language governance agencies are the Welsh Language Board (WLB), Bòrd na Gàidhlig (Scotland), and Foras na Gaeilge (Ireland; Bord na Gaeilge, prior to 2 December 1999). Created to advise government and to advance corpus and status language planning, the constituent Board officers work to co-create and implement official language policy under the direction of Board members who tend to be public service appointees, not directly elected politicians. The relationship between Boards and government can at times be subject to tension, especially if Board members overstretch their remit or commit government to a course of action to which neither political will nor resources have been directed. Such actions can embarrass government ministers, and political repercussions may follow, especially accusations that the Boards are not sufficiently accountable to the body politic. The more typical virtue of this arrangement is that because the Board members bring a range of skills from varied professional backgrounds, they are better able to innovate and take risks which cautious civil servants would not contemplate; they also act as a point of entrée for community engagement and concerns. Let us illustrate by reference to the WLB.3 A new era in language policy and planning was inaugurated by the passage of the Welsh Language Act 1993 by the UK Parliament, which created a

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statutory WLB and introduced the Welsh Language Scheme as the prime instrument by which the principle of treating English and Welsh on the basis of equality would be realised in the public sector (HMSO 1993, 1997).4 The WLB’s primary goal was to enable the language to become self-­ sustaining and secure as a medium of communication in Wales. It set for itself four priorities: (1) to increase the numbers of Welsh speakers, (2) to provide more opportunities to use the language, (3) to change the habits of language use and encourage people to take advantage of the opportunities provided, and (4) to strengthen Welsh as a community language.5 In charting the difficult course between acting as a promotional and a regulatory agency, the WLB made great strides in creating new opportunities by which Welsh could be used as a matter of course. It directed and funded innovative work in community language planning through the Mentrau Iaith (Language Enterprise Agencies) and Local Action Plans, in intergenerational language transmission through the TWF (‘Growth’) project which encourages parents to raise their children bilingually, in information technology (IT) and software development, and in promoting Welsh in the private and voluntary sectors.6 By 2012, the WLB had approved 546 language schemes which detailed the manner in which Welsh-medium services would be delivered by institutions and organisations covering most of public life and with a fair representation in the private and voluntary sector. The WLB has been criticised for operating within a largely neo-liberal model of intervention and for not recognising that top-down planning does not necessarily induce the desired behavioural change (Williams and Morris 2000). Further difficulties resulted from the WLB being one step removed from government, which hampered the operation of the Board, as since 2004, it had been threatened with abolition as part of a cull of the quangos by the Government of Wales (Morgan 2004; Williams 2009). The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 abolished the WLB, transferred many of its functions to an enlarged Welsh Language Unit within the Government of Wales, established a Welsh Language Commissioner (operative since April 2012), and signalled that language schemes were to be phased out and replaced by language standards (Williams 2013b). These developments constitute significant reforms to the administration of public life and to Welsh law, and the establishment of a Language Commissioner, in particular, has added a powerful regulatory agency to the suite of bodies concerned with the promotion and protection of citizen rights. The Better Regulation Delivery Office’s survey of the regulatory landscape in Wales demonstrates the salience of UK and Welsh government policy as drivers affecting regulation (BRDO 2013). Given the devolved nature of Welsh public life, the analysis shows that “the system is

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complicated due to the sheer number of policy interests, the fact that delivery happens both locally and nationally and that the legislative environment encompasses the EU, UK and Wales” (BRDO 2013, p. 3). Having only been established on 1 April 2012, the Welsh Language Commissioner is a relatively recent, if potentially robust, addition to the regulatory landscape. Discussions on the merits of a regulator as distinct from a commissioner are to be found in Williams (2007); those on the various characteristics of language Ombudsmen, Commissioners, and Regulators in Carlin et al. (2015); while an account of the first years of the Welsh Language Commissioner is provided by Mac Giolla Chríost (2016). In the spring of 2017, the Welsh Government called for evidence to improve the current ­system, and a submission made by Mac Giolla Chríost et al. (2017) outlined alternative institutional arrangements by which the functions of a Language Commissioner could be discharged. The then Minister for Lifelong Learning and Welsh, Alun Davies, reported that many of the responses received to a call for evidence on the operation of the regulatory system argued that the bureaucracy surrounding the Welsh Language Standards was far too cumbersome (Welsh Government 2017a, b, c; Wales Online 2017). The 504 responses to the call for evidence were varied but tended to favour greater clarity in the system as to the precise and distinctive roles of both the Welsh Language Commissioner and the Welsh Government; these roles, however, were reconfigured following the passage of the Welsh Language Bill (Welsh Government 2017d). The 2017 White Paper, Striking the right balance: proposals for a Welsh Language Bill, includes the following suggestions: • Establishing a Welsh Language Commission to organise and coordinate work to promote the Welsh language across all parts of Wales. • Making it clearer to people, public bodies, and businesses who they can turn to if they want to develop their use of the Welsh language. • Giving greater clarity for Welsh speakers as to which services bodies must provide in Welsh and to work to increase the use of those services. • Helping bodies develop their capacity to deliver services in Welsh. • Streamlining the processes involved in making and imposing Welsh Language Standards and removing the bureaucracy involved in handling complaints of bodies’ non-compliance with standards to ensure people receive a quick remedy. • Setting out the Welsh Government as responsible for imposing standards on bodies through regulations and compliance notices and the Welsh Language Commission as responsible for monitoring and enforcing compliance with the standards.

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• Removing the restrictions in the current legislation so standards could be placed on any body, so long as it is within the Assembly’s power to do so (Welsh Government 2017d). In January 2018, Eluned Morgan, the Minister for Lifelong Learning and Welsh, published a written statement together with the full disclosure of the responses received and argued that the report on the White Paper proposals showed “that, with the exception of one question relating to the frequency with which the Welsh Government reports to the Assembly on our Welsh language strategy, our proposals were supported by those who responded to the consultation” (Welsh Government 2018). The major proposal is the absorption of the Welsh Language Commissioner’s functions into a new Commission, a body with both promotional and regulatory functions.7 Such an integrated agency would bring matters ‘in house’, and demonstrate the government’s commitment to being wholly responsible for matters relating to the Welsh language (Williams 2017). It is anticipated that the proposed Bill would be scrutinised by the National Assembly in late Autumn 2018 and should it be largely accepted that the new language regime would be operational towards the end of 2019. However, should a change of political climate or a government with a different agenda be elected on 6 May 2021, then the virtues of a dedicated, independent agency with a detailed brief could trump the current proposals and act as a bulwark against the emasculation or incorporation of the Commissioner’s functions. Such reforms have to be set within the broader legislative landscape and the maturation of the Welsh Assembly as a political chamber which has been transformed from a secondary to a primary legislative body. Section 107 of the Government of Wales Act 2006 gave the Assembly the power to make Acts, while Part IV of the 2011 Referendum gave the Assembly the power to make Acts in specific areas and enshrined the ‘conferred powers’ model. This mode of operating was further changed by the revised Wales Bill (2016), which strengthened Welsh devolution within the UK Constitution. It has instituted a ‘reserved powers’ model for the Assembly more akin to the Scottish and Northern Irish settlement. The consequence for such reforms in terms of language policy is that for the first time in Welsh history, it is the Welsh Government which is squarely responsible for the future of the Welsh language in terms of education, community development, planning, legislation, and public administration. Governance of the language now foregrounds direct government action on behalf of the language. However, while the regulatory system in Wales may occasion structural tensions and appear overly complicated, in several other jurisdictions the salience of a Language

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Commissioner as part of the governance framework is well established and has led to the formation of an international network which is examined below.8

The Role of Language Commissioners One direct consequence of the growth of the regulatory state has been the establishment of a suite of commissioners covering a wide variety of fields such as parliamentary conduct, children’s welfare, the police service, information, and official languages. The longest established office of Language Commissioner is that of the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages (OCOL) based in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, which was established by the Official Languages Act 1969. More recently, Language Commissioners have been established in Ireland, New Brunswick, Ontario, Nunavut, and Wales, while equivalent bodies who have some responsibility for the investigation of breaches of language obligations exist in Catalonia, Finland, Kosovo, Flanders, South Africa, and elsewhere (Williams and Ó Flatharta 2012). Below we examine the contribution of the IALC, while here we describe the mandate and role of the Canadian Official Languages Commissioner and his office at OCOL as the example of best practice in the field. The Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada is an agent of Parliament appointed by commission for a seven-year term. The Commissioner reports directly to Parliament and is supported by OCOL. The mandate, set out in Section 56 of the Official Languages Act, requires the Commissioner to (1) ensure the equality of English and French in Parliament, the Government of Canada, the federal administration, and the institutions subject to the Official Languages Act; (2) support the preservation and development of official language of minority communities in Canada; and (3) promote the equality of English and French in Canadian society.9 The Commissioner discharges a number of roles. As an Ombudsman, the Commissioner receives and reviews complaints and, where necessary, conducts investigations which relate to the right of any member of the public to use English or French to communicate with and receive services from federal institutions; the right of federal public service employees to work in the official language of their choice in designated regions; the right of all Canadians to equal opportunities for employment and advancement in federal institutions; the development and vitality of Canada’s official language minority communities; and the promotion of linguistic duality in Canadian society. As an auditor, the Commissioner conducts audits to measure federal institutions’ and other organisations’ compliance with the Official Languages Act and makes recommendations. In adopting a liaison role, the Commissioner partners

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with an official languages network to ascertain the concerns of communities, make relevant recommendations, and intervene judiciously in major official languages issues. In a monitoring role, the Commissioner may act pre-­ emptively by intervening at the stage where laws, regulations, and policies are developed to ensure that language rights are upheld. The Commissioner may also appear before the courts in any proceeding related to the status or use of English or French. The Commissioner has developed a promotional and educational role principally in raising awareness of the benefits of linguistic duality and by creating educational tools, commissioning research, and speaking to a wide variety of audiences. Finally, the Commissioner has a reporting responsibility as an annual report is submitted to Parliament that addresses current issues, findings, and recommendations. Clearly, the Commissioner operates within a context which relies on several other agencies to discharge their responsibilities with respect to official languages, among which are the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Canadian Heritage, Department of Justice Canada, Public Service Commission of Canada, and Canada School of Public Service, several of whose annual reports are monitored by the Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages and the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages. OCOL is by far the largest and best developed model of a Language Commissioner; all the other more recent Language Commissioners have a much smaller staff complement, and some face real difficulty in fulfilling their mandates. Taken together, the various types of Language Commissioner face broadly similar issues and challenges. Their collective contribution to the regulatory landscape would be enhanced were additional detailed work undertaken on the following issues as raised by Williams (2013c). 1 . The value of a comparative perspective on Language Commissioners. 2. The interpretation of the differing, if at times overlapping, roles of Regulator, Ombudsman, and Commissioner. 3. The transfer of best practice as regards the investigation of complaints and the adoption of audits and report cards to evaluate the performance of government departments. 4. The role of standards as a new element in language legislation, policy, and implementation. 5. The relationship between the powers of various Language Commissioners and the Courts System. 6. The influence of language regulation on aspects of constitutional change in jurisdictions such as Canada, Ireland, Spain, the Republic of South Africa, and the UK.

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 he International Association of Language T Commissioners The most significant development in the field of language governance and regulation has been the establishment of a new, potentially influential international actor, the IALC, in Dublin in 2013.10 This occasion provided opportunities for the first formal meeting of Language Commissioners to enable them to showcase their role before a mixed audience of politicians, public servants, diplomats, academics, and representatives of the media.11 The dominant theme was the desire of Language Commissioners to encourage key agencies within the various jurisdictions to partner them in achieving the common aims of language promotion and protection.12 At the end of the meeting, representatives established the IALC and confirmed a common set of association aims and rules of engagement. Colin H. Williams, acting as the Conference Rapporteur, raised a number of crucial themes which would animate the future discussions of the IALC.  They are as follows: how are language rights articulated in practice? How may the effectiveness of Language Commissioners be measured? Where does power reside? How is influence diffused? What is the role of Supreme Courts and the legal system? While these are significant issues, there are broad gaps in our knowledge and understanding as to how these questions play out in particular IALC member jurisdictions, such as the Republic of South Africa and Kosovo. In addition, we recognise that it is difficult to measure and interpret the impact of IALC members and would argue that such tasks remain an urgent priority. Williams further argued that several essential issues had received less emphasis than they ought to and that future meetings and interchanges could focus on at least four elements which impacted on the world of Language Commissioners and the implementation of language rights, namely, the ­political context; economic imperatives; the world of work; and the bundle of issues which fell under skills, science, technology, and leisure (Williams 2013c). In a ‘Where Next?’ section, he argued that it would be advisable to formalise and detail how the international network of Language Commissioners and regulatory bodies should be regularised, which evolved into the preparation of a constitution for the IALC, whose discussions were led by Sean Ó Cuirreáin, (Ireland), Graham Fraser (Canada), and Pär Stenbäck (Finland). He also advised that the IALC should liaise with other international organisations so that it did not remain isolated but form part of a family of international agencies devoted to broader language issues, while upholding their

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compliance and Ombudsman functions. To avoid the tendency of being solely concerned with complaint handling, the regulation of statutory public service provision, and interaction with politicians, state committees, public servants, and the courts, he argued that members of the IALC should also give due attention to hitherto neglected elements of the formation of official language policy. These would include the potential to influence the professional discussion and discourse on official language regulation and stimulate a greater awareness of public involvement and buy-in to official language policy and the suite of language rights, together with articulating the role of civil society in mobilising pressure on improving the implementation of language rights and services. The inaugural conference of the IALC13 held in Barcelona, March 2014, focused on ‘Language Rights’ and was organised by Rafael Ribó, the Catalan Ombudsman, Sindic de Gruegs. Here, the emphasis was on the changes which pluralism and globalisation wrought on minority language education and the impact of the various Commissioners’ investigations on the delivery of public services in designated jurisdictions.14 The second IALC conference “Protecting Language Rights|Promoting Linguistic Pluralism” was held on 20–21 May 2015 in Ottawa, Canada, and organised by the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute of the University of Ottawa, together with the OCOL. This meeting saw a wider range of Commissioners making presentations and was programmed to allow representatives from various Canadian federal and provincial government departments to reflect on their reaction to, and implementation of, the Official Language Commissioner’s and other Commissioners’ recommendations. This was a strategically crucial decision, for it allowed the audience to gauge how the respective duties, responsibilities, working cultures, ideas, and norms of Commissioners and senior civil servants related one to the other.15 The central themes of the conference were strategies and resources; measurement and evaluation; action and implementation; setting goals and changing behaviour; dialogue and communicating; post-conflict reconciliation; partnership and development; revitalising indigenous vitality; and international actors: mandate, goals, resources, and impact. What general lessons may be gleaned from the experience of the Language Commissioners gathered in Ottawa?16 The first is that context is all important, for political pressure is a constant. The second is that strategic decision-­ making and challenges are an important part of the mandate. When to intervene in a case, whether in respect of a court challenge or a departmental omission, can have both immediate and long-term implications. Are challenges to ministerial authority a calculated gamble or a statutory obligation

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determined by the evidence-based logic? What are the long-term consequences of such challenges to the Commissioner’s standing, independence, and credibility? Government reaction to constant criticism can result in financial and resource pressure which can lead to capacity stresses, to risk-averse behaviour, and to atrophy within the Commissioner’s office. But it can also force a rethink of the core mandate of the Commissioner and a re-evaluation of where Language Commissioners fit into the regulatory landscape. Language Commissioners are but one type in a growing family of regulatory agencies and actors, but the clear warning is that the growth of the regulatory state should not overshadow the vital promotional efforts of language activists and agencies. For the more established offices, it is evident that a Language Commissioner’s role changes over time. Thus, the question may be asked: how responsive are they to new challenges? This suggests that a great deal of internal evaluation and constant capacity-building and training is required by a Commissioner’s staff. Were this to be accomplished, then it would be more feasible to formulate professional benchmarks whose evaluation would enable a degree of impact assessment across the sector to be undertaken. We argue that one of the great virtues of membership of the IALC is that the combined efforts to produce best practice tools and instruments could be employed to make the Commissioner’s monitoring and interventions more effective both in public administrative/service delivery terms and in legal challenges to a Commissioner’s decision. This in turn would allow for a greater degree of evaluation as to the structural impact of any particular Commissioner’s actions and term of office. Enhancing capacity would also require a roadmap for action. This would involve consistent and regular data collection and the development of a range of evaluative techniques and practices to share among members. Outcome-­based approaches would require that the IALC develop techniques to evaluate changes in actual individual and institutional behaviour so that impact and success can be measured in a consistent manner. The same consistency is required in respect of supporting evidence and interpretation of policy, but precisely whose evidence and which policy might Commissioners most effectively influence by their recommendations, interventions, and challenges is a subject which requires sound judgement and strategic/political acumen. In turn, it would be advisable to devise a different set of measures by which the internal work and not just the external impact of Language Commissioners may be evaluated. One element of this which would be especially useful for newly established Language Commissioners would be the preparation of

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training and evaluation packages so that worked examples, guidelines, and best practices can be shared among members of the IALC. After several successful conferences which have showcased the work of Language Commissioners and the response of the principal government departments charged with implementing language rights and obligations, it is reasonable to ask where is the IALC headed. Given his concern for identifying possible future impact, Williams (2015) identified four areas of future work and projects that the family of Ombudsmen and Commissioners could initiate. The first requires systematic investigation to ascertain what powers, roles, tools, processes, and types of impact and interaction serve the responsibilities of Language Commissioners best. He argued that it was now time to conduct an audit on the impact of the various Language Commissioners to ascertain to what extent they are part of the mainstream or a tolerated sideshow in selected jurisdictions. It was also his conviction that the ‘regulatory state’—the prime legal and administrative context as characterised by Prosser et al. (2010)—also needs systematic investigation so that abuses of power or mission creep do not cloud or mask the core functions of the Ombudsmen and Commissioners. A third area of attention is an examination as to how international law plays out and influences the duties and actions of Language Commissioners in specific jurisdictions. A fourth area is a focus on the potential which Language Commissioners have in playing a useful role in post-conflict accommodation and reconciliation. There was sufficient evidence in the 2015 Ottawa conference to demonstrate the relevance of the idea of inaugurating a systematic regulatory agency in selected cases, but as both Sri Lanka and Kosovo made clear, without the supporting infrastructure and capacity to implement the recommendations of the Commissioner, language rights were more often than not a constitutional provision rather than a daily lived reality for so many citizens. A mature, well-­ regulated framework, such as currently exists in Switzerland, shows the added value and the advantages of linguistic skills, enables citizens and the state to understand their economic value, and can reinforce ‘national cohesion’. Clearly, it is recognised that the Swiss experience may well lie at one end of the continuum, while contexts such as Kosovo, Eritrea, Iran, and South Sudan lie at the opposing end, but it was indeed argued that part of the justification for the IALC is to have an impact within those targeted jurisdictions which have most to learn and gain from the transfer of sound ideas and best practices from mature, stable liberal democracies as represented by Switzerland and Canada. Several of these proposals made in Ottawa formed the basis of recommendations adopted at a private meeting of the IALC’s Language Commissioner

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members on 7 March 2016 in Galway.17 In his role as Conference Rapporteur, Williams (2016) outlined a series of key questions which relate to the performance and interaction of Language Commissioners with systems of governance and official language communities, namely: (a) How is the effectiveness of Language Commissioners measured? What instruments can be developed to assess this and is there a role for the IALC in this, or is it up to individual commissioners? (b) What does the existence of commissioners tell us about systems of language governance? How do they aid our understanding of governance as a theory? (c) How do we understand the work of commissioners for specific indigenous minority languages in increasingly pluralistic and globalised societies? (d) How do commissioners interact with dominant majority populations who do not necessarily speak the minority language but whose support for change is crucial? A pressing current issue is how the IALC interprets the discourse, strategy, and potential for enhancing language vitality by examining the relationship between majorities and new speakers. If growth is to be anticipated within the various systems represented within the IALC, then surely it is from ‘new speakers’ among the pluralist, often hegemonic majority population that such growth is to be garnered, as illustrated by O’Rourke et al. (2015).18

Case Study of Irish Although the new Irish state in 1922 declared that Irish was to be maintained as the community language in its heartland, the Gaeltacht, and revived elsewhere as the general means of communication, no Irish government has ever adopted a vigorous approach to achieving those aims. On the one hand, Irish is constitutionally both the ‘national’ and the ‘first official’ language of the state, and all children are obliged to study it for an average of 14 years at school. On the other hand, however, the principal legislation governing the delivery of services, the Official Languages Act (OLA) 2003, is weak by international standards, and Irish speakers have very limited rights to such services even if they are located in the Gaeltacht. Irish is mentioned in over 150 other pieces of legislation, revealing a complex and uneven framework of mostly limited or symbolic protection for the language with a notable restriction of language policy in

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recent decades (Walsh 2017). A recent policy initiative, the 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language, has been weakened by subsequent government decisions to undermine or dilute various policy supports for Irish, including the failure to enact a revised and strengthened OLA (Government of Ireland 2010). While the overt policy of the pre-eminence of Irish persists in a constitutional sense and is reflected in aspects of public discourse, the covert state policy continues to promote the overwhelming dominance of English, and Irish is treated as a minority concern of little practical importance to the work of government. The problematic position of Irish as simultaneously national, first official, and minority language has been discussed by various authors in the fields of law and sociolinguistics (e.g. Ó Conaill 2009; Nic Shuibhne 1999, 2000; Ó Giollagáin 2014). While establishing a statutory basis for public services in Irish for the first time since the foundation of the state, the OLA itself can be seen as reflecting slippage from an ideology of a national language deserving robust promotion to one of a minority language merely tolerated on the margins (Walsh 2015). The legislation, which aims to increase gradually the level of public services offered in Irish from virtually zero at the time of enactment, encompasses more than 650 public bodies ranging from government departments to local authorities and semi-state companies covering all aspects of life. It creates three categories of obligation: (1) direct obligations covering a limited range of publications and correspondence with the public (Section 9(2) and (3) and Section 10); (2) obligations based on ministerial regulations, related mostly to signage and oral announcements (Section 9(1)); and (3) obligations based on language schemes, internal language plans outlining how public bodies will increase services in Irish (Sections 11–18). Each language scheme is agreed between the public body and the Minister with responsibility for the Gaeltacht, and its implementation is then monitored by the Commissioner. Every scheme lasts for three years and is supposed to be replaced by another scheme guaranteeing additional services in Irish, thereby ensuring a cumulative improvement in services over time. There are limited requirements related to the language competence of public bodies serving the Gaeltacht but only as part of language schemes (Section 13(2)), and there is no obligation on the state to make Irish its primary language when dealing with Gaeltacht residents. Only a limited number of unambiguous rights are conferred on Irish speakers in relation to use of Irish in the Oireachtas (parliament) and the courts (Sections 6 and 8), and for the most part, the success of the legislation is dependent on the extent to which public bodies comply with their obligations. At the time of writing, a review of the Act was underway and Heads of a revised Bill (the outline of the new

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legislation) had been accepted by government (Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht 2017).

Language Commissioner The office of An Coimisinéir Teanga (Oifig Choimisinéir na dTeangacha Oifigiúla)19 was established on foot of the 2003 Act as an independent body with both regulatory and promotional functions in relation to this and other legislation. The current Commissioner, Rónán Ó Domhnaill (since 2013), oversees a small team in offices in the Galway Gaeltacht. The Commissioner’s functions and powers and the manner in which he or she will conduct investigations are described in Part 4 of the Act. Section 21 outlines the Commissioner’s six functions, which may be summarised as follows: (1) to monitor how public bodies comply with the Act, (2) to take all measures within his or her authority to ensure compliance by public bodies; (3) to investigate complaints related to failures by public bodies to comply with the Act; (4) to provide advice or assistance to the public regarding their rights under the Act; (5) to provide advice or assistance to public bodies regarding their obligations under the Act; and (6) to investigate complaints related to failures by public bodies to comply with any other enactment regarding the status or use of an official language. More than 150 pieces of legislation other than the OLA are covered by subsection (6), a small number of which have far-reaching implications for language policy in fields such as education and broadcasting (Walsh 2017). The time devoted to the advisory and compliance functions is roughly equal, although a stronger emphasis in recent years on the duties of public bodies (under Article 21 (e)) has led to an increase in the number of cases where advice is offered (Ó Domhnaill 2016, personal communication). The Commissioner’s powers are outlined in Section 22. Under this section, he or she may require that any person possessing information or records relevant to one of the Commissioner’s functions to appear before him or her and that such a person must comply. Anyone who fails to do so or “who hinders or obstructs the Commissioner in the performance of his or her functions shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding €2,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or both” (Section 22(4)). The Commissioner may bring proceedings under this section on himself or herself. No Commissioner has yet used this power, although it is occasionally necessary to remind public bodies of its existence (Ó Domhnaill 2016, personal communication). The

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Commissioner may also compensate any person who has appeared before him or her. Sections 23–25 are largely procedural and describe how the Commissioner will proceed if he or she proposes to carry out an investigation into a complaint that a public body has failed to comply with the Act. Section 26 relates to findings pursuant to an investigation and states that the Commissioner will issue to the public body, the minister and, if relevant, the complainant, a written report and recommendations as appropriate. If the Commissioner decides that the public body has not implemented the recommendations, he or she may report that failure to the Houses of the Oireachtas (parliament). By 2018, this power had been used on seven occasions since the establishment of the Commissioner’s office. Section 27 allows the Commissioner to establish a scheme of compensation under which a public body would pay a sum of money to any person affected by the failure of such body to comply with the OLA, although subsection (2) restricts such compensation to investigations made under the OLA only and not under other enactments related to Irish. Section 28 states that any party to an investigation of the Commissioner may appeal the findings and recommendations of an investigation to the High Court on a point of law within four weeks of the report’s issue. Of the more than 100 investigations conducted since 2004, this has occurred on only one occasion, in the case of the Revenue Commissioners. The High Court rejected the appeal. Section 29 allows the Commissioner to publish commentaries on the application of the Act, and Section 30 provides that he or she will publish a yearly report for the Minister on his or her activities. Such a report will be placed before the Houses of the Oireachtas. This section also allows the Commissioner to publish reports on any investigation or other function. So far two such commentaries have been published, a review of the Act and its weaknesses (2011) and an analysis of language schemes (2017; see below).

Implementation of Legislation The period from 2003 to 2008 can be characterised as one of gradual implementation of the legislation and bedding down of the apparatus to implement it. From 2008 onwards, increasing attention has been paid to the deficiencies of the OLA, particularly in relation to language schemes. Such criticism came to a head with the resignation of former Commissioner Seán Ó Cuirreáin in 2013. This section examines both phases and looks at the changing discourse

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over time from a focus on implementing the existing legislation to greater criticism of its shortcomings. The OLA was not fully in place until 2008 when the Minister made regulations covering recorded oral announcements and signage erected by public bodies under Section 9 (1). The initial years of Seán Ó Cuirreáin’s tenure were characterised more by the promotional aspects of his functions, given the paucity of language schemes that had been ratified. Therefore, the early reports from 2004 to 2005 dealt largely with the provision of advice to public bodies on their obligations and to citizens on their rights in relation to the legislation. As not all provisions were in place, the Commissioner frequently attempted to resolve complaints by appealing to the ‘spirit’ of the legislation in his dealings with public bodies, on the basis that they would soon have to adjust to the full extent of the Act’s powers (see, for instance, An Coimisinéir Teanga 2005: 34). By the end of 2006, 43 schemes were in place, covering 71 public bodies. An analysis of the schemes during this period categorised them into (1) national bodies without a specific Gaeltacht remit and (2) those with a specific link to the Gaeltacht. It found that the first category of schemes envisaged only very minimal provision of services but that the second category at least had the potential to create employment for Irish speakers in the bodies in question (Walsh and McLeod 2008). However, the study also identified a number of problems with the schemes related to (1) competence of front-line staff in Irish, (2) emphasis on written rather than oral communication, (3) recruitment of Irish-speaking staff, and (4) stimulation of demand for services (2008: 31). As we see below, ten years later these concerns have only worsened. In his annual reports from 2008 onwards, Seán Ó Cuirreáin expressed concern about the slow institutionalisation of the system of language schemes which, as the principal measure to provide Irish language services, were supposedly at the heart of the legislation (see, for instance, An Coimisinéir Teanga 2008: 27; 2009: 7; 2010: 7). In 2011, of the 105 schemes which had been ratified by the Minister, 66 of them had expired. About 20 per cent of the schemes had expired for more than three years and another 20 per cent by two years. Twenty-eight public bodies had been asked to prepare a draft scheme by the Minister, but by 2011, these had still not been ratified, and the delay was more than five years in the case of ten bodies. The Commissioner was strongly critical of the situation (2011b: 6). An analysis of the beliefs and ideologies associated with the schemes ratified in 2007 uncovered a number of key ideological stances that were deemed to undermine their effectiveness in enhancing the delivery of services in

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Irish. There was widespread reliance on a training policy of teaching existing staff a minimal amount of Irish rather than recruiting fully bilingual staff, despite the limitations of such an approach to serve fluent Irish speakers. Furthermore, the schemes revealed the belief that there was little public demand for Irish and that services would only be made available when requested rather than on the basis of the Canadian system of ‘active offer’. An overarching ideology of the cúpla focal (the few words of Irish) was dominant if implicit in the schemes, meaning that for the public bodies concerned, a very limited service in Irish was deemed adequate to fulfil their statutory obligations. This is reflective of a widespread, if largely undocumented, ideology in Ireland that a tokenistic display of Irish will suffice in all cases, whereas those who had campaigned for the OLA wanted legislation that would guarantee a comprehensive level of state services in Irish. The Act was supposed to overcome such a limited position for Irish, but through its reliance on minimalist language schemes, it has in fact institutionalised it (Walsh 2012). In a detailed analysis of the OLA in 2011, published under Article 29, Seán Ó Cuirreáin recommended that public bodies be categorised according to “their range of functions and their level of interaction with the public in general, including the Irish language and Gaeltacht communities, and that the level of service provided in Irish should depend on that classification.” The language schemes should be replaced by a system of language ‘standards’ based on statutory regulations, such as in Wales. He also recommended that services be made available in Irish on a statutory basis in the Gaeltacht and called for a new system of training and recruitment in order to deal with the lack of staff competent in Irish, which he described as “the most fundamental difficulty with the provision of state services through Irish” (An Coimisinéir Teanga 2011a: 3–4).

Review of the Official Languages Act In the autumn of 2011, the government announced a review of the OLA, in line with a commitment made during the general election the previous spring. A short time later, and in the absence of any meaningful progress with the review, the government announced that the Commissioner’s office was to be merged with that of the Ombudsman, ostensibly as an economic measure in response to the financial crisis. Following a public outcry, that decision was dropped but two years later, when the review of the Act had still not been published, Seán Ó Cuirreáin resigned in protest at government inaction over

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the legislation and Irish language policy in general (Walsh 2015). The Heads of Official Languages (Amendment) Bill was finally published in 2014 but was strongly criticised by Irish-language organisations as failing to deal with the main deficiencies of the existing legislation. In 2017, following more campaigning by Irish-language groups, revised Heads of Bill were accepted by government. Among the proposed amendments were the replacement of the system of schemes with language ‘standards’, a provision dealing with names and addresses in Irish, and, critically, measures to increase the proportion of new recruits to the public service who are Irish speakers to 20 per cent and to ensure that public offices in the Gaeltacht operate through Irish (Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht 2017). Several years after the government promised to conduct a review, the OLA remains at crossroads. The legislation that civil society activists hoped would create a framework for the provision of state services in Irish has had only limited success. More public services in Irish are available now than in 2003, and the Commissioner’s annual reports indicate that there is greater awareness among public bodies in general of their direct obligations under the Act. However, the ongoing problems with language schemes are reflected in the fact that over one-third of all complaints received in 2015 related to non-­compliance with a provision of a scheme. A second commentary on the Act, based on a detailed analysis of 40 language schemes ratified in 2015 and 2016, concluded that the system was failing to achieve its stated objective. Commissioner Rónán Ó Domhnaill found that there were significant delays—an average of three and a half years—between the time when a public body was requested by the Minister to prepare a scheme and the date when the scheme came into effect, with delays as long as nine years in some cases. The Commissioner also noted a problem of ‘regressive modifications of commitments’ in subsequent language schemes: instead of enhancing services in Irish, only a small minority of the second- and third-language schemes agreed in 2015 and 2016 contained a significant improvement to services. In almost two-thirds of the schemes investigated, a commitment which was the subject of an investigation by the Commissioner was diluted or removed in a subsequent scheme, a situation described as ‘extremely unsatisfactory’ and confirmation of the “dysfunctional nature of the system” (An Coimisinéir Teanga 2017: 6). It remains to be seen what will transpire from the review of the legislation, but it appears that there is now a consensus that language schemes are to be phased out. Overall, the development of the OLA has been stymied by the failure of successive governments to see through the legislative process that would bring about a new Act as promised in 2011. There is ample evidence of the low

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political prioritisation of Irish in the governmental agenda, ranging from weak implementation of the 20-Year Strategy to the sluggish progress of the legislative review. For instance, the placing of ‘Gaeltacht’ at the end of the title of the Department for Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht is not a coincidence and reflects the physical location of the Gaeltacht division in Connemara, far removed from the locus of power in Dublin. Former Minister Heather Humphreys (2014–2017) was criticised on numerous occasions for failing to engage with Irish-language organisations since her appointment, and the Minister of State for the Gaeltacht, Joe McHugh, had limited competence in Irish when appointed although he improved with effort over time. The dominant ideological backdrop is that of a centre-right government with a neo-­ liberal hue and without any particular interest in Irish beyond its limited referential function as a symbol of Irishness. This position, reflected in the widespread cúpla focal ideology, undermines policy initiatives which are aimed ostensibly at serving fluent Irish speakers rather than those who wish to use a little Irish in order to satisfy a desire to mark their identity in a symbolic fashion. Therefore, although technically most of the population is “in favour of Irish” (e.g. see Ó Riagáin 1997, 2008; Darmody and Daly 2015), the Commissioner’s core constituency is a much smaller but vocal minority of habitual Irish speakers who wish to live their lives through Irish as much as is possible. Such a constituency agitated for the legislation in the first place, as they had done on numerous previous occasions when civil society campaigns brought about important Irishlanguage institutions such as Irish-language radio and television stations. It is important to point out that such initiatives, ranging from the media to the OLA itself, did not come about due to proactive measures by the state but in response to persistent and dogged pressure from civil society. The oppositional pressures of official but reluctant state recognition and civil society agitation are among the ‘multilevel influences’ that have to be managed by the Commissioner, as pointed out at the Galway meeting of the IALC (see above). The 2016 Census returns for Irish showed a decline, for the first time since 1946, in all key statistics about knowledge and use of the language. The most dramatic decline was recorded in the Gaeltacht, where the number of daily speakers outside education fell by 11 per cent from 23,175 or almost 24 per cent in 2011 to 20,586 or 21.4 per cent in 2016 (Central Statistics Office 2017). It is not clear to what extent the decline can be attributed to the policy context, but the sluggish pace of implementation cannot be expected to yield positive demographic results. The census figures are a stark reminder that the ongoing increase in numbers of Irish speakers over the past 70 years cannot be taken for granted.

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Conclusion Our focus on the vicissitudes of language policy and planning for selected nonhegemonic languages has demonstrated that the rise of the regulatory state has shaped a new context within which statutory interventionist actors deploying a new discourse of rights and expectations have real potential to transform the fortunes of previously marginalised speakers. However, a clear implication of both the emergence of the IALC and the experience derived from the Irish case study is that while in many cases the supportive infrastructure for language promotion, protection, and regulation may be in place, the acid test of the adequacy of such developments is their implementation within the relevant jurisdiction and full incorporation into the machinery of government. The yawning gap between the constitutional and legislative status of Irish and the failure of successive governments to fulfil more than the minimal requirements of statutory obligations should be a clear warning that in contradistinction to many other aspects of public policy, minority language-­specific enactments are more difficult to embed within the culture and machinery of the modern state, unless successive governments are fully committed to the political project. This may be clearly illustrated by contrasting the fortunes and standing of official language policy in Ireland with the more integral and politically salient Canadian experience. Conceptual frameworks of both governance and governmentality need better to account for these imbalances in public policy implementation, and greater attention to the ideological stance of the permanent government of the civil service may go the same way towards providing an explanation. In our judgement, the role of public servants in implementing official language policy is a relatively neglected area, and the replication elsewhere of studies such as those conducted by Savoie (2013, 2017), which evaluate the relationship between Canadian politicians and public servants in the formulation and discharge of policy, would surely pay dividends. Issues of implementation and the respecting of language rights depend ultimately on the desires of the citizenry as demonstrated either through the ballot box or by acting in concert in civil society. Yet so often, rather than being a medium for the pursuit of other policy objectives, minority languages tend to be positioned as a competitive and too easily emasculated consideration in a crowded policy arena. Acknowledgements Colin H.  Williams wishes to acknowledge the support of Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant ES/J003093/1 which allowed Dr. P. Carlin, Prof D. Mac Giolla Chríost, and Prof Colin H. Williams to examine the role of Language Commissioners in comparative perspective. John Walsh would

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like to thank the Irish Language Commissioner, Rónán Ó Domhnaill, for his comments on a draft. Work on this material was facilitated by the authors’ membership of the COST Action IS1306 ‘New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges’. Both authors were also members of the team Les Savoirs de la gouvernance communautaire led by Prof Linda Cardinal, Political Science, University of Ottawa, and we are grateful to our colleagues in Ottawa for sharing with us their Canadian expertise. This chapter has been improved by the critical comments of an anonymous reviewer for which we are grateful. We would like to dedicate this chapter to our former colleague Dr Peadar Ó Flatharta of An Cheathrú Rua, Galway and Dublin City University. Peadar dedicated his life to working tirelessly for language rights for Irish speakers but died prematurely in 2016 before his mission was complete. He is greatly missed. Go raibh suaimhneas síoraí aige.

Notes 1. We are concerned here with minority languages in jurisdictions such as the Basque Country, Catalonia, Ireland, the UK, and Canada; although they may have achieved constitutional status as official languages, they are still considered in need of protection and formal regulation in order to remain vital elements of everyday life. 2. Alliance de recherché universités-communautés/Community-University Research Alliance. 3. Prior to UK devolution, the Welsh Office discharged its remit on language promotion and regulation through the non-statutory WLB a quango, established by the UK Conservative Government in 1989, to act as a sounding board for the development of Welsh-medium services. 4. Williams questioned the original settlement of the Welsh Language Act 1993 and concluded that in vesting public institutions with language obligations, whilst eliding over the issue of individual language rights, the 1993 Act had fallen far short of establishing Welsh as a co-equal language (Williams 1994, 2000). 5. The 11 Board members were appointed by the Secretary of State for Wales and they devoted two days a month to the activities of this quango. The dayto-day work of the Board was undertaken by initially 30, subsequently 84, staff members divided into seven areas, namely, policy, public and voluntary sector, grants and private sector, education and training, marketing and communication, finance, and administration. 6. The NAfW TWF project came to an end in 2016; for details please visit http://cymraeg.llyw.cymru/learning/cymraegiblant/?lang=en 7. The proposed Commission would follow the logic and be broadly similar to the revised version of a model suggested by the WLB as its successor agency in April 2012.

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8. The IALC made a powerful submission to the review process in 2017 pointing out from international experience some of the ways in which promotion and regulation may be better integrated; for details see http://languagecommissioners.org/documents/LettertoWelshGovernmentonbehalfofIALC.pdf 9. For access to OCOL’s Annual Reports please visit http://www.officiallanguages.gc.ca/en 10. The initiative followed advice given by Peadar Ó Flatharta and Colin H Williams to the founding Coimisinéir Teanga, Sean O Cuirreáin to co-operate with other similar office holders, and together they organised a conference on the theme of Language Rights in Dublin in May 2013 during which they proposed the establishment of the IALC. 11. The presentations are available at http://www.coimisineir.ie/index. php?page=news&news_id=118&lang=eng 12. Williams acted as rapporteur and adviser on future directions; please see http://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/ES.J003093.1/outputs/ read/f07e30fc-8c14-4709-b3d5-07d5e0a497be. For an independent critique of the conference please visit https://cosmopolitique.org/2013/05/25/ international-conference-on-language-rights-dublin-may-24-2013/ 13. For details on the IALC please visit http://languagecommissioners.org/welcome.php?lang=1 14. For details on the conference please visit http://www.languagecommissioners. org/documents/PROGRAMME_DELEGATES_INTERNATIONAL_ FINAL.pdf. For a video record of the proceedings please visit http://www. sindic.cat/en/page.asp?id=269. For a report on the conference please visit http://www.languagecommissioners.org/documents/IALC-BarcelonaConference-Report.pdf 15. For the programme see http://www.languagecommissioners.org/documents/ Program_EN.pdf 16. For information please visit the IALC Website at www.languagecommissioners.org 17. http://www.ireland.ie/eveants/international-association-language-commissioners-conference-2016 and a for a copy of the programme please visit http://www.coimisineir.ie/downloads/Clar_na_Comhdhala.pdf 18. For details please visit COST Action IS1306 New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges: http://www.cost.eu/domains_actions/ isch/Actions/IS1306 19. This translates as ‘the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages’ but is referred to in its Irish form in the English version of the legislation. The English text refers to the holder of the office as ‘An Coimisinéir Teanga’ and states that the individual is referred to as ‘the Commissioner’ in the Act.

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Part II Recognition, Self-Determination, Autonomy

5 The Recognition of Ethnic and Language Diversity in Nation-States and Consociations Christian Giordano

Introduction: Regimes of Toleration and Politics of Recognition In tackling the question of the recognition of ethno-cultural diversity, Michael Walzer put forth an important distinction between tolerance as a political-­ philosophical principle that can be expressed in avowals, attitudes, stances, or social representations of an ideal or indeed abstract nature and toleration. Toleration as the actual performance of tolerance is instead a concrete social practice grounded in peaceful coexistence, even if barely agreeable, among human groups with different histories, cultures, and identities, thus in most cases with different religions and idioms (Walzer 1997, 1998). This chapter deals especially with this second form of essentially practised tolerance. Walzer (1997) developed five types of political communities in which highly diverse regimes of toleration may be observed. Examining five types of political organizations, especially in which five different regimes of toleration are in place, he distinguishes the following: 1. Multinational empires, such as the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman ones (Walzer 1997: 15–19); 2. International community institutions that promote and endeavour to establish the practice of toleration. These supranational organizations set global C. Giordano (*) Department of Social Anthropology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_5

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standards, in theory at least, for good practices of toleration (Walzer 1997: 19–24); 3. Consociations in which toleration amongst their different ethnic groups arises in everyday life without requiring a centralized political-bureaucratic intervention (Walzer 1997: 22–24). Thus, consociations are cradles of federalism; 4 . Nation-States whose political organization currently represents the overwhelming majority at a global level and must ensure toleration between the majority and minority communities (Walzer 1997: 24–30); 5 . Immigration societies, that is, societies that emerged in the course of various migratory waves in sparsely populated territories such as Canada, which, however, was the homeland of autochthonous peoples with their own specific culture (Walzer 1997: 30–36). Clearly, Walzer developed ideal types along the lines of traditional Weberian ones (Weber 1968: 234–260). Though ideal types are known to be intellectual abstractions not present in empirical reality, they significantly help analysis of analogous yet distinct social phenomena. This is true of both the consociations and the Nation-States, where the current presence of immigrant communities allows observation of a number of similarities between these two types of regimes of toleration and the immigration societies. In this chapter, we empirically analyse different regimes of toleration. Therefore, we chose two types expressly mentioned by Walzer that are currently significant in modernity’s complex societies, that is, the Nation-States, highly prevalent in Europe, and the consociations, exceptionally present in Europe (e.g. in Switzerland and Belgium) but more widespread in various post-colonial African States (e.g. Ghana and South Africa) and particularly in Southeast Asia (e.g. Indonesia, Malaysia, and perhaps in a not too distant future, Myanmar). To the Nation-States and consociations, we also added immigration societies (such as Canada), since socially and politically they ultimately appear to be very similar to the first two. In essence, over the last 60 years, classic Nation-States and traditional consociations, especially in old Europe, have slowly acquired some of the characteristics of immigration societies. Our analysis does not include the first two types cited by Walzer because multinational empires belong to a now distant past, whereas the institutions of the international community are by definition multistate if not indeed extra-state, such as the United Nations, the European Union (EU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and so on. By analysis of specific cases, this choice allows us to show empirically that the politics of recognition (Taylor 1992) of ethnic and cultural diversity, on which every regime of toleration is founded, is not an effortless, self-evident or

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trouble-free process. Indeed, the diverse politics of recognition and distinct regimes of toleration in both Nation-States and consociations are characterized precisely by tensions, dissent, exclusions, discriminations and, at times, conflicts, yet also by negotiations, talks and concessions. This chapter is marked specifically by this disenchanted anthropological vision that aims to corroborate Walzer’s philosophical pragmatism through the analysis of two specific forms of political community mentioned above, which are the most widespread types in the present-day world, where the regime of toleration and the politics of recognition in terms of linguistic diversity are particularly important yet also controversial.

 ation-States, Monoethnic Territory, N and the Inopportune Linguistic Diversity In this section, we analyse the regime of toleration and the politics of recognition in the European continent starting from observing that Nation-States, despite being a global phenomenon, have undisputable European origins (see also McDermott and Nic Craith, this volume). Therefore, we focus, in particular, on the historical evolution of the current situation of this continent inasmuch considered as father of the Nation-States. Europe’s current political layout is still based in the main on Nation-States being fiercely protective of their sovereignty, though the latter has been slightly limited lately by regionalist and autonomy demands. This political layout is the outcome of the proliferation of such States at the end of the eighteenth century and thereafter and of the project to establish a Europe of nations as theorized and solicited by the then President of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, in the aftermath of the First World War. Nation-States, which we must keep in mind still determine Europe’s political order, were established mainly by means of two models first conceived in France and in Germany (Brubaker 1992). Clearly enough, in this chapter, these models are taken into consideration as Weberian ideal types.

The French Model It has often been remarked that the French model of national State is based on the idea of a political nation. According to this widespread opinion, the national State would be the outcome of a political agreement or, better yet, of a pact, that is, a contract between its citizens. On the subject, Jules Renan has spoken, somewhat rhetorically, about the nation, thus about its political

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organization, as un plebiscite de tous les jours. This well-known formula highlights that the political nation of French derivation is an elective community, implying the existence of a patrie ouverte in which religious and/or ethnicrelated differences are irrelevant (Dumont 1991: 25). Under this aspect, the national State represents the outcome of a declaredly voluntary act of each citizen that mirrors the viewpoint expressed by baron Charles de Montesquieu in his pensées, for whom Je suis nécessairement homme…et je ne suis français que par hazard (Montesquieu 1949: 10). Nowadays, we are aware that the non-ethnic concept of nation that stemmed from the French Revolution was markedly modified and relativized rather soon, since it was merged with ideas that were not utterly devoid of ethnicizing tendencies. The French experts who have delved into this matter point up that, according to the 1791 and 1793 constitutions, any foreigner living in France could be granted citizenship without having to prove that he had acquired a French identity. In other words, this meant that obtaining citizenship came before obtaining nationality, that is, before acquiring that sum of cultural stances and social rules regarded as typically French (Weil 1988: 192; Lochak 1988: 78; Weil 2002; Weil and Hansen 1999). The sequence citizenship-nationality was all but reversed in the course of the nineteenth century. This fundamental shift occurred together with, and was justified by, the introduction of further ethnicizing concepts by which the prerequisites to belong to the elective nation and its State were increasingly defined by ethno-­ cultural criteria, such as knowledge of the French language and acquisition of the way of life specific to the country. Though weakened, the original idea of citoyenneté was never totally set aside. In particular, the subjective, thus individualistic vision of the nation (Sundhaussen 1997:79), by which any foreigner living in France can take advantage of the apparently trouble-free mechanism of assimilation to become a citizen, remained unchanged. According to this scenario, any ethno-cultural differences, identities and boundaries are never inescapable and insurmountable. Each human being, if he deems it worthwhile, is intrinsically able to adapt and consequently become a full-fledged member of the cité wherein all relationships between individuals, as well as all relations between people and public institutions, are regulated by a social contract, which, in theory at least, has no room for ethnicity and culture. Whether ethnic, cultural or national, for the French model, any type of belonging is never definitively set; on the contrary, it can be modified through acculturation processes that lead to integration via the assimilation of those who are not regarded as foreigners. The assimilation process, which clearly entails significant changes in the individual’s cultural identity, legitimizes

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welcoming the xenos (English: stranger, foreigner) to the bosom of the community and the national State. This brief presentation already highlights that the French type of national State is associated with the concept of a more open society than other models of political-administrative organization. This fact is further substantiated by the actual, albeit incomplete, application of the jus soli in the French juridical system. On the other hand, we ought to bear in mind that the significant openness in welcoming foreigners is counterbalanced by the surprisingly weak appreciation for ethno-cultural differences within its own national territory. Eugene Weber (1976) has aptly shown how the French national State’s various governments between the end of the revolution and the First World War set up an extensive assimilationist apparatus aimed at reducing ethno-cultural differences between its various regions as much as possible (yet was unable to do so completely). As expressed in the original title of Weber’s work, peasants with their local characteristics would have been transformed (and to some extent they were) into more or less standard French citizens. Minorities in France, that is, groups within the country that on the strength of real or purported ethno-cultural criteria demand the recognition of their diversity and may voice claims to territorial autonomy (e.g. see Corsica and Brittany) are ignored or kept out of sight to this day. At best, they represent an awkward though perforce acknowledged reality. Moreover, the law known as Loi Pasqua, which reformed the renowned code de la nationalité, one of republican France’s juridical institutions, came into force on January 1, 1993. Without delving into its legal technicalities, this law makes obtaining nationality more difficult, especially for immigrants. Consequently, there is a creeping ethnicization that puts present-day France increasingly in contrast with the revolutionary ideal of patrie ouverte, thus also with the one of political nation. We can rightfully wonder whether France is undergoing a Germanization.

The German Model The national State-based on the German model is often described as ethnic, in this context mainly with a negative connotation. The use of this adjective expresses, rightly or not, the fact that the German model of national State is based on genealogy, that is, on the shared origin of its citizens.

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Arguably, linking the German model with the notion of Volk, which not always has an ethnicizing overtone, would be more appropriate from an historical viewpoint. It is common knowledge that Gottfried Herder, together with the Grimm brothers, popularized the idea of Volk and its derivatives such as Volksgeist, Volksseele and so on. Therefore, viewing Herder as the first zealous advocate of the ethnic variant of the concept of Volk, thus stigmatizing him as the inventor of the most dangerous explosive of modern times (Talmon 1967: 22; Finkielkraut 1987: 56 ff.), would be both misleading and somewhat incorrect. In fact, Herder believed that the genuine expressions of Volksgeist, thus also of the Volk, were principally the language and its literary evidence, such as fairy tales, poems, proverbs, phraseology and so on. This author was rather a representative of Germanic cultural patriotism and one of the creators of the concept of Kulturnation (Pierré-Caps 1995: 79 ff.). Undeniably, however, during the nineteenth century several intellectuals, including renowned politicians, artists, jurists, philosophers, historians and, last but not least, folklorists (Volkskundler) increasingly defined the culturalistic notion of Volk in ethnicizing terms. Descent and origin, no longer regarded symbolically but strictly physiologically, became the inherent characteristics of the Volk, by then understood to be my people (the German one, clearly). Yet, for a long time this ethnicization of the idea of people and nation in Germany would circulate solely in intellectual circles and would not have juridical consequences on the right to citizenship. As pointed up by historian Rudolf von Thadden, a definitive shift towards the institutional birth of a German ethnic nation only took place in 1913 with the introduction of a restrictive variant of the jus sanguinis` principle in the Reich’s juridical system (Pierré-Caps 1995: 112; Gosewinkel 2001). Accordingly, what became known as the German model of the national State, determined by the formula the people as an ethnic entity is the essence of fully entitled citizens, became a reality only at this time (Grawert 1973: 166). Thus, descent and origin become the two fundamental criteria to define who belonged to the nation and who was excluded. The escalation of nationalism over the next years led to a gradual ethnicization of the German model, which, via National Socialism and its infamous Nuremberg Laws, inevitably led to the racialization of the notion of Volk and of the national State. After the abominable aberrations of the Nazi period, post-war Germany, though never a strictly ethnic State, renewed its links with the previous model of national State in which ethnicity overrides culture. To corroborate this last statement, we need only mention the notion of citizenship in the Federal Republic at the time of the two Germanys (1945–1990). As constitutionalist Böckenförde (1968: 424) aptly noted, the Federal

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Republic recognized one citizenship only, that is, the German one, regardless of all the changes that occurred after 1945 with the division of Germany into two separate States. Before the reunification, therefore, neither a specific citizenship of the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) nor one of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) was recognized. Instead, only one German citizenship was juridically considered as such, that is, the expression of both the unchangeable ethnic unity of the Volk and the continuity of the national State born in 1866. The power of ethnicity in the German model was noticeable also after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the country’s subsequent reunification, especially by comparing the situation of the Aussiedler, re-immigrants of German origin that wished to settle permanently in Germany, to that of immigrants mainly from Southern Europe, Turkey and other African and Asian countries. In fact, by virtue of the ethnic notion of Volk and of the jus sanguinis principle, the Aussiedler could acquire German citizenship nearly automatically, that is, by proving to have had even remote ancestors from Germany in the past centuries. Until the red-green coalition headed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder passed new laws, nationality was granted solely on the grounds of descent, regardless of potential links to the German culture. The other immigrants, instead, despite their lengthy residency and even their birth in Germany including their acculturation and integration process in German society, still had to go through complex naturalization procedures to be granted nationality. To remedy this paradox, on June 23, 1999, the German parliament led by a red-green majority ratified a new law on nationality that in essence sought to partially de-ethnicize the German model. The reaction of the opposition’s centre-left parties (CDU, CSU and FDP) and most of the population was very negative. Yet, despite their initial opposition, the centre-right governments that replaced the red-green coalition did not repeal the law. German citizenship is currently based on the idea of belonging to a cultural collectivity and not a genealogical one. Under this aspect, the German model has been somewhat Gallicized.

F rench Model Versus German Model: Differences and Similarities European Nation-States have far too often been regarded as sheer geographical expressions. Though not completely off the mark, this approach is exceedingly reductive since it overlooks the fact that a nation’s political-institutional

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architecture is also and foremost a social organization. In particular, as Rogers Brubaker aptly remarked, it disregards the fact that in the first place the national State is a political association of citizens to which the latter belong owing to specific attributed or acquired shared (mainly cultural) prerequisites (Brubaker 1992). Accordingly, not everyone can be fully entitled to belong to a given national State. Drawing on a well-known formula by Max Weber (1956: 26), we could say that as a rule, a nation’s political organization is an association partially open to the outside. Clearly enough, this limited openness towards the outside, namely towards the foreigner, that is, most often the culturally other, implies creating institutional mechanisms of social selection to regulate belonging and foreignness. Citizenship and/or nationality are the fundamental instruments to indisputably determine who is fully entitled to belong to a national State and who is not. Therefore, citizenship and/or nationality are closely linked to practices of inclusion and exclusion. If we focus on the practices of inclusion and exclusion towards the culturally different, we can observe an essential analogy, despite obvious dissimilarities, between the French and the German model with reference to the recognition of ethno-cultural diversity. Through the subjective and individualistic vision of belonging, buttressed by the jus soli principle, the French version of the national State is grounded in the principle that a person’s otherness may and ultimately should be wiped out. Once assimilation has occurred and been substantiated, the former alien is granted political citizenship, thus is welcomed into the national community. The German version of the national State, with its objective, naturalizing and collective concept of difference strengthened by the jus sanguinis doctrine, inevitably and unchangeably determines the alien’s belonging to an ethno-­ national group that is clearly dissimilar to the Volk’s one. The alien is in principle denied the chance to obtain nationality, thus to become a full-fledged member of the German political community. Yet, these apparently very dissimilar terms of exclusion and inclusion actually pursue the same goal, that is, establishing, maintaining or at best restoring cultural and ethnic homogeneity on the entire national territory. In fact, a national State’s territory that is not monocultural or monoethnic is perceived as an anomaly that needs to be modified somehow, if not indeed eradicated. For this reason, ever since their advent, both the French and the German models have revealed a considerable incompatibility with pluriethnicity and multiculturalism, along with serious troubles in managing either. This emerges very clearly in the problematic stance towards minorities and immigrants to whom the national State offers the alternative between assimilation and the supposed resulting passage from one identity to another (as in the French

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model), and the more or less permanent marginalization from the civic and political community (as in the German model). The propensity for territorial homogeneity common to both in their own Nation-States stems from the fact that the prime movers of both models drew on the Staatsnation doctrine, a term much in use in the Germanic area, which, strangely enough, is of French origin (Pierré-Caps 1995). In this context, we need to highlight that this principle is based on the incisive formula one nation, one State, one territory (Altermatt 1996), that is, on the nearly untouchable and indisputable axiom by which the area occupied by a nation must coincide with the state’s territory. If the two models of Nation-States just described adhere to the abovementioned postulate, then clearly the logical corollary is the achievement of ethno-cultural homogeneity in their territory. Yet, we need to stress that the French or the German models referenced in this chapter were a crucial source of inspiration for most State-building activities in Europe. However, such models are Weberian ideal types, and they do not exist in a pure form. This is especially true nowadays, since the recognition politics of ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity have become, at least in theory, widespread throughout Europe, albeit not always voluntarily but rather under the pressure of international bodies such as the EU. We need only mention post-Francoist Spain, Italy’s law on linguistic minorities, Finland’s bilingualism and, to some extent, post-socialist Romania. Ever since their establishment, these four Nation-States had drawn inspiration from both the German and the French models. However, by now, they have enacted rather efficient legislative measures concerning the recognition of cultural diversity as well as decentralization and devolution, thus softening their initial maximalism and centralism to some extent. It is no coincidence therefore that Spain now defines itself a supranaciόn, that is, a nation of nations, much more akin to a consociation than to a classic Nation-State. We should also mention the case of the recognition of cultural and linguistic diversity in the UK, which historically, however, has more characteristics of a consociation than of a politically and culturally uniform Nation-State. Still, these examples may be considered rather exceptional for there are paradigmatic cases of Nation-­ States, especially in Eastern and South-eastern Europe (Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Macedonia just to mention seven of them), where laws regulating the recognition of minorities, chiefly introduced under pressure from the EU, have been enacted but are hardly, if not indeed arbitrarily, enforced. The ideal of a culturally homogeneous Nation-State, as in the French and the German model, currently appears to have regained popularity through the new populisms. This comes after the disappointments caused by globalization

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and its proposals to overcome the localist logic inherent to the principle of a single State for a single nation, as well as the massive influx of immigrants and refugees.

 ation-States and the Politics of Ethno-Cultural N Homogenization: Assimilation, Elimination, Minorities and Linguistic Standardization. Europe’s Drama After these theoretic considerations, we now turn to the empiric reality. A reconstruction and analysis of modern European history shows that during this period, Nation-States constantly endeavoured to make their territories and societies increasingly homogeneous, both ethnically and culturally as well as linguistically. In fact, the past two centuries, in particular, were characterized by ongoing efforts to turn each national territory into a gradually more homogenous one in terms of ethnicity, culture and language, especially in Central and Eastern Europe where the Staatsnation principle was introduced much later than in Western Europe, that is, only after the collapse of the multinational empires (Vielvölkerstaaten). These processes of ‘ethno-cultural recomposition’, aimed at making the Nation-States ‘ethnically pure’, are achieved through a dreadful, ongoing and far-from-over series of boundary revisions, forced assimilations, banishments, targeted and planned immigrations, deportations, ethnic wars and cleansings, genocides, reinstatements and secessions. A periodization of the various processes of ‘ethnic separation’, in which more or less all European Staatsnationen were involved during the past two centuries, will reveal roughly four surges whose virulence would be fraught with consequences for the entire continent’s layout (Giordano 2015, Vol. 8: 277). The first surge struck the Balkans, in particular, soon after the creation of the first Nation-States in the nineteenth century. Major population contingents of Turkish origin or simply of Muslim religion were forced to leave the region. As administrators and civil servants of the Ottoman Empire, they did indeed represent the hated occupiers, but members of social strata that had nothing or little in common with the ruling class were involved in the expulsion process as well. During the great crisis in the Orient, which led to the bloody Russian-Turkish war, between 1875 and 1878 alone a million and a half people were repatriated. At that time and for the area involved, it was an exceptional movement of people (Giordano 2015, Vol. 8: 277).

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The second virulent phase took place between 1913 and 1925. It was characterized by the forced transfer of entire minoritarian ethnic groups, yet it was internationally recognized and guaranteed. In the diplomatic language of those days, it was euphemistically termed ‘population exchange’. Some ­examples illustrate the ‘homogenization’ strategies through ‘ethnic separation’. Substantial groups of Albanians from Kosovo and Western Macedonia were transferred to Turkey at the end of the Balkan Wars (on August 10, 1913) mainly because of their religion. These in turn were substituted by Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Slovenian people, especially after the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, with the intention of ‘re-­Slavizing’ the region. The alleged ‘population exchange’ between Greece and Turkey was even more dramatic. It was decreed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which ratified a series of reciprocal expulsions and hasty repatriations caused by the Greek military catastrophe during the reckless campaign in Asia Minor. After the tremendous defeat, Greece was overrun by refugees from the coasts of Western Anatolia as well as Greeks (and also Armenians) from the Black Sea area and the Caucasus who had been fleeing the new Bolshevik regime’s repressions since 1917. A country with a population of 4.5 million was faced with the arrival of 1.3 million refugees. At the same time, the ‘population exchange’ provided for the departure of the ‘inhabitants of Muslim religion’, mostly Turks but also Albanians (Giordano 2015, Vol. 8: 277). The third ethnic homogenization surge spanned the period between 1940 and 1945 that was prevalently marked by the Nazi policy of annihilation, transfer and expulsion of entire ethnic communities. Stalinist deportations and purges between 1945 and 1953 continued these strategies of extermination. Along with the holocaust of the so-called transnational minorities (Kende 1992: 13 ff.), namely Jews and Roma, there were massive population movements in all of Central and Eastern Europe that would considerably alter the ethnic map of this part of the continent. A total of 11.5 million Germans were expelled from the Ostgebiete, while 3 million Poles, 2 million of which from the regions that were assigned to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, would settle in Silesia and in the southern part of Eastern Prussia. As a result, Poland became an almost monoethnic country, quite consistent with the Staatsnation ideal. The treaties between Czechoslovakia and Hungary and between the latter and Yugoslavia, which likewise provided for reciprocal ‘population exchanges’, date back to the same period immediately after the Second World War (Giordano 2015, Vol. 8: 277). Finally, Stalin consolidated his conquests in the Western part of the Soviet Union through a policy of ‘planned’ and often imposed ‘mobility’. On the

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one hand, this involved the deportation of populations considered ‘accomplices of the enemy’, thus ‘traitors of the great patriotic war’ (Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians etc.), to Siberia or Central Asia. On the other hand, it involved substituting them with immigrants mainly of Slavic origin such as Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians, who were considered more ‘reliable’ (Conte and Giordano 1995: 28 ff.). The fourth virulent phase of ethnic homogenization, which may be termed the return to the national State, is the wave of ethnic separations that devastated Central and Eastern Europe throughout the 1990s. It can be traced back to Socialist Bulgaria with its alleged solution of the nationality issue, namely with the expulsion and/or forced assimilation of the ‘ethnic Turks’ in the second half of the 1980s. This phase continued with the disintegration of the three countries born after the First World War (Yugoslavia, Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia) via a multiethnic and multinational ‘logic’. All the new and old States generated by this process are based on the Staatsnation principle. Thus, the war in Bosnia was fully in line with this tragic but centuries-old logic of homogenization. Given the historical antecedents, it would have been rather surprising if the war had not broken out, while the Dayton Agreement (1995), despite obvious formal differences, is but a new version of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) dissembling a project of ethnic recomposition. Present-day Bosnia, in fact, is a sham multicultural State since it is divided into two different ethno-political entities. On the one side is the Muslim-Croat Federation in which the two communities are territorially and socially separate and, on the other side, the Republika Srpska with its practically autonomous political life (Giordano 2015, Vol. 8: 277). The war and the independence of Kosovo have notoriously led to a double ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. At first, the Serbs tried to annihilate or expel the ethnic Albanian population from the region. Then, when Slobodan Milosevic lost the war declared on him by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Kosovar State with a vast Albanian majority was created. At the same time, most of the ethnic Serb population was expelled. The entire process of the double ethnic cleansing was once again in accordance with the founding principle of European Nation-States: ethnic homogeneity. The separation between Serbia and Montenegro had a similar ethnic connotation, though for once there was no violence involved. The long-standing conjuncture is not over yet! In any case, thanks to these homogenization policies in the name of the ideal of a monoethnic and monocultural national State, the multiculturality of many European regions has dwindled, if not disappeared over the past two centuries.

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L anguage: A Symbol of Identity and National Unity In Europe’s Nation-States, both in the long-established ones and especially in the ones that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the national language has become a symbol of identity, cohesion and, ultimately, national unity. In these cases, religion remains undoubtedly relevant in terms of identity and national building but is still secondary to language. We ought to bear in mind that ‘nation’ as a concept is a product of eighteenth-­century Enlightenment (see also McDermott and Nic Craith, this volume), thus it always has a more or less secular connotation. This is especially true of Euro-American Nation-States rather than those in other continents where the influence of Western secularization processes was slighter or nil. We need only mention the classic case of Thailand where language and Buddhism are equally important pillars in the national community’s collective imagination (Kosonen and Person 2014: 200–231). Consequently, it stands to logic that the national language as a symbol of the country and society’s unity is crucially important in most of today’s Nation-States. In national education policies, teaching in the language of the community that is regarded as the titular nation becomes central. Knowledge of the national language also becomes a means to appropriate national culture because it is the foundation of social cohesion within a given Nation-State. Yet, as mentioned above, Nation-States, with few exceptions such as Portugal and Iceland, for example, were not and to this day are not culturally homogeneous political entities. Indeed, cultural as well as ethnic homogeneity is more of an abstraction, an ideal, a goal to be achieved rather than a sociological reality. The nearly generalized presence of linguistic plurality in a state entity that views itself as homogeneous generates embarrassment and frustration, as mentioned above. If not through attempts or actual processes aimed at eliminating cultural and linguistic diversity via drastic measures, such as a ban on teaching or using a minority idiom, at the very least a hierarchical system between the titular nation’s language and the minorities’ languages will be established. This hierarchical order is already noticeable after the First World War in the first policies of recognition of linguistic diversity within Europe’s Nation-­ States with the emergence of the question of the protection of minorities implemented via the failed Minderheitschutz policy under the aegis of the League of Nations (Horak 1985: 7 ff.). One of the most important points of this policy,

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which ultimately boiled down to a feeble moral pressure exerted by the League of Nations, was the protection of linguistic minorities. However, the need of protection implies a danger. At the time, in fact, especially in the new Nation-­ States born of the ashes of multinational empires and echoing the French or German model, linguistic discrimination was systematic and could even reach the point of prohibiting the use of any other language except the titular nation’s one. At the time, the predominant stance was what Hungarian historian Istvan Bibό (1993: 172) aptly called the right of supremacy of the titular nation. Circumstances are rather different nowadays; most Nation-States, at least in Europe, slackened their strings several years ago and the recognition of linguistic diversity is no longer unthinkable, though in France and Germany, that is, the two Nation-States par excellence, linguistic plurality remains questionable or at the least hardly fashionable. To this day, however, minority languages are tolerated in Nation-States but nearly never on a par with the titular nation’s language. This gives rise to a hierarchical situation in which the titular nation’s language takes on a hegemonic role, whereas minority idioms end up being subordinate. This occurs even in Italy, which probably has one of the world’s most progressive statutes in terms of the recognition of linguistic minorities. However, Italy’s rather unique situation, which concerns all of the country’s linguistic minorities (Germans in Alto Adige/South Tyrol [see also McDermott and Nic Craith, this volume], French in Aosta Valley, Slovenes in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Arbëreshë/Albanians in Sicily and Calabria, Sardinians in Sardinia, Croatians in Marche and Abruzzi, Greeks in Apulia etc.), is chiefly the upshot of the international agreement with Austria on the recognition of German in Alto Adige/South Tyrol, rather than a heartfelt belief in the added value of a rich linguistic diversity. Finally, we need to emphasize that current territorial disputes, such as the one regarding Transylvania that is souring relations between Hungary and Romania, often involve the failed recognition of a minority language. To this day, nearly all the Nation-States born of the ashes of multinational empires, renowned for their rather lax thus scarcely regulated multilingualism, coerce minority groups, even by resorting to structural and often also physical forms of ethnic violence, to learn and use the language of the new titular nation that had recently taken control of the territory by military action or thanks to international treaties. Thus, language and its enforcement by the State becomes the paramount symbol of power.

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 onsociations: A Different Way of Ensuring C a Regime of Toleration, Politics of Recognition and Linguistic Diversity? The Nation-State model of European origin has undeniably spread all over the world. We need only look at the structure of the international community’s individual institutions where it is almost a given that they essentially consist of classic Nation-States. Yet, as mentioned in the introduction, there are also other empirically observable political associations, which, albeit very dissimilar from the Nation-States, can ensure specific regimes of toleration and politics of recognition in terms of ethnic and linguistic diversity. We are referring to consociations, which, though far less common worldwide than Nation-States, are both structurally and politically very different from the latter, thus can neither be likened nor associated with them. Accordingly, consociations ought to be viewed as political, yet also social alternatives to Nation-States. What makes a theoretical conceptualization of consociations highly complex is their marked diversity. We need only think about the enormous differences between six classic consociations such as Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Ghana, South Africa and Malaysia. On analysing the Nation-State type, we can notice that despite variations, which we took into account in the previous sections about Germany and France, one tends to reduce complexity, as Niklas Luhmann (1989) would say. Thus, uniformity and institutional rigidity increase through simplification. Consociations, instead, tend to be more adaptive and flexible, thus situational. Clearly, this encourages the production of unique arrangements with a structural and institutional specificity. Yet, given the marked cultural diversity inherent to each consociation, these brief observations already point up that consociations are structurally fragile political communities. Though certainly more fragile than Nation-­ States, thanks to their flexibility, they prove to be more mindful of cultural and linguistic diversity in societies with a more marked multiethnic structure than that of Nation-States. The regime of toleration and consequently the politics of recognition are far more differentiated. Bearing in mind the specificities of the individual consociations, thus of their diversity, and in avoiding sweeping generalizations, we now illustrate how consociations envision the regime of toleration and the politics of recognition through a case study analysis of a paradigmatic example.

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Malaysia: A Paradigmatic Case of Consociation In this section, we discuss a very particular case of consociation: Malaysia. This country, independent since 1957, is characterized by a remarkable ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic diversity, which poses a threat to social cohesion nearly on a daily basis. Yet, by opting to establish itself politically as a consociation, Malaysia has been able to maintain its unity and cohesion to this day despite the almost daily rate of misunderstandings as well as the permanent tensions between the different ethnic groups that make up its society.

 thno-Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Complexity E of Malaysian Society Malaysia as a current political subject is the upshot of British colonial domination (Hirschman 1986: 330 seq.). In fact, the present-day marked ethno-­ cultural differentiation of this society is the result of the politics of immigration under the colonial regime. The British believed that the local population of Malay origin was hardly inclined or indeed unable to perform tasks beyond cultivating rice. This is why the arrival of a significant number of Chinese, chiefly from the south of the former empire, and Indians, Tamil in particular, but also Punjabi and Sikh, was encouraged and organized. With the exception of the scarcely populated territories in Northern Borneo, the effects of this colonial immigration policy are highly noticeable to this day in Peninsular Malaysia (see also Sercombe, this volume). In this territory, the British had devised a clear division of labour by which the Chinese mainly dealt in trade (including opium) and skilled crafts. The Indians, instead, were employed as manual workers on the vast sugar cane and rubber plantations, in port infrastructures and, at times, as subordinate clerks in the colonial administration. Finally, they were also active as small retailers. The Malays, scarcely appreciated by colonial authorities, who regarded them as unreliable, were recruited as farmers on rice paddies; thus, their task was to ensure basic nutritional needs. To this day, this policy of immigration and division of labour heavily influences the country’s multicultural structure as well. In fact, the Malays represent 50% of the population, in contrast to the Chinese and Indians (who total 23% and 7%, respectively). The remaining 20% consists chiefly of indigenous peoples (the orang asli) plus small quotas of other groups, amongst which the Ibans and the Bidayuh of Sarawak (see also Sercombe, this volume) and the Kadazans of Sabah. Finally, we need to mention the Jawi Peranakan and

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the Baba Nyonya, two mixed-race communities resulting, respectively, from intermarriages between Malay and Indians of Muslim faith and the latter between men of Chinese origin and Malay women. This triad consisting of Malays, Chinese and Indians, which must be regarded as the backbone of this country’s society, is characterized by a complex diversity, especially in terms of religion and language. The Malays, in fact, are by definition Muslim (Sunni), and their language consists of a series of local variants of Bahasa Malaysia, despite the existence of an official, nationally standardized Bahasa Malaysia. The Chinese adhere to what inaccurately goes by the name of Chinese Religion in Malaysia, that is, a syncretic combination of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Hailing from Southern China, they learn and currently resort to Mandarin as a foreign language, mainly for convenience (Teh 2017: 21). However, in everyday communications within their own community, they chiefly use the idioms of their region of origin, that is, Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. Finally, since the Indians are chiefly Tamil, a vast majority is Hindu of Shivaist tendency with their specific festivities such as the spectacular Thaipusam. Among the Indians, however, there are also relatively small religious communities of Muslims (such as the Chulia, skilled and often wealthy traders in gems and other precious articles), of Catholics and of Sikhs. The everyday spoken language is chiefly Tamil, not Hindi, which remains a foreign language for the Tamil community despite certain attempts to promote it.

 alaysia: Cult of Cultural Diversity, Interethnic Tensions, M Intercommunity Negotiations and Compromises John S. Furnivall (1944) coined the term plural societies to describe the colonial Malaysian society. By means of this concept, Furnivall pointed up a crucial aspect of plural societies, that is, their marked cultural diversity. In his analysis of these societies, Furnivall drew from a theorem formulated by the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, which the utilitarian philosopher summarized in this famous passage: Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. (Mill 1958: 230)

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In line with this philosophical tenet, Furnivall upheld that plural societies consist of two or more elements or social orders which live side by side, yet without mingling, in one political unit. (Furnivall 1944: 446)

Given the lack of shared values and mutual fellow feeling, these societies are unable to develop a satisfactory social cohesion, thus are doomed to live in a constant state of social disorganization and political uncertainty. This is how Furnivall described the likely scenario of social life in plural societies. As a proper British public servant, Furnivall evidently voiced the need for the presence of a colonial power to prevent disruptive conflicts between the various ethno-cultural communities. Yet, Furnivall’s gloomy predictions were not much off the mark since some plural societies, as, for example, the Fiji Islands, proved to be politically and socially fragile precisely because of their divisions along ethnic lines strengthened by socioeconomic imbalance between the various communities. Furnivall’s hypothesis, however, is not generalizable since several plural societies, such as Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago and South Africa, proved to be much more stable and cohesive than expected. Most likely, Nelson Mandela is right when he speaks about rainbow nations, and this formula can almost certainly characterize Malaysia as well. In fact, since its independence, this country experienced a definite socioeconomic growth and an unexpected political stability. The deadly ethnic riots thematized by American political scientist Dan Horowitz (Horowitz 1985, 2001) occurred solely during a severe crisis, as in the renowned and now distant May ethnic riots of 1969. The disorders between Malays and Chinese at that time have become a sort of negative national myth, that is, an incident that must never happen again, although, at times, similar, yet far less disruptive conflicts have occurred between ethnic communities in the recent past and most probably will occur again in the future, since these interethnic tensions are inherent to societies such as the Malaysian one. We need to mention, however, that deadly ethnic riots have been occurring evermore frequently in the United States, the UK, France and also in the latest countries of immigration such as Italy, Spain and Greece. Contrary to some stances, I uphold the apparently paradoxical hypothesis that the coexistence of the different ethnic communities that make up Malaysia, especially the Malay, Chinese and Indian communities, was feasible thanks to a veritable cult of difference, thus thanks to the recognition of ethno-cultural diversity. Though not fulfilling everyone’s expectations, the

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consociative social contract in force since independence, and subsequently redefined, is based on a prudent, if not indeed a wary variant of the concept of a Malaysian Malaysia as opposed to a Malayan Malaysia. The latter case would have meant establishing a national State along the lines of European ones with an entitled nation, the Malay, and extranational minorities, namely, the Chinese, Indians and so on. The former case, instead, worked towards a more open and inclusivist political solution, since, as Bellows (1970: 59) aptly points out: ‘A Malaysian Malaysia means that the nation and the state is not identified with the supremacy of any particular community or race’. This citation shows how Malaysia as a consociation differs from classic Nation-States based on the European model since it takes into account the country’s polyethnic and multicultural structure of society and acknowledges all ethnic groups on the federation’s territory at independence as members of the political community with equal rights without drawing a distinction between titular nation and minorities. The constitution of 1957 represents the core of a consociative-like identity bargaining that has created a very specific type of ethnically differentiated citizenship (Hefner 2001: 28) grounded in the fundamental distinction between natives (i.e. Malays) and the other communities regarded as indigenous and immigrants (first of all, Chinese and Indians). Since the natives are economically and professionally the most disadvantaged group, they were granted a special statute concerning economy, education and property rights (especially with respect to land and house ownership). As per Articles 89, 152 and 153 of the constitution, specific territories are reserved for them. They are also granted house purchase deductions and special regulations for commercial licenses and concessions, in addition to quotas in higher education. Immigrants are granted full Malaysian citizenship, as well as specific rights of religious and linguistic expression within a secular State in which Islam, however, is the State religion. This institutional compromise is, as two experts of this region, Milton J. Esman (1994: 57f ) and Robert W. Hefner (2001: 23), have aptly pointed out, the outcome of defensive strategies that are ascribable to reciprocal fears and mistrust that still characterize Malaysian society’s different ethnic communities. Which fears troubled the different ethnic communities? The Malays and the other indigenous groups, being bumiputera, (‘sons of the earth’), thus natives, feared that due to their patent socioeconomic inferiority, they would be overcome by the Chinese and Indian enterprise and suffer the same miserable plight of the red Indians in North America, as some members of their elites stated verbatim (Esman 1994: 53). The Chinese and Indians, instead,

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were concerned about the future of their flourishing economic activities and of their cultural identity in a State with a strong Islamic connotation. The message conveyed by this instrument is that, though culturally different, we are all Malaysians; better yet, we are all Malaysians precisely because we can all cherish our diversity in this country. Most likely, the doctrine of national harmony, that is, the principle known as rukun negara, was invented because of these widespread fears. This ideological construct, though not very conspicuous in social practices, undoubtedly has a strong symbolic significance. It is a way to proclaim unity in diversity, though, in practice, it is a less optimistic unity in separation. These inventions, however, are also necessary to legitimize the government’s power, which to some extent is what has occurred for the past 50 years. At this point, we need to add that, in the context of the above constitutional compromise, public life abides by the ethno-religious boundaries. Because of these borders, the non-bumiputera have almost tacitly accepted the political pre-eminence of the bumiputera community, especially the Malay one, in exchange for their own economic freedom and supremacy. Consequently, Arend Lijphard speaks of hegemonic consociativism with reference to Malaysia (Lijphart 1977: 5). However, this asymmetry is far from complete, or speaking about consociativism would be misleading. In fact, the federal government has always been a coalition of the three ethnic parties (plus a few minor ones) denominated National Front (Nasional Barisan). From the very start, this coalition has compulsively pursued, better yet striven, to stage a spirit of consensus (musyawarah) that is difficult if not impossible to attain. Moreover, representatives of the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) as a rule serve as cabinet ministers, although representatives of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) always hold the key ministries. Accordingly, the office of prime minister is customarily entrusted to a Malay who must, however, be able to play the role of great mediator in case of interethnic conflicts that could jeopardize the nation’s unity. We should also bear in mind that Malaysia is an elective monarchy but that becoming king (Yang Dipertuan Agong) is the exclusive prerogative of the sultans of only nine states (out of 13) of the Federation. Though a purely representative post, it has a strong symbolic value since it signals the political predominance of the Malays over the non-bumiputera and the other bumiputera. Over the years, the compromise elaborated by the constitution has proven obsolete and, on several occasions, new forms of negotiated agreements have changed the character of Malaysia’s ethnically differentiated citizenship. Despite

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contrasts and permanent tensions among the various communities, a collegial and consensual solution has always been reached. Thus, after the May 13, 1969, ethnic riots, a New Economic Policy (NEP) was launched granting further social rights to the Malays whose socioeconomic situation over the 12 years of independence had worsened compared to middle and higher strata that mainly comprised non-Malays (Faaland et al. 1990: 17 ff.; Gomez 1999: 176 ff.). In 1991, after a period of sensational and dizzying economic growth, which, apparently at least, somewhat lessened social differences between the bumiputera and non-bumiputera, the coalition government launched the project Vision 2020, whose primary goal was to finally establish a bangsa Malaysia, that is, a united Malaysian nation with a sense of common and shared destiny (Hng 1998: 118). In political practice, this would have meant establishing a consensual, community-oriented democracy (ibid.) that would guarantee the existence of a tolerant society in which Malaysians of all colours and creeds are free to practice and profess their customs, cultures and religious beliefs, and yet feeling that they belong to one nation (Hng 1998: 119). Vision 2020 aimed at making the concept of ethnically differentiated citizenship more inclusive by means of the notion of bangsa Malaysia, which would have brought together the various communities in a single civic body. Through the pursuit of excellence, Vision 2020 endorsed a less ethnic and more meritocratic idea of citizenship. From this point of view, Malaysia drew on Singapore’s model of nation based on the combination of two founding myths, that is, multiracialism and meritocracy (Hill and Lian 1995: 31–33). When the current prime minister came to power, the project Vision 2020 (Mahathir 1991, http://www.epu.jpm.my/) was shelved and substituted with the one denominated 1Malaysia (http://www.1malaysia.com.my/en), which, though endeavouring to distinguish itself from Vision 2020, maintains some of its goals, especially the ones related to the creation of a more cohesive national society where ethno-cultural diversity still remains an essential element. Summing up the above observations, Malaysia will probably continue to be an ethnically divided society, that is, a multiethnic and/or multiracial entity based on consensual separation and sociocultural inequalities between natives and immigrants, and between the single ethnic communities. The ongoing tensions and disputes, the permanent negotiations and subsequent compromises and, last but not least, the symbolic and political significance of the cult of diversity with its various stagings, will still be the cornerstones of the complex construction of both national and local social cohesion in this country founded on unity in separation.

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The process is not over yet, however, because with its fast-paced economic development, Malaysia is rapidly becoming a country of immigration and will have to tackle this phenomenon that makes the country even more ethnically and culturally diverse. But this new situation is a challenge to the current regime of toleration that will need to be addressed in the near future. After this brief analysis of the Malaysian consociation’s political set-up, we need to examine its highly variegated multilingualism, which in everyday life is actually far more flexible and less regulated than in the classic Nation-States. In fact, formally Bahasa Malaysia is Malaysia’s standard official language. Yet, in everyday practice, this language’s regional and local differences are rather noticeable. Bahasa spoken in Penang and more in general along Peninsular Malaysia’s Western coast is different from the one of the Eastern coast or Borneo territories (see also Serecombe, this volume). Unlike Malaysia, in Indonesia, the Bahasa language, which is different from the Malayan Bahasa, was enforced more strictly in schools and became prevalent nearly throughout the country’s vast territory thanks to the rigidity of its educational system. With regard to the Chinese, there is a growing number of schools that teach Mainland China’s official language Mandarin, though linguistic practices are much more diversified in everyday life. In fact, the Chinese community is highly diversified in terms of language since in everyday life the Chinese will use one of the five vernaculars of their place of origin (Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew and Hainanese). Since these five vernacular languages are not alike, the Chinese of the various communities will often resort to English. Indians, too, are not alike linguistically although the majority speaks Tamil, a Dravidian language, whereas some relatively small communities speak Punjabi, which instead is an Indo-Aryan language. Any foreigner arriving in a Malaysian city will immediately notice the country’s linguistic diversity thanks to the many writing systems used in everyday life. In fact, there are four principal writing systems: the Jawi alphabet of Arab origin, the Latin alphabet for Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese ideograms and characters of Sanskrit origin for the languages spoken by the Indian community. At the end of the day, ever since independence, Malaysian governments have been unable, or probably never wanted, to impose a linguistic uniformity. Yet, in practice, their remarkable toleration has been outstanding, though to a Western observer, especially if from one of Europe’s classic and ostensibly monolingual Nation-States, this may seem disconcerting. In fact, in everyday life, one hears a constant switching from one language to another or English, the one true lingua franca, interspersed with multilingual phrases, whereas Bahasa, despite being the official and bureaucratic-administrative language, remains a rather abstract entity.

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 onclusions: Nation-States and Consociations: C Two Incomplete and Imperfect Types of Political Communities Our analysis reveals that the Nation-States tend to lessen cultural diversity, thus also linguistic diversity, by resorting to different strategies, such as a more or less compulsory assimilation or integration (as in the French model) or exclusion (as in the German model). Therefore, Nation-States have a universalist scope linked to Enlightenment philosophical current and are based on the premise that cultural conformity will create solidarity among its citizens, thus ensuring long-term social and political stability. This, however, entails limiting the regime of toleration and consequently curtailing the corresponding politics of recognition in terms of cultural and linguistic differences. As the example of Malaysia shows, consociations are definitely more tolerant but also more divisive because the various cultural and linguistic communities are not inclined to mingle, thus neither to blend into a single society. This is why Furnivall rightly spoke of plural societies, though his diagnosis is too pessimistic as well as ethnocentric for there were Europe’s Nation-States at the back of his mind. On the other hand, thanks to negotiation strategies and to the ability to reach often complex and difficult compromises, consociations have been able to ensure a sui generis interethnic and intercultural cohesion grounded in the unity in separation paradox, as illustrated not only by the case of Malaysia but also, without delving further into the matter, by the case of Switzerland. Consociations show a greater toleration of cultural and linguistic diversity but are also more fragile, as the existence of highly problematic if not failed consociations, such as Belgium, former Yugoslavia and several others, goes to show. In conclusion, Nation-States are clearly imperfect, given their major difficulties in the recognition of ethno-cultural and linguistic diversity, but are also much more stable. Consociations, instead, are much more mindful and tolerant in their management of the abovementioned differences but are also at risk of gruelling secessions and dissolutions. Their survival can be ensured only thanks to complex negotiations and compromises between their various ethno-cultural and linguistic components. Deciding which of the two most important forms of political community of modernity may be most suitable for the recognition of cultural and linguistic diversity is tantamount to the vain illusion of being able to solve a sphinx’s riddle.

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6 Linguistic Recognition in Deeply Divided Societies: Antagonism or Reconciliation? Philip McDermott and Máiréad Nic Craith

Linguistic diversity has been championed as a notion by a number of organisations such as the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN) and the Council of Europe (CoE)  (McDermott, 2011; Spiliopoulou Åkermark, 1997). The European Commission, for instance, notes that: “the harmonious co-existence of many languages in Europe is a powerful symbol of the EU’s aspiration to be united in diversity, one of the cornerstones of the European project” (European Commission 2016). Likewise, the CoE has been ­instrumental in celebrating the “European Day of Languages” each year on 26 September, while the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in its Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights has noted the importance of finding a way “to guarantee the promotion and respect of all languages and their social use in public and in private” (UNESCO 1996). This declaration “advocates policies of cultural pluralism in the world’s increasingly diverse societies: suggesting that such pluralism is essential for harmonious interactions among groups with dynamic cultural identities” (Nic Craith 2006: 165). P. McDermott (*) School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Ulster University, Derry, Northern Ireland e-mail: [email protected] M. Nic Craith Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_6

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Rhetoric such as that noted above suggests that there is a widening perception that the application of language rights is crucial for the fostering of peace, stability and security in all regions of the world. Within such an understanding, language rights are perhaps even more crucial in the context of societies which are deeply fractured along ethnic lines and which are transitioning from a period of conflict to peace. In this chapter, we define a deeply divided society as one where there are deep cleavages between ethnic groups on issues relating to questions of dominance, power, territory or national sovereignty. In such societies, these contestations will largely have manifested in overt intergenerational antagonism and/or conflict. Cultural artefacts such as flags, emblems, cultural traditions, rituals and, significantly for the purposes of this piece, language become part of a process by which communities create boundaries between themselves and their ‘other’ (Ross 2012). The durability of these practices over generations is often reflective of the potential for conflict to emerge again even in times of relative stability and ‘peace’, thus indicating why issues on cultural questions such as language relate to wider questions on social stability and security. In post-conflict societies where there continues to be contestation over statehood, cultural and ethnic identities have often become central to wider political struggles. For instance, the very speaking and/or promotion of a particular language by an individual or a community can be viewed as an antagonistic act. Similarly, macro-decisions such as the recognition, or indeed non-recognition, of a language by a government in public policy can itself be viewed by different sides of an ethnic conflict as a highly emotive issue. In other words, the politics of language matters in deeply divided societies and linguistic conflicts within wider political contestations are considered as having the potential to destabilise embryonic peace processes. From the Balkans to South Africa, from Rwanda to the Basque Country, from Northern Ireland to Guatemala, the issue of language and language planning has been a controversial topic which authorities have aimed to address within peace agreements and other associated constitutional measures. Given that the efforts to solve ethnic conflicts have often focused on the alleviation of unequal power relationships between groups, it is unsurprising that international standards in minority rights protection, which developed in the aftermath of World War II, have frequently been utilised within peace processes. This chapter, therefore, considers the ways in which language rights have been recognised within peace processes, treaties or new constitutions and explores how these rights have then been applied. The case studies which we use to illustrate the points in this chapter are not exhaustive but are a means of identifying certain trends that have emerged.

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In our evaluation, we consider the different roots to recognition taken by minority languages in deeply divided societies, alluding to both the transformative and disruptive potential of such approaches. First, we consider the theoretical notion of recognition and indicate how these debates are particularly relevant to post-conflict regions. Then, we illustrate the different ways that language rights are applied or ignored at different levels. We start with the idea of non-recognition and the potential contribution of this to conflict. We then consider how language movements have been influenced at different levels. This includes input from grassroots movements, alterations to restrictive attitudes at national level and the influence of global politics in the application of language rights in deeply divided societies.

Discourses of Recognition Recognition of one’s language is hardly a matter of everyday concern for a majority/host community. For linguistic minorities, however, recognition of one’s language is more problematic and can be seen as a gauge by which the minority is accommodated and accepted within the majority community. In divided societies which are emerging from conflict, the broad question of recognition takes on greater significance and can become a major negotiating point within peace processes or new post-conflict constitutional arrangements. However, the term recognition itself encompasses a number of competing concerns under one ‘umbrella’. Recognition, on the one hand, can include ensuring that the system of individual rights for each individual citizen is adhered to (Kloss 1971). The political theorist Charles Taylor (1994) has referred to this as the politics of universalism, which requires that every citizen has identical rights (cf. Nic Craith 2003a). Proponents of the politics of universalism seek non-discrimination so that every individual receives equal treatment. They “seek to protect against harm caused by prejudice and discrimination, and therefore to restore and maintain a level playing field” (Packer 1999: 259). This process is perceived as essentially neutral and could be regarded as ‘culture-blind’ or even utopian, given social inequalities. However, in certain contexts, it is groups rather than individuals which are recognised which Taylor terms the politics of difference. Taylor (1994: 38) suggests that the politics of difference emphasises the distinctiveness rather than the sameness of each individual or group and focuses on positive discriminatory practices in order to ensure equality. “With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are

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asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else” (Ibid). Advocates of the politics of difference seek positive or reverse discrimination for collectivities in order to ensure that no one suffers disadvantage. Their concern is “to protect against harm caused by identity through the effects of the normal majority rule, and also to facilitate the equal opportunity for persons belonging to minorities to maintain and develop their identity/ies” (Packer 1999: 259). Peace processes have often advocated this politics of difference by recognising the claims of those groups which have felt unjustly treated in the course of a conflict. Examples might include attempts to address unequal social and cultural opportunities against minority groups. Other types of recognition might include the representation of a minority group’s culture or language in the public space. In some instances, the quest for recognition might involve the legitimation of a minority’s language and/or cultural traditions. Failure on behalf of a majority group to recognise a particular minority community’s cultural identity can first and foremost be construed as a failure to recognise that group’s separate and distinctive identity, which might include its own trajectories, narratives and values. As Margalit and Raz state, “Individual dignity and self-respect require that the groups, membership of which contributes to one’s sense of identity, be generally respected and not be made a subject of ridicule, hatred, discrimination or persecution” (1995: 87). Non-­ recognition, therefore, could constitute an exclusion of the value and worth of these separate cultural identities (Wolf 1994: 75), which may create the conditions for conflict to emerge again (see Nic Craith 2003a).

Non-recognition The emergence of nation-states in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was often coterminous with grand claims of cultural homogeneity. Where cultural homogeneity did not exist, as was the case in most polities, civic bureaucracies and social institutions were called upon to create this. Part of this process was the embedding of a myth of ‘national’ language, often channelled through structures such as organised education systems, which, over a period of the past 200 years, rigorously obliterated regional distinctions and variances in language use. In channelling systems of power and authority through its institutions, preferred  language ‘norms’ were promoted by the state, whilst other forms of mutually intelligible speech (or dialects) were rendered marginalised, or, in the most extreme cases, ‘deviant’. In other examples, where languages from different linguistic families were spoken on the national

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territory, these were viewed as even more incompatible with the apparent ideals of national unity and thus speakers of such tongues were expected to assimilate (Nic Craith 2007). The most common example cited in the literature is France which, after the revolution in 1789, set about an ongoing process of assimilating the hundreds of mutually intelligible regional idioms into a common standard national ‘language’. At the same time, speakers of very distinct languages from different family branches, such as Basque and Breton, were expected to put civic patriotism before linguistic identity and accept standard French for overall national cohesion. As Phillipson (2007) notes, such processes were replicated elsewhere, regardless of political system, with monarchical Britain, republican France and Fascist Spain all complicit in suppressing linguistic diversity in a drive towards national cohesion. Essentially, these historical processes were the ultimate in a game of ‘recognition’ versus ‘non-recognition’ and were intricately linked with power. Of course, many, arguably all, conflicts are driven by competition for power. Ownership of the means of communication is an important element in legitimising one’s own world view while negating that of another. Therefore, language is not merely a prop used in the competition between communities, as might be the case with other cultural artefacts such as flags and icons. The non-legitimation of a language might be construed as an attempt to strip a community of its very mode of expression. Kymlicka (1995) describes how membership of a shared societal culture “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities” (Kymlicka 1995: 76). Language especially plays a strong part in this concept as recognition of a community’s means of expression ensures that individuals who belong to minority groups feel a sense of belonging within a wider political union. Therefore, non-recognition of a language by a state can lead to, contribute to, or be an element in the instigation and/or maintenance of conflict. While the inherently monolingual state is no longer the norm at the beginning of the twenty-first century, conflicts over non-recognition, or very limited ­recognition, of a language are still evident. Perhaps the most prevalent case is the issue of recognition for Kurdish within the Turkish state. Since the establishment of Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, extreme policies of Turkification were implemented by successive governments. This included the promotion of the Turkish language in a process of state centralisation which did not recognise minorities such as the Kurds in official discourse and in applied language policy. Skutnabb Kangas’ concept of ‘linguicide’ has often been applied to the situation of the Kurdish language in Turkey (Skutnabb

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Kangas, 2000). It is only in recent decades (especially the 1980s and ­prolonged periods of violence between different parties) where policies of ‘linguicide’ reached their zenith (Zeydanlıoğlu 2012). While some reforms have taken place as Turkey has sought membership of the EU, it is the issue of recognition for Kurds and their culture which has been criticised within the international community.

Grassroots Recognition In reaction against a perception of non-recognition by the state, minority groups have sought to improve the status of their language through ‘informal’ means. By creating community spaces in which a minority language would be given profile, the dominant linguistic narrative of the state could be challenged. We view this as a form of recognition from ‘within’ communities themselves, at grassroots level and essentially a first step towards legitimation at national or transnational levels. Historically, European examples of a language maintaining its survival at grassroots level have included Trentino-South-Tyrol where German was suppressed when the region became a part of Italy as a consequence of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. Speakers of German, despite the prohibition on the language by Mussolini’s fascist regime, maintained the use of the language at home and in secret catacomb schools (Alcock 2001: 3). The ferocious defence and subsequent survival of the German language at grassroots level despite pressure from both Hitler and Mussolini was an important factor in the current context where German is a recognised language within this region of the Italian state (Kockel 1999; see also Giordano, this volume). During the early years of the Franco regime in Spain (1939–1975), the suppression of Catalan and Basque and other varieties was counteracted by grassroots reactionary movements. Following the decline of the Franco regime, grassroots movements became more sophisticated in their articulation of the significance of language for identity (May 2001). The emergence of ­‘community elites’ in the Basque Country, for example, facilitated debates about the inextricable link between the Basque language and Basque identity. Urla points to examples of community activism such as public lectures and publications (academic and political) which drew on the field of linguistics to legitimise claims for further recognition of the Basque language. She notes that a more organised form of discussion in the regions “has grounded the demand for language planning” and was “indispensable for the very survival of Basque culture” (1988: 114), including improvements in language policy.

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Another context in which grassroots activity has been prevalent has been in the case of the conflict and subsequent peace process in Northern Ireland. The early days of the conflict were characterised by calls by the Catholic/nationalist community for an affirmation by the state of their Irishness, which included calls for recognition of the Irish language. Since the establishment of Northern Ireland in the 1920s, the Irish language had received no state recognition and indeed the last enclave of native Irish speakers in Northern Ireland died out in the 1950s (Ó Gadhra 1988). In the early 1970s, parents of children in nationalist areas mobilised and established private Irish-medium schools as part of a revival movement which was itself a reaction to the conflict against the British state. The non-recognition of Irish at this time took on a political and countercultural approach, which was further exemplified through the adoption of the Irish language by nationalist prisoners in the Maze prison (Nic Craith 2002). Prisoners had vigorously protested against the British withdrawal of their political status and several embarked on a hunger strike. Initially, most inmates had little knowledge of Irish, but before long, many of them were studying the language. This was a symbolic challenge to the authorities of both the prison and the wider British system. In addition, the Irish language became associated at grassroots level with the politics of Sinn Féin and the wider nationalist campaign. The groundswell of interest in Irish at grassroots level created a situation where the British government could no longer ignore demands for more official recognition, which ultimately led to the inclusion of recognition of Irish in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (Nic Craith 1999). Stipulations were placed on better provision in areas like media, education and public service delivery which, although not always accepted as sufficient by Irish speakers, have been continually evolving. This ethos of intercultural dialogue, whilst still unsatisfactory for many, has started to seep into the public space (cf. McDermott et al. 2015). Grassroots movements are normally a first step to acceptance at the community level and frequently the first step on the path to legitimation/recognition. Such movements  are a local/community reaction against ‘non-recognition’ by the state which often achieve a level of sophistication that cannot be ignored by the authorities. This can, in some instances, create counter-reactions from other communities. For instance, in Northern Ireland, the emergence of Ulster-Scots as a language movement/dialect has frequently been perceived as a protestant reaction against catholic nationalist Irish (Nic Craith 2000, 2003a). At the time of writing, the language issue in Northern Ireland has become so fractious that it has been one of the key stumbling blocks in furthering the

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peace process. The provision of formalised legislation on the Irish language was a central demand of nationalist parties in early 2017. This became a hugely contentious question, following the pattern of the past decade. However, in this instance, the failure to implement a formal language act for Irish has resulted in the collapse of the local government, and the return to direct rule from Westminster in London.

State Recognition In this section, we look at the manner in which states have officially recognised languages in the public space. Recognition from within the state in which the language is spoken is a political act and does not always necessarily result in actual implementation of government policy in all areas. Nonetheless, incorporating minority languages into the realm of officialdom is a key (and necessary) step towards better provision. In the context of deeply divided societies, recognition might come in the form of a peace treaty which places emphasis on the rights of a minority language to exist and flourish. For instance, at the end of the bloody civil war in Guatemala, a new constitution was formed which emphasised equality between the indigenous and Ladino communities (Plant 1998). The indigenous population has been considered under the umbrella of Mayan identity and up until the mid-1990s, Mayan identity had little recognition in the public space. Whilst Spanish was the language of dominance, Mayan was considered incompatible with modern life. The Mayan identities were mobilised by grassroots organisations—so much so that they gained recognition in the peace legislation of the mid-1990s. In 1995, an “Agreement on Identity and Rights of the Indigenous Peoples”, which was part of the Guatemalan Peace Process, recognised the cultural identity and languages of indigenous Guatemalans, with those from within the Mayan communities the major beneficiaries. The agreement specifically referred to better provision and protection of the languages of indigenous communities in the education system, the judiciary and the public sector, including the translation of all important documents into the Mayan language (see Holmlund 1999: 37). While this process has created the conditions for a rejuvenation of Mayan culture, it was viewed with less enthusiasm by the dominant Spanish-speaking Ladino community. As Barrett notes, though vibrancy has emerged in Mayan culture, this “has not challenged the general Ladino/indigenous binary understanding of ethnic ­identity” (2008: 146).

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It is important, however, to note that state recognition of languages can occur directly as a result of the outcome of a conflict—especially in relation to those conflicts which have a clear victor. In such circumstances, the process of recognition does not necessarily guarantee equality for speakers of different languages. An example of such a multi-tiered language policy has occurred in the setting of post-genocide Rwanda, where the three most significant languages of English, French and Kinyarwanda have been accorded different levels of recognition. As a Belgian colony until 1962, French had held a particular status of privilege in Rwandan society, but this has recently waned. After the civil war between ethnic Hutus and Tutsis and the ensuing genocide, which resulted in almost 1,000,000 deaths (see Hatzfeld 2005), French status was challenged by the encroachment of English as the dominant lingua franca. This was exemplified by the Rwandan government’s 2008 decision to remove the teaching of French in state education. Whilst English is upheld by the government as a more ‘neutral’ language than that of the former Belgian coloniser, the current framing of language preferences can be understood by the historical backdrop to the conflict and the victors in that conflict. President Paul Kagame and other political elites, who had been part of an exiled Tutsi community residing in neighbouring Uganda, had a preference for English as this was the language that they had grown up with in exile. This group, which constitutes a mere 5% of the population, returned permanently as a result of the Rwandan Patriotic Front victory in the civil war of the mid-1990s. By contrast, Samuelson and Freedman note how even today French continues to be viewed as “the language of Hutu who lived in Rwanda prior to the wars and genocide” (2010: 194). A period of Hutu political dominance from the late 1950s to the 1990s, alongside French’s status as the language of administration at this time, had cemented this position. Consequently, the removal of French clearly had undertones of identity politics. What is clear is that Rwanda has witnessed a geopolitical shift from being in a Francophone to an Anglophone sphere of interest (Kiwuwa 2012). Although the Rwandan government has ostensibly promoted a more equal society, it has at the same time stripped away the right to self-identity. Ethnic terms such as ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ have been prohibited in an attempt to create national cohesion. Moreover, the process of language recognition has largely ignored Kinyarwanda, the language spoken by the majority of Rwandans across various ethnic groups. Indeed, the  Kinyarwanda language has not been seized upon as a unifying symbol in areas such as education (Ibid: 192). Instead, the political elites have replaced one former colonial language with another. While this may also have been motivated by economic factors, identity politics has played a huge role in creating multi-tiered and unequal levels of recognition in Rwanda.

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This is quite different to the situation in South Africa, where in the post-­ apartheid era, the language of the state has become “arguably the most ­progressive constitutional language provision on the African continent” (Bamgbose 2003). In that instance, the languages of 99% of the population were accorded equal status with the former colonial languages, English and Afrikaans. Not only has recognition been provided, but constitutional measures for previously marginalised languages have also been put in place. This has included the establishment, through an Act of Parliament, of the Pan South African Language Board, whose remit is to promote multilingualism in South Africa and improve status language planning, education in the official languages, place name recognition and interpreting and translation at state level (Beukes 2004: 7; Pan South African Language Board 2016). This undeniably increased the status of those languages which had not been officially recognised during the Apartheid regime—an issue which we return to later in this chapter.

Transnational Recognition In some cases, language policy in post-conflict societies is influenced by geopolitics from beyond the state’s borders. This might include influence from a more powerful state like the USA, Russia or indeed a supranational body like the EU, CoE or UN. In this section, for purposes of illustration, we draw on the manner in which the EU and other European human rights bodies, such as the CoE, have influenced language recognition policy in post-conflict societies. As noted above, in Rwanda, the Kinyarwanda language had been largely considered at a lower status than English and French (Sibomana 2016). In 2016, UNESCO promoted the wider teaching of Kinyarwanda at all levels of schooling—not just early years, through its International Mother Language Day. The day, which followed the global theme on quality of education and language of instruction, championed an improvement in the status of the indigenous language. The Head of the Rwanda Academy of Language and Culture was present and noted that it was “a good occasion to ponder about the value of Kinyarwanda language as the channel of national unity and development” (Mbaraga 2016). This shows the potential influence an international body can have on local attitudes towards indigenous languages which may eventually overturn dominant government attitudes. Another example is the case of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYR Macedonia). In this instance, the EU and the USA were heavily involved in the drafting of the 2001 Ohrid Framework Agreement. This peace treaty

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aimed to end a period of paramilitary-style conflict between state forces and elements of the Albanian minority (McEvoy 2011). With regard to language rights, the peace framework has facilitated the official use of Albanian (and others) in those local jurisdictions where 20% or more of the local population speak that language. This has benefitted speakers of minority languages in such jurisdictions through improved public sector provision and in the education sector which has seen an increase in the amount of bilingual and multilingual schooling. Monitoring of the Framework arguably has taken place through European Human Rights Mechanisms, particularly the CoE’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCPNM) (CoE 1995; cf. Spiliopoulou Åkermark), which FYR Macedonia became a party to in 1997. A recent report by the Advisory Committee of the FCPNM affirmed the development of a strong presence of minority languages in education (CoE 2011: 2). However, the monitoring process is not without criticism of language policy and noted the tensions caused by the introduction of compulsory Macedonian language classes for all children, regardless of ethnic background, from the first year of schooling. The decision, it is noted, was subsequently reversed due to social protest (Ibid: 17). It also criticised the lack of intercultural dialogue on public media (Ibid: 7). These examples illustrate the potential utility of transnational influence on language policy in post-­ conflict societies. This impact has also been felt in other regions like Northern Ireland (McMonagle and McDermott 2014). International influence in language planning is also evident in the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where both the USA and the EU played a direct and indirect role with regard to language planning decisions in the region. Prior to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the language of the state was defined as Serbo-Croat, a Slavic language spoken throughout the region with its own distinct yet mutually intelligible regional variations. However, in the years of rumbling discontent in the lead up to the civil wars and immediately after, the politics of language has been emblematic of animosities in the region (cf. Tollefson 2002). Croatia, Serbia and, to an extent, Slovenia, in the 1980s and 1990s, set about defining what had previously been regarded as distinct variations of the same language into separate languages. The role of academies, lexicographers, linguists and politicians were crucial in each region in a process which was essentially concerned with emphasising each vernacular’s unique characteristics—a process that could be likened to the language ­movements of nineteenth-century romanticism in Europe (see Barbour and Carmichael 2000).

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For much of the period prior leading up to the war, the language spoken in Bosnia had been accepted by linguists as a dialect of Serbo-Croat, which reflected the region’s geographic location in-between Serbia and Croatia. This ‘in-betweeness’ had created an idiom reflective of connections to Serbia, Croatia and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, borrowings from Serbian and Croatian were common, as was a certain prevalence of Turkish and Arabic loanwords (see Greenberg 2004: 144; Naylor 1978). It was only in the period after 1992, amidst the animosities from a fragmenting Yugoslavia, as well as the development of the language movements in the other regions, that more sustained demands for a recognition of a separate Bosnian language emerged— one which rejected the label of dialect. The work of linguists such as Senahid Halilović (Greenberg 2004) was responsible for providing scholarly impetus in the legitimation and recognition of the emerging Bosnian language in the early 1990s. However, at a political level, the publication of the 1995 Peace Accords, drafted in Dayton, Ohio, has been regarded as a seminal moment in the recognition of Bosnian’s linguistic status. The agreement set out the blueprint for the peace process, with the ensuing constitutional arrangements largely enforced from above, especially under the watch of the EU and USA. However, the actual peace talks held in 1995 provide a particular point of recognition for Bosnian (see Askew 2011). First, the US authorities provided interpreters in Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian despite the ability of delegates to fully understand each other’s speech varieties. Second, when the accords were published officially, they included written versions in the Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian standards. Indeed, these processes have led some observers to note that “the Dayton Process gave the Bosnian language legitimacy and international recognition” (Ibid: 136). In the post-conflict Bosnian state, whose largest communities are Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks (Muslims), international agents such as the EU continue to shadow/chaperone the peace process. While no official language is denoted in the constitution, the Bosnian language has grown in acceptance almost exclusively amongst Bosnian Muslims, whilst this idiom has largely been rejected by the Bosnian-Croats and Bosnian-Serbs who prefer to refer to their own varieties of speech as Croatian and Serbian, respectively. Such fragmented definitions have created antagonisms in fields such as education which have been played out through a zero-sum game of language identification. In some cases, especially in the western part of Bosnia close to the Croatian border, communities have articulated demands for their children “to be taught in their own Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian language” and for this to be provided through “funding of separate schools or classes”, which often creates

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segregation along language and ethnic lines in the same school building (Pupavac 2006: 75). Other recent examples of linguistic antagonisms have also been evident in Slovenia and Croatia. In Slovenia, it is still the case that those who speak Slovene but whose first language is Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian have felt under immense pressure to speak with no trace of an accent from their mother tongue so as to avoid ethnic discrimination. In Croatia, the language issue appeared to have dissipated by the mid-2000s but has resurfaced amidst insecurities created by the 2008 financial crisis and the recent Syrian refugee crisis in Europe. Language has come to the fore again as a key marker of the ‘nation’, particularly in the town of Vukovar where veterans of the 1990s wars have resisted the introduction of Cyrillic  (Serbian) street signs. At the national level, the heavy promotion of Croatian publications as a criterion for academic tenureship is only one example of this resurgence of language politics (see Hodges 2017).

Critique of Current Approaches Our earlier examples in this chapter focused on issues of non-recognition of languages in the public space. Theorists of liberal multiculturalism note that the non-recognition of cultural and linguistic minorities forces groups to maintain their own identities in clusters rather than encouraging wider participation in the public space. Iris Young (2002) states that non-recognition of cultural difference has led to the oppression of many minority groups and that recognition of groups is required to address this. In relation to linguistic diversity in particular, Kymlicka states that language is one form of a societal culture and that providing minorities access to such cultures is vital because of the role language “plays in enabling meaningful individual choice and in supporting self-identity” (1995: 105). Therefore, advocating group rights that support wider participation is “not only consistent with liberal values, but is actually promoting them” (Ibid: 106). At the same time, critics of multiculturalism argue that it is precisely the advocacy of these rights which creates such silos in the first place (cf. Barry 2001). This is an argument frequently referred to in academic, media and policy discourses. In the case of divided societies, the notion of “high fences make good neighbours” is frequently employed as a critique of peace processes which advocate a politics of difference. Therefore, the fundamental question that comes to the fore in both arguments is an absence of focus on intercultural dialogue. The examples cited in our chapter exemplify issues relating to

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language in contested public spaces and have focused on attempts of individuals or groups to assert their identity in their language of choice. However, enabling individuals to use their language of choice or indeed the imposition of a “language of choice” does not necessarily encourage dialogue and understanding across the divide. It is such dialogue which is necessary for conflict amelioration or resolution. A simple, inflexible principle of recognition for diverse cultural groups can be perceived as having serious implications for the identity of a majority and can be viewed as a threat. If a cultural other is to receive recognition (however small), the larger community may lose its historical prerogative to dominance. However, such historical prerogative needs to be managed if societies in conflict are to move forward. As Habermas (1996: 289) notes, if “different cultural, ethnic and religious subcultures are to co-exist and interact on equal terms within the same political community, the majority culture must give up its historical prerogative to define the official terms of the generalized political culture, which is to be shared by all citizens, regardless of where they come from and how they live” (see also Giordano, this volume). Given these theoretical concerns, we end our chapter with a discussion on whether language recognition in post-conflict societies problematises matters further and contributes to conditions of further conflict or serves to alleviate them. In simple terms, does recognition of language rights antagonise or reconcile? It is clear that, in some instances, recognition of language rights has heightened rather than softened political views. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for instance, the increasing politicisation of language and identity has, some critics argued, heightened tensions and drawn metaphorical and actual boundaries between communities. There has been an increasing use of ‘language rights’ rhetoric which has been drawn upon by various populations to further the recognition of their own identities—such as in the case of education or the recognition of a particular language used in public signage. However, some observers have been critical of these processes for merely creating linguistic boundaries between communities where previously they did not exist (Pupavac 2006). This polarises a divided society rather than creating the conditions which would lead to further conflict resolution. However, in many cases, political elites in divided societies have apparently manipulated the system of language rights itself in a game of ‘zero-sum’ politics. In the Ukraine, for example, contestations over territory and power have often been reflected in language politics. Whilst Russian is widely utilised as a language of the “Ukrainian business, cultural and political elite” (Charnysh 2013: 6; Kulyk 2011: 630), it is still a contested symbol for many. This is particularly pronounced in those regions along the Eastern border where large

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sections of the population self-identify as ethnic Russian. This has been further complicated by splits between Ukrainian parties whose ideological positions prioritise relationships either with Russia or the EU. In 2012, the pro-Moscow government introduced a law which elevated the status of languages spoken by over 10% of regional or city jurisdictions. Although this might appear to be an attempt to recognise language rights of minority communities, the primary beneficiaries of this were in fact the Russian-speaking minority who were not inherently disadvantaged in a society which (as noted above) privileged Russian in public and commercial spaces. Moreover, the approach was justified in that this was merely meeting the expectations of language rights contained in documents such as the CoE’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (CoE 1992; cf. Nic Craith 2003b). In this instance, the geopolitics of the day was used to frame debates on language rights within wider antagonistic debates on Ukraine’s relationship with Europe and Russia. Although the language law “claimed to promote the norms enshrined in the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages (1992), the furtive manner in which it was passed and the 10% threshold designed to benefit the least disadvantaged minority  – Russians – suggest other motives were at play” (Charnysh 2013: 1). Attempts to repeal the Language law ensued in February 2014 after the pro-Moscow government of Viktor Yanukovych was overturned. There was much criticism of this move from transnational organisations that argued again that the best approach was to accommodate the different language groups, which would include consolidating the position of the Ukrainian language. These debates and the threat of repeal contributed to unrest and antagonised the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and arguably played a part in the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014. Unsatisfactory language recognition was one of the issues which contributed to the growing discontent among both Russian and Ukrainian speakers who felt that not enough has been done to solidify their language status. The relinquishment of power is frequently a key issue to negotiate in the application of language rights in deeply divided societies. Earlier in this ­chapter, we noted how the post-apartheid era in South Africa had been characterised by an ethos of plurilingualism. This has not gone without difficulty—particularly for those who had previously been in positions of dominance. The advocacy of plurilingualism has gone hand in hand with discourses of decolonisation that have arguably problematised the recognition of all languages in South Africa. Recently, the social mobility of Black South Africans has increased student numbers from this section of society at u ­ niversities. Subsequently, calls have

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been initiated to remove the teaching of courses through the Afrikaans language, which has deeply angered sections of this formerly dominant group. Therefore, in this case, the concept of plurilingualism has been viewed as the domain of the previously dominated. Here, the communicative function of Afrikaans has been trumped by the symbolic perceptions of others towards the language. Whilst structures for language recognition have been put in place, attitudinal issues towards languages and their speakers are still key barriers in the journey towards reconciliation (cf. BBC 2016). Despite reservations held by some towards the application of language rights in deeply divided societies, we feel that the importance of this process is a requirement in the journey towards reconciliation. Monolingualism is a denial of social reality, and a misrecognition is deeply embedded in unequal systems of power which themselves cause conflict. At the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned some historical examples of monolingualism which have successfully achieved a balance between language recognition of a majority and a minority language and have accommodated the demands of different language groups. Such examples include the case of South-Tyrol in Italy, Schleswig-Holstein on the German-Danish border and, to an extent, Catalan in Spain (cf. Kockel 1999). In some of these instances, ‘language conflict’ is played out through democratic processes which distinguishes these examples from those which have witnessed recent armed conflict. Both authors’ research has spanned the period of the peace process in Northern Ireland and both have lived there and conducted research on the development of policy for the Irish language. In the early years of the peace process, there were key difficulties in the sharing of narratives and the ownership of symbols and cultural artefacts (Nic Craith 2002; McDermott et al. 2015). However, the Northern Irish government, with support from the EU, has continually engaged in building an ethos of ‘shared space’. This has included the development of infrastructural projects in places like city centres as well as advocating the idea of sharing narratives on contested symbols, including languages. An example which illustrates investment in such cultural infrastructure includes the increased public funding of spaces for language learning and dissemination, such as Irish-language cultural centres (Gael Arais) in cities like Belfast and Derry. The state funding of Irish-medium schooling has also been significant (Nic Craith 1999). Indeed, these processes of ‘normalisation’ have paid dividend in reaching out to the ‘other’. In Belfast, for example, state funded Irish language classes have been established for Protestant unionists to learn the language. This has been a radical departure as, traditionally, Protestants had distanced themselves from a language they viewed as correlating with the politics of Irish

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nationalism, thus threatening their constitutional position within the UK. Such an alteration has been made possible through the promotion of a more complex historical narrative which draws attention to the efforts made by the Protestant intelligentsia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in saving the Irish language in a period of steady decline. This is a small example of interculturality in a deeply divided society which would not have been possible had it not been for the formal accommodation of the Irish language in the public space.

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter, we noted the significance of international organisations such as the EU, the UN or the CoE for championing linguistic diversity. In an increasingly diverse and divided world, the recognition of language rights at all levels cannot be ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. At a transnational level, the linguistic landscape is volatile. The vote in the UK in 2016 to leave the EU and the consequent removal of most of the native speakers of English from the Union will inevitably have consequences for the status of English—not just within the EU but also on a world stage. Although Spanish is the second language of the USA, that language has disappeared from the White House website. The UN regards the protection of minority languages as a human rights obligation, but this does not always extend to speakers of different languages worldwide. A 2017 handbook on the language rights of linguistic minorities developed by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority issues noted the significance of language rights in conflict amelioration. The Report noted that if not properly addressed in a balanced, reasonable way, linguistic rights issues “can lead to sentiments of alienation or marginalization and potentially instability or conflict” (United Nations Special Rapporteur on minority issues 2017: 6). It argued that “ethnic tensions and conflicts within a state are more likely to be avoided where language rights are in place to address the causes of alienation, marginalization and exclusion” (Ibid: 9). Our chapter has evidenced that language issues are at the core of conflict in many divided societies. Recognition of language rights can do much to alleviate tensions. However, it seems that despite the widening perception that language rights are crucial for stability, many governments at the beginning of the twenty-first century still underestimate the significance of language for issues of identity and stability. This chapter has outlined many of the key debates in relation to the application of language rights in deeply divided societies. Processes of recognition

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can create conditions for neighbours to live side by side in peace. Language rights on their own, however, do not necessarily create dialogue between groups, which we feel is an essential next step in the journey towards peace. In writing this chapter, it became apparent that prominent examples of communities engaging with the language of their other in post-conflict societies are somewhat limited whilst, ironically, immigrants in such societies have been more open to engaging with the linguistic diversity even though their own languages often go unrecognised (cf. McDermott 2017). It is still often the case that indigenous groups in divided societies view the languages of competing groups as symbolic of the antithesis of their own political identity. Perhaps monitoring processes of international law have been largely satisfied when communities can live side by side in ‘peace’. Yet, this rumbling discontent hardly creates the conditions for intergenerational stability. Therefore, we would advocate a more transformative position on language rights—one that actively champions using language diversity as a prism through which to promote intercultural understanding. We recognise that this is a huge challenge. However, given that language issues have been so integral in contributing to the conditions for conflict to emerge, as indicated in this chapter, it is a challenge which cannot be ignored.

References Alcock, A. (2001). The South Tyrol Autonomy. A Short Introduction. Coleraine: University of Ulster. Askew, L. (2011). Clinging to a Barbed Wire Fence: The Language Policy of the International Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina Since 1995. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Nottingham. Bamgbose, A. (2003). The Future of Multilingualism in South Africa: From Policy to Practice. Presented at Language Conference of the Department of Arts and Culture, Kopanong, Johannesburg, 12–13 June 2002. Barbour, S., & Carmichael, C. (Eds.). (2000). Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrett, R. (2008). Linguistic Differentiation and Mayan Language Revitalization in Guatemala 1. Journal of SocioLinguistics, 12(3), 275–305. Barry, B. (2001). Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. BBC. (2016). South Africa’s Stellenbosch University Aims to Drop Afrikaans After Protests. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-34807291. Accessed 17 Dec 2016. Beukes, A.  M. (2004). The First Ten Years of Democracy: Language Policy In South Africa. Diàlegs – Fòrum Universal de les Cultures – Barcelona.

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Charnysh, V. (2013). Analysis of Current Events: Identity Mobilization in Hybrid Regimes: Language in Ukrainian Politics. Nationalities Papers, 41(1), 1–14. CoE. (1992). European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Strasbourg: CoE. CoE. (1995). Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Strasbourg: CoE. CoE. (2011). Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Third Opinion on “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” Adopted on 30 March 2011. Strasbourg. ACFC/OP/III(2011)001. European Commission. (2016). European Commission Website: Languages and Linguistic Diversity. Available on WWW at http://ec.europa.eu/languages/policy/ linguistic-diversity/index_en.htm Greenberg, R. D. (2004). Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1996). The European Nation-State: Its Achievements and Its Limits. In G. H. Balakrishnan, & B. Anderson (Eds.), Mapping the Nation (pp. 281–294). London: Verso. Hatzfeld, J.  (2005). Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hodges, A. (2017). A Slow Conservative Revolution? Academia, Clientelism and the  Right in Croatia. Available on WWW at http://balkanist.net/a-slowconservative-revolution-academia-clientelism-and-the-right-in-croatia/ Holmlund, A. K. (1999). Indigenous Rights in Guatemala – The Observance of the Agreement on Identity and Rights of the Indigenous Peoples. Unpublished Masters Thesis University of Lund, Sweden. http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?f unc=downloadFile&recordOId=1558383&fileOId=1564635. Accessed 15 Dec 2016. Kiwuwa, D. (2012). Ethnic Politics and Democratic Transition in Rwanda. London: Routledge. Kloss, H. (1971). Language Rights of Immigrant Groups. International Migration Review, 5(2), 250–268. Kockel, U. (1999). Borderline Cases: The Ethnic Frontiers of European Integration. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kulyk, V. (2011). Language Identity, Linguistic Diversity and Political Cleavages: Evidence from Ukraine. Nations and Nationalism, 17(3), 627–648. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margalit, A., & Raz, J. (1995). National Self-Determination. In W. Kymlicka (Ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (pp. 79–92). Oxford: Oxford University Press. May, S. (2001). Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity. Nationalism, and the Politics of Language. London: Pearson. Mbaraga, J. (2016). Rwanda to Mark World Mother Language Day. The New Times. http://www.newtimes.co.rw/section/article/2016-02-20/197257/. Accessed 17 Dec 2016.

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McDermott, P. (2011). Migrant Languages in the Public Space: A Case Study from Northern Ireland. Munster: Lit Verlag. McDermott. (2017). Language Rights and the Council of Europe: A Failed Response to a Multilingual Continent? Ethnicities, 17(5), 603–626. McDermott, P., Nic Craith, M., & Strani, K. (2015). Public Space, Collective Memory and Intercultural Dialogue in a (UK) City of Culture. Identities, 23(5), 610–627. McEvoy, J. (2011). Managing Culture in Post-conflict Societies. Contemporary Social Science, 6(1), 55–71. McMonagle, S., & McDermott, P. (2014). Transitional Politics and Language Rights in a Multi-ethnic Northern Ireland: Towards a True Linguistic Pluralism? Ethnopolitics, 13(3), 245–266. Naylor, K. E. (1978). The Eastern Variant of Serbo-Croatian as the Lingua Communis of Yugoslavia. Folia Slavica, 1(3), 456–460. Nic Craith, M. (1999). Irish Speakers in Northern Ireland, and the Good Friday Agreement. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 20(6), 494–507. Nic Craith, M. (2000). Contested Identities and the Quest for Legitimacy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 21(5), 399–413. Nic Craith, M. (2002). Plural Identities, Singular Narratives: The Case of Northern Ireland. New York: Berghahn. Nic Craith, M. (2003a). Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nic Craith, M. (2003b). Facilitating or Generating Linguistic Diversity: The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In G.  Hogan-Brun & S.  Wolff (Eds.), Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects (pp. 56–72). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nic Craith, M. (2006). Europe and the Politics of Language: Citizens, Migrants, Outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nic Craith, M. (2007). Languages and Power: Accommodation and Resistance. In Language, Power and Identity Politics (pp. 1–20). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ó Gadhra, Ó. (1988). Irish Government Policy and Political Development of the Gaeltacht. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1(3), 251–261. Packer, J.  (1999). Problems in Defining Minorities. In D.  Fottrell & B.  Bowring (Eds.), Minority and Group Rights in the New Millennium (pp.  223–274). Amsterdam: Kluwer Law International. Pan South African Language Board. (2016). Official Website. http://www.pansalb. org/. Accessed 17 Dec 2016. Phillipson, R. (2007). Linguistic Imperialism: A Conspiracy, or a Conspiracy of Silence? Language Policy, 6(3–4), 377–383. Plant, R. (1998). Ethnicity and the Guatemalan Peace Process: Conceptual and Practical Challenges. In R.  Siedler (Ed.), Guatemala After the Peace Accords (pp. 80–96). London: Institute of Latin American Studies.

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Pupavac, V. (2006). Language Rights in Conflict and the Denial of Language as Communication. International Journal of Human Rights, 10(1), 61–78. Ross, M. H. (Ed.). (2012). Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies: Contestation and Symbolic Landscapes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Samuelson, B.  L., & Freedman, S.  W. (2010). Language Policy, Multilingual Education, and Power in Rwanda. Language Policy, 9(3), 191–215. Sibomana, E. (2016). “Kinyarwanda Doesn’t Have a Place in Communication at our Schools”: Linguistic, Psychological and Educational Effects on Banning One’s Mother Tongue. Rwandan Journal, 3, 23–40. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000). Linguistic Genocide in Education  – Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Spiliopoulou Åkermark, A. (1997). Justifications of Minority Protection in International Law. London: Kluwer. Taylor, C. (1994). The Politics of Recognition. In C. Taylor (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (pp. 25–73). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tollefson, J. W. (2002). Language Rights and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. In J. W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language Policies in Education: Critical Issues (pp.  179–199). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. UNESCO. (1996). The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. Barcelona: UNESCO. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. (2017). Handbook by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. http://md.one.un.org/content/dam/unct/moldova/docs/pub/Language%20Rights%20of%20 Linguistic%20Minorities%20–%20A%20practical%20Guide%20for%20implementation.pdf Urla, J.  (1988). Ethnic Protest and Social Planning: A Look at Basque Language Revival. Cultural Anthropology, 3(4), 379–394. Wolf, S. (1994). Comment. In A. Gutman (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (pp. 75–85). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young, I. M. (2002). Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zeydanlıoğlu, W. (2012). Turkey’s Kurdish Language Policy. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 217, 99–125.

7 National Cultural Autonomy and Linguistic Rights in Central and Eastern Europe Federica Prina, David J. Smith, and Judit Molnar Sansum

This chapter examines the theory and practice of non-territorial National Cultural Autonomy (NCA) from the perspective of linguistic rights of national minorities in four countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): Russia, Estonia, Hungary and Serbia.1 The NCA concept was first developed in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is based on the “personality principle”—the notion that ethno-linguistic communities can be autonomous (and sovereign) within a multi-ethnic state, regardless of their members’ place of residence. In its original conceptualisation, it envisaged the establishment of self-government in the spheres of culture and education, where local languages would be employed. Subsequent practical application of the NCA concept has been limited to only a few cases, with the closest approximation to the original model being found in Estonia during the 1920s (Coakley 2016; Smith and Hiden 2012). The notion has, however, intermittently formed the object of wider discussion, with a rediscovery particularly since the 1990s. In addition to raising the interest of academics (Malloy et al. 2015; Nimni 1999, 2005, 2007; Nimni et al. 2013; Roach 2005; Smith and Cordell 2008), NCA has been incorporated into the law and practice of several CEE post-Communist countries. As an alternative form of diversity management, NCA is explored here as a potential vehicle to advance the linguistic rights of national minorities and F. Prina (*) • D. J. Smith • J. M. Sansum Central and East European Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; Judit. [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_7

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linguistic pluralism in CEE. Following an overview on NCA’s original model, the chapter outlines the practice of NCA in Russia, Estonia, Hungary and Serbia. These countries were chosen in light of the fact that they all have adopted NCA legislation in the post-Communist period.

 on-territorial Cultural Autonomy and Linguistic N Rights Non-territorial autonomy has been described as “one policy tool of a greater family of statecraft tools”—including the more well-known and widely researched forms of territorial autonomy (e.g. Hannum 1990; Lapidoth 1997; Suksi 1998; Weller and Wolff 2005)—that “aims to consolidate the state and promote social unity through accommodating ethno-cultural demands and requirements” (Malloy 2015: 1). There are two main approaches to non-­ territorial cultural autonomy: as a general principle of an ethnic group’s autonomy in managing its internal (primarily cultural and linguistic) affairs and as a system of ethnicity-based institutions that manage autonomously public competences (again, in the cultural and linguistic realm), regardless of place of residence (Osipov 2013b: 9). We focus here on the second approach, in the sense of cultural (also known as “personal”) autonomy (Lapidoth 1997: 37–40). This type of arrangement is clearly auspicious when multiple ethnic groups inhabit same territory, which precludes territorial solutions to diversity management. While there have been historical precedents of NCA—for example, in the shape of the millet system in the Ottoman empire2—a theory was only elaborated by Austro-Marxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, starting with Renner’s 1899 article State and Nation.3 The publication of State and Nation had been preceded already by decades of social transformation in CEE. These changes created a crisis of what had been “constants” of the socio-political order since the Middle Ages. Modernising reforms indirectly strengthened ethnic identity, which also translated into a struggle for linguistic equality, as non-dominant groups came to see a connection between their social inequality and linguistic difference. Meanwhile, new forms of group solidarity compensated for the crisis of decaying “constants” (Hroch 2007a, b): language connected individuals of the same ethno-linguistic background by creating a sense of community (Stokes 1974: 536–7). Language was then placed at the forefront of national movements, from its codification/standardisation to the struggle for national schools and the use of non-dominant languages in public administration (Fishman 1972;

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Gellner 1987: 24; Hroch 2007a, b). The link between nationalism and language resulted in the belief that a nation’s existence was directly menaced by a possible loss of its language (Fishman 1972: 54; Hroch 2007b: 93) and, in turn, that language preservation was a prerequisite for the survival of national identity. In this context, national movements were believed by the Austro-Marxists as likely to dismember the state.4 The problem was linked to territoriality— namely, the fact that a numerical minority tends to be subjected to the domination of the majority within a state, with the routine imposition of its legal system as well as its language (Renner 2005 [1899]: 27–8). Renner started from the premise that “the territorial principle […] can only produce struggle or oppression, because its essence is domination” (Renner 2005: 28): specifically in relation to language, Renner referred to the postulate of cuius region illius lingua, which caused the “state language” to become “a perennial source of strife” (Renner 2005: 30). The proposed solution was a shift of emphasis from territory to nations (as personal associations) and, consequently, from states to peoples. Indeed, in Renner’s opinion, problems associated with the “national question” stemmed from the fact that “[w]e still cannot rid ourselves of the patrimonial approach to the state constitution, according to which an administrative authority is above all attached to a region to which in turn … people belong” (Renner 2005: 36). By turning this paradigm upside down, each community would be afforded the agency to organise the (cultural) life of the nation by exercising their collective rights. Clearly, one cannot completely do away with territory: institutions are physically located in particular districts, and factors such as geographical density of individual settlements do play a role in the organisation of such communities (Renner 2005: 31). At the same time, NCA would incorporate a novel feature: the differentiation between spheres of general administration (involving the country—and its nations—as a whole, such as security and the military) and cultural issues (pertaining to each nation). This would lead to (a cultural form of ) self-determination, while not infringing upon the state’s (politico-administrative) competences. In practice, in multi-ethnic areas, various ethnicities would form national councils (NCs) to deal with ethnicity-related matters autonomously, while the municipality’s politico-administrative functions would be distributed partly to the national community and partly to joint colleges headed by a state functionary (Renner 2005: 35–6). NCs would include representatives democratically elected on the basis of national registers, following enrolment on the basis of self-identification. This system envisaged the ethnic community’s own language as the working language in national self-administrating bodies.5

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Consequently, even if persons belonging to minorities employed a lingua franca as a means of (inter-ethnic) communication,6 minority languages would continue to be widely employed in local institutions, also in light of the fact that education (up to tertiary level7) would be available in these languages (Renner 2005: 39, 43–5). Communities were to be equipped with their own finances to sustain their institutions (including schools) operating in local languages through a portion of the taxes paid by members of the community themselves. As Nimni (1999: 298; 2007: 348–9) argues, the resulting cultural autonomy would free a nation from the condition of “minority” in need of protection, as “[t]he status of national minorities is a by-product of a national state that has a sovereign national majority” (Nimni 2007: 348). In this way, the Austro-Marxists attempted to create an innovative model, overcoming age-old practices by transcending territoriality-centred approaches. It was an effort “to break out of normative straightjackets”, as Nimni (1999: 295) writes. Some features of the NCA model are ­forward-­looking, even by today’s standards: NCA upheld the notions of minorities’ empowerment and collective rights by arguing that these communities ought to control their cultural destiny and actively participate in the affairs of the state. This can seem particularly aspirational in today’s world, where minorities’ collective rights remain controversial, a state’s monolingualism is often considered desirable—as it simplifies and expedites state administration—and states (rather than nations) remain the principal actors in international relations. In this sense, NCA has been seen as a hope for greater accommodation of the rights of nations (Nimni 1999, 2007), including their linguistic rights, while also reflecting the modern criticism of the nation-state’s “sovereign territorial ideal” that routinely places minorities in a subordinated position vis-à-vis the majority (see, e.g. Nootens 2006). Indeed, the nationstate, even when purporting to treat all citizens equally, tends to be fundamentally assimilationist (Ra’anan 1991: 20–25): state “neutrality” vis-à-vis various communities has then been described by Nimni (2007: 351) as a “chimera”, while others (Kymlicka and Grin 2003; Kymlicka and Patten 2003; Wright 2001: 48) have pointed out that the choice of a state language can never be considered “neutral” (in the sense of fulfilling a purely communicative—and thus “instrumental”—function). Rather, this choice carries an underlying social and political significance: it can then become a “perennial source of strife”, as Renner (2005: 30) argued. In the 1990s, the post-Communist states considered in this chapter were—like the Austro-Marxists nearly a century earlier—attempting to find new solutions to old problems. They were grappling with drastic socio-political changes while also having inherited a highly complex

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(socio-)linguistic situation (Paulston and Peckham 1998; Pavlenko 2008; Sloboda et  al. 2016) with a striking politicisation of language issues (Kamusella 2009).8 The resulting instability created new fears of societal fragmentation along ethnic, social and political lines. Apprehension over a possible torrent of demands of territorial autonomy was particularly evident in Russia. In Estonia, the primary concern was regulating relations between the substantial minority (and former dominant group) of ethnic Russians and the titular majority group. In Hungary, the priority was the creation of a system of reciprocity which, by safeguarding the rights of Hungary’s ethnic minorities, would simultaneously act to promote the rights of Hungarian co-ethnics residing outside Hungary. Claims by the local Hungarian minority were in turn a key driver behind the adoption of NCA legislation in neighbouring Serbia, as it sought new ways of accommodating ethno-linguistic diversity following the dissolution of the federal union with Montenegro and the secession of Kosovo.

 CA Laws and Practice in Central and Eastern N Europe During the period of post-Communist transition, CEE countries reached out to various models to stabilise their inter-ethnic relations. The countries considered in this chapter made the choice to incorporate NCA in their strategies for diversity accommodation. As different motivations guided the governments of these states, NCA can be seen as having fulfilled—at least partially— a historically determined political function. At the same time, this chapter focuses on another possible function: the potential role played by NCA in enhancing the linguistic rights of minorities, including by reflecting the spirit of the original NCA model.

Russia Russia is an exceptionally vast multi-ethnic and plurilingual country. Cultural, linguistic, ethnic and linguistic diversity has been a feature across the tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet eras. In the 2010 census, as many as 19.1% of the population declared themselves non-Russian. Census data list 193 minority groups and subgroups, of which the largest are Tatars (3.87% of the population), Ukrainians (1.40%), Bashkirs (1.15%), Chuvashes (1.05%) and Chechens (1.04%).9 The census recorded 169 languages10 besides Russian.

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Characteristic of Russia is also its ethno-territorial federalism, introduced during the Soviet period. In light of this legacy, the Law “On National Cultural Autonomy”11 (hereinafter “the NCA Law”) was adopted in 1996 as a form of extra-territorial accommodation of minority interests, with a view to pre-empting claims for supplementary ethnicity-based territorial f­ ormations from the numerous ethnic groups which had not been “assigned” a territory during the Soviet period.12 At the same time, NCA has continued to coexist with ethno-territorial federalism. Thus, for example, the Republic of Tatarstan exists alongside a network of Tatar national cultural autonomies (NCAs).13 In fact, the NCA system aims at complementing ethnic federalism: NCA provisions apply to groups “in a situation of minority”:14 this means titular nationalities outside “their own” territorial units and those without a territory named after them (“non-titular” nationalities), no matter how small. The provisions contained in the NCA Law are, for the most part, vague and declarative. For example, Article 4 stipulates that an NCA “has the right to receive support from the organs of state power and the organs of local self-­ government, that are necessary for the preservation of national distinctiveness (samobytnost’), the development of national (native) language and national culture”. Even though the expression “right” is employed, this and other related provisions have not been interpreted as conferring corresponding ­obligations on the state (i.e. to provide funding for their realisation). Similarly, the Law refers to NCAs’ “right” to establish media outlets operating in ­minority languages, receive and impart information in such languages and establish minority educational institutions, but no specific mechanisms are envisioned.15 NCA in Russia was meant to streamline interaction between the state and minority communities by creating an integrated system comprising institutions at the local, regional and federal level. At the same time, there is no clear differentiation in terms of role, rights or responsibilities between NCAs and other institutions promoting minority languages and cultures (such as cultural centres and NGOs that have opted not to register as NCAs). This results in only partial streamlining of efforts towards the preservation of cultural and linguistic pluralism and of exchanges between government and minority representative institutions. Since the NCA Law’s adoption in 1996, there has been few tangible effects resulting from its implementation (Osipov 2013a; see also Bowring 2005, 2007). At the regional and federal levels, NCA institutions have remained at the periphery of the formulation of state policies. And generally, opportunities for civil society to feed into decision-making have been much restricted through legal and policy changes under Putin.16 Moreover, there is no legal obligation to elect representatives in NCAs; while many have

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opted to do so, electors are persons who have chosen to affiliate themselves to NCA institutions and participate in their activities rather than the ethnic community in the wider sense, which can raise issues of representation. Unlike in Renner’s model, Russia’s NCAs do not directly run their own educational institutions. NCAs’ activities remain frequently linked to inter-­ ethnic festivals, with an ethnographic, folkloristic flavour typical of the Soviet period. At the same time, in Russia, language has historically been considered a highly salient ethnic marker, and NCA representatives recognise it as indissolubly linked to identity preservation.17 Consequently, today, NCAs devote considerable attention to language issues. Their activities in this sphere have included teaching of languages (through NCA institutions themselves), cooperation with schools (e.g. in producing teaching materials, including textbooks for the teaching of minority languages)18 and monitoring the fulfilment of legal obligations in the sphere of minority-language education. Language tuition outside the formal education system is often provided directly by NCAs. This involves the teaching of minority languages, particularly through Sunday schools, by volunteers but also by teachers remunerated by NCAs. In the case of migrants moving to Russia for work and better financial prospects—who mostly originate from Central Asia and the South Caucasus—NCAs fulfil a dual role by aiding their integration and preserving their linguistic distinctiveness. The Russian government’s official position, however, has seen the balance between linguistic integration and plurilingualism tipping towards the former, with a strong emphasis on the promotion of the state language.19 This trend is exacerbated by the fact that, in the presence of trying economic conditions, the younger generations—and their parents— often prioritise fluency in the state language, or marketable foreign languages such as English, over the inter-generational transmission of minority languages. Unlike in the original NCA model, most of the funding for NCA institutions derives from the state: grants are accessed through project applications or, in some cases, regular (if unsubstantial) state financing. Financial resources also originate from private sponsors and/or from community members. Overall, financial resources are very limited, which cause NCAs to operate in precarious conditions. While NCAs’ cultural “autonomy” per se is limited, a form of partial autonomy—including with regard to cultural matters affecting minorities—is, instead, found in the Russian Federation’s territorial arrangements: some of the titular languages are legally required to be studied in the ethnic republics20 (in some cases by all residents, including ethnic Russians), and most (republican) legislation recognises titular languages as co-official alongside Russian.21 At

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the same time, there are considerable disparities between the conditions of various titular groups in “their” territorial formations in terms of numbers and resources. And, while Russia is de jure a federation, its political centralisation has meant that policies and legislation affecting national minorities, including minority-language education, have been primarily conceived at the central, federal level.22 Autonomy in managing cultural matters has, overall, decreased in the Federation’s subjects, with a generalised tendency to reduce the teaching of (and through the medium of ) minority languages and increasing switching to Russian (Alòs i Font 2014; Chevalier 2012; Prina 2016; Zamyatin 2012). This has resulted in assimilatory tendencies,23 even in a republic such as Tatarstan, where—compared to other regions—the titular nationality has been in a strong position financially and demographically.24 It is in situations of extra-territoriality—outside titular groups’ “own” territorial formations—that a greater need for NCA exists. For a titular group such as the Tatars—the second largest ethnic group after the Russians—NCA could fulfil the significant role of promoting the interests of co-ethnics residing outside the republic (approximately two thirds of Russia’s entire Tatar population). Yet, the limited impact of NCA has been particularly apparent outside the ethnic republics, as it is primarily within the republics that (some) resources exist  for the teaching of titular languages.25 Meanwhile, there are clearly logistic difficulties in reaching out to non-titular groups that are territorially dispersed, such as Georgians or Armenians. If a school introduces a course for the study of a minority language, it is likely that only a small number of students will live sufficiently close to make their regular attendance viable.26 Particularly challenging are cases of highly vulnerable languages, such as those of Russia’s numerically small indigenous peoples.

Estonia Estonia’s Law on National Minority Cultural Autonomy, adopted in 1993, has since been implemented by the country’s small Ingrian Finnish (2004) and Swedish (2007) minorities. It has also featured in debates on the status of the Russian language, spoken as a mother tongue by a quarter of the country’s current 1.1 million inhabitants. The contemporary Republic of Estonia is a restored state: established in 1918, it was forcibly annexed by the USSR in 1940 and was under Soviet rule until August 1991, when it re-attained de facto sovereignty. The current legislation on NCA is portrayed as a restoration of the more famous one previously in force during 1925–1940,27 when small, territorially dispersed German

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and Jewish communities created Cultural Councils (public-legal bodies with devolved state funding and tax-raising powers, elected through voluntary enrolment on national registers) with direct responsibility for running public schools teaching in the relevant language(s) of the minority group (Smith 2016). This system, however, was not restored into existence in 1993. The current law, the National Minorities Cultural Autonomy Act (“NCA Act”), gives “persons belonging to German, Russian, Swedish and Jewish minorities and persons belonging to national minorities with a membership of more than 3,000” (Article 2(2)) the right “to establish cultural autonomy in order to achieve the cultural rights given to them by the constitution” (Article 2(1)). Autonomy bodies are elected but lack public-legal status and clear funding guarantees. They cannot assume control of public schools but only establish private ones (Article 25). There is, therefore, little to differentiate the rights of NCAs from those of regular NGOs, which are far easier to establish (Poleshchuk 2013, 2015; Smith 2014).28 Restoring a more substantial variant of NCA was never likely given the legacies of a Soviet period that saw the ethnic Estonian share of the population decline from 88% to 61%, principally due to mass settlement by mainly Russian-speaking Soviet citizens. The official emphasis on knowledge of Russian as the lingua franca of the Soviet state meant that new settlers were neither required nor encouraged to learn Estonian. Ever more prevalent use of Russian in an urban context gave Estonians the consciousness of an embattled minority within a larger state, facing the prospect of longer-term assimilation. Post-1991, state policy has therefore prioritised making Estonian the dominant medium for communication within society. Within this context, the NCA Act was not intended for use by the Russian population, which could already access a full publicly funded system of education in its native language. A more pressing task was to increase the proportion of Estonian-­ language teaching in existing Russian schools to facilitate integration into the structures of a restored nation-state. NCA was intended for minorities “whose problems derived from their small size”,29 though even here the NCA Act had little immediate instrumental value: Estonia’s policy of granting automatic citizenship only to citizens of the inter-war Republic and their descendants left 30% of the population without full citizenship in 1993. Since the NCA Act defines persons belonging to national minorities as citizens of the Estonian Republic, smaller ethnic groups have struggled to meet the minimum threshold of 3,000 members: divided along citizen/non-citizen lines, most opted to create cultural NGOs.

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For the groups in question, high levels of assimilation into the Estonian or Russian linguistic sphere mean that language learning has mainly been confined to organising extra-curricular hobby schools (huvikoolid).30 The Estonian state has encouraged such initiatives, which help to counter claims of a single, homogeneous “Russian-speaking minority”. It also funds a Jewish Gymnasium in Tallinn (teaching in Russian and Hebrew) and secondary and vocational schools in western Estonia teaching in Swedish, while in some schools, students can study other smaller minority languages for a couple of hours a week.31 The NCA Act has thus been described as an entirely “performative law” designed to assert symbolic continuity with inter-war democracy and underscore a tradition of tolerance towards “genuine” national minorities (Smith 2000; Aidarov and Drechsler 2011). “Small, motivated” Finnish and Swedish groups have since implemented NCA (Poleshchuk 2013: 157), but in practical terms, this has had little added value for minority language preservation. The Finnish minority (12,000-strong during the early 1990s) has undergone a steep demographic decline (largely due to migration to Finland), and activists underscore the challenge of encouraging younger people to learn the language.32 In the Swedish case, most registered members of the NCA actually reside in Sweden rather than Estonia: these are inter-war citizens (or descendants thereof ) evacuated en masse to Sweden during World War II.33 For all this, Finnish and Swedish activists regard NCA as important in terms of conferring status and giving greater potential voice in shaping minority policy.34 Both maintain that autonomy bodies should be given public-legal status, enhanced powers and greater funding.35 Yet, the state seems unwilling to develop the legal base of NCA any further, fearing that this might give rise to Russian minority institutions susceptible to external manipulation from Russia.36 The rejection of four separate applications for Russian NCA since 1996 indeed suggests that autonomy is securitised. At the same time, none of these applications reflected broad support for cultural autonomy among Russian minority activists. The latter have criticised a political system which, they claim, denies equal opportunities for political participation within the state. Russian elites had no say in the 1993 NCA Act, and since Russian speakers could, at that time, already draw on existing institutional supports, the vague and minimalist framework of NCA offered them nothing—indeed, it ran the risk of “ghettoising” Russians.37 Recent calls for Russian NCA have cited education reforms obliging upper secondary schools teaching in Russian to switch to a bilingual Estonian curriculum from 2011. Here, though, critics rightly pointed out that adopting NCA would in no way assist efforts to maintain

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Russian-language tuition within state schools.38 Indeed, when the state consulted an umbrella organisation of Russian cultural NGOs over NCA in 2009, it declared its opposition. For most Russian activists, attaining greater voice and influence in political decision-making remains more important.

Hungary Hungary was part of a multi-ethnic monarchy until the end of World War I. Its ethnic composition then changed significantly due to the loss of territory under the 1920 Trianon Treaty. As a result of deportations, population exchanges during and after World War II and a policy which promoted assimilation of national minorities during the Communist period, the proportion of Hungarian citizens whose mother tongue was a language other than Hungarian fell from 10.4% (1920 census data) to 1% by the 1980s (only rising to 1.5% in recent decades). However, there has been a more significant growth in the proportion of persons self-identifying as national minorities since 1980 (0.5%), especially between 2001 (3.1%) and 2011 (5.6%). Although the real size of the minority population may in fact be double the official figure, the number of people with a mother tongue other than Hungarian is relatively small. For most national minorities, the biggest concern is loss of their mother tongue and ethno-linguistic assimilation. Act LXXVII of 1993 on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities (hereinafter the “1993 Minority Law”) included regulations on the rights of national minorities (as individuals and as communities), minority self-­ governments, the national minority representative’s role as spokesperson in municipal self-governments, cultural and educational self-administration of nationalities, minority language use and financial affairs of Nationality ­Self-­Governments (NSGs).39 Article 13 declared that “Persons belonging to a minority have the right to (a) learn, foster, enrich and pass on their mother tongue, history, culture and traditions; (b) participate in education and cultural activities in their mother tongue”. Chapter 7 of the Law expanded on language-related provisions, by guaranteeing the right to freely use one’s mother tongue, and the use of minority languages in courts and the public administration. A new law, Act CLXXIX of 2011 on the Rights of Nationalities,40 retains the same provisions on language use but more clearly defines the parameters for their implementation according to the percentage of the national minority within the local population (10% or 20%). The legislation provides for the creation of NSGs in a settlement where at least 25 people have declared to belong to one of the nationalities recognised under

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Hungarian legislation.41 Members of NSGs are established through democratic elections held at the same time as local elections. NSGs function at three levels: locally, regionally and nationally. These minority institutions aim to support minorities in their cultural and educational needs; indeed, activities relating to culture, tradition, language and education are considered crucial by NSGs’ representatives.42 NSGs have also directly taken over the management of educational and cultural institutions (ACFC 2016: §67, 70); consequently—compared to the Russian and Estonian systems—the Hungarian NSG institutions more closely resemble the original NCA model. There were 75 preschools/schools run by NSGs in 2015, 39 of them by German NSGs. Altogether, in the same year, 846 preschools/schools offered programmes taught in a minority language. If an NSG runs a minority school, it receives additional financial support from the government equivalent to the funding given to regular state schools offering minority-language programmes. There has been a growing trend towards NSGs taking over the management of schools, with a view to avoiding centralisation and increasing local community oversight. Despite this, Dobos (2013) observes a tendency whereby Hungary’s national minorities have become  increasingly Hungarian-speaking (while, however, preserving their distinct ethnic identities, cultural particularities and traditions). There are several factors behind the relatively rapid loss of mother tongue competence. First, minorities live scattered across the country. Second, nationalities represented in larger numbers (e.g. Germans, Slovaks and Croatians) have been speaking regional dialects and, because they settled before industrialisation, their vocabulary did not generally develop to keep pace with modernisation. This has resulted in obstacles to their effective communication and hence increased pressure to assimilate linguistically (Demeter Zayzon 2003). Third, under Communism, the Hungarian government’s minority policies largely neglected national minorities’ identities and languages (Dobos 2013), which accelerated the movement towards assimilation. In light of these factors, the revival of minority languages has been extremely challenging in Hungary. A generation has grown up without speaking their mother tongue, while society as a whole has not become accustomed to national minorities using their native languages. Although the 1993 Minority Law guaranteed the right of minorities to use their mother tongue in public institutions and courts, in most cases the conditions for this have not been developed. Within the existing NSG system, the Roma are the most disadvantaged among the 13 national minorities recognised under Hungarian law, given their social marginalisation. Those nationalities which are organised, have kin

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states and are better integrated into society seem to be in a position to advance the interests of their communities even in the presence of unfavourable circumstances, although the greatest threat continues to be advanced assimilation, which is likely to only intensify in the future. While the new spokesperson system in parliament43 can count some successes,44 persons belonging to minorities seem to be generally dissatisfied with national minorities’ parliamentary representation.45 Indeed, despite having guaranteed access to parliament, nationalities’ spokespersons have no right to vote therein. There are two different types of funds to support NSGs: the “operational” fund and the “task-based” fund. Although in 2015 the government raised the “operational fund”, financial support is relatively low. It is also independent of the size of minority communities, as every NSG is allocated the same amount. The “task-based fund” depends on how active each NSG is (as noted, additional funding is provided when an NSG manages a school). However, it has often been considered unclear how the “task-based” funding for individual NSGs is calculated.46

Serbia The Law on National Councils of National Minorities (hereinafter “NC Law”47) was introduced in Serbia, after substantial delays, only in 2009, much later than elsewhere in CEE.48 The Law was not met with full consensus: a number of its provisions were later contested in the Constitutional Court (ACFC 2013: §190; Beretka 2014; Korhecz 2015; Surová 2015), resulting in rulings that have diluted the original Law’s provisions.49 Practical difficulties have further stemmed from some contradictions between the NC Law and other Serbian legislation (ACFC 2013: §15).50 Despite this, compared to other laws considered in this chapter, it provides much broader competences in the management of minority languages and cultures by minority representatives themselves. The nC Law stipulates that national minorities may elect NCs in order to realise their “rights to self-government in culture, education, information and official use of language and script” (Article 2). “Self-government” is to be understood in the sense of (partial) autonomy in managing cultural and ­linguistic matters. NCs have the right to express opinions on all issues concerning culture, education, information and language use of national minorities, including curricula (Article 13). Article 23 imposes sanctions on state bodies that do not respect the rights of NCs, and the Hungarian NC has successfully pursued lawsuits against local authorities that did not comply with this

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­ rovision (Beretka 2014: 269). At the same time, this role is essentially advip sory.51 The Law further contains provisions on funding of NCs’ activities and highly detailed regulations (Articles 44–109) on the election of representatives. Overall, NCs are the main institutions promoting minority rights in Serbia.52 They have engaged in a range of activities, including designating the traditional names (in minority languages) of local self-government units and settlements (Article 22, NC Law); funding minority-language newspapers (CoE 2016: §16, 59, 197); involvement in the provision of (minority-­ language) textbooks53 (Article 14). NCs have also been active in expanding the teaching of minority languages at various levels of education. The (Council of Europe) Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (ACFC) referred to a “broad offer” for the teaching in and of minority languages in schools in Serbia, while some schools provide bilingual education (ACFC 2013: §42; CoE 2016: §69). However, attempts to introduce minority languages as new subjects have not been successful in some schools (CoE 2016: §64, 69, 80), and there have been limited efforts to implement the legislation on minority-language education in some localities. The resulting shortcomings in minority-language education have led, in some cases, to parents transferring their children to schools functioning in the state language (ACFC 2013: §42; 153–4). The NC Law presents some similarities with the original NCA model inasmuch as it contains provisions on participation of minorities in elected bodies and the administration; yet, in practice minorities—particularly numerically smaller ones—have been under-represented in these institutions (ACFC 2013: §30–31, 176–9, 183). Elections to NCs have taken place in 2010 and 2014, when 19 and 21 such bodies, respectively, were established. As in the original NCA model, elections occur following enrolment into special ­electoral registers on the basis of self-identification.54 Unlike other countries analysed in this chapter, only one NC is elected for each minority for the country as a whole, with no smaller representative bodies at the local level. This is despite the fact that some initiatives concerning minorities (and their languages) occur at the local level, such as declaring a minority language official within a municipality.55 Practical difficulties in implementing language-­ related legal provisions also exist at the level of municipalities and are linked to insufficient numbers of staff proficient in (official) minority languages and inadequate resources for the translation of documents (ACFC 2013: §26, 139, 196). With regard to funding, 30% is divided equally among all registered NCs, and 70% is allocated on the basis of the number of NCs of a particular minority and the number of persons they represent56 (Korhecz 2014; Beretka 2014:

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268). NCs receive less funding from the authorities if the language of the ethnic communities they represent have not been introduced in local official use. Moreover, there are discrepancies in the funding available across the country: the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina benefits from more far-­ reaching programmes for the promotion of minority languages and cultures and greater funding opportunities, while minorities whose NCs are located outside Vojvodina have in practice been at a disadvantage (ACFC 2013: §14, 88, 138, 195; CoE 2016: §15). In sum, particular circumstances in Serbia—including Yugoslav legacies, a desire to engage with the EU and the need to consolidate a newly sovereign state after years of political struggle and ethnic conflict (Purger 2012)—contributed to the creation of an NCA system which is, by regional standards, very far-reaching. However, autonomy remains politically contested and has been reduced in scope since 2013. The question therefore remains—as Korhecz noted in 2014 in “Quo vadis Serbia?”—whether or not the country’s continued engagement with the EU integration process will entail stronger guarantees for respect of minority rights, including the protection and promotion of minority languages.57 In this regard, Petsinis (2012) observes that the NC Law selectively applied elements of the federal legacy of the former Yugoslavia: these were reformulated and adapted to more recent European trends in minority rights protection as part of Serbia’s engagement with the EU and other international organisations after 2000. Moreover, as in other cases considered by this chapter, most authors suggest that the system in place is far more effective in the case of larger and more territorially concentrated minorities—especially those, such as the Hungarian one, with support from external kin states—which can draw upon greater resources and have more options in respect of representation in the national parliament and local councils (Beretka 2014; Purger 2012; Surová 2015).

Conclusion The practices of NCA in the four countries analysed here have considerably distanced themselves from the theory first elaborated by Renner and Bauer. The Austro-Marxists’ model of NCA would have created a mosaic of multi-­ ethnic communities, united by a set of common interests within a polity, but with exclusive competence over the exercise of their linguistic and cultural rights. The reality in the four countries is that the levels of actual cultural autonomy afforded to minority communities are limited. Restricted is also NCA institutions’ influence on policymaking on (cultural or other) matters

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affecting minority communities, while resources remain a problem in all cases. Meanwhile, minority languages continue to be used only marginally, rather than being the working languages of self-administering communities. At the same time, there are some variations between the four countries, as NCA is considerably affected by historical legacies and local circumstances. While in the 1990s the countries in question shared a need to respond to emerging challenges posed by ethno-linguistic diversity, the motivations behind the introduction of NCA, and the type of NCA chosen, differed. For example, in the case of Estonia, the drive for the restoration of pre-Soviet conditions has been highly significant. NCA institutions’ reliance on folklore and ethnography in post-Soviet states reflects a prolongation of Soviet practices. NCA’s potential in the promotion of minority languages is circumscribed by the choices made by the relevant governments with regard to its application, which, while referring to the principles of “autonomy” or “self-­ government”, have often effectively curtailed them. Local circumstances have further influenced the conditions surrounding minority languages and the way they may be protected and promoted. In all four countries, there is a tendency towards linguistic assimilation, exacerbated by the breaking up of linguistic communities: emigration, population decline and, generally, the disappearance of areas once densely populated by speakers of minority languages—which created linguistic oases akin to those envisaged by the NCA theorists—lead to the use of the state language by default. Often, the younger generations (and their parents) opt to learn languages that offer prospects for financial well-being rather than marginalised minority languages. Overall, the opportunities offered by NCA are limited in the sphere of language revitalisation if one considers that the successful promotion of a minority language would require not only enhancing language skills (e.g. through language tuition) but also providing opportunities and a desire to use it (i.e. raising its prestige of the language) (Grin and Moring 2002: 74). In practice, it is those minority communities that have a kin state and (paradoxically) are territorially concentrated that have most benefited from NCA. Meanwhile, Russia and Estonia have seen a drive to promote their state languages in an effort to consolidate national (majority) identities. In this sense, the scepticism58 with reference to a presumed state neutrality in the treatment of ethno-linguistic groups does not seem unjustified. At the same time, in the four countries, NCA institutions have made use of opportunities available to them to promote minority languages and to see these languages and cultures—at a minimum—recognised within their societies despite the restricted opportunities to participate in public affairs. Moreover, the cases of Serbia, Hungary and inter-war Estonia point to the fact

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that NCA-based systems tend to be more viable when they are closer to their original concept: by providing minorities not just with the option to engage in cultural and/or folkloristic events but to be involved in the running of cultural and educational institutions, with the support of public resources. Admittedly, translating the original NCA model into reality would present considerable logistical difficulties, given its ambitious framework. Yet, the original NCA model identified very real concerns of minority communities: the need for steady, guaranteed—rather than intermittent—funding; the importance of representation and participation in decision-making; and the value of (long-term) minority-language education, including in the case of dispersed groups. It brought to the fore questions that still remain unresolved, such as the definition of the scope of collective rights and of mechanisms to institutionalise the status of minority communities, particularly for those groups that are disadvantaged by their being territorially dispersed. NCA continues to remind us that the space between the individual and the state—and occupied by ethnic communities—can be easily neglected. Finally, Renner’s argument that the designation of a state language (and confining other languages to an inferior status) is a “source of strife” still rings true today. The concerns raised by minority communities in CEE today59 tend to resemble those that Renner had regarded as crucial: particularly, a drive to make minority languages more prominent and the importance of participatory processes in devising and implementing linguistic policies. The spirit of the Austro-­ Marxists’ theory—inasmuch as it calls for minorities’ empowerment and autonomy in managing their cultural and linguistic uniqueness—has not ceased to be relevant.

Notes 1. The research for this chapter was largely carried out under the project “National Minority Rights and Democratic Political Community: Practices of Non-territorial Autonomy in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe” (2014–2017), supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/L007126/1]. The data will be deposited with the UK Data Service, Collection Number 852375. The research used semi-structured, indepth interviews, mostly conducted in 2015 and 2016, with representatives of NCA institutions and NGOs, academics and public officials (76 in Russia, 19 in Estonia, 37 in Hungary, 18 in Serbia). 2. See Lapidoth (1997: 37–40). 3. The theory was later developed by Otto Bauer ([1907] 2000).

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4. As noted, the Austro-Marxists based their theory on the circumstances surrounding the Austro-­Hungarian empire. 5. Ethnically mixed districts would have a requirement of bilingualism for civil servants. 6. Renner conceded that the language of communication between the multiple nations’ institutions would be German. 7. Similarly, the (Council of Europe) Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (ACFC) has recommended that education in minority languages be provided up to university level so as to enable students to consolidate their language skills. See, for example, ACFC (2002: §105; 2012b: §75). See also the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Article 8(1)(e)(i). 8. Post-Soviet states were striving to promote (newly declared) state languages while distancing themselves from Russian (Pavlenko 2013). 9. 2010 Census. Available at: http://www.perepis-2010.ru/results_of_the_census/results-inform.php 10. The census gathered data generally on “knowledge of languages by the population of the Russian Federation”, so this number encompasses languages other than minority languages. See the 2010 census, Part IV, Item 5. Official figures refer to 130–160 minority languages in Russia (government data supplied for the 2009–2011 project—with the European Union (EU) and Council of Europe—“Minorities in Russia: Developing Languages, Culture, Media and Civil Society”, and cited in Oeter 2013: 38). 11. No 74-FZ, 17 June 1996. 12. On the introduction of NCA in post-Soviet Russia, see Osipov (2004). The ethnic groups that were “assigned” a territorial unit during the Soviet period became known as “titular nationalities”. 13. Another network of institutions that can be characterised as a form of nonterritorial cultural autonomy is that of peoples’ congresses (see Osipov 2011), such as the World Congress of Tatars. 14. Article 1. 15. On the inadequacy of legal mechanisms for the effective functioning of NCAs, and for the exercise of minority rights more generally, see Bowring (2013), Oeter (2013) and Prina (2016). 16. See, for example, Gilbert (2016) and Horvath (2011). 17. Interviews held in Russia in 2015–2016; 76 persons were interviewed (in Moscow, St Petersburg, Saransk, Kazan, Petrozavodsk and Ufa). Respondents were civil society activists (from national cultural autonomies, peoples’ congresses and minority NGOs), academics and public officials from a range of ethnic backgrounds (see also note 1). 18. Some textbooks were funded through initiatives of inter-governmental organisations, such as the 2009–2011 project “Minorities in Russia: Developing Languages, Culture, Media and Civil Society”, implemented by the EU and Council of Europe in cooperation with the Russian government.

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19. Since 2001, there have been several programmes for the promotion of the Russian language, both at the federal and regional levels (see Prina 2016: 102–105). 20. According to Russian government data from 2012, 39 minority languages were languages of instruction and 50 were taught as subjects (ACFC 2012a: 6). 21. The exception is Karelian in the Republic of Karelia. 22. For example, the ACFC (2006: §90) stated that minority advisory bodies in Russia’s regions are in some cases “expected to implement rather than contribute to the preparation of minority-relevant legislation”. 23. The study of and through the medium of minority languages has tended to decrease since 2000 (see Prina 2016: ch. 6). 24. Tatars are a numerical majority within the Republic of Tatarstan. On the situation of the Tatars, see also Bowring (this volume). 25. At the same time, such resources are generally scarce, particularly when a titular nationality amounts to a small numerical minority within a republic 26. Interviews with minority education specialists, Kazan, 2015. 27. Lagerspetz (2014: 458 & 465). 28. Interviews with Ülo Kalm, Chair of the Swedish Cultural Council; Aleksandr Aidarov, Advisor to the Ministry of Culture (both 2015); and Toivo Kabanen, former Chair of Ingrian Finnish Cultural Council, 2012. 29. VII Riigikogu Stenogramm, 30 September 1993, p. 221. 30. Hobby schools provide instruction and activities in sports, technology, culture, nature, music or other arts. They can be established by individuals and associations, and those attending are entitled to a subsidy from the local authority. See Regulation of the Minister of Education and Research ‘Standard for Hobby Education’, 21 March 2007. 31. Interview with Kalm, 2015 (note 28); and Aidarov and Drechsler (2013: 111–121). 32. Interviews with Vladimir Vogi, Head of the Ingrian-Finnish Society of Tallinn and Taisto Raudalainen, Editor of Inkeri journal, 2015. 33. Strictly speaking, this contravenes the terms of the NCA Act, but (at least until 2016) the Swedes were exempted from the requirement that citizens be resident in Estonia. Interview with Kalm, 2015. 34. A former Head of the Swedish NCA claimed that an autonomy body has a more legitimate and officially recognised voice compared to an association since “we carry out democratic elections and … have citizens, not members”. Cited in Lagerspetz (2014: 469). 35. Interviews with Kalm, 2015, and Kabanen, 2012 (note 28). 36. Interview with Kabanen, 2012. Also Aidarov and Drechsler (2011) and Lagerspetz (2014). 37. Vabariigi Presidendi Ümarlaua istungite protokoll 1/2000, Tallinn, 11. veebruaril 2000.

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38. Interviews with Aleksey Semenov, Director of the Legal Information Centre for Human Rights and Yuri Polyakov, Director of the Russian Cultural Centre, 2015. See also Semenov (2006). 39. Unlike in Russia and Estonia, the Minority Law was not devoted exclusively to NCA but related to minority protection more generally; NCA (in the form of NSGs) has, however, been its main mechanism. 40. The Act repealed the 1993 Minority Law. 41. There are 13 such nationalities (Article 61, 1993 Law; Appendix 1, 2011 Act). 42. Interviews with representatives of Roma and German Nationality SelfGovernments (NSG). Language and education were mentioned less often than culture and tradition by the respondents. In Hungary, 37 in-depth interviews were held in 2015 with members of the Roma and German NSGs (at three levels: local, county and national levels) and with politicians and political activists involved in minority issues. Roma and Germans are the two largest minorities in Hungary, although their characteristics are very different. 43. Hungary’s 2011 Election Law allows the 13 officially recognised minorities to appoint a designated spokesperson, who has the right to address parliament but not to vote. 44. Interview data revealed the view, among some respondents interviewed in 2015–2016 (see note 1), that the new system has enabled the discussion of issues relating to language and minority-language teachers. 45. Interviews in Hungary, 2015–2016 (see note 1). 46. Some respondents referred to the lack of an obvious relationship between activities implemented and the monies received. Additionally, the ACFC (2016: §67–70), while welcoming the funding allocated to NSGs and their activities, has noted shortcomings linked to delays in transferring funds for the management of cultural and educational institutions run by NSGs. 47. “Official Gazette of the RS”, No 72/09, 20/14—CC and 55/14. 48. Minority NCs were established already in 2002 under Article 19 of a former Yugoslav Law on the Protection of Rights and Freedoms of National minorities. However, it was only in 2009 that a Serbian Law of the same name clearly determined their competences, funding mechanisms and election procedures (Korhecz 2014: 3). 49. In particular, the Court rescinded the provision that NCs could designate “institutions of particular importance” for the national minority, such as educational institutions, and which gave NCs “founding rights”, allowing them to nominate or approve candidates for management positions within these institutions. Even with these changes, Malloy et al. (2015) classify the Serbian NCA model as one that confers “voice through self-governing institutions” (see also Surová 2015). 50. Some contradictions were later rectified (ACFC 2013: §137). 51. Interview with Ernő Németh, President of Information Committee of the Hungarian National Council, 2016.

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52. The ACFC (2013: §196) states that they play “an overwhelmingly dominant role” in the realisation of minority rights in Serbia. Korhecz (2014) notes that, in the case of the Vojvodina Hungarians, the NC Law—at least in its initial incarnation—heralded a “new quality of life” for the minority in question. 53. Compiled in Serbia or imported from minorities’ kin states. 54. Although direct elections to NCs are only held if a number of voters equivalent to 40% of the relevant minority population enrols on an electoral register; otherwise, autonomy bodies are created indirectly by nominated electors. In 2014, 17 out of 21 NCs were directly elected, and 4 created indirectly. 55. Legally, there is an obligation to do so when the local minority population amounts to more than 15%. 56. Article 115, NC Law. 57. This was the view expressed by Bálint Pásztor, MP and Chair of the Hungarian Party VMSZ, in an interview in 2016. 58. See above (“Non-territorial Cultural Autonomy and Linguistic Rights”). 59. As per the interviews carried out under the project (see note 1).

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Hroch, M. (2007a). From Ethnic Group Toward the Modern Nation: The Czech Case. In M. Hroch (Ed.), Comparative Studies in Modern European History: Nation, Nationalism and Social Change (pp. 95–107). Aldershot: Ashgate. Hroch, M. (2007b). The Social Interpretation of Linguistic Demands in European National Movements. In M. Hroch (Ed.), Comparative Studies in Modern European History: Nation, Nationalism and Social Change (pp. 67–96). Aldershot: Ashgate. Kamusella, T. (2009). The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Korhecz, T. (2014). Non-territorial Autonomy in Practice: The Hungarian National Council in Serbia. In Z.  Kantor (Ed.), Autonomies in Europe: Solutions and Challenges (pp. 151–164). Budapest: L’Harmattan. Korhecz, T. (2015). National Minority Councils in Serbia. In T. Malloy et al. (Eds.), Managing Diversity Through Non-territorial Autonomy (pp.  69–91). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, W., & Grin, F. (2003). Assessing the Politics of Diversity in Transition Countries. In F. Daftary & F. Grin (Eds.), Nation-Building, Ethnicity and Language Politics in Transition Countries (pp. 1–27). Budapest: Open Society Institute. Kymlicka, W., & Patten, A. (2003). Language Rights and Political Theory: Context Issues, and Approaches. In W. Kymlicka & A. Patten (Eds.), Language Rights and Political Theory (pp. 1–51). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lagerspetz, M. (2014). Cultural Autonomy of National Minorities in Estonia: The Erosion of a Promise. Journal of Baltic Studies, 45(3), 457–475. Lapidoth, R. (1997). Autonomy: Flexible Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Malloy, T. H. (2015). Introduction. In T. H. Malloy et al. (Eds.), Managing Diversity Through Non-territorial Autonomy: Assessing Advantages, Deficiencies and Risks (pp. 1–15). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malloy, T.  H., Osipov, A., & Vizi, B. (2015). Managing Diversity Through Non-­ territoral Autonomy: Assessing Advantages, Deficiencies and Risks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nimni, E. (1999). Nationalist Multiculturalism in Late Imperial Austria as a Critique of Contemporary Liberalism: The Case of Bauer and Renner. Journal of Political Ideologies, 4(3), 289–314. Nimni, E. (Ed.). (2005). Natural Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics. London: Routledge. Nimni, E. (2007). National-Cultural Autonomy as an Alternative to Minority Territorial Nationalism. Ethnopolitics, 6(3), 345–364. Nimni, E., Osipov, A., & Smith, D. (Eds.). (2013). The Challenge of Non-territorial Autonomy: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Peter Lang. Nootens, G. (2006). Liberal Nationalism and the Sovereign Territorial Ideal. Nations and Nationalism, 12(1), 35–50.

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Oeter, S. (2013). International Norms and Legal Status of Minority Languages in Russia. In O.  Protsyk & B.  Harzl (Eds.), Managing Ethnic Diversity in Russia (pp. 37–61). Abingdon: Routledge. Osipov, A. (2004). Natsionalno-Kulturnaya Avtonomiya: Idei, Resheniya, Instituty [National Cultural Autonomy: Ideas, Decisions, Institutions]. St. Petersburg: Centre for Independent Sociological Research. Osipov, A. (2011). The ‘People’s Congresses’ in Russia: Failure or Success? Authenticity and Efficiency of Minority Representation. Working Paper No. 48. http://www. ecmi.de/uploads/tx_lfpubdb/Working_Paper_48_Final.pdf. Accessed 15 Dec 2016. Osipov, A. (2013a). National-Cultural Autonomy in Russia: A Matter of Legal Regulation or the Symbolic Construction of an Ethnic Mosaic? In O. Protsyk & B.  Harzl (Eds.), Managing Ethnic Diversity in Russia (pp.  62–84). Abingdon: Routledge. Osipov, A. (2013b). Non-territorial Autonomy During and After Communism: In the Wrong or Right Place? Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 12(1), 7–26. Paulston, C., & Peckham, D. (Eds.). (1998). Linguistic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pavlenko, A. (Ed.). (2008). Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pavlenko, A. (2013). Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Successor States. Language and Linguistic Compass, 7, 262–271. Petsinis, V. (2012). Minority Legislation in Two Successor States: A Comparison Through the Lens of EU Enlargement. Baltic Worlds, 1, 31–35. Poleshchuk, V. (2013). Changes in the Concept of National Cultural Autonomy in Estonia. In E.  Nimni et  al. (Eds.), The Challenge of Non-territorial Autonomy: Theory and Practice (pp. 149–162). Oxford: Peter Lang. Poleshchuk, V. (2015). Russian National Cultural Autonomy in Estonia. In T. Malloy et al. (Eds.), Managing Diversity Through Non-territorial Autonomy (pp. 229–248). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prina, F. (2016). National Minorities in Putin’s Russia: Diversity and Assimilation. Abingdon: Routledge. Purger, T. (2012). Ethnic Self-Governance in Serbia: The First Two Years of the National Minority Councils. South-East Europe International Relations Quarterly, 3(2), 1–17. Ra’anan, U. (1991). Nation and State: Order Out of Chaos. In U.  Ra’anan et  al. (Eds.), State and Nation in Multi-Ethnic Societies: The Breakup of Multinational States (pp. 3–32). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Renner, K. (2005). State and Nation. In E. Nimni (Ed.), National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics (pp. 15–47). London: Routledge. Roach, S.  C. (2005). Cultural Autonomy, Minority Rights, and Globalization. Burlington: Ashgate.

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Semenov, A. (2006, April 26). Komu zhe eto vygodno? [Whom Does This Benefit?] Molodezh’ Estonii. Sloboda, M., Laihonen, P., & Zabrodskaja, A. (Eds.). (2016). Sociolinguistic Transition in Former Eastern Bloc Countries: Two Decades After the Regime Change. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Smith, D. J. (2000). Cultural Autonomy in Estonia: A Relevant Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era? One Europe or Several? Working Paper 1901. Brighton: Economic and Social Research Council. Smith, D.  J. (2014). National-Cultural Autonomy in Contemporary Estonia. In L. Salat et al. (Eds.), Autonomy Arrangements Around the World: A Collection of Well and Lesser Known Cases (pp. 299–320). Cluj: Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities. Smith, D.  J. (2016). Estonia: A Model for Interwar Europe? Ethnopolitics, 15(1), 89–104. Smith, D.  J., & Cordell, K. (Eds.). (2008). Cultural Autonomy in Contemporary Europe. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, D.  J., & Hiden, J.  (2012). Ethnic Diversity and the Nation State: National Cultural Autonomy Revisited. Abingdon: Routledge. Stokes, G. (1974). Cognition and the Function of Nationalism. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4, 525–542. Suksi, M. (Ed.). (1998). Autonomy: Applications and Implications. The Hague: Kluwer Law International. Surová, S. (2015). Exploring the Opportunities for Trans-Ethnic Cooperation Within and Across Serbia Through the National Minority Councils. Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 14(2), 27–50. Weller, M., & Wolff, S. (Eds.). (2005). Autonomy, Self-Governance and Conflict Resolution: Innovative Approaches to Institutional Design in Divided Societies. Abingdon: Routledge. Wright, S. (2001). Language and Power: Background to the Debate on Linguistic Rights. International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 3(1), 44–54. Zamyatin, K. (2012). From Language Revival to Language Removal? The Teaching of Titular Languages in the National Republics of Post-Soviet Russia. Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 11(2), 75–102.

8 Sign Language Communities Maartje De Meulder, Verena Krausneker, Graham Turner, and John Bosco Conama

Sign Languages and Sign Language Communities1 This chapter uses the concept of ‘Sign Language Communities’ (SLCs) to emphasise the language minority status of these groups, the shifting boundaries of, and the diversity between those communities. There are also other concepts in use to talk about deaf and hearing sign language-using people as a group, like ‘Sign Language Users’ and ‘Sign Language Peoples’ (Batterbury et al. 2007). In a non-Anglo-Saxon context, other concepts with similar meanings have been developed, such as ‘gebärdensprachig’ in German or ‘gebarentalig’ in Dutch. M. De Meulder (*) University of Namur, Namur, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] V. Krausneker Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] G. Turner Department of Languages & Intercultural Studies, School of Social Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. B. Conama Centre for Deaf Studies, School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_8

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SLCs exist—as far as we know—in every country of the world. With various types of SLCs across the globe, Woll and Ladd (2003) suggested a multi-­ dimensional approach of identifying the statuses and positions of those communities in wider societies.2 These communities, and the sign languages they use, have historically emerged in specific geographical locations around the world, rather than in relation to specific (national) spoken languages. This illustrates why, for example, British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) or Flemish Sign Language (VGT) and Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) are very different from each other. SLCs’ emergence has centred around places where deaf people have lived together or gathered frequently, such as deaf schools, within large multi-generational deaf families, in large cities, and in places with high rates of hereditary deafness. Sign languages are usually regarded as non-territorial languages because they are typically used throughout a country, as opposed to spoken indigenous minority languages, which are usually identified with a particular area of the territory of a state. Exceptions to this are so-called village or shared sign languages which have emerged in places with high rates of hereditary deafness (Kusters 2015; Nyst 2012) and small territorial sign languages like Finland-Swedish Sign Language in Finland (Hoyer 2004). Sign languages differ from many other minority languages in that all of them are in a minority position (by number, power, and access to resources) in every country in the world. They have traditionally mostly been excluded or ignored by minority language research and policies, a fact that is acutely related to their long road to being understood as full-fledged, real languages. They also differ because of their ‘untraditional’ transmission patterns: since over 95% of deaf children are born to hearing (non-signing) families (Mitchell and Karchmer 2004), sign languages are usually not transmitted within the family. Some estimates state that the number of sign languages around the world is as high as the number of spoken languages, between 6000 and 7000 (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), although many of them remain undocumented. The Ethnologue, however, lists just 138 documented and identified sign languages.3 Indeed, new sign languages still emerge and are being ‘discovered’ and documented (Meir et al. 2010). Examples are the sign languages that arise in a small community context, such as Chican Sign Language in rural Mexico (Le Guen 2012; Safar 2017), or in an institutional context, such as a deaf school, for example, Nicaraguan Sign Language (Polich 2005). Just like there is an enormous diversity between sign languages, there is a huge diversity between and within SLCs. There is not just one ‘deaf community’ or ‘sign language community’, although there is still a tendency to talk about ‘the deaf community’ as a monolithic, single unit with agreed ideas.

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SLCs have a long tradition of worldwide networking, exchange, and communication, and it is widely recognised that they form transnational communities (Murray 2007; Solvang and Haualand 2014). Kusters and Friedner (2015, x) describe the idea of DEAF-SAME that is typically used by deaf people coming from around the world, emphasising the feeling of deaf similitude and deaf universalism and deaf peoples’ communication practices across borders and boundaries using (mixtures of ) national sign languages, gestures, and International Sign (on International Sign see Rosenstock and Napier 2015). They also emphasise, however, that despite these shared experiences, there are also substantial (and hierarchical) differences between them based on nationality, ethnicity, class, occupational status, mobility, educational level, and language, differences that are intensified by globalisation. Contemporary SLCs are thus characterised by a diversification of intersectional backgrounds, with deaf people negotiating these multiple intersections on a daily basis (see, e.g. Foster and Kinuthia 2003; Ruiz et al. 2015). They are also characterised by diversity in language practices, and contemporary research in Deaf Studies is focusing on those fluid and hybrid language practices as they are (for an overview see Kusters et al. 2017). Kusters et al. (2017), however, also emphasise that, because of the current ideological atmosphere, a clear distinction should be made between studying language practices and promoting them, with promotion needing to focus on bilingualism and sign language rights and not on the interrelationship among various modalities. The World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) estimates that there are about 70 million deaf people worldwide for whom sign language is ‘their first language or mother tongue’.4 Recent estimates put the number of ‘sign language users’ in the European Union (EU) at 1 million (although it is not stated whether hearing sign language users are included in this estimate).5 However, very few countries have reliable data over many decades on the number of people in their population who are either deaf and/or a signer and their level of competence. Because different definitions and indicators are used, it is difficult to make comparisons from one point in time to another and from one country to another (Johnston 2006). This lack of reliable data makes it difficult to discuss sign languages as minority languages or to include them in minority language policies and statistics. It also makes numbers prone to being inflated or talked down, depending on the point of view. In most (generally Western) countries, boundaries of deaf communities are becoming more permeable, and there is a continuing transition to SLCs. Apart from deaf signers, these communities consist of (but are not limited to) hearing people who identify with sign language and what it means to them (e.g. hearing signers with deaf parents, interpreters, researchers, parents of

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deaf children, teachers, learners, partners) and people who claim an association with the language by learning it, mostly through formal lessons. While until quite recently the demographic profile of (mostly Western) SLCs consisted (mainly) of deaf and hearing traditional signers, this profile is now increasingly dominated by a growing number of deaf and hearing new signers and an ever-diminishing number of deaf traditional signers. New signers learn sign language (often) later in life through peer contact (mostly deaf new signers) and/or formal lessons (mostly hearing new signers). The number of deaf new signers is increasing because of the erosion of traditional transmission settings (mainly deaf schools and deaf clubs), which means greater numbers of deaf people come into the community as late learners of sign language. The increasing number of hearing new signers is linked to the greater visibility of sign languages, greater availability of formal learning opportunities, and increased intercultural contacts. At the same time, there seems to be an ­ever-­diminishing number of deaf traditional signers who acquire sign language via intergenerational or peer transmission (in a home or school context). It is even likely that in some countries, among the very youngest age groups, there are now more hearing than deaf signers. Indeed, there is an increasing inclination among deaf parents to sign with their hearing children and pass on the language, while at the same time hearing parents do rarely receive holistic information on using sign language with their deaf children at home. In the older age groups, hearing new signers outnumber (deaf and hearing) traditional signers and deaf new signers. This numerical disparity is also found in some indigenous language groups like the Sámi (Sarivaara et al. 2013), the Mãori (Spolsky 2003), and many other minorities (O’Rourke et al. 2015) and greatly impacts on the linguistic future and language change in SLCs (see also De Meulder and Murray 2018; Turner 2009). This situation is the result of a complex combination of demographic, political, economic, social, and educational factors which we discuss further in the chapter.

Sign Language Policy and Planning Although it has become clear that sign languages are full-fledged languages, they have traditionally been neglected, if not ignored, by minority language policies and institutions. For example, they have been excluded from the European Charter on Regional or Minority Languages (see Krausneker 2000) and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities by the Council of Europe. Both EU-funded institutions, Mercator and the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages (closed in 2010), never took up

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the family of sign languages and did not integrate them into their realm of activities. The same is true of many linguistic research departments. It is also noticeable that WFD has not availed of the international conventions on minority rights to champion and achieve their policy objectives. This led Krausneker (2003) to term sign languages ‘minorised minority languages’: they are minority languages in numerical terms and are unequal in terms of power but are then minorised by institutions, policies, and research. Sign languages can also be described as ‘small languages’: ‘small’ in terms of number of speakers compared to the dominant national language but also ‘small’ in their diminished number of speakers among those who claim a shared cultural identity (Pietikäinen et al. 2016). This minority status might also be rooted in the widespread misunderstanding that sign languages belong to the policy field of disabilities. Indeed, this is a significant difference with other linguistic and cultural minorities: SLCs are also perceived and administered as people with disabilities (Turner 2003). As such, they manifest dual category membership (De Meulder 2016b). This categorisation, as people with disabilities, is the result of social, political, and historical processes and practices (Ladd 2003) which conceptualised SLCs as individual people requiring medical cures and sign languages as compensatory tools. The ideology of oralism, which was the dominant educational ideology for much of the twentieth century, prioritised the instruction of spoken language over the use of sign language and has been described as linguistic and cultural genocide (Ladd 2003; Jokinen 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 1999). It parallels the assimilationist ideologies to which many other linguistic and cultural minorities have been subjected (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). De Meulder and Murray (2017) state that while this dual category membership should not in theory be problematic and even has been used by deaf organisations in their political work towards the recognition of sign languages (Murray 2015), the problem lies in the fact that policies aimed towards SLCs traditionally envisage them only as persons with disabilities. The either/or stereotyping (Krausneker 2015) poses a problem and especially the ‘deficit framing’ has significantly impacted on the planning of sign languages (see also De Meulder 2016a), which has historically already been done mostly from a language-as-­ a-problem perspective (Conama 2010; Ruiz 1984). Sign languages have been (and often still are) seen as inappropriate in the education of deaf children (see de Quadros 2015; Ladd 2003), needing standardisation (see Adam 2015a; Al-Fityani and Padden 2010), seen as manual codes for spoken languages (see Van Herreweghe et al. 2015), and as the subject of devaluating, audistic, stereotypical, and economic ideologies (see Krausneker 2015). The current medicalisation of ‘deafness’ and the individualisation of deaf children in mainstream

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education crowds out the need for a separate and proactive language policy to protect and promote sign languages and makes it difficult for lay people to see the need for such a policy. Much sign language policy and planning has been done by hearing non-signers, very often without consultation or even under exclusion of SLCs. In some documented cases, not only the details but also the complete aim and direction of the planned measures are in conflict with the needs and wishes of SLCs and often concern attempts to standardise or unify sign languages, like the standardisation of Sign Language of the Netherlands (Schermer 2012) or the ‘unification’ of Arab Sign Languages (see Adam 2015b; Wilcox et al. 2012).

The Legal Status of Sign Languages The last two decades have seen a substantial growth in the most visible kind of language planning for sign languages: their legal recognition. Campaigns to grant sign languages legal status are still taking place around the world. Currently, over 30 countries (of which the majority are EU member states) have recognised their sign language(s) in legislation on language status and/or language rights (De Meulder 2015). These recognition laws are very diverse in nature and scope. In contrast to the recognition of spoken languages, including minority languages, that of sign languages does not always mean they receive national, official, or minority status or that they are included in the constitution or in language legislation. Actually in most cases such laws do not lead to official minority status. In only one country, New Zealand, did the national sign language gain status as an official language (next to te reo Maori), but even here the de jure recognition is very different from the de facto one (McKee and Manning 2015). The desired outcomes of sign language recognition campaigns led by SLCs are centred around issues of citizenship and inclusion in society. This citizenship is meant to be a differentiated citizenship which accords a form of group representation rights to accommodate SLCs’ particular needs and practices (see also Emery 2009, 2011). Concerning inclusion, SLCs do not have separatist aspirations resisting their inclusion in society, but because hearing-led efforts at ‘inclusion’ have historically tended towards assimilation and have caused the loss of their languages, cultures, and identities, they aim to achieve this participation while resisting/avoiding assimilation, something they have in common with other cultural-linguistic minorities. The key issue at stake is that with these campaigns, SLCs seek to be able to retain a significant degree of cultural and linguistic self-determination not only aimed at the forms and

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institutional usage of their languages but equally, and increasingly, at their further existence (see further in this chapter). This process towards linguistic and cultural self-determination involves three developmental stages: firstly, achieving legal recognition that confirms that sign languages are indeed languages, which have communicative, identity, and intrinsic value for SLCs. This is what is called ‘symbolical recognition’. Secondly, achieving legislation that gives instrumental value to sign languages. This mainly concerns individual linguistic rights, for example, the right to access services through sign language interpreters (SLIs). Thirdly, establishing or protecting educational linguistic rights and language acquisition rights in the home and education. Most sign language recognition legislation achieves only the first stage, that is, symbolical recognition, with some legislation achieving aspects of the second stage. The third stage is as yet very rarely achieved, which is highly problematic, as is clear in the following paragraph (for more on this, see De Meulder 2016b).

 hreats to and Opportunities for Sign Language T Communities The twenty-first century has brought a unique dynamic for SLCs. Opportunities for sign languages and SLCs are proceeding hand in hand with external factors that are endangering them, and they have reached a critical tipping point as they respond to pressures and opportunities. The next section discusses some of these threats and opportunities.

Medical Normalisation and ‘Deaf Gain’ An estimated 80% of deaf children in the developed world now receive cochlear implants (a surgically implanted electronic hearing device) (Blume 2010). This evolution often coincides with monolingual education practices in spoken language promoted by the medical profession, educators, early intervention services, and child welfare services. Parents of deaf children generally do not receive balanced and holistic advice and information on bilingualism and the cognitive, social, and emotional benefits of early exposure to sign language (see also Mauldin 2016). The majority of those children who have had an early implant have limited or no access to sign language during what is considered to be the critical period for language acquisition and as such are at a significant risk for linguistic deprivation (Humphries et al. 2016).

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Because SLCs are also perceived as people with disabilities, the medical and genetic discourse has been dominant and is stigmatising deaf bodies (Bryan and Emery 2014). SLCs have encountered a long history of eugenics (Burke 2011) and currently gene therapy has been introduced to ‘cure’ deafness. An example is the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFEA) 2008, more specifically Section 14(4), which imposes a prohibition to prevent the selection and implantation of embryos for the purpose of creating a child who will be born with a ‘serious disability’ and was passed with the intention to include embryos with a deaf gene (Bryan and Emery 2014; Porter and Smith 2013). Although an international campaign has opposed the law, leading to references to deafness being removed from the explanatory note for clause 14(4), it opened up the question of whether deafness falls within or outside the scope of the term ‘serious disability’. Bryan and Emery (2014) and Kusters et al. (2015) have argued that interventions to remove the ‘deaf gene’ mean a loss of diversity and that there is a need for recognising deaf children’s right to be born. They state that, since they make up a collective minority group, genetic practices to eliminate deafness are in fact moves towards the ultimate elimination of the group. These attempts have been associated with national socialist eugenics and forced sterilisation activities in Germany and Austria against ‘hereditary deaf ’ people and are also documented for other countries like Finland and the US (Biesold 1999; Greenwald 2009; Krausneker and Schalber 2009; Ryan and Schuchman 2000). Faced with these fundamental—even existential—threats, Deaf Studies scholars are beginning to recognise that, instead of arguing against these developments, a more useful response would be to change the frame and take an offensive instead of defensive position. This reframing is meant to be a changing definition of deafness, not as a lack or loss of something but as a ‘Deaf Gain’, a contribution deaf people make to wider society and human diversity in different ways such as biodiversity, linguistic and cultural diversity, and design and architecture (Bauman and Murray 2014).6

Educational Linguistic and Language Acquisition Rights Because of their untraditional transmission patterns, sign languages mainly have to rely on horizontal transmission settings, like deaf schools. These settings have eroded however, because of individual mainstreaming of deaf children following policies aimed towards educational inclusion. In many cases, this mainstreaming means that deaf children are individually placed in regular schools for hearing non-signing children where they often do not receive

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s­upport services such as SLIs or educators with specialised knowledge and appropriate competencies. Deaf-led NGOs have traditionally resisted having deaf children swept under the mandate of full inclusion, seeing individual placements in local schools as linguistically and socially isolating. They argue for a special group right to ensure that the education of deaf children is protected, enabling them to be taught in their own groups, or in separate schools or settings, through the medium of sign bilingualism, and that educational policies should reflect and incorporate SLCs’ histories, epistemologies, and value ­systems (Murray et al. 2016). This group right would be critical to SLCs’ way of life (see also Emery 2011). The resistance SLCs have shown against these isolating and assimilatory policies demonstrates a profound difference between deaf people and other people with (primarily physical) disabilities, who seek the elimination of separate, group-focused education. The issue of what inclusion means for deaf children is a very real one, since the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which includes deaf people, has the right to inclusive education (Article 24) as one of its main premises (Kauppinen and Jokinen 2013; Murray et al. 2018).7 Support for sign language acquisition could come from institutions in the educational field. Those countries that have seen to securing the right of children to learn sign language have often done so by means of an official school curriculum for the national sign language. The curriculum has led to the use of sign languages in deaf schools and has led to the possibility to learn (and live) as a multilingual deaf child. A recent study shows that out of 39 European countries, only 22 have an official school curriculum for their national sign language or for bimodal bilingual education.8 The study asked national experts to estimate whether bimodal bilingual education was well established in their country or not. Statistical analysis showed that in those countries where there are legal foundations (curricula, laws) for the use of the national sign language in schools, bimodal bilingual education is well established, and the same also applies the other way round (Krausneker et al., in press).

The Vitality of Sign Languages Until recently, most sign languages have been the subject of benign neglect in discussions on language endangerment and revitalisation (Nonaka 2014). This is partly due to their resilient nature but also to endangerment discourses, ideologies, and beliefs within both SLCs and external researchers (mostly linguists). For example, a language shift to spoken languages was not seen as a

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relevant factor for sign languages because of the belief that because of their biological difference, deaf people would need to hold on to sign languages throughout their lives. The discourse also assumed that, because public policy still mainly perceives deaf people as disabled, their use of and need for sign language would not be questioned. Until quite recently, concerns over the endangerment of sign languages were thus mainly limited to the context of village sign languages and small territorial sign languages (though cf. Turner 1995a), for which the maintenance-supporting and maintenance-threatening factors are different than for larger, national sign languages (Zeshan and de Vos 2012). Several factors have changed this situation considerably. Primary among these are demographic changes (leading to a decrease in community size), the widespread normalisation of the cochlear implant and the associated monolingual focus on speech, changes in the sociolinguistic ecology of SLCs as a result of technological changes, and the erosion of inter- and intra-­generational transmission settings. This all leads to a changing ideological atmosphere that does increasingly question deaf people’s—and primarily deaf children’s— ‘need’ for sign language. This ideology has been institutionalised by widely read academics (e.g. Knoors and Marschark 2012) and institutions (e.g. Sugar 2016) and has profound influences on the future vitality of sign languages. The concern about this vitality has now come to include long-established sign languages in mainly Western nations, many of which are legally recognised and used by larger communities (see, e.g. McKee 2017 for New Zealand Sign Language). The ‘Cataloguing endangered sign languages’ project has so far indexed 15 sign languages, and all the national sign languages included in the project are labelled ‘vulnerable’.9 There is still discussion among scholars about whether sign languages can be described as endangered languages at all and about the application to sign languages of the concepts developed in the field (see, e.g. De Meulder 2016b; Hoyer 2013; Quer and de Quadros 2015). Indeed, concepts like (reversing/ resisting) language shift, language obsolescence, linguicide, language maintenance, and language (re)vitalisation have primarily been developed for and applied to the situation of spoken languages. Contributing to this scholarly discussion, De Meulder and Murray (2017) state that SLCs need to look at ways in which sign languages can create new generations of users without relying solely on intergenerational transmission in family homes, something which is a current concern for other language minorities and indigenous peoples as well (Albury 2015; Romaine 2006). In this context, they refer to the growing number of hearing new signers as constituting a case of both vitality and endangerment.

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Popularisation and Appropriation of Sign Languages It has been estimated that for every deaf person who uses British Sign Language there are nine hearing people who have some knowledge of the language (Woll and Adam 2012). In many American and some Canadian post-­ secondary contexts, ASL courses have emerged as an increasingly popular foreign-language offering (Goldberg et al. 2015; Snoddon 2016), making it the third most commonly taught language at that level. Sign languages are also gaining popularity on the cultural, artistic, and commercial scene and are being adopted as a research topic by hearing (mostly non-signing) researchers and innovators claiming they can (and need to) solve what they perceive as deaf people’s communication problems, for example, by designing ‘automated translation’ devices or avatars. These attempts are not always welcomed by SLCs. Other developments too are observed somewhat doubtfully by SLCs; for example, the popularity of ‘Baby Signs’, according to which hearing parents and hearing babies learn signs in order for babies to communicate their needs more efficiently and therefore reduce stress (Pizer et al. 2007; Kirk et al. 2013). This popularity of sign languages results in tensions between promotion of ‘heritage’ sign languages (Turner 1999) and loss of ownership and authenticity.10 This plays out in many SLCs, especially in those that have gained some form of recognition. The promotion of sign language to hearing people can open the floodgates to appropriation and alteration of sign languages by non-deaf-driven agendas (cf. the previous examples of the automated translators and the Baby Sign hype). Moreover, this has caught SLCs in an ironic double bind: while their languages are increasingly being popularised and institutionalised, they find themselves becoming increasingly marginalised and medicalised. Research into this means addressing questions of linguistic ownership, linguistic and cultural appropriation, and linguistic prescriptivism and purism (see, e.g. Snoddon 2016).

Research in Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies Sign linguistics as an academic discipline originated in the 1950s and 1960s (Stokoe 1960; Tervoort 1953). For an overview of how the field of sign linguistics has evolved historically, see McBurney (2012) and Napier and Leeson (2016). For overviews of contemporary research topics in sign linguistics, see Baker et  al. (2016), Gertz and Boudreault (2016), and Orfanidou et  al. (2015).

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The birth of sign linguistics led to the emergence of the field of Deaf Studies in the 1970s (see Murray 2017) and was also influenced by the civil rights movement in the USA of the same period. Both sign linguistics and Deaf Studies have historically been and still are mostly led by hearing scholars, who still outnumber deaf academics in these fields (O’Brien and Emery 2014). This discrepancy has to be historically situated; it is linked to the oppression of sign languages in education and the resulting language deprivation which led to generations of deaf people having obtained overall lower levels of formal education in comparison with their hearing peers (Powers et al. 1999). Due to improvements in educational outcomes (e.g. sign bilingual education in some countries and improved access to the national curriculum, sometimes via mainstream education), there are a growing number of deaf scholars within Deaf Studies and sign linguistics. While some approaches to Deaf Studies have defined the field broadly to include the study of anything linked to deaf people, other accounts focus on certain specific strands within the field of Deaf Studies that have been underdeveloped and underfunded in contrast to, for example, theoretical sign linguistics. These areas are built around deaf people’s ontologies (deaf ways of being) and epistemologies (deaf ways of knowing), communities, networks, ideologies, literature, histories, religion, language practices, political practices, and aspirations. Deaf Studies as a research field is currently undergoing innovation, spurred by the gradual increase in the number of Deaf Studies scholars, who are themselves deaf and who start to engage with deaf ontologies and methodological processes, and by a number of new theoretical trends. For an overview of contemporary issues and innovation in Deaf Studies, see Kusters et al. (2017). As a guideline, it has now become an internationally accepted standard that research on sign languages and SLCs should take place with strong involvement of, if not led by, deaf researchers (Harris et al. 2009; Kusters et al. 2017; Ladd et al. 2003), and there has been increasing attention for ethical research practices within sign linguistics and Deaf Studies, with regard to both research implementation and dissemination (Adam 2015a; Leeson et  al. 2017; Singleton et al. 2012, 2014, 2015; Young and Temple 2014). Within development cooperation too, there is growing attention given to power imbalances—not only between hearing and deaf researchers but also between deaf individuals from different backgrounds (Finnish Association of the Deaf and World Federation of the Deaf 2015).11

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Linguistic Rights While the right to language, and thus also sign language, is in itself a human necessity, access to sign language and the right to use sign language is essential for the fulfilment of other basic human rights, such as the right to education, to vote, or to a fair trial. In order to guarantee human rights for SLCs, it is essential to understand the concept of linguistic human rights (Jokinen 2000; Murray 2015; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). For SLCs, these are compromised in many countries, including in those that have legally recognised their sign language(s). Claims to sign language rights (usually educational) have been directly addressed through litigation, for example, through publicised cases in various countries such as the USA (Siegel 2008), Australia (Komesaroff 2007), and Canada (Snoddon 2009). Salient in these day-to-day discriminatory experiences is the lack of professional SLIs. The right to well-trained and adequately paid interpreters is key to full participation of deaf signers. As with so many social responses to the presence of SLCs in society, the emergence of SLIs commonly had its roots in forms of benevolence. These were often situated within the church or related voluntary action or subsequently associated with state-sponsored welfare provision. In both cases, no actual entitlement to an interpreting service, as such, was often in place. Interpreters were minimally trained and were typically the hearing members of signing families (Frishberg 1990). Only as the civil rights shifts initiated in the 1960s took hold did the basis of the ties between interpreters and communities change. The key to a new way of thinking about interpreting was its establishment as an independent profession. The foundation in 1964 of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf in the USA (Fant 1990) marked the initial formalisation of the role as distinct from related fields, and the slow spread of professionalism in the SLI arena has progressed, unevenly but globally, over the succeeding half century (Napier 2011; De Wit 2016). The aim of this process has been to embed the right to secure interpreting provision of reliable quality, scaffolded by ethical assurances of confidentiality, neutrality, and altruism. With progress towards such goals worldwide, SLIs are recognised to be among the more professionally advanced community or public service interpreters in many countries or contexts (Pöchhacker 2016) and indeed have, since 2014, begun to break into the prestigious Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conference (International Association of Conference Interpreters—AIIC). The field of sign language translation is currently undergoing the beginnings

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of a similar professionalisation process, particularly as on-screen signed output starts to become more routinely provided by businesses, services, and charities. In addition, the major role of providers who are themselves deaf starts to prompt re-evaluation of practices, relationships, and service standards (Stone 2009; Turner 2006). The right to interpreting has been enshrined in law differently depending upon cultural and political contexts. On the one hand, improvements in public service interpreting for users of all languages have served to benefit SLCs. Globally, interpreting is even less frequently offered at public expense for family life or democratic participation. The advent of remote SLI availability resulting from advances in digital video telecommunications (Haualand 2014; Turner et al. 2017; Vogler et al. 2011), whilst offering the promise of faster access to services and the removal of geographical limitations upon standards of provision, has also provoked questions about interpreting ethics and relationships with the community (Peterson 2011; Napier et al. 2017). Nuanced negotiation concerning the rights, regulations, and responsibilities of SLCs, interpreters, and others (Turner 1995b, 1996) and the limits of SLI professionalism (Pollitt 1997; Tate and Turner 2002) has gone on for 50 years or more. It is more than clear that the issues of role, positioning, and ethics colouring relevant ideas about interpreting (see overviews in Turner 2005; Napier and Leeson 2016) arise alongside an extraordinarily close— some would say interdependent—type of association between deaf signers and the interpreters with whom they work. The SLI field in general was a relatively early adopter of notions about the necessarily collaborative nature of interpreting process (following Turner’s (1995c) introduction of ‘co-­ construction’ to the triadic model of interpreting). As the implications of this thinking take hold, it becomes clearer that upholding the linguistic rights of SLC members requires considered attention on the part of interpreters. Exercising these rights entails placing a high degree of trust in paid service providers. The need to secure such trusting relationships has led to a growth in ‘designated interpreter’ agreements, whereby deaf people seek to work consistently with a very small number of interpreters with whom they can develop shared knowledge and greater rapport (Hauser et al. 2008). De Meulder (2016b) has argued that for deaf signers, the meaning of language rights and the right to access services in sign language is thus in most, if not all, cases understood and implemented as the right to use a SLI. In contrast with provisions for other language minorities, there is thus no bilingual service delivery; it is merely service delivery in the majority language, mediated through an interpreter. Several reasons cause this situation, first of all the dual category status of deaf signers which means that their

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categorisation in public policy as persons with a disability is automatically seen as justifying their right to interpreting services (or vice versa) (see also Wilson et al. 2012). Wilson et al. (2012) also state that in most EU countries, the status of sign language interpreting is more secure than that of other public service interpreting because the number of deaf people is subject to less dramatic fluctuation, particularly as a result of unpredictable patterns of migration, than the number of users of other community languages. The dual category status of deaf signers also means that their (life-long) right to an interpreter is not questioned, while for other language minorities, public service interpreting has historically been seen as a temporary measure until they have acquired the majority language. Furthermore, the dispersed nature of deaf signers means that it is perceived as economically more efficient to provide interpreters instead of making sure that front-line staff in the public sector are qualified to deliver services directly in the national sign language. Across Europe, very few professionals can communicate directly in sign language or have enough proficiency to deliver services without an interpreter. Deaf professionals in public services like healthcare, social care, the judiciary, and administration are also in short supply. This sole use of interpreters to grant linguistic rights is problematic for several reasons. First of all, the provision of SLIs is inadequate almost everywhere, both in terms of the quality of the provision and in terms of the number of potential interpreters per deaf person. In most countries, there is a serious shortage of SLIs (De Wit 2016), although the number of interpreters per country varies widely. Also, in many countries, interpreting services are underdeveloped or even non-existent in remote localities, which is especially problematic in countries with extensive rural areas. The question of qualified SLIs has become so pressing that the European Parliament recently adopted a resolution on ‘Sign language and professional sign language interpreters’ ­ roviding (November 23, 2016).12 The resolution points out the importance of p accessibility for deaf people through sign language interpretation as well as which measures need to be taken in order to improve the provision of sign language interpretation at EU and national levels. Thirdly, for specific services such as in healthcare, it is crucial to be able to have direct communication with a doctor/counsellor instead of through a third person. Rather than through the sole provision of interpreters, linguistic rights for deaf signers and their demand to access services directly in sign language could be addressed by enabling hearing people, more widely than is currently the case, to learn to sign, for example, by making sign language an optional subject in the national curriculum (see McKee et  al. 2014). It also means to urgently pay attention to the education opportunities of deaf people so they can be educated and provide services to their fellow citizens.

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Self-Representation and Political Participation SLCs started to do international networking and form national groups well before linguistic minorities and people with disabilities did so. Some National Associations of the Deaf were already founded in the early nineteenth century and deaf representatives from all over Europe met annually for a ‘banquet’ in Paris starting in 1834 (Gulliver 2009). The Paris banquet has been termed the ‘birth of a Deaf Nation’ (Mottez 1993: 151). Today, SLCs worldwide feature a high level of self-organisation and self-­ representation on different levels, from the local to the national and international, although as yet they have no formal representation in most state bodies (with the possible exception of sign language planning bodies, see De Meulder and Murray 2017) and do not have the same level of collective political self-­ determination as some indigenous groups have. SLCs thus have to organise themselves politically from within the mainstream political system. There are currently several deaf Members of the European Parliament, several deaf Members of national Parliaments, and several deaf representatives at the regional or local level (for the linguistic, cultural, and attitudinal barriers they experience see Turner and Napier 2014). Currently, 133 National Associations of the Deaf are members of the WFD. WFD was founded in 1951 and is by self-definition ‘one of the oldest international organisations of persons with disabilities in the world’.13 It was vital in bringing the language perspective into the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities while it was being drafted (Kauppinen and Jokinen 2013; Murray et al. 2018). WFD is a self-representation body that makes an effort to keeping links to academia, and its policy papers, recommendations, fact sheets, guidelines, and statements present a valuable resource and basis for any starting researcher.

Conclusion These are turbulent times for SLCs, and the way in which they—and majority representatives—respond to pressures and opportunities will play a decisive role in the quality of their future existence. Because of social and political threats, including strong tendencies towards medical normalisation, it remains urgent that SLCs receive attention from the relevant national and international authorities. Neither the legal recognition of their languages nor handling SLCs within a disability framework only can accommodate their cultural-linguistic situation. SLCs are vigilant and remain outspoken in dealing with potential challenges.

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Notes 1. Many statements in this chapter concern SLCs all over the world. Some information is written with a focus on Western countries (Europe/North America/ Australia), such as  the  discussion of  the  legal status of  sign languages and the description of threats to and opportunities for SLCs. 2. Woll and Ladd (2003) use variables such as the societal attitudes towards deaf people and sign language, the size of deaf communities, and the availability of life choices to them in the majority society. This approach produces three general identification groups: oppositional (majority society’s negative attitude towards sign language reducing the availability of life choices), integrated (majority society supportive and life choices mostly available), and single (where everyone can sign or understand signing and life choices are the same for anyone). 3. www.ethnologue.com/ethnoblog/ted-bergman/why-are-sign-languagesincluded-ethnologue 4. https://wfdeaf.org/whoarewe 5. http://helgastevens.eu/userfiles/files/20160921%20Programme%20 FULL%20Print.pdf 6. For a critique on the concept of Deaf Gain, see Kusters et al. (2015). 7. For an analysis and discussion of the CRPD’s impact on deaf people, see Batterbury (2012), De Meulder (2014), and Kusters et al. (2015). 8. See www.univie.ac.at/map-designbilingual/?l=en 9. www.uclan.ac.uk/research/explore/projects/sign_languages_in_unesco_ atlas_of_world_languages_in_danger.php 10. See also Novic (2016). 11. www.slwmanual.info 12. www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+ MOTION+B8-2016-­1241+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN 13. https://wfdeaf.org/about-us/history/

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Murray, J.  J. (2015). Linguistic Human Rights Discourse in Deaf Community Activism. Sign Language Studies, 15(4), 379–410. Murray, J. J. (2017). Academic and Community Interactions in the Formation of Deaf Studies in the United States. In A. Kusters, M. De Meulder, & D. O’Brien (Eds.), Innovations in Deaf Studies: The Role of Deaf Scholars (pp. 77–100). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, J., Kraus, K., Down, E., Adam, R., Snoddon, K., & Napoli, D. J. (2016). WFD Position Paper on the Language Rights of Deaf Children. World Federation of the Deaf. https://wfdeaf.org/news/resources/wfd-position-paper-on-the-language-rights-of-deaf-children-7-september-2016/. Accessed 17 Oct 2017. Murray, J.J., De Meulder, M., & le Maire, D. (2018). An Education in Sign Language as a Human Right? An Analysis of the Legislative History and On-Going Interpretation of Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Human Rights Quarterly, 40, 37–60. Napier, J.  (2011). Signed Language Interpreting. In K.  Windle & K.  Malmkjaer (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (pp. 353–372). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Napier, J., & Leeson, L. (2016). Sign Language in Action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Napier, J., Skinner, R., & Turner, G. H. (2017). “Its Good for Them But Not for Me”: Inside the Interpreter’s Call Centre. International Journal of Translation & Interpreting Research, 9(2), 1–23. Nonaka, A. M. (2014). (Almost) Everyone Here Spoke Ban Khor Sign Language— Until They Started Using TSL: Language Shift and Endangerment of a Thai Village Sign Language. Language & Communication, 38, 54–72. Novic, S. (2016). Sign of the Times. https://www.guernicamag.com/sara-novic-signof-the-times/. Accessed 17 Oct 2017. Nyst, V. A. S. (2012). Shared Sign Languages. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach, & B. Woll (Eds.), Sign Language: An International Handbook (pp. 552–574). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. O’Rourke, B., Pujolar, J., & Ramallo, F. (2015). New Speakers of Minority Languages: The Challenging Opportunity  – Foreword. International Journal of Sociology of Language, (231), 1–20. O’Brien, D., & Emery, S. (2014). The Role of the Intellectual in Minority Group Studies: Reflections on Deaf Studies in Social and Political Contexts. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(1), 27–36. Orfanidou, E., Woll, B., & Morgan, G. (Eds.). (2015). Research Methods in Sign Language Studies. A Practical Guide. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Peterson, R. (2011). Profession in Pentimento. In B. Nicodemus & L. Swabey (Eds.), Advances in Interpreting Research: Inquiry and Action (pp. 199–223). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pietikäinen, S., Jaffe, A., Kelly-Holmes, H., & Coupland, N. (2016). Sociolinguistics from the Periphery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part III Migration, Settlement, Mobility

9 Changing Perspectives on Language Maintenance and Shift in Transnational Settings: From Settlement to Mobility Anne Pauwels

Introduction The most common language situation around the world is one that involves or has arisen out of language contact. After all, mobility—voluntary or forced—has long been a common trait of human behaviour. History is strewn with multiple examples of large migratory movements that have been key factors in the spread of many languages and dialects and that have given rise to various forms of language contact. The outcomes of language contact are also diverse: they include the emergence of short-lived contact varieties as well as pidgins and creoles. Sometimes the contact has given rise to the formation of a new language. Other outcomes resulting from language contact could be described as more dramatic: they involve the loss, obsolescence, or even death of one or more languages in the contact situation. This scenario is faced by a large and ever-increasing number of languages around the world, as documented on the Ethnologue database. Language shift (LS) is another common outcome of language contact. This term is usually reserved for contact situations where one language is abandoned in favour of another language without the former being at risk of obsolescence as it is still being used elsewhere. Migrant and refugee groups are the most likely candidates being confronted

A. Pauwels (*) School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, SOAS, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_9

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with the phenomenon of LS. Such communities take their language(s) with them when moving to a new linguistic environment in which they plan or are forced to settle. However, in this new environment, their language or languages face(s) competition from the local language(s), possibly leading to the migrant community shifting away from the use of its own language(s) to that or those of the local (often dominant) speech community. LS can also occur in communities that are or have become minorities in a state or polity, not so much as a consequence of ‘migration’ but of political changes (e.g., invasion, annexation, new state formation). The term LS is particularly applicable when the language in question is losing ground in one state but not in another; hence, the consequence is not language death because the language survives elsewhere. The situation of Basque in France and Spain provides an example of such a situation. In this chapter, the discussion around issues of language maintenance (LM) and LS focuses on the former context, that is, the one often referred to as a migrant, transnational, or even diasporic setting.1 It comprises a brief history of the field, covering its emergence, development, and expansion during the twentieth century. This is followed by an overview of the main types of approaches investigating the processes of LM and LS, as well as the theories put forward to understand such processes and account for differences in the language practices of various ethnolinguistic groups. This overview pertains mainly to approaches practised in the pre-twenty-first-century period. The final section moves beyond the twentieth century and focuses on how globalisation has significantly altered what constitutes ‘migration’. Rather than seeing it primarily as a process resulting in ‘permanent’ (re)settlement in another location, migration increasingly results in ongoing mobility. Such changes are likely to affect language practices in diaspora contexts, sometimes quite drastically, which may entail a rethinking of what constitutes LM or LS and how LM can be practised in such situations. A final preliminary comment relates to the nomenclature surrounding the languages of transnational minorities. These languages have attracted numerous names including ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’, ‘transplanted’, ‘ethnic’, ‘transnational’, ‘community’, ‘minority’, ‘diasporic’, and ‘heritage’. Each of these terms has particular histories that have been critiqued and have thus given way to other terms. While recognising the dialectics surrounding this kind of terminology, I have opted for the use of the term ‘heritage language’, mainly because of its widespread currency, at least in Anglophone studies.

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 esearching Language Maintenance and Shift R in Transnational Settings: A Brief History The mass exodus from Europe to North America, and later to Australia and New Zealand, in the aftermath of the two world wars has arguably been the main trigger for dedicated studies on LM and LS. Millions of people chose or were forced to leave their homelands and settle elsewhere, mainly in the Anglophone parts of the ‘new world’. This mass movement arguably gave rise to unprecedented language contact scenarios that rapidly became fruitful ‘real-life’ laboratories for studying language contact. The initial focus of work produced by pioneer scholars such as Einar Haugen and the Weinreichs (father Max and son Uriel) and Nils Hasselmo centred on the linguistic phenomena arising in such contact situations: as linguists, their primary interest was on describing how the language of the new environment—English— affected the immigrants’ languages. Haugen did this for Norwegian (Haugen 1938, 1953), Max Weinreich focused on Yiddish (1932), and his son Uriel Weinreich expanded this to a plethora of languages in his seminal text Languages in Contact (Weinreich 1953; for a detailed discussion of their legacy, see Katz, this volume). Hasselmo (1961) undertook a detailed study of how English influenced the Swedish spoken by Swedish immigrants to the United States. In Australia, Clyne’s early work Transference and Triggering (Clyne 1967) documented how German was influenced by English. Although the early work of these scholars also contained some comments on questions of LM and LS, it is the work of Joshua Fishman that not only launched the field of LM and LS research in migrant settings but also shaped it for many decades. Fishman’s (1964) paper ‘Language maintenance and language shift as a field of enquiry’, followed by his book on the sociology of language (Fishman 1972), set the parameters for the study of LM and LS by identifying the key concepts and tools of analysis that continue to be central in studies of maintenance and shift to this day. Foremost among these is the question to guide all studies of LM and LS: ‘Who speaks what language to whom and when?’ and the concept ‘domain of language use’. Although Fishman cannot be credited with its creation—that honour goes to Schmidt-Rohr (1932)—it is his work that ensured its widespread use in research focused on understanding how LS proceeds and how it can possibly be reversed. It is undeniable that Fishman’s seminal oeuvre on LM and LS had and continues to have a tremendous impact on the focus, approach, and methodology of thousands of LM and LS studies undertaken on many transnational communities around the world. Another important figure in the early development of LM and LS

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studies is Heinz Kloss (1966). Based on the findings of his research into the language behaviour of German immigrants to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he identified and categorised a list of factors that were instrumental in understanding how and why different migrant (ethnolinguistic) communities managed to maintain their home/ heritage language or not. He labelled factors that contributed unequivocally to either LM or LS as ‘clear-cut’ and those that could influence the process either way as ‘ambivalent’. Clear-cut factors included: 1. the separation of the group from the ‘mainstream’ population on socio-­ religious grounds; 2. the group’s early arrival into the new territory (i.e., slightly before or concurrently with the ‘dominant’ group); 3. the existence of linguistic enclaves in the territory; 4. the group’s association with a denomination that maintained parochial schools; 5. the group’s experience with LM before migration. While these factors may have been clearly supportive of LM in the scenario that Kloss researched, they were not always clear-cut in other migrant settings. Clyne (1979, 1982), for example, tested the ‘clear-cut’ nature of these factors among migrant groups in Australia and found that factor (2) only supported LM if it was combined with factor (3). Furthermore, factors (4) and (5) turned out to be ambivalent factors in the Australian migrant context. Kloss’ list of ambivalent factors included (1) the numerical strength of the group, (2) the group’s cultural and linguistic similarity with the dominant group, (3) the dominant group’s attitude towards the migrant group and its language, and finally, (4) socio-cultural characteristics—a factor that was left rather undefined. Despite the significant shortcomings of these factors in understanding the dynamics of LM or LS, they, nevertheless, became the starting point for a multitude of studies that ‘tested’ these in other settings or that tried to identify other factors influential in LM or LS patterns. For example, several researchers have identified ‘exogamy’ as a factor clearly contributing to LS (e.g., Castonguay 1982; Pauwels 1985; Robinson 1989), while others have investigated factors such as gender and language variety spoken by the group or family constellation (e.g., nuclear or extended family), with most findings confirming their ambivalent status (for a detailed overview, see Pauwels 2016a; see also Katz, this volume). While most early LM studies were conducted on immigrant groups in the United States, Australian studies did not lag far behind. Clyne’s (1967) pioneering study of German-Australian language

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c­ ontact built upon Weinreich’s and Hasselmo’s linguistic work of immigrant language contact and on Haugen’s and Kloss’ work on LM. During the next decade, investigations of the LM efforts and LS processes of Australian immigrant groups rapidly expanded, culminating in a vast body of studies on almost all ethnolinguistic groups that had settled in Australia since the Second World War (e.g., Clyne 1982,1991; Horvath and Vaughn 1991; Rubino 2010 for overviews). In Canada, the analysis of the 1971 census data on language use (de Vries and Vallée 1980) was one of the earliest studies examining a range of socio-demographic factors that influenced LM and LS in Canada’s immigrant population. Although early work by Canadian scholars also included studies of LM in specific communities (e.g., Reitz and Ashton 1980, see also Cummins and Danesi 1990; Jedwab 2000; Pendakur 1990 for overviews), their major role lay in the development of a demolinguistic approach to LM and LS studies. In New Zealand, another major recipient of post-war immigrants, dedicated research on immigrant LM and LS started somewhat later—in the late 1980s and early 1990s—and has been described as (still) relatively sparse (Holmes 1993). In Europe, Great Britain was at the forefront of immigrant language studies. This is not necessarily surprising as its colonial past and subsequent decolonisation had led to former colonial ‘subjects’ settling in Britain. The ‘other languages of England’ project undertaken by the Linguistic Minorities team (LMP 1985) was the first large-scale study of Asian as well as South and Eastern European migrants’ language patterns. Continental Europe followed suit somewhat later: Dutch, German, and Nordic scholars (e.g., Extra 1990 for the Netherlands; Pfaff 1991 for Germany and Boyd 1985 and, Boyd and Latomaa 1996 for Sweden) started examining language issues mainly affecting a new type of migrants to Northwestern Europe, the so-called guest workers (German Gastarbeiter). Mainly originating from Southern Europe, the Mahgreb, and Turkey, these workers were brought (temporarily) to the northwestern region to address largely unskilled labour shortages. At the start of the new millennium, such studies were conducted in all parts of Europe as a consequence of new migration waves from outside Europe and changes in EU policy regarding freedom of movement within Europe—the Maastricht Treaty 1992—leading to greater internal mobility (Extra and Gorter 2001; Extra and Verhoeven 1993;  Extra and Yağmur 2004). Although these regions and continents continue to dominate LM and LS studies involving transnational populations, South America is also home to many post-war European migrants who have become the subject of academic research (e.g., Kanazawa and Loveday 1988; Williams 1991). In Africa, studies of immigrant LM tend to focus on South Africa, given its multi-ethnic immigrant population including individuals from other African

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countries, Europe and South and East Asia. Although much of Asia is exposed to intra-continental and intra-national migration, studies of LM and LS are of a much more recent nature there, possibly because the main focus has been on documenting threatened (endangered) indigenous languages or on the impact of colonial languages on local language dynamics. Although the early frameworks of analysis and methods guiding the study of immigrant LM and LS continue to shape new studies, other approaches, both from within the social study of language and from associated disciplines (e.g., anthropology, social psychology, education), came to influence how LM studies were carried out during the latter half of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-­ first century. Next, I review the more widespread approaches that have shaped and continue to shape immigrant LM studies.

 ey Approaches to the Study of LM and LS K in Migrant Settings The development and expansion of any discipline or field of study tend to bring about methodological and theoretical changes and innovations. Insights from early work lead to new approaches and different methods and often result in new subfields being created. Developments in related fields also impact on the evolution of research. The study of LM and LS is no exception. It is indebted to many related fields of language study, including areal and/or geolinguistics, multilingualism, and contact linguistics, to name but a few. It has also drawn upon the concepts, methods, and theoretical frameworks of other disciplines, most notably sociology, psychology, and anthropology, in an attempt to study and understand the phenomena of LM and LS. Here, I focus on the models, approaches, and frameworks that have dominated the study of LM and LS during the twentieth century. Of course, a number of other models have been developed, and I refer the reader to Clyne (2003), Fishman and García (2010/2011), Goebel et al. (1996), and Heller (2007) for more details.

The Sociology of Language The sociology of language approach arguably dominated in the earlier decades of the field and continues to be a key approach to this day, at least in structuralist-­oriented studies. This approach centres around the examination of domain-specific language use patterns in a given ethnolinguistic community or across such communities guided by the question: ‘Who speaks what

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Table 9.1  Stages of reversing language shift Severity of intergenerational dislocation (Read from the bottom up) 1. Education, work sphere, mass media, and governmental operations at higher and nationwide levels 2. Local/regional mass media and governmental services 3. Local/regional (i.e., non-neighbourhood) work sphere, among both Xmen and Ymen 4. b. Public schools for Xish children, offering some instruction via Xish, but substantially under Yish curricular and staffing control   a. Schools in lieu of compulsory education and substantially under Xish curricular and staffing control II RLS to transcend diglossia, subsequent to its attainment 5. Schools for literacy acquisition, for the old and for the young, and not in lieu of compulsory education 6. The intergenerational and demographically concentrated home–family– neighbourhood: the basis for mother tongue transmission 7. Cultural interaction in Xish primarily involving the community-based older generation 8. Reconstructing Xish and adult acquisition of XSL I RLS to attain diglossia (assuming prior ideological clarification) Source: Fishman (1991: 395)

language, to whom, and when?’ This information is largely obtained through surveys by means of questionnaires and then subjected to a quantitative analysis. However, these questionnaire data are often complemented by interviews with a sample of the participant body. The aim is not only to locate the settings but also to identify the interlocutors who remain most resistant to LS. Furthermore, socio-demographic features of these individuals such as age, gender, marital status, education, ethnicity, and religious affiliation are examined to understand their possible impact on the process of LM or LS. Thus, the domain-based examinations assist in identifying ‘strongholds’ or key domains for the maintenance of the heritage language, as well as those that are susceptible to the ‘intrusion’ of the dominant or majority language. The analysis of socio-demographic factors and related features helps explain differential rates of LM or LS not only within a group but also across communities. Both sets of data are then used to make prognoses about the group or community’s chances of maintaining the heritage language or about to assess how advanced the process of LS is. A prime example of this is Fishman’s (1991) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, known as GIDS, that helps a community to identify how far along the path to LS (in case of language death) it has moved and what kind of actions (LM efforts) would be needed to keep it going.2

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Linguistic Demography Another approach closely associated with the sociology of language that relies entirely on quantitative data and analyses is linguistic demography. While the former approach tends to concentrate on examining LM or LS in a specific community or group, the latter has a much more macro-level focus, using data on language(s) from censuses or other large-scale surveys to understand the dynamics of LM or LS across a region and/or country. Despite the many weaknesses of such data for the study of LM (for a detailed analysis, see Pauwels 2016a), they are nevertheless a valuable resource for charting language use and behaviour, for example, across a wide range of years, generations, and ethnolinguistic groups. As census surveys collect a massive amount of personal data from the entire population (usually excepting those aged under three or five years old) of a country or region, the language data can be cross-tabulated not only with this wealth of personal information but also with geographic data, for example, by postcodes, council or borough units, villages or cities, or other administrative regions in which individuals reside. It may reveal areas with high/low concentrations of specific ethnolinguistic groups and, conversely, it can show that some groups have a high level of geographic dispersion. Analysing the data across census surveys can give insight into changes in settlement patterns and how these affect language use. Prime and detailed examples of this kind of work include de Vries and Vallée’s analysis (1980) of the 1971 Canadian census (also de Vries 1994) and Clyne and colleagues’ analyses of four consecutive Australian census surveys between 1976 and 2006 (e.g., Clyne 1982,1991, 2005; Clyne and Kipp 1997, 2002; Kipp et al. 1995; Kipp and Clyne 2003). Many other scholars (for detailed references, see Pauwels 2016a) have analysed census-derived language data to complement their more specific LM examinations, for example, of a particular ethnolinguistic group or a particular factor in the process of LM and LS.

Social Network in LM Research Sociolinguistic studies of social variation within a specific language together with linguistic anthropological studies started to have an impact on LM and LS research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Gal’s (1979) study of LS in bilingual Oberwart, Austria, and Milroy’s work on (English) language variation in Belfast (1980) highlighted the importance of social networks in shaping and explaining linguistic behaviour. Within the field of LM and LS research, the idea of social network was seen by some as a less abstract

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concept than domain, thus allowing for a more refined insight into language choices and practices. Employing the typical tools of qualitative research— participant observation, interviews, field observation, and notes—the social network approach is particularly helpful in understanding language dynamics from the individual’s perspective. It examines the types of networks (e.g., dense, uniplex, multiplex) individuals establish and maintain with others in a neighbourhood, small community, or similar settings. Strong and dense network ties were identified by Milroy (1980) as a mechanism for norm maintenance, leading individuals to adopt or maintain specific speech features. Conversely, Granovetter (1983) showed that people with weak ties tend to act as conduits for change and innovation. Transposed to an immigrant context, this would equate to LM being stronger among individuals who operate largely within networks in which the heritage language is still used regularly, whereas the individuals less involved in such networks could become ‘agents’ of LS. Although the volume of studies that have adopted the social network approach is not (yet) as extensive as those within the sociology of language mould, more studies are paying attention to the role of social networks in the dynamics of immigrant LM and LS (e.g., Cashman 2003; Gonzalez 2012; Hulsen et al. 2002; Lanza and Svendsen 2007; Li Wei 1994; Rubino 2014; Stoessel 2002).

Social Psychology of Language: Ethnolinguistic Vitality The social psychology of language approach made its entry into the study of immigrant LM via studies focusing on minority language settings in Europe (specifically Wales, e.g., Giles 1973) and on the Anglo-French language situation in Canada (e.g., Bourhis and Giles 1977). Its impact on immigrant LM research lies mainly in the approach’s emphasis on considering the study of language attitudes as central to understanding language use and language choices. Although others (e.g., Kloss 1966; Fishman et al. 1966; Clyne 1979) had identified the relevance of exploring language attitudes, questions of attitude were seldom examined with the same vigour that social psychologists devoted to the study. The latter researchers developed not only detailed surveys to measure language attitudes but also devised the matched-guise technique (MGT) to clearly distinguish between attitudes towards language and attitudes towards the speakers of a specific language (Lambert et  al. 1960). Although a range of attitudinal surveys and some MGT studies (e.g., Bettoni and Gibbons 1988; Callan and Gallois 1982) found evidence that negative attitudes towards the heritage language (held by either the migrant

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­ opulation or the majority) adversely affected LM, the status of this ‘factor’ p continues to be ambivalent rather than clear-cut. More influential was and is their work on a group’s ethnolinguistic vitality, a concept developed to predict whether members of the group will continue to use the heritage language or not. Ethnolinguistic vitality is described as ‘…that which makes a group behave as a distinctive and active collective entity in intergroup relations’ (Giles et al. 1977: 308). A group that has low vitality in such settings is more likely to disintegrate, and thus also to abandon, its language, whereas groups displaying strong vitality are better placed to maintain their identity and language. Earlier versions of this theory identified a set of structural variables—status, demography, and institutional support—that shape ethnolinguistic vitality. In later work, Bourhis et  al. (1981) recognised the importance of the group’s own assessment of its vitality. They revised their theory to comprise both the original structural variables, labelling them objective ethnolinguistic vitality, and the group’s own views and assessments, labelled as subjective vitality. This led to the claim that groups that rank high on both sets of vitality will maintain or be in a better position to maintain their heritage language.

Language as a Core Value Perhaps less widely known in immigrant language studies around the world are studies by J.J.  Smolicz, an Australian sociologist whose work was inspired by the humanistic sociology approach associated with the Polish sociologist Znaniecki. Smolicz and his colleagues (e.g., Smolicz 1980, 1981, 1991; Smolicz and Secombe 1985; Smolicz et al. 2001) drew upon diverse sets of data including questionnaires, diaries, interviews, and census data to study language use among immigrants in Australia. Not unlike the social psychological approach, Smolicz’s approach also focused on the group rather than the individual to understand patterns of language use and choice. Based on his Australian investigations, he developed the notion of ‘core value’: this referred to ‘those values that are regarded as forming the most fundamental components or heartland of a group’s culture, and act as identifying values which are symbolic of the group and its membership’ (Smolicz and Secombe 1985: 11). If language belongs to this fundamental—indeed, core—set of values, then a group’s distinctive identity is closely associated with the maintenance of its language. Potential loss of its language will thus jeopardise the group’s identity. Such groups are, therefore, more motivated to maintain their language than groups for which language

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has a more peripheral status. Smolicz and colleagues found evidence for this theory in language use and attitudes among a range of migrant groups in Australia.

Critical Appraisals of These Approaches Not unexpectedly, these approaches and theories have been submitted to critical assessment exposing their limitations, weaknesses, or flaws. For example, the limitations of linguistic demography are regularly pointed out by those using them as well as those avoiding them for LM research (e.g., Pauwels 2016a). The main weaknesses concern question formulation about language use, the operationalisation of relevant factors such as race/ethnicity/birthplace/ancestry, and restrictive processing of language data (i.e., the limit in the total number of languages processed for the population as well as per individual). For the sociology of language approach, its view of ‘language as a whole, bounded system that is associated with whole, bounded communities’ (Heller 2007: 11) has come under particular scrutiny, as it severely restricts our understanding of the complexity of language choices in bi- or multilingual settings (see also Blommaert and Rampton 2011). With regard to the social network approach, criticism has been directed at the concept itself: its construction as an independent dimension of social organisations (Martin-­ Jones 1989) or as a closed system (e.g., Bourdieu 1991) that does not take account of changes in socio-economic or political conditions or ideologies. Furthermore, the claim that strong and dense networks create ‘ideal’ conditions for LM has been weakened by studies that show little or no link between such networks and LM (e.g., Clyne 2003; Govindasamy and Nambiar 2003). The theories of ethnolinguistic vitality and of core value have come under more severe criticism, with scholars highlighting flawed specifications in the concept(s) (e.g., Husband and Saifullah Khan 1982; Clyne 1988), restricted applicability (e.g., Clyne 1991), or a lack of accounting for key historical or structural variables (e.g., Tollefson 1991). Rebuttals of the criticisms and of alleged flaws were particularly strong for the theory of ethnolinguistic vitality, although its creators also took on board some of the criticisms to refine and revise the theory (e.g., Johnson et al. 1983; Ehala 2010). Despite various flaws and limitations, these approaches continue to be used to examine the language choices and practices of migrants and their offspring in a number of transnational contexts. However, in the final section of this chapter, I explore whether these approaches are ‘fit for purpose’ to deal with questions of LM and LS in the new linguistic constellations arising out of new forms of migration and mobility.

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F rom Migration and Settlement to Mobility: Implications for the Study of LM Globalisation has become a major, if not the major, reference point for discussing the need to revisit and revise a multitude of concepts and frameworks that study human behaviour, including language and communication. Particularly pertinent to studies of LM and LS are the changes in patterns of population movement brought about by globalisation.

From Migration to Mobility Studies The expanding influence of globalisation forces has both been brought about by and led to significant changes in the movement of people around the world: put simply, more people move more often for more reasons to more places around the globe. Long-standing triggers for individual and mass movements such as warfare, religious and other forms of persecution, economic hardship, natural disasters, or adventure seeking have been complemented by newer ones including educational exigencies or opportunities, tourism, and employment practices. The latter impetuses have added not only a significant number of people to transnational movements but also led to an increase in short(er)-term mobility. Another factor that has led to the transformation of global mobility is a change in policies allowing or restricting greater or even free movement of people transnationally. While some countries or federations have facilitated the easy or free movement of people in their jurisdictions (e.g., the EU’s Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the Schengen agreement), others have strengthened border controls to limit (il)legal movement into or across their territories. The results of this transformation in global mobility include a much greater number of people ‘on the move’ on a permanent or long-term basis, either because they do not need or desire to settle or because they are prevented from (re)settlement. These developments have also impacted on the study of social relations, moving away from seeing proximity as the primary locus for studying such relations to adopting a perspective that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries, with a focus on real and virtual mobility (e.g., the creation of the mobilities paradigm, Urry 2000, 2007, also Cresswell 2006). This change in paradigm also affects the way in which migration is perceived: migration is not primarily viewed as a process of movement by a group or individual from one ‘stable’ location to another ‘stable’ or ‘long-term’ location; rather, long-term (re)settlement becomes just one of multiple possible outcomes of migration.

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Impact on LM and LS Changing global mobility patterns inevitably influence language issues. Many countries around the world have witnessed a sharp and steady increase in the linguistic diversity of their population. This increase is particularly noticeable in western(ised) urban environments. Although cities have always been prime locales of multilingualism, in terms of both the number of languages found among the residents and the number of bi- and multilingual speakers, globalisation has led to what some have labelled ‘superdiversity’ (Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Vertovec 2007), ‘metrolingualism’ (Otsui and Pennycook 2010), or ‘linguistic hyperdiversity’ (Pauwels 2014). This entails not only the presence of a growing number of languages and multilingual speakers in cities but also (relatively) rapid changes in the languages and speakers that impact on the urban linguistic landscape. The emergence of linguistic landscape study (e.g., Backhaus 2007; Gorter 2013; Gorter et al. 2011; Landry and Bourhis 1997; Shohamy and Gorter 2009) has assisted in documenting both the visual aspects of linguistic diversity and the rapid changes therein. In the past, it may have taken decades for a specific city, neighbourhood, or street to change its linguistic image, whereas these days such changes occur within a couple of years, sometimes even months. Furthermore, the growing body of urban multilingualism studies (e.g., Block 2005; Extra and Yağmur 2004; García and Fishman 2002; King and Carson 2016; Rampton 2006) testifies to these changes. Apart from the more traditional scenarios of linguistic changes, such as the entry of new languages into the city’s ‘langscape’ either adding to or supplanting older ones and new speakers joining existing heritage language communities, such studies have also revealed a multitude of complex language practices associated with many ‘newer’ arrivals whose language repertoires include various languages or language varieties in which they have different levels of proficiency. The greater presence of people with such multilingual repertoires can be traced to the increase in the diversity of global movement. Besides migrants who grew up in multilingual environments (e.g., from sub-Saharan Africa), there are now many more people whose life trajectory has brought them in contact with other languages: refugees who are spending considerable amounts of time in ‘international’ refugee camps who pick up fragments of languages along the way; citizens, especially those of the EU, who move between countries in search of employment opportunities; international aid workers; employees of multinational companies; and legal and illegal border crossers, to name but a few categories. Although some develop advanced competence in some or all of their languages, the majority

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display ‘truncated’ forms of multilingualism (Blommaert 2010) or fractured linguistic repertoires, relying heavily on language mixing and switching to communicate in their new environments. While some decide or are allowed to settle long term in another location, many more continue their voluntary or imposed mobility, requiring new language skills. Although there have always been such people, global mobility has led to an exponential increase in their numbers. These individuals’ linguistic profiles have become the subjects of an increasing number of case studies documenting the complexity and fluidity of their linguistic situation and trajectory (e.g., Blommaert 2010; Duran 2013; Haque 2011; Pauwels 2016a, b; Sharples 2017). By way of illustration, let us now turn to extracts from a case study of the members of a Vietnamese refugee family whose forced and voluntary mobility led them to live and work in France, England, Australia, and Sweden, resulting in linguistic repertoires that include Vietnamese, English, French, Swedish, and Berber (for a detailed description, see Pauwels 2016a). Their linguistic profiles and practices pose considerable challenges to examining questions of LM or LS within the ‘dominant’ frameworks. Some of these challenges include (1) an inability or unwillingness of individuals to identify one language as one’s native, first, or heritage language; (2) language choices that defy clear associations with domains, interlocutors, and social networks; and (3) occasional or even regular changes in the languages that make up one’s linguistic repertoire. The following extract from exchanges with Birgit illustrates these points. Birgit is a young ‘third-generation’ Swedish-Vietnamese woman whose father ‘migrated’ to Paris, France, as a young child and later moved to Sweden and married a ‘second-generation’ Vietnamese-Swedish woman: I am a person who speaks some languages and I will probably add some more in the course of my life. I’ll probably continue using my home languages with my family and friends and I would like my children if I have them to also be multilingual but not necessarily with the same languages. As to Vietnamese: I consider Vietnamese as one of my languages but it has no special status in my life. At home we speak a mixture of Swedish, Vietnamese and some French. Sometimes I’ll use the three in the same conversation with my dad – he likes speaking French as his Swedish is not so good but my mother prefers to speak Swedish or Vietnamese. […] I think that in our family our main way of talking to each other is by using bits and pieces of our languages. I think that’s pretty normal for our type of families.

The other second- and third-generation members of this Vietnamese family display similar views: they identify as multilingual without special ‘allegiance’

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to Vietnamese. There is also evidence of LM: these generations transmit and continue to use Vietnamese but also the other languages that their (grand) parents brought into the family as a result of their forced and voluntary mobility (Berber, French, English, and Swedish). The complexity and the fluidity of their language practices are not easily captured by the concepts associated with the dominant frameworks—domain, social network, even community of practice. This issue has frequently been raised by those engaging in post-­ structuralist studies of multilingualism (e.g., Aronin and Singleton 2008; Blommaert 2010; Gardner and Martin-Jones 2012; Heller 2007; Lähteenmäki et al. 2011; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Martin-Jones et al. 2012). There is no doubt that the ‘tools’, methods, and concepts aligned with, or emerging from, post-structuralist approaches are well-suited to the documentation of this linguistic superdiversity, mobility, and fluidity occurring primarily at the micro-level. These studies have provided, among other things, detailed insights into the dynamics of individual language use and have exposed the ‘myth’ of multilingual repertoires consisting of full-fledged ‘standard’ languages among other varieties. Understandably, given its focus on the micro-level, the macro-­ perspective on questions of LM and LS has received limited attention. Nevertheless, the latter perspective continues to be relevant, as these ‘new’ forms of multilingualism and linguistic fluidity are located in nation-states that still espouse linguistic ideologies grounded in nationalism that continue to recognise languages as bounded entities and assign speakers to designated ethnolinguistic groups (with or without rights). In fact, recent world events and political developments in many nation-states seem to have generated an upsurge in ideologies that foreground the notion of ‘one nation-one language’, potentially leading to a return of anti-multilingualism views (excepting elite multilingualism). In such environments, there is a need for both micro- and macro-level studies detailing the language practices and views of these multilingual individuals. Yet, it has been shown that some of the key concepts associated with the macro-level approaches are not well suited to capturing the new linguistic realities, profiles, and practices and are thus in need of adjustment. This is best done from within the field (i.e., macro studies), albeit through an interaction with other fields studying multilingualism (e.g., Blommaert 2016; Darquennes 2014). In this ‘reshaping’ process, particular attention needs to be paid to the relationship between identity and language(s) and between language and group membership. In relation to the former, case studies have shown that many participants assign multilingual identities to themselves without privileging the ‘heritage’ language. When it comes to the link between language and group membership, there is no indication that a specific language is equated with being a member of an ethnic/cultural group.

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For Birgit, the Swedish-born daughter of a Vietnamese-French father and a Vietnamese-Swedish mother, being ethnically Vietnamese is not primarily expressed through use of Vietnamese: it can be through Swedish or French or any combination of the languages in her repertoire. If such views are more widespread among people with multilingual profiles, then the organisation of LM efforts along ethnic group or ethnolinguistic community lines is unlikely to be relevant, if not futile. Yet, it is the efforts of such communities that have contributed significantly to the maintenance of heritage languages in transnational settings. An important task in this reshaping exercise will be to investigate how the presence of this ‘new’ type of multilingual individual affects the role of community-based initiatives for LM. Whatever the outcomes of these field-reshaping efforts will be, they are likely to lead to a different interpretation of what constitutes LM and LS. In Pauwels (2016a: 183–184), I made an initial suggestion that ‘… rather than seeing LS as a process of (gradual or rapid) shift from one language to another language, we may conceive of it as a gradual reduction in the multilingual nature of a person’s or group’s language repertoire or language practices’ and that ‘LM could be conceived as the maintenance of a multilingual repertoire even if the languages or codes upon which the individual or group draws change’.

Notes 1. Although terms like ‘transnational’, ‘migrant’, and ‘diasporic’ have different historical contexts and hence are not equivalent, I will be using these here synonymously. 2. The GIDS is not the only framework or model developed to ‘predict’ LS (see Pauwels 2016a for other models) and has not escaped critical appraisals (e.g., Clyne 2003; Williams 2007).

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Martin-Jones, M., Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (Eds.). (2012). The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Milroy, L. (1980). Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Otsui, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, Fluidity and Language in Flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240–254. Pauwels, A. (1985). The Role of Mixed Marriages in Language Shift in the Dutch Community. In M.  Clyne (Ed.), Australia. Meeting Place of Languages (1st ed., pp. 39–55). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, ANU. Pauwels, A. (2014). Rethinking the Learning of Languages in the Context of Globalization and Hyperlingualism. In D.  Abendroth-Timmer & E.  Henning (Eds.), Plurilingualism and Multiliteracies: International Research on Identity Construction in Language Education (1st ed., pp. 41–56). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Pauwels, A. (2016a). Language Maintenance and Shift. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pauwels, A. (2016b, September). Superdiversity, Globalisation and Heritage Language Maintenance: Challenges and Opportunities in 21st Century Europe. Plenary Paper Presented at the International Conference of Applied Linguistics, Vilnius University. Pendakur, R. (1990). Speaking in Tongues: Heritage Language Maintenance and Transfer in Canada. Ottawa: Policy and Research, Multiculturalism Sector. Pfaff, C. (1991). Turkish in Contact with German: Language Maintenance and Loss among Immigrant Children in Berlin (West). International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 90, 97–129. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reitz, J. G., & Ashton, M. A. (1980). Ukrainian Language and Identity Retention in Urban Canada. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 12(2), 33–54. Robinson, P.  A. (1989). French Mother Tongue Transmission in Mixed Mother Tongue Families. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 14(3), 317–334. Rubino, A. (2010). Multilingualism in Australia: Reflections on Current and Future Research Trends. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 33(2), 17.1–17.21. Rubino, A. (2014). Trilingual Talk in Sicilian-Australian Families. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmidt-Rohr, G. (1932). Die Sprache als Bildnerin der Völker. [Language as Educator of Peoples]. Jena: Eugen DiederichsVerlag. Sharples, R. (2017). Local Practice, Translocal People: Conflicting Identities in the Multilingual Classroom. Language and Education, 31(2), 169–183. Shohamy, E., & Gorter, D. (Eds.). (2009). Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery. New York: Routledge. Smolicz, J.  J. (1980). Language as a Core Value of Culture. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(1), 1–13.

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Smolicz, J. J. (1981). Core Values and Cultural Identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4, 78–90. Smolicz, J. J. (1991). Language Core Values in a Multicultural Setting: An Australian Experience. International Review of Education, 37(1), 33–52. Smolicz, J.  J., & Secombe, M. (1985). Community Languages, Core Values and Cultural Maintenance: The Australian Experience with Special Reference to Greek, Latvian and Polish Groups. In M. Clyne (Ed.), Australia: Meeting Place of Languages (pp. 11–38). Canberra: Department of Linguistics, RsPACS, ANU. Smolicz, J. J., Secombe, M., & Hudson, D. (2001). Family Collectivism and Minority Languages as Core Values Among Ethnic Groups in Australia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 22(2), 152–172. Stoessel, S. (2002). Investigating the Role of Social Networks in Language Maintenance and Shift. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 153, 93–131. Tollefson, J. (1991). Language Planning, Planning Inequality. London: Longman. Urry, J. (2000). Sociology Beyond Societies. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vertovec, S. (2007). Superdiversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30, 1024–1054. Wei, L. (1994). Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family. Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Weinreich, M. (1932). Tsveyshprakhikayt: Mutershprakh un tsveyte shprakh. [Bilingualism: Mother Tongue and Second Language]. YIVO Bleter, 1, 301–316. Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in Contact. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York. Williams, G. (1991). Welsh in Patagonia: The State and Ethnic Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Williams, G. (2007). Reversing Language Shift – A Sociological Visit. In J. Darquennes (Ed.), Contact Linguistics and Language Minorities/Kontaktlinguistik und Sprachminderheiten/Linguistique de contact et minorities linguistiques (1st ed., pp. 161–177). Asgard: St. Augustin.

10 Arctic Languages in Canada in the Age of Globalization Donna Patrick

Introduction Canada’s Arctic region is home to many Indigenous peoples and languages. It is also a region undergoing rapid social, physical, and ecological change. While such change has characterized this part of the world over the past 400 years of European expansion, changes in the late twentieth century have been even more rapid and intense, accelerating colonization, industrialization, and environmental degradation. These changes have also deepened ­concerns about human and animal health and increased flows of goods, languages, knowledge, capital, pollutants, and people (McGrew 1992), leading Indigenous peoples to engage with all of these developments (Watt-Cloutier 2015). In particular, global warming and the rapid rise of communication networks, scientific technologies, and extractive resource industries have been shaping the Arctic and its peoples as never before. This chapter investigates the language contexts of the Inuit, an Indigenous people in Canada’s North, and the dynamic multilingual communities in which Inuit languages and their revitalization figure prominently. This dynamism is reflected in a wide range of multilingual language practices, which have been shaped by rapid social and environmental change. Nevertheless, despite the legacy of contact with English and, to a lesser extent, French, both D. Patrick (*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_10

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hegemonic on regional and global scales, Arctic languages remain, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (Moseley 2010), among the most viable in Canada. So, the focus here is on the following questions: • What has created this dynamic language context and what continues to shape it? • In what ways are Inuit languages endangered and how have Inuit been working to counter these trends by working with the technologies, political arenas, and institutions now at their disposal? • How do the interests of Inuit language speakers mesh with Inuit political and economic interests to further Inuit autonomy and jurisdictional control over their territories? The answers to be offered to these questions point to Inuit as active agents who continue to maintain and shape these language contexts through everyday interactions with the land, human actors, and the political, institutional, and other spheres that have opened up through globalization. The context for examining Arctic languages in Canada is that of the Arctic region itself. This region has particular geopolitical significance, despite its small population; this is largely because of the global forces that have impacted Indigenous relations on national, regional, and local levels and have been interacting with local ecologies, peoples, institutions, and policy development. For example, the rapid onset of modernization in the late twentieth century has brought with it the “time-space compression” experienced by Arctic communities (among others) and the increased speed in which people, objects, natural resources, information, ideas, financial transactions, and other things move (Giddens 2003). Speakers of Arctic languages have experienced numerous effects of modernization and global forces, including mandatory schooling, forced settlement, and the introduction of governance structures, among other forms of institutionalization. These changes have also meant greater exposure to, and the perceived need to speak, more English in most of the region. For the most part, however, Inuit languages have managed to persist across time and space—as demonstrated, for example, in the bi- and multilingualism of many Inuit, particularly in the Eastern Arctic region. Language use is linked to local economies (or ways of making a living), cultural practices (or ways of life), and families, churches, schools, governments, and other institutional arrangements, all of which lead to perceptible social and linguistic transformations of everyday life. Any sociolinguistic and policy analysis of these languages thus

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needs to be rooted in the historical and social conditions that underpin language endangerment. As we see, language issues do not operate outside of the larger systems of power or beyond the “accelerated flows or intensified connections” or “[the] disconnections, exclusion, marginalization and dispossession” of people, homelands, and resources in the age of globalization (Edelman and Haugerud 2007, p. 97). These connections and disconnections—and the interconnectedness of global communication—are especially relevant to Arctic languages and homelands. Situating Arctic languages within a social and political context calls for a multipronged approach, which considers not only various local, regional, national, and global conditions at different moments in time but also broader sociohistorical processes of knowledge production that have shaped how we conceptualize, count, value, and talk about endangered languages. Such an approach will help to shed light on minority languages and communities on the (geographical, political, and economic) global periphery—which, ironically, are nonetheless at the center of both environmental and other global changes and the actions to counter such changes. Accordingly, the next section “Language Varieties and Indigenous Communities in the Arctic,” describes the different languages spoken in the Arctic and this linguistic context in general, including the challenges that Inuit face regarding the languages they use in their daily lives. The third section “The Social and Political Context of Arctic Languages,” examines ongoing social and political processes at the national and international levels that have shaped Inuit political and policy responses to Arctic languages. The fourth section “Inuit Language Policy and Politics in a Changing North,” examines these responses in light of the economic, political, and environmental transformations in the Arctic. The fifth section “Arctic Languages and Multilingualism in Local Contexts,” turns to some of the sociolinguistic literature related to Inuit languages. The sixth section “Language Revitalization, Teaching, and Learning in Mobile Contexts,” explores the effects of local and global transformations on the movement of information, language, people, ideas, and objects, especially as these relate language revitalization projects and the migration of members of Arctic communities to the cities of southern Canada. In contributing to this multipronged approach, each section provides a survey of the literature on the subject. The final concluding section considers some future directions for research. Note that in describing these Arctic languages, their use, and the political and legal actions that have shaped their speakers’ practices, I use the term “small languages”—rather than “Arctic minority languages.” This follows the

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practice of certain sociolinguists (e.g. Dorian 1995, p. 129) who use “small language” to highlight the precariousness of languages with relatively small population bases. Moreover, unlike the term “minority languages,” it does not carry various policy, legal, and categorization implications that are often inconsistent with such small languages (Dorian 2014; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). As it happens, for Inuit languages in Canada, the term “minority language” is an especially awkward fit, since these are spoken by the majority of Arctic residents and, as with other Indigenous languages in Canada, have rights associated with them that are specific to the country’s historical Indigenous-state relations.

L anguage Varieties and Indigenous Communities in the Arctic Before I turn to my main topic of Arctic languages in Canada, it might be useful to review some geographical and geopolitical facts about the broader Arctic region itself. This region, also referred to as the Circumpolar North, comprises the Arctic Ocean and the northern tips of the continents that surround it. Although “no country will ever ‘own’ the north pole” (Byers 2014, p. 112), a number of countries are vying for access to sea routes for transporting both goods and tourists,1 as well as the oil, gas, and mineral deposits that have been opening up as a result of rapidly melting sea ice. These emerging sea routes are among the obvious impacts of global warming on the land and the peoples living there (Watt-Cloutier 2015). These impacts include political, economic, environmental, social, and linguistic transformations affecting the peoples who call the Arctic home. Internationally, there have been ongoing negotiations over environmental regulations for industrial pollution,2 including mining and other extractive industries, and over control of the continental sea beds and, thus, potential oil and gas exploration.3 Such developments inevitably have implications for Indigenous peoples, given the interest that they signal in Canada and elsewhere in an increasing presence for multinational corporations pursuing non-renewable resource extraction in the region. An important concomitant of these developments for Inuit and other Arctic peoples is that proficiency in English as a global language, especially by bilingual brokers who can maneuver in both Western and Indigenous worlds, has never seemed so important. This linguistic fact represents the many challenges facing Inuit and other Arctic peoples in maintaining their languages as global warming and the influx of n ­ ewcomers

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brought in by extractive and other industries imperil these peoples’ hunting economies and cultural practices. In 1996, in response both to these global concerns and to changes facing the Arctic especially, the Arctic Council was formed to represent the interests of the eight Arctic states4 with respect to environmental protection and sustainable development. There are six Indigenous Permanent Participants on the Arctic Council, reflecting the range of circumpolar linguistic and cultural diversity. These Permanent Participants, who support Indigenous interests in the Arctic, include representatives of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), the Saami Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON), the Gwich’in Council International (GCI), the Arctic Athabaskan Council (AAC), and the Aleut International Association (AIA). For the purposes of this chapter, I limit my discussion to Arctic Inuit languages spoken in Canada, which are supported by the ICC. The ICC represents some 160,000 Inuit, from the Chukotka Peninsula in the Russian Far East, across Alaska and Canada, to Greenland (Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada 2016). The Indigenous languages spoken by these peoples are part of the larger Eskimo-Aleut language family, which links northern languages of Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this language family received a great deal of attention from linguists. This resulted in the production of a number of comparative studies as well as speculation on the origins or proto-languages of this family and on the migrations of the peoples who spoke them (see Dorais 2010, pp. 89ff.). As regards the latter, researchers have compared archaeological records with linguistic research using comparative methods. This work has led some linguists to claim that the original speakers of these languages lived in what is now west-central Alaska some 4500 years ago (Dorais 2010), or even earlier, given available records of human habitation in the area. Various migrations followed to the Aleutian Islands, for one branch of the family, and in various waves eastward, across the Arctic, for others. Ancestors of present-­ day Inuit language-speaking peoples originated from a migration from northern Alaska, estimated to have occurred about 800 to 1000 years ago. These ancestors, the Thule people (or “Neo-Eskimo” culture), developed technologies, including seal-skin boats and hunting tools, that increased their mobility and travel efficiency, allowing them to traverse vast distances across the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland, and into northern Quebec and Labrador. As Dorais (2010, p. 97) notes, this migration had a significant impact on the Inuit language, allowing it to “spread over the entire North American Arctic without losing its basic grammatical and lexical unity.”

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Despite such linguistic unity, there is still considerable diversity among the Inuit languages in this vast geographical region, which constitutes over 40% of Canada’s land mass. Although Canada’s Inuit population is relatively small, with roughly 60,000 members, there are 53 communities spread across Inuit Nunangat (“the place where Inuit live”) (Simon 2014).5 These communities are situated across four vast land-claim areas (see Map 1)—the Inuvialuit region (in the Yukon and Northwest Territories), Nunavut, Nunavik (Arctic Quebec), and Nunatsiavut (Labrador) (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2018)—and represent two main language groups, western Canadian Inuktun and Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. These two language groups are, in turn, divided into a number of “dialects” and “sub-dialects.” According to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley 2010),6 these constitute 11 distinct Inuit language varieties, although some researchers have identified over 20 distinct varieties (Dorais 2010, pp. 28–29) (Fig. 10.1). For sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, the tasks of determining what counts as a separate language and, in turn, what counts as an endangered

Fig. 10.1  Map of the four Inuit land-claim regions in Canada. (Source: Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami)

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one have for some time been recognized as difficult and contentious (see Muehlmann 2012 for an overview of relevant discussion).7 In particular, the construction of boundaries between language varieties has long been acknowledged as arbitrary, historical, and ideological, involving the commonly held belief that languages are separate and bounde4d entities (see e.g. Freeland and Patrick 2004; Duchêne and Heller 2007; Urla 1993). Also long acknowledged is the existence of continua of language varieties, created through the historical movements of peoples and goods that have been constrained by physical, political, and social conditions. Moreover, in our modern and literate era, one variety may gain more power than others through standardization—or through “the homogenization and institutionalization of one variety over others” (Muehlmann 2012, p. 164; see also Mühlhäusler 1996). How one language variety is distinguished from another and how it is or is not granted the status of a distinct language are assessments central to the field of endangered language study. For Indigenous as well as other small languages, the process of choosing (or constructing) a given variety as the standard or dominant one has become a common part of language promotion, text production, teaching, and other forms of revitalization. Yet, the circumstances under which language varieties or dialects are designated as distinct languages are as much political as they are linguistic. Thus, while a local way of speaking—including the vocabulary, meanings, and grammatical structures associated with particular place-based practices—may well be deemed worthy of promotion, other varieties may actually come to be promoted, often in opposition to widely held beliefs about the importance of local languages, their continued use, and their need for greater institutional support. Languages at risk are designated as such because of the risk of their replacement by other, more dominant languages. As just noted, ideas about what language varieties are worth supporting and maintaining through institutional, policy, and other initiatives are supported by the same ideological assumptions about languages in general: that they are bounded units (or at least relatively stable systems) and that some languages are more powerful— that is, have greater political, economic, and institutional support—than others. These are among the linguistic realities that Inuit face, where bilingualism, especially among younger speakers, is on the rise, along with access to electronic media and to more culturally and economically powerful languages. Globalization and greater communication, educational, and economic opportunities have all increased pressure on Inuit to enhance their education systems to improve student outcomes and to prepare for the global transformations discussed earlier. These challenges are discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

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 he Social and Political Context of Arctic T Languages Inuit have experienced a long history of encounters with Europeans, including imperial powers and colonial agents. In fact, engagement with colonial trading empires, proselytizing missionaries, government agents, transnational corporations, and various political ideologies and legal regimes have characterized Inuit life for generations. However, as the global political-economic terrain has shifted, so too has the relationship between Inuit and the Canadian state. Officially formed about 150  years ago as a settler state, Canada was founded under a political-legal regime based on particular political-legal ontologies—that is, particular assumptions about the truth and nature of the laws and politics of governance—that served to justify the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This legal order included two legal doctrines: the “Doctrine of Discovery,” whereby European Christians could claim lands from those who were not subjects of a European Christian monarch, and the legal doctrine of “terra nullius” (literally “land of no one”), whereby territory not belonging to any particular nation or monarch was land not possessed by anyone. Of course, from Indigenous perspectives, the territory in question had already been settled long before the arrival of Europeans and belonged, and still belongs, to Indigenous peoples (Turner 2006; Ladner and Dick 2008). Canada was also founded under a process of treaty-making with Indigenous peoples that was initiated in the seventeenth century “to secure favourable trading relationships and acquire land, as demanded by international law” and “to create and maintain trading, political, and military relations with … Indigenous nations” (Ladner and Dick 2008, p. 65). To a certain extent, the process of acquiring lands and rights to resource extraction and of maintaining political relationships continues today in the form of modern land claims, including those pertaining to the four Arctic regions, Inuit Nunangat, referred to in the previous section. Significantly, the seventeenth-century treaties just mentioned were effectively nation-to-nation agreements, and this understanding of them is the basis of the modern relationship between First Nations—that is, those previously referred to as “Indians”—and the Canadian state. However, treaties signed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not understood in this way but were instead seen as a mechanism to displace Indigenous groups from their traditional territories and to confine them to reserve lands. In other words, the reserve system, instigated by the colonial administration in the

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mid-nineteenth century, involved “disconnecting Indigenous peoples from their lands” and administering the reserve lands as notable “spaces of exception and elimination” apart from colonial settlers (Tomiak 2017, p. 929). The 1876 Indian Act entrenched this reserve-making policy in Canadian law, along with laws about who was legally defined as “Indian,” effectively accelerating the twin processes of treaty-making and reserve creation across western Canada (Miller 2000; Lawrence 2004). Clearly, these colonial processes of identification and space-making are basic to the history of First Nations communities. What is important to note, though, is that a second Indigenous group in Canada, the Inuit, were largely separated from these processes. Indeed, the Inuit have long been recognized as a group distinct from the First Nations in Canada and are differentiated from both the First Nations and Métis, a third Indigenous group in Canada,8 in the Constitution Act, 1982, Canada’s central constitutional document. (The three groups, however, are all identified in this document under the umbrella term “Aboriginal peoples of Canada.”) In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the period of (primarily) European settlement in the more southerly regions of Canada, there was little desire among settlers, aside from a small number of traders and proselytizers, to venture into the far northern lands of the Inuit. (As it happens, the traders and proselytizers who did settle in the Arctic played a key role in the creation of Inuit settlements in the mid-twentieth century.) This substantial lack of interest among settlers in northern territories accordingly meant that Inuit (until the 1970s, commonly referred to as “Eskimos”) and their lands were not a government priority, even though “Indians” and the lands reserved for them had been identified as a responsibility of the federal government in Canada’s original constitutional document, the British North America Act of 1867. In fact, the question of whether Inuit should be treated legally as “Indians” did not arise until the matter was referred to the Supreme Court of Canada in Reference Re Eskimos (1939). The court’s decision in that case affirmed the position of the province of Quebec that the well-being of Inuit was indeed a federal rather than a provincial matter. In this respect, then, the Inuit were like “Indians”; however, in most others, they were not— and, in particular, were not subject to the (paternalistic and invasive) terms of the Indian Act (Backhouse 1999).9 The low demand of the settler state for Arctic lands, however, changed rapidly after the Second World War. The Arctic’s strategic importance for military purposes, the region’s potential for mining, fishing, and other resource activities, and the situation of the region’s Inuit inhabitants—in particular, the fact that they still lived on the land, did not attend schools, and were in

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need of food and medical attention—heightened federal attention to the Arctic and its peoples. Colonization efforts accelerated in the North; in a manner similar to that of the First Nations and Métis in the rest of Canada, many Inuit children were sent to residential schools. These schools, which operated from the 1840s to 1996, with most closing in the 1960s and 1970s, represent a very dark chapter in Canada’s history. These caused profound and lasting harm to generations of Indigenous peoples across Canada, given their overtly assimilationist goals and the frequent physical and sexual abuse of Indigenous children that occurred in many of them (Barman 1986; Chrisjohn and Young 1997; Milloy 1999). Although Inuit children were not sent to residential schools until well into the twentieth century, the kinds of personal, collective, and intergenerational impacts experienced by First Nations and Métis communities likewise affected many Inuit communities. As it happens, it was not the case, especially in the Eastern Arctic, that every Inuit child was sent away for schooling; moreover, as noted in Watt-Cloutier (2015), some who were sent away went to live with southern families or went to residential schools only as teenagers. Many Inuit children were nevertheless separated at a young age from their families and communities and placed into a foreign environment where they were either forbidden or had no opportunity to use their first language. Such experiences took their toll on Inuit communities across the North and in particular on the transmission of languages from one generation to the next. The conditions in residential schools attended by Inuit and other Indigenous students were brought to broader public attention in the 1990s, through the 1991–96 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). Lawsuits against the federal government soon followed, seeking restitution for the abuse suffered by children in the schools. These suits resulted in financial compensation and an official federal government apology in 2008. Settlement of these disputes also included the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which, from 2009 to 2015, carried out a mandate to document the incidents that had occurred in residential schools and to convey this information to the Canadian public (Regan 2011; Coulthard 2014). Following the release of the TRC’s final report, Calls to Action,10 in 2016, action has been taken across the country to find ways to implement the report’s 94 recommendations. These recommendations include implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Both the national Calls to Action and the international UNDRIP call for a strengthening and revitalization of Indigenous languages and for Indigenous community control over education. Together, these two key documents continue to shape the discourse and politics of Indigenous languages in Canada.

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Of further note at the national level is the recommendation—number 13 in the TRC Calls to Action—that Aboriginal rights, as recognized in the Constitution Act, 1982, be recognized to include Aboriginal language rights.11 This recommendation, also made by the Aboriginal Language Task Force (2003–05), follows from over 50 years of reports, lobbying, and Indigenous activism seeking the recognition of Indigenous language rights. What also emerges from these efforts is the need for greater funding for language teaching and education, arguably on par with that allocated for French and English minority-language instruction (Haque and Patrick 2015; Patrick 2007). Moreover, very recent federal government promises to enact legislation that would help to maintain and promote Indigenous languages, as part of efforts to resolve Indigenous language issues in Canada, are by no means new ones (Patrick 2016).12 The milestones in Indigenous-state relations described earlier form part of the political and social context necessary for an adequate understanding of the development and implementation of Arctic language policy in Canada. This context is particularly important, given the key role that language plays in education, identity, politics, and livelihoods—a role that has perhaps never been greater. In order, then, to gain a fuller appreciation of contemporary developments in the promotion, maintenance, and revitalization of Arctic languages, we need to look back on the international, national, and regional shaping of Arctic language policy since the 1960s.

Inuit Language Policy and Politics in a Changing North The history of Inuit language and education policies is a long one, reflecting different phases of Inuit encounters with colonial, political, and institutional realities. Inuit actions have arisen in a specific social and political context, some of which were described earlier. These actions can be fruitfully seen as situated within larger social and political discourses, where the latter are understood in the Foucauldian sense—that is, where language and ideologies construct relations of power that constrain and shape the work of social actors. Inuit have a substantial history of pragmatic political engagement (Kuptana 2014; Patrick et al. 2017a) and “have taken the initiative in connecting wider developments in law and politics to specific issues of sovereignty and governance” (Simon 2014, p. 183). In this section, we look more closely at these and, in particular, at Inuit engagement with language politics discourses locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.

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Simon (2014) describes three domains where political opportunities opened up for Inuit at the national level in the 1960s and 1970s. The first domain was the courts, where a number of landmark court cases on Aboriginal rights and title to land initiated the land-claim process. The second was the domain of Canadian constitutional reform, where the results included a new constitutional document that recognized various individual and minority rights. The third domain was that of Arctic affairs, which had historically been “removed from mainstream political focus” and from some of the “barriers to political change” (Simon 2014, p.  179). As noted earlier, this domain was shaped by the fact that Inuit-occupied lands were not considered desirable by southern capitalist or settler interests until the latter half of the twentieth century; before then, little political attention was paid to them. However, each of these three domains, or political spaces, came to assume importance in Inuit action. This action included the negotiation of four land claims between 1975 and 2005 and the spearheading of a drive for Inuit control of both education and language policy. In addition to this action at the national level, Inuit also engaged with a number of international discourses, as related to the notion of peoplehood (having a distinct language and culture), self-determination, and rights, all of which have shaped the linkages between language, politics, and education in groundbreaking ways. The history of Inuit language policy in education arguably began in ­northern Québec—a region previously known as Nouveau-Québec (“New Québec”) and now as Nunavik—with the signing of the 1975 James Bay and northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA), a massive land claim.13 Comprising 14 Inuit settlements, Nunavik is under Québec and federal jurisdiction, with a unique relationship with both levels of government as a result of the JBNQA (Watt-Cloutier 2015). Inuit residing within the borders of Québec have encountered a unique political context. In this province, the implementation of French-language education for Inuit, a task with which the Direction Générale du Nouveau-­ Québec (DGNQ) was mandated in 1963, was seen as one way to assert Québec’s sovereignty and control over its northern region. The introduction of French-language education in the region turned out, however, to have a surprising result. In 1964, during a meeting with the DGNQ in a Nouveau-­ Québec village, an Inuk man took the floor and “asked on behalf of the community if the proposed new provincial school would teach his children in Inuktitut” (Diveky 1992, p. 2, cited in Patrick and Shearwood 1999, p. 256). According to a teacher present at this meeting, the answer, after some deliberation, was “yes, the provincial schools would provide instruction in Inuktitut for the children” (ibid.). The first teacher-training course for Inuit thus began

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in 1967, with Québec assuming full jurisdiction over education in Nunavik in 1969. This relatively early start to Inuit teacher training and curriculum development led directly to Nunavik Inuit gaining control of their education system in 1978 after the signing of the JBNQA.14 The idea of teaching children in their own, Indigenous, language was not unique to the Inuit of northern Québec, who were responding to the impulses of Québec nationalism. Internationally, a process of decolonization had been underway since after the Second World War, and part of this process was an increased interest in vernacular language education (Patrick and Shearwood 1999, p. 252). In 1950, the UNESCO convened a meeting of experts, who recommended that: the use of the mother tongue be extended to as late a stage in education as possible. In particular, pupils should begin their schooling through the medium of the mother tongue, because they understand it best and because to begin their school life in the mother tongue will make the break between home and school as small as possible. (UNESCO 1953, p. 48)

The global circulation of discourses on vernacular and other human rights might have reached the Arctic via those involved in education, including missionaries involved in schooling at the time (see Patrick and Shearwood 1999, p. 253). What might have also spurred Québec’s actions was Greenland’s use of Inuit languages in education since the mid-1800s and its establishment of a teachers’ college as early as 1841 (Hobart and Brant 1966). Indigenous language education had also already begun in Mexico in the 1940s and been adopted as national policy by 1964 (Modiano 1973, p. 89). All of these developments can be seen as a groundswell of support for Indigenous education, which ultimately led to UNESCO’s championing of a vernacular education model. In Nunavik, the Kativik School Board was established in 1978 as a consequence of the JBNQA. The school board’s partnering with McGill University to certify Inuit teachers (Cram 1985) and its development of an Inuktitut curriculum led to a program of Inuktitut-medium instruction for the first three years of schooling, which has continued to this day. This program became a model for Nunavut, the largely Inuit territory to the north of Nunavik, which achieved Inuit-majority control over a new territory with the signing of the 1993 Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (NLCA). While such initiatives were groundbreaking in their day, achieving satisfactory educational outcomes for Inuit in Québec and across the Arctic has remained a challenge (Watt-Cloutier 2015).15 In light of this, the Government

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of Nunavut has placed a substantial emphasis on language and education policy, as reflected in its Official Languages Act and the Inuit Language Protection Act (2008), a language policy plan (2012) to coordinate government language programs and services and an ongoing standardization project (Cloutier 2013; Palluq-Cloutier 2014; Patrick et al. 2017a). These initiatives follow the recommendations of Berger (2006), a report intended to advance implementation of the Nunavut land claim’s language-related provisions. Among this report’s recommendations was for Inuktitut-medium education to be increased beyond grades 2 or 3, as a way to increase Inuit employment in the Nunavut public service.16 One consequence of the report is that Nunavut now recognizes as official languages of the territory not only English and French but also Inuktut (a cover term introduced in Nunavut in 2007 for the Inuit language varieties spoken across the Canadian Arctic). Other key developments in the promotion of Inuktut in Nunavut are the recognition in the Official Languages Act of the right of Inuit to use the language in the Nunavut legislature, courts, tribunals, and the “head or central service offices” in the territory and the recognition in the Inuit Language Protection Act of the right of Inuit to use Inuktut in government workplaces to receive “essential,” “household, residential or hospitality,” and other services in Inuktut, and to have their children receive instruction in this language. This language legislation gave rise to the 2012 policy document Uqausivut, which offers a comprehensive plan to coordinate various government language programs and services.17 More recently, a language standardization process has been initiated by Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the national organization of Inuit in Canada. In August 2015, the ITK hosted a language summit in Iqaluit, Nunavut, on the “unification” of the Inuit writing system. This was part of a series of community consultations whose goal was to establish a common writing system for Inuktut, in order to replace with a single Roman system the nine different systems, based on either Roman or syllabic scripts, that are currently in use across the Arctic.18 Driving this effort has been the desire to share texts across the Arctic and to increase the availability of written resources for Inuit—seen as necessary to maintain and broaden Inuit language use to increase Inuktut-­ medium education from kindergarten to grade 12 (Patrick et  al. 2017a).19 Various aspects of the new writing system are still being discussed and consulted on, although its implementation is anticipated to begin in 2019. In all of these recent efforts—legislation, policies, and processes to strengthen, protect, unify, and further institutionalize Arctic languages— Inuit have been the driving force. They have drawn strategically on regional, national, and international discourses of language rights and on particular

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approaches to language politics, policymaking, and rights recognition to address language endangerment in the changing Arctic. In the next section, I examine in more detail what is at stake at the local level, as well as the links between language, identity, and Inuitness (or ways of living as Inuit) in an era of increasing mobility and globalization.

 rctic Languages and Multilingualism in Local A Contexts An examination of the broader context of language politics leaves open the question of what is happening at the local level—in the domain of sociolinguistic interaction, identity formation, and current and future language use. With increasing multilingualism in the Arctic at both individual and societal levels, the hegemonic role of English as a national and global colonizing language has gained prominence in Inuit communities in both spoken and written forms (Dorais and Sammons 2000, 2002; Hot 2008; 2012; Tulloch 2004; Shearwood 2001). In addition, as at other multilingual sites, language mixing is on the rise, particularly in larger multilingual centers; this has created new dynamic forms of language use and ways of speaking, which invite further investigation (Dorais 2012). Yet, questions also remain about the attachment of Inuit language speakers to their language, about the persistence of hunting and other traditional activities and the language use associated with these, and about the roles that language politics and policy—in education, the workplace, and the public sphere—might play in connecting with the desire of Inuit to maintain Inuktut cultural and linguistic practices and the everyday practices that help them to do so. Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, offers an interesting local context in which to consider these issues, given both its diversity and its growing population. According to the 2016 census, the population grew 15.5% between 2011 and 2016, to roughly 7750 people. Of this population, some 60% are Inuit, 6% French-speaking, and the rest English-speaking from elsewhere in Canada and other countries (Hot 2008, p. 122). In such an environment, English is spoken widely and maintains a dominant position, given its role in the workplace, its accessibility through electronic media and popular culture (internet, television, music), and its status as the primary language of communication between Inuit and non-Inuit (Dorais 2012). Yet, as noted in Dorais and Sammons (2002) and Dorais (2012), Inuktitut (as spoken in the Eastern Nunavut region) has continued to be a strong marker of Inuit identity and is still used in contexts with other Inuit speakers and as a means to identify

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oneself as Inuk. And it continues to play an important role in local and regional political arenas, where many still expect Inuit leaders to speak Inuktitut in order to be considered legitimate (or genuine) Inuit (Dorais 2012, p. 41). One very concerning development, however, is the reported increase of English among young people, who speak more English than Inuktut once they enter school. This switch to English is found not only in the school environment but also in interactions between peers outside of school; moreover, this use of English appears to be having a detrimental effect on oral as well as written Inuktut language performance. While Inuktut is still widely used in many households, especially those with young children, English is more dominant outside of the home and becomes more dominant as children age (Dorais and Sammons 2002, p. 63). Dorais (2012, p. 42) also points to his own research findings from 2006, according to which (younger) Inuit increasingly use English or a mixed English-Inuktut variety when conversing about modern life. Arguably, these findings would need to be tested further—in particular, through long-term ethnographic data collection and analysis— before a clear sociolinguistic picture can emerge about what is happening. However, Dorais’s findings reflect those of other, earlier research. For example, Tulloch (2004, p. 133) reports on a questionnaire-based study that she conducted on the linguistic practices of young Inuit in Iqaluit, which found that almost half of the participants (47.5% or 38/80 respondents) indicated that they found it easier to communicate in English than in Inuktitut. This might suggest that English is taking hold in larger, multilingual communities, where (1) the school system is still dominated by English, used as the main language of instruction after grade 3; (2) the number of mixed (Inuit and non-Inuit) households is increasing, which would mean that an increasing number of children are being raised with more English in the home; and (3) where English is a draw culturally, politically, economically, and affectively and seen in particular as more worldly and globally connected. A key takeaway of these observations, but one in need of confirmation through further research, is that such forces can lead to greater bilingualism among younger speakers, who, in becoming more dominant in English, are creating new, mixed forms of language use. Further research might reveal what these new language forms look like—and also how schools in the region might respond to the emerging forces of Inuktut, English, and (especially in Nunavik) French and of peer-­ based languages of interaction. It is notable, though, that these findings do not apply across the Eastern Arctic. In smaller Nunavut communities such as those studied by Tulloch (2004), including Pangnirtung and Pond Inlet (where Tulloch’s sample sizes  were 22 and 25, respectively), younger speakers’ bilingualism was not

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­ ominated by English, and Inuktut remained an important language of peer d ­interaction (p. 134). Dorais (2012) makes the same observation, particularly with respect to smaller Nunavik communities such as Quaqtaq (a place where Dorais’s years of ethnographic work have drawn on strong relationships with members of this community). These findings might indicate that in these communities, Inuktut enjoys considerable stability as a language of social reproduction—that is, as a language that continues to be passed from parents to children, leading to relatively stable forms of bilingualism, which are associated with stable social relations and with Inuit identities linked to the Inuktut language. Nevertheless, the finding that English has become dominant in Iqaluit and in other multilingual communities such as Kuujjuarapik, Nunavik (Patrick 2003; Dorais 2012) seems to provide strong evidence of the need for the language policy and political initiatives being advanced in Nunavut, which seek to extend Inuktut-medium education until the end of grade 12. To be sure, many key challenges remain in implementing Indigenous-­ language-­medium education as a way to address the increasing sociolinguistic dominance of English. Not least is the financial burden of teacher training and professional and curriculum development. Other challenges include the (re)marginalization of certain Arctic languages that will accompany the anticipated introduction of a standard form of Inuktut, despite the benefits of a standard form in easing the institutional implementation of the language and in increasing Inuktut literacy and text production. These challenges, in other words, involve the question of how to provide institutional support for bilingualism that does not, at the same time, undermine the production and continued use of certain “smaller” oral and written forms of Inuit languages. As Muehlmann (2012, p. 164) notes, there has been little concern among linguists and others for “endangered dialects—that is, particular varieties of language whose status is threatened by other encroaching varieties of the same language,” despite a great concern globally with language endangerment, including the endangerment of Arctic languages themselves. This, then, is one of the key tensions that exist in the ongoing process of Inuktut language unification. Easing this tension will require heeding calls for continued support of local ways of speaking and writing, while still addressing the need for a standard, “teachable,” and technologically accessible variety of Inuktut—one, in other words, that does not “belong” to any one community of speakers and makes use of a simple writing system suitable for word processing programs and text messaging. A language variety that fulfills these conditions has the potential to become the vehicle for Inuit to use their own

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languages within their own institutions and thereby a force for increasing Inuit employment in these institutions. The introduction of both a standard writing system and a standard form of Inuktut text production is seen as a necessary first step toward this goal of greater linguistic autonomy. However, the acceptance and implementation of both across the vast Arctic territories are not without challenges. These challenges, then, represent another site for further investigation, which would involve not only documenting the unique Inuit-driven process of language unification across Inuit Nunangat but also tracing how this unification comes to be implemented. This would, in particular, involve conducting the necessary research on language revitalization efforts and the complexities of the goal of improving Inuit educational outcomes. As it happens, a number of efforts have been made at the local level to revitalize language and to build capacity by increasing local language expertise and the number of Inuit teachers, the latter by establishing teacher qualification procedures. Other important efforts are also underway to study and document Inuit-centered pedagogical practices, which adopt what might be called “doing” language or engaging with “living” language practices. These alternatives to more passive reading and listening activities take into account Inuit culture, including its attachments to the land and its tradition of “land-­ based” learning. Many of these efforts have involved community-university collaborations, whereby pedagogical and practical expertise is shared, in order to engage in and enhance pedagogical practices through “doing” activities. Some examples and discussion of these efforts, and future research directions related to them, are illustrated and discussed in the next section.

L anguage Revitalization, Teaching, and Learning in Mobile Contexts Inuit and their languages are on the move—moving not only geographically, linguistically, politically, and in the policies that they initiate and develop but also as representations and ideas move with them and without them beyond local communities. This movement of people, images, ideas, pedagogies, and practices enables the creation of living language opportunities through practice and action, reflecting ongoing efforts to maintain and revitalize Arctic languages and to keep Inuit at the forefront of these efforts. For example, the pace of the development of university programs that focus on language revitalization and Indigenous language pedagogical development has never been

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greater. Perhaps not coincidentally, the migration of Inuit to southern Canadian cities—to escape housing shortages and find greater social, health, education, and employment opportunities—has likewise never been greater. A good example of this movement of people, ideas, and practices is one reflected in the life history of Millie Qitupana Kuliktana and her (literal) journey to revitalize Inuinnaqtun, as described in a short, widely available documentary called Millie’s Dream: Revitalizing Inuinnaqtun (Walton and Wheatley 2012).20 The Arctic language variety Inuinnaqtun that has been the focus of Kuliktana’s efforts is a marginalized one spoken in Kitikmeot, the westernmost region of Nunavut (formerly known as the Central Arctic region of the Northwest Territories). This language variety has suffered serious decline as a result of residential schooling, as discussed earlier, and the loss of language transmission from older to younger generations. A key point in the trajectory of Kuliktana’s life as described in Millie’s Dream is her career as a language teacher. This included her teacher training and graduation from the Master of Education program associated with the Arctic College in Iqaluit and the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown and her exposure to the Master-Apprentice language revitalization program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Bringing language revitalization expertise back to her home community, Kuliktana worked with an Inuinnaqtun “apprentice” in Kugluktuk (formerly Coppermine) and taught her the language through face-to-face interaction and “doing”—that is, carving and preparing hunting game, sewing, and other activities where the language was shared along with other tangible skills. Other Inuit-centered language revitalization projects and pedagogies have emerged over the past few years, and focus on language teaching and learning by doing, centered on tangible objects and the talk associated with these. Tulloch et al. (2012, 2017) report on informal language teaching and learning practices led by the Nunavut Literacy Council. These practices are part of “non-formal culturally-anchored programs” used to teach Inuit literacy skills through activities such as traditional sewing and interaction between elders (experts) and younger learners. Community researchers, including a local elder and two local educators, lead the programs in different communities— which, as noted by the authors, “are multiplying across the territory, generally with waiting lists and high retention” (2012, p.  82). The outcomes, which include the building of greater confidence, interest in lifelong learning, interconnectedness, and well-being, mean that learners acquire more language skills in informal culturally relevant contexts. In other words, learners “work on skills and practices that they see as highly relevant and to produce tangible products,” strengthening not only cultural connections through language and

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doing but “relationships with instructors and students … [This] in turn supports engagement in the community, education and the workforce” (ibid.). Still other projects, such as one in Nunavik, have focused on early childhood education. As Rowan (2014, 2015) observes, working with “land, water, ice and snow” is central to Inuit early childhood education practice: children acquire language while out on the land with their families and elders, collecting materials to make baskets or setting a trap to catch an Arctic fox. Thus, an Inuit-centered pedagogy, which brings elders, mothers, and children together in a land-based community context, is another way forward in language revitalization and intergenerational reconnection. Lastly, my own work in a southern urban context, with Inuit educators and community members, has served to produce and document culturally relevant Inuit language and literacy activities with meaningful objects, whether found, made, or transported from Arctic homelands to southern cities (Patrick et al. 2013; Patrick and Budach 2014; Budach et al. 2015; Patrick et al. 2017b). With the increasing pressures of urbanization, population growth, and globalization in the Arctic, more Inuit are settling in southern Canadian cities, for various periods of time. The prohibitive cost of frequent air travel to the North keeps many Inuit in the South for longer periods than they anticipate. Yet, the city-based Inuit I have worked with remain concerned about the Inuit language, about remaining connected with family and communities, and about living as Inuit, creating new forms of Inuitness or being Inuit, in their everyday interactions. For these reasons, southern Canadian cities now offer many new sites of language teaching and learning. One promising project is the current Montreal Inuit radio show, Nipivut (“Our Voice”), broadcasted in Inuktut and English on community radio and over the Internet every two weeks.21 These projects need to be further examined, not only so that they can gain greater attention and secure greater funding but also so that the work they produce can be assessed to see how it can best serve urban Inuit. Arctic languages might be considered endangered, but in many ways, they are very much alive and finding new ways to be transmitted, shared, and put into communicative practice. Of course, all of this language work, pedagogical development, and cultural production involve a great deal of time and resources. In the context of the global Arctic, it reflects one of many Inuit concerns about Inuit futures. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Inuit identities are linked not only to language but also to practices associated with the land and environment—including the people and other life-forms living there—and the myriad ways of being Inuit in the twenty-first century. Inuit agency involves not only ­understanding

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changing Arctic conditions and striving for greater participation in broader political domains but also maintaining Inuit control over language learning, teaching, and ways of communicating in a rapidly changing, modernizing Arctic. These forms of Inuit agency put Inuit interests in the Arctic and the wider world and their concerns about Arctic languages, into local, regional, national, and global contexts. What has been referred to as “scaling up”—seeing community interests as intertwined with national and global scales—has also involved “scaling down,” as Inuit use broader expertise from national and international domains in pragmatic and Inuit-centered ways to face both old and new global challenges.

Conclusions This chapter has examined Arctic languages by exploring local, regional, national, and global influences and perspectives on them. By using an analytical lens that takes into account power relations between colonizers and colonized and between different languages and language varieties, it has looked at some of the ways that Inuit and non-Inuit have engaged with Arctic languages historically and in contemporary practice. It has also scrutinized what could be referred to as “top-down” political and legal action and “bottom-up” local, Indigenous-driven processes to see what future directions Arctic languages might take. Finally, it has discussed how Inuit have responded to the political spaces that have opened up to address language issues and also how these issues are connected to broader concerns about culture, health, education, and other aspects of social and economic survival. To be sure, nothing is certain in the changing physical, social, political, and economic environments of communities that span the vast Arctic region. Arctic languages are linked to Arctic hunting activities on the land, sea, and ice, and these are linked, in turn, to global concerns about sustainability and what that might mean for Inuit (Watt-Cloutier 2015). These concerns raise many questions, such as the following: how will Inuit deal with the ongoing pressures of mining and other extractive industries, the potential increase in cruise-ship tourism, or the effects of greater economic and cultural globalization? In other words, how will Inuit maintain control over their cultural and land-based resources and assert further control over the ways in which they are represented and treated in a global economy? These questions are not just Inuit concerns, but global ones, affecting us all.

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Indigenous languages in many countries have been marginalized through colonialism and European expansion and are indeed at risk. They are, thus, in need of financial and other resources—in particular, to build on early childhood and school language programs and to create opportunities for language learning at all ages. Although many of these languages, including those spoken in Arctic communities, are perceived by their communities to be in urgent need of support, it is worth noting that in some communities the number of Indigenous-language speakers is actually rising, given community efforts to revitalize and use these languages in institutional and other contexts (Norris 2007, p. 24). In other words, while Arctic and other Indigenous languages are indeed facing many real challenges, many are very much alive and thriving, giving some reason for optimism about their future survival. For language researchers, the challenges and prospects are also real. What becomes clear as Inuit move forward with their own language initiatives is the need for respectful engagement with communities, speakers, and those involved in language politics and policymaking. Such engagement might foster more long-term, and especially qualitative, research, which enables the co-production of knowledge, process-oriented approaches, and the sharing of expertise and research findings to address the particular challenges that the Arctic context presents.

Notes 1. In August 2016, one of the first cruise ships, carrying over 1000 passengers, sailed through the Northwest Passage, stopping at a number of Inuit communities. See McKie (2016). 2. Such as the internationally negotiated Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (2001). 3. This exploration has included seismic testing that the Inuit have challenged in the courts. See Skura (2016). 4. The Arctic Council states include Canada, Denmark, and the politically aligned but self-governing Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) and the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and the USA (Alaska). 5. The Inuit population is growing. These population figures are according to the national Inuit organization, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK); see ITK (2018). 6. The Atlas is published online; see Moseley (2010). 7. For early treatments of this issue, see also Haugen (1966), Mühlhäusler (1996), and Simons and Fennig (2018).

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8. Metis are commonly defined as a mixed people of European and Indigenous descent, and more specifically, those people who are descended from the ­western Canadian prairie settlement region of the Red River, near Winnipeg, Manitoba. 9. Although it is important to note that Inuit were subject to restrictive settler colonial administrative measures, including a numerical identification system, or “Eskimo disc numbers.” These small, round discs were distributed in 1941 (to be worn or sewn into clothing) and were used for identification purposes until the early 1970s, when surnames were introduced. See Library and Archives Canada (2018). 10. See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015). 11. The same claim was made by the Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures (2005), as discussed in Patrick (2007, p. 49). 12. This policy was announced in Canadian news media, including the Globe and Mail; see Galloway (2016). 13. The name Nunavik (meaning roughly “land-place”) gained currency in Arctic Quebec since the signing of the 1975 land-claim agreement, the first land claim or modern treaty since 1921. Nunavut (“our land”), became an official territory as a result of the Nunavut Land Claim in 1999. 14. The 1975 land claim also gave Inuit control over health services and other institutional spheres that were unprecedented at the time in Canada (WattCloutier 2015). 15. For example, in February 2012, La Presse, a Montreal French-language daily reported that Quebec Inuit graduation rates of 17.8% are well below the 72.3% rate for the rest of Québec. An English translation of this article appears as Breton (2012). 16. The report addresses the failures in implementing the land claim, with an emphasis on the need for more Inuit employment in the territory’s civil service and for greater efforts to maintain and use Inuktitut in Nunavut. See Berger (2006). 17. See Cloutier (2012). The Uqausivut plan is available at Government of Nunavut (2012). 18. An ITK task force has held consultations on unifying the writing system for Inuktut across the four regions of Inuit Nunangat. See Rogers (2015). 19. Worth noting is that the specific changes to current systems that will figure in the single system will affect speakers in all regions; speakers in Nunavik and certain parts of Nunavut will face particular challenges, given that the syllabic systems currently in use and valued in these regions would be replaced. 20. The film is widely available on the Internet, including at University of Prince Edward Island/Nunavut (n.d.). 21. See, for example, Watson (n.d.).

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in the Arctic: Essays in Memory of Susan Sammons (pp. 39–48). Québec: Éditions du CIÉRA, Université Laval. Dorais, L.-J., & Sammons, S. (2000). Discourse and Identity in the Baffin Region. Arctic Anthropology, 37(2), 92–110. Dorais, L.-J., & Sammons, S. (2002). Language in Nunavut. Discourse and Identity in the Baffin Region. Iqaluit/Québec: Nunavut Arctic College and GÉTIC. Dorian, N.  C. (1995). Small Languages and Small Language Communities. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 114, 129–137. Dorian, N. C. (2014). Small-Language Fates and Prospects: Lessons of Persistence and Change from Endangered Languages. Collected Essays. Leiden: Brill. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (Eds.). (2007). Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum. Edelman, M., & Haugerud, A. (2007). Development. In D. Nugent & J. Vincent (Eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (pp.  86–106). Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Freeland, J., & Patrick, D. (2004). Introduction. In J. Freeland & D. Patrick (Eds.), Language Rights and Language Survival: Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 1–34). Manchester: St. Jerome Press. Galloway. (2016, December 6). Trudeau Reassures First Nations of Commitment to Deliver on Promises. The Globe and Mail. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/politics/trudeau-announces-indigenous-languages-act-at-afn-assembly/article33215626/. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Giddens, A. (2003). Runaway World: How Globalization Is Shaping Our Lives. New York: Routledge. Government of Nunavut. (2016). UQAUSIVUT: The Comprehensive Plan Pursuant to the Official Languages Act and the Inuit Language Protection Act 2012–2016. http://www.ch.gov.nu.ca/en/Uqausivut.pdf. Accessed 25 Mar 2018. Haque, E., & Patrick, D. (2015). Indigenous Languages and the Racial Hierarchisation of Language Policy in Canada. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 36(1), 27–41. Haugen, E. (1966). Dialect, Language, Nation. American Anthropologist, 68(6), 922–935. Hobart, C. W., & Brant, C. S. (1966). Eskimo Education, Danish and Canadian: A Comparison. Canadian Review of Anthropology and Sociology, 3, 47–66. Hot, A. (2008). Un bilinguisme stable est-il possible à Iqaluit? Études/Inuit/Studies, 32(1), 117–136. Hot, A. (2012). Reading and Writing the Inuit Language in Iqaluit and Igloolik: Conclusions of a Qualitative Research Project. In L.-J.  Dorais & F.  Laugrand (Eds.), Linguistic and Cultural Encounters in the Arctic: Essays in Memory of Susan Sammons (pp. 49–56). Québec: Éditions du CIÉRA, Université Laval. Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. (2018). Inuit. https://www.aadnc-aandc. gc.ca/eng/1100100014187/1100100014191. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada. (2016). About ICC. http://www.inuitcircumpolar.com/. Accessed 24 Mar 2018.

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ITK. (2018). Who We Are. https://itk.ca/national-voice-for-communities-in-thecanadian-arctic/. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Kuptana, R. (2014). Indigenous Peoples in Canada: Politics, Policy and Human Rights-­ Based Approaches to Development and Relationship-Building. Public lecture, Trent University, Peterborough. https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152653528630909/. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Ladner, K., & Dick, C. (2008). Out of the Fires of Hell: Globalization as a Solution to Decolonization. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 23, 63–91. Lawrence, B. (2004). “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. Vancouver: UBC Press. Library and Archives Canada. (2018). The Inuit: Disc Numbers and Project Surname. https://thediscoverblog.com/?s=inuit+discandsubmit=Search. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. McGrew, A. (1992). A Global Society? In S. Hall, D. Held, & T. McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and Its Futures (pp. 61–116). Cambridge: Polity Press. McKie, R. (2016, August 21). Inuit Fear They Will Be Overwhelmed as “Extinction Tourism” Descends on Arctic. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2016/aug/20/inuit-arctic-ecosystem-extinction-tourism-crystal-serenity. Accessed 4 Mar 2017. Miller, J. R. (2000). Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian White Relations in Canada (3rd ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Milloy, J. S. (1999). A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Modiano, N. (1973). Indian Education in the Chiapas Highlands. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Moseley, C. (Ed.). (2010). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Muehlmann, S. (2012). Von Humboldt’s Parrot and the Countdown of Last Speakers in the Colorado Delta. Language and Communication, 32, 160–168. Mühlhäusler, P. (1996). Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. London: Routledge. Norris, M. J. (2007). Aboriginal Languages in Canada: Emerging Trends and Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. Patrick, D. (2003). Language, Politics and Social Interaction in an Inuit Community. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Patrick, D. (2007). Indigenous Language Endangerment and the Unfinished Business of Nation-States. In M. Heller & A. Duchêne (Eds.), Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the Defence of Languages (pp. 35–56). London: Continuum. Patrick, D. (2016). Indigenizing Language Policy in Canada: Redressing Racial Hierarchies. In G. Lane-Mercier, D. Merkle, & J. Koustas (Eds.), Plurilinguisme et pluriculturalisme (pp. 125–138). Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Patrick, D., & Budach, G. (2014). Urban-Rural Dynamics and Indigenous Urbanization: The Case of Inuit Language Use in Ottawa. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 13, 236–253.

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Patrick, D., Budach, G., & Muckpaloo, I. (2013). Multiliteracies and Family Language Policy in an Urban Inuit Community. Language Policy, 12(1), 47–62. Patrick, D., Murasugi, K., & Palluq-Cloutier, J. (2017a). Standardization of Inuit Languages in Canada. In P. Lane, J. Costa, & H. De Korne (Eds.), Standardizing Minority Languages: Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery (pp. 135–153). New York: Taylor and Francis. Patrick, D., & Shearwood, P. (1999). The Roots of Inuktitut Bilingual Education. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 19, 249–262. Patrick, D., Shaer, B., & Budach, G. (2017b). Language and Territorialization: Food Consumption and the Creation of Urban Indigenous Space. Semiotic Review 5. https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/8. Accessed 25 Mar 2018. Pietikäinen, S., Kelly-Holmes, H., Jaffe, A., & Coupland, N. (2016). Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Regan, P. (2011). Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Rogers, S. (2015, August 12). ITK Gears Up for Iqaluit Language Summit: Cross-­ Country Consultations Show Inuit Favour Roman Orthography. Nunatsiaq News. http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674itk_gears_up_for_iqaluit_ language_summit/. Accessed 12 Mar 2017. Rowan, M.  C. (2014). Co-constructing Early Childhood Programs Nourished by Inuit Worldviews. Études/Inuit/Studies, 38(1–2), 73–94. Rowan, M. C. (2015). Thinking with Land, Water, Ice and Snow: A Proposal for Inuit Nunangat Pedagogy in the Canadian Arctic. In V.  Pacini-Ketchabaw & A.  Taylor (Eds.), Unsettling the Colonialist Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education (pp. 198–218). New York: Routledge. Shearwood, P. (2001). Inuit Identity and Literacy in a Nunavut Community. Etudes/ Inuit/Studies, 25(1–2), 295–307. Simon, M. (2014). Canadian Inuit: Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going. In K.  Battarbee & J.  E. Fossum (Eds.), The Arctic Contested (pp.  177–189). Brussels: Peter Lang. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2018). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (21st ed.). Dallas: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Skura, E. (2016, November 29). “We Thought No One Care”: Clyde River Inuit Flooded with Support. CBC News. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/ supreme-court-indigenous-duty-to-consult-clyde-river-seismic-testing-1.3873059. Accessed 3 Mar 2017. Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. (2001). 2256 UNTS 119; 40 ILM 532. http://chm.pops.int/TheConvention/Overview/tabid/3351/. Accessed 25 Mar 2018.

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Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures. (2005). Towards a New Beginning: A Foundational Report for a Strategy to Revitalize First Nation, Inuit and Métis Languages and Cultures. Ottawa: Minister of Canadian Heritage. Tomiak, J. (2017). Contesting the Settler City: Indigenous Self-Determination, New Urban Reserves, and the Neoliberalization of Colonialism. Antipode, 49(4), 928–945. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Calls to Action. http:// nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. Accessed 25 Mar 2018. Tulloch, S. (2004). Inuktitut and Inuit Youth: Language Attitudes as a Basis for Language Planning. PhD Thesis, Université Laval, Québec. Tulloch, S., Pilakapsi, Q., Uluqsi, G., Kusugak, A., Chenier, C., Ziegler, A., & Crockatt, K. (2012). Impacts of Non-formal, Culturally-Based Learning Programs in Nunavut. In L.-J.  Dorais & F.  Laugrand (Eds.), Linguistic and Cultural Encounters in the Arctic: Essays in Memory of Susan Sammons. Québec: Éditions du CIÉRA, Université Laval. Tulloch, S., Kusuguk, A., Chenier, C., Pilakapsi, Q., Uluqsi, G., & Walton, F. (2017). Transformational Bilingual Learning: Re-engaging Marginalized Learners Through Language, Culture, Community and Identity. Canadian Modern Language Review, 73(4), 438–462. Turner, D. (2006). This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. UNESCO. (1953). The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. Paris: UNESCO. Urla, J. (1993). Cultural Politics in an Age of Statistics: Numbers, Nations, and the Making of Basque Identity. American Ethnologist, 20(4), 818–843. Walton, F., & Wheatley, K. (Producer), Sandiford, M. (Director). (2012). Millie’s Dream: Revitalizing Inuinnaqtun. A Documentary Video. Charlottetown: University of Prince Edward Island. Watson, M.  K. (n.d.). Nipivut Radio Show. http://anthro.edublogs.org/nipivut/. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Watt-Cloutier, S. (2015). The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet. Toronto: Penguin.

Part IV Economics, Markets, Commodification

11 Minority Languages and Markets Sari Pietikäinen, Helen Kelly-Holmes, and Maria Rieder

Introduction Along with prevailing political regimes and colonisation, the minoritisation of speakers and communities is to a large extent the result of market processes. The shift from speaking a minority language to a dominant language is in many cases caused by the lack of economic opportunities in regions where minority languages are spoken and the low demand for skills in the minority language. Revitalisation efforts in the form of language policy and planning are therefore often targeted at reversing the negative economic status of m ­ inority languages and creating new demand for and supply of speakers. This chapter explores how minority languages both figure in economic development and are invested with values of expertise, distinction and authenticity. Drawing on previous research, including our studies on minority and indigenous language practices and discourses in peripheral, multilin-

S. Pietikäinen (*) Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä Finland, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] H. Kelly-Holmes • M. Rieder School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_11

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gual Irish and Sámi sites, we discuss the changing and expanding role of minority languages in some key economic domains: advertising and marketing, tourism, the media and job markets. We reflect on the conditions and consequences of these economic processes for minority languages in changing markets.

Minority Languages in Changing Markets As illustrated throughout  this volume, minority and indigenous languages occupy a central role in identity projects and in political struggles for rights and recognition of speaker  groups (Hinton and Hale 2001; Hinton 2003; McCarty 2003). However, in the current era of globalisation, characterised by intensified and increased circulation of ideas, products and people, and enhanced by technology (Appadurai 1986), minority languages have gained new value as resources for economic development, especially as an index of difference, authenticity and uniqueness (Heller et al. 2016; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). In this contribution we use critical sociolinguistic and discourse analytical approaches (Heller et  al. 2018) to discuss the dynamics of minority languages and economic development, drawing on our work related to Irish and Sámi languages and extending our discussion to other languages and contexts. In classical Marxist terms, this revaluation of minority languages can be understood in terms of exchange value, which presents itself quantitatively as the “proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort” (Marx 1867; see also Harvey 1982; Del Percio et al. 2016 for an overview on language and political economy). The attribution of use and exchange value implies that languages are seen as commodities, as objects that by their properties satisfy human wants of some sort or another (Marx 1867) and that are exchanged, invested in and are means of investment. Languages therefore have market value (Duncan 2014). Heller and Duchêne (2012) describe the changing values of language as a shift from pride to profit. They shed light on the dynamics between the ideologies of seeing language in terms of rights, ethnicity and citizenship in a powerful nation-state (e.g. Hobsbawm 1990) and of perceiving language as increasingly constructed through discourses of economic profit, used in struggles over legitimate ownership and access to resources. While the “pride to profit” trope is just one example of the recent intensification of interest around economic aspects, minority languages have a long history of involvement with

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market conditions. The process of minoritisation of languages and communities is often the result of economic considerations and market developments.1 Indeed, one of the key reasons for language shift from a minoritised language to the dominant, majority language is economic: for example, in a colonial context, which is often described as a previous era of globalisation, the local indigenous language became minoritised and disadvantaged relative to the language of the coloniser (Léglise and Migge 2007; Rassool et  al. 2007; Mufwene 2001; Grenoble and Whaley 1998). Under these conditions, in order to gain access to valuable capital, such as education, job markets and so on, the indigenous population needs to move to the language of the coloniser in an asymmetrical power relationship. The language of the coloniser becomes the language of economic and political power, and acquires capital on the linguistic market of the particular country or region.2 Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of the linguistic market is one way to understand the relative exchange ‘values’ of languages in a particular society and social order. Here, languages and linguistic practices are understood as symbolic assets, capital that can receive different values, depending on the market where they are exchanged (Del Percio et al. 2016: 56). As with colonisation or mobility, the indigenous or migrants’ languages often lose their economic value under new conditions. Learning the political elite’s or the host society’s language becomes crucial capital in order to access education and job markets (Extra and Gorter 2008; Extra and Yaǧmur 2004; Beacco 2008; Cheesman 2001). While political and economic minoritisation of languages has often led to stigmatisation (Gal 2008), minoritised languages can gain new value as indexes of locality, uniqueness and authenticity under different circumstances, such as in the global tourism and culture industries (Pietikäinen et al. 2016). As with all commodities and exchange rates, and like any other resource, minority languages can also gain or lose their economic value under specific conditions, related to a particular moment in time and place. This value of language is intertwined with the economic, cultural, political and technological orders of a certain moment. These assessments are ideological valuations, discursively constructed in the interaction. They are also subject to ­contestation and struggle. The perceived value of particular languages in a given moment impacts on the exchange value of the language repertoires of speakers and in this way becomes linked to the wider social issues of access, rights and inequality. For example, it is hard to imagine the power of Latin in Europe before the development of the printing press. Print capitalism directly or indirectly challenged and ultimately overturned the dominance of Latin, by enabling mass publishing in other languages (Anderson 1983).

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Appadurai (1986) reminds us that one of the criteria for being a ‘commodity’ is usability or usefulness. Minoritised languages often suffer a loss in their (perceived) usefulness beyond immediate family, community and intimate domains (de Swaan 2001). For example, one of the major factors contributing to language shift from Irish to English in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the economic need to emigrate to English-speaking parts of the world (see Hindley 1990; Lee 1989). Consequently, the Irish language became associated with economic backwardness and even came to be seen as incompatible with a modern, successful economy (see Walsh 2011). Similarly, in Corsica, learning French made Corsicans eligible for well-paid civil service jobs on the island; it also enabled them to migrate to the French mainland and to work in colonial service throughout the francophone world. The widespread experience of relative prosperity led to the reputation of French as a ‘lingua di u pane’ (‘language that brought the bread home’) and cemented the Corsican language’s negative economic exchange value and its association with backward rurality and poverty (Jaffe 2007b; Pietikäinen et  al. 2016). Similar kinds of processes can be found in several other minority and indigenous language contexts (see e.g. Pietikäinen 2015; Rubdy and Tan 2008; Rassool et al. 2007). Thus the actual process of minoritisation can be seen as the result of an economic process by which a speaker’s language becomes devalued in the particular linguistic market in which they live and work. Once the language is recognised as minoritised or endangered, the first step is often to reverse the economic process by which the minoritisation occurred. For instance, language policies can be introduced to protect the language from market conditions. Much of language policy and planning is therefore designed to counter prevailing market forces and reverse the language shift. Language policy and planning can involve subsidising industries in peripheral minority language sites in order to maintain the population living and speaking the language there. Resources may be diverted to support acquisition of the language even if there is a greater demand for learning other, perhaps bigger and more dominant languages (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). Top-down language policy activities, especially in education, public administration and the media, often give priority to the continued and increased use of minority languages in existing and new markets. Stimulated in this way, many industry sectors, such as the media, local retail, tourism and creative arts, create a multiplying effect through the deployment of minority languages as commodities. Minority languages become resources for authenticated, individualised and unique products in niche markets that are otherwise dominated by mainstream, mass products, and at the same time stimulate other

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industries involved in the production of the product. Jobs created in these processes as well as domains where the use of minority languages is exploited as a value-adding capital mean that these languages potentially become fitter for survival in an increasing range of settings. Economic revaluation through the interplay of language and economic policies therefore plays a decisive role in overcoming the precarious situation in which many minority languages find themselves. Investing money in the promotion of minority languages can trigger demand (Harvey 1982) for minority-language development (for instance, for educational staff and increased intergenerational transmission). Profits can be used to supply products using minority languages (Evas 2000), effectively helping local as well as global industries. At the same time, this revaluation creates tensions and debates over issues such as fair distribution of profits, legitimate access, and respectful and sustainable use of minority languages (Pietikäinen 2015). While minority-language policy and planning efforts stimulate the positive exchange value of minority languages, the indirect benefits from the creative use of minority languages (for example, their use in branding or product names) should not be underestimated (Li 2011; Li and Wu 2009; Kramsch and Whiteside 2008; Canagarajah 2005). Here, generating income contributes to the opening up of a minority language to other fields, turning on additional supply–demand feedback loops. It is the interplay between individuals, institutions and industry that we aim to address in four fields, namely, the media, job markets created by language policy, tourism and marketing. We focus on these fields in order to discuss their role in increasing the exchange value of minority languages.

 urrent Contexts and Conditions: Minority C Languages, Exchange Value and Markets Language policy and planning initiatives can influence and promote the use of minority languages for business purposes, with a multiplying Catherine wheel effect (Strubell 1999) that creates new demand and markets for minority languages, for example in the education, translation and interpreting, administration, and culture and arts sectors. Using minority language not only for political purposes but also for economic development involves introducing exchange relations to domains that were previously untouched by such processes. This appears to be a pervasive process that invades every area of life. Yet, as we shall see, there is some resistance to exploiting minority languages

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for economic benefit. We discuss four overlapping domains where minority languages have been used for economic development: (1) the media, (2) job markets, (3) tourism and (4) marketing.

Minority Languages and Media Markets Traditional broadcast and print media as well as new social media have the potential to affect the value of minority languages. The recent rise in the availability of diverse media presents an opportunity for minority languages to increase their visibility and to deliver content in a range of areas and through a diversity of usage that target different generations’ changing tastes and needs (Moriarty and Pietikäinen 2011; Matsaganis et al. 2011). These developments have an impact on market recognition for minority languages and so create revenue and further demand for minority-language media jobs, programmes and companies. Wider audiences and a stronger presence of minority languages in media mean that media fulfil an important function, a type of ‘upgrading’ of the minority language. Thus, media processes contribute both to ideological changes in prestige and to symbolic value ascription of minority languages and the development of competences through the promotion of use (Amezaga and Arana 2012). Minority-language media have the potential to add symbolic value to a minority language by contributing to the standardisation process of the language. Highly regulated and ordered, ideologically invested in terms of prestige, visibility and voice, and central to minority-language practices, innovations and markets, minority media are at the heart of processes of standardisation and norm-creation (Jaffe 2007a; Moriarty 2009; Kelly-Holmes et al. 2009; Pietikäinen 2008). An example is the purchase of broadcasting rights for sports such as tennis by Irish language station TG4, and rugby by Irish-, Welsh- and Scottish Gaelic-medium television channels, which resulted in corpus development as well as the widening of audiences.3 At the same time, minority-language media spaces and practices become sites for language development and renewal. With growing urbanisation and internal migration, minority-language speakers become dispersed within a majority linguistic context. In this context, minority-language media provide a sense of connection, where not only is content shared, but also norms are established, creatively contested, resisted and modified, particularly in humour and hybrid language use (Matsaganis et  al. 2011; Moriarty 2009; Kelly-­ Holmes 2014a; Pietikäinen et al. 2016).

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Minority-language media have great potential in terms of raising the prestige of the language, shaping norms and contributing to language development overall through a strategic use of media, with the potential effect of raising exchange values for the language.4 This can lead to diverse business opportunities (Cormack 2005), as in the case of the Irish-language radio and television stations in Ireland’s Gaeltacht region, which have helped to sustain the language community by providing employment in journalism, production and advertising for Irish speakers who might have left the area otherwise, further depleting the status of the language in the community and contributing to further minoritisation. In Sámiland, Sámi radio is located in the northern periphery of Finland, providing jobs and facilitating media-oriented training for Sámi-language speakers (Pietikäinen 2008). In Scotland, the case of the BBC ALBA Gaelic-medium television channel shows that the use of multiple platforms (television, radio and internet) not only attracts a large viewership, but also creates media-related positions (Chalmers et al. 2013). Innovation, openness and commitment are the three key concepts for successful business models of minority language media. For example, in the Basque and Catalan language contexts, a ‘back to the roots’ philosophy of relations between media and the community has helped to raise the prestige of two private minority-language media companies, Euskarazko Komunikazio taldea S.A. in the Basque country and the Catalan-language news platform VilaWeb (Zabaleta et al. 2014). While print and broadcast media are one of the most important means for a minority group to represent themselves in their own words, to tell stories in their own way and to cover content of interest to the minority group (Matsaganis et al. 2011; Lilapati Devi 2016), new communication technologies offer opportunities to create online media products that serve younger generations, making language content accessible outside traditional domains such as the education system. The first era of minority-language media is described as a ‘gifting era’, in which media resources are gifted to the minority-­ language community by a central, national media authority. This is followed by a ‘service era’ in which the minority-language channel aims to offer a full-­ service model. The current era, a ‘performance era’, involves a blurring of boundaries between producers and consumers where individual speakers are encouraged to become agents and media producers (Pietikäinen and Kelly-­ Holmes 2011a). The potential of the performance era for motivating minority-­ language use, boosting the visibility of minority languages across large distances with very little effort or economic cost, and attracting advertising revenues (Moring 2013; Moriarty 2009), is still not fully exploited. However, several existing grass-roots level and NGO initiatives exist which attempt to

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take advantage of these features. For example, language workers and teachers in the extremely endangered indigenous Skolt Sámi language and Inari Sámi language (both of which have only a few hundred speakers) have used Facebook and text messaging as tools for creating a language learning and usage environment. Similarly, Finnish sign language users have exploited the multimodality provided by social media to promote and increase the use of this minority language. Minority-language media, like all media, are subject to market dynamics (see e.g. Golding and Murdock 1997). In addition, investing profitably in minority-language media is a challenge due to the small size of the markets involved. While the presence of minority languages in publicly funded television and radio stations is still often supported by national and policy instruments such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) and the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML), the same does not apply to new, digital media, which may therefore be more subject to market forces.5 Despite these difficulties, media can give an immense boost to minority languages, with positive symbolic, practical and economic consequences.

Minority Languages at Work The media sector is a setting where top-down social, economic and language policy efforts can be particularly effective in regulating the market, creating job opportunities, normalising minority languages and stimulating their further use by business people (Moring 2013; Cunliffe et al. 2010). However, as Fishman (1997; see also Romaine 2007) points out, language policies in media and other sectors that are backed by the community through informal intergenerational transmission and other informal means of everyday life are likely to be more sustainable in supporting language maintenance and development. For this to happen, people need to see employment opportunities (and possibilities of increasing affluence and other real economic advantages) to being educated in and through that language (Ferguson 2006). Therefore, support for language policy will need to be gained by demonstrating economic advantages of learning the minority language. Hence a strong link between economic planning and language policy becomes paramount. If the lack of economic possibilities were the main reason why people shifted away from the language, then increasing economic possibilities has to be at the heart of the schemes to reverse this process. If language policies are not linked with other areas of social and economic policy, they will remain empty, symbolic gestures.6

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For example, introducing a minority language as a compulsory subject in education (as is the case with the Irish language in Ireland) creates employment opportunities for native speakers to teach their language. The Irish-­ language-­speaking Gaeltacht regions also offer Irish-language-learning holiday opportunities and summer camps for teenagers seeking to improve their skills in the language. This provides a valuable source of income to families in this region and contributes to keeping a vibrant community of first language speakers viable.7 In Finland’s Sámi domicile area, the indigenous people have the right, guaranteed by two language acts, to use their Sámi language when dealing with the authorities. Furthermore, in Sámiland, official announcements, proclamations, notices and signs must be written in the three Sámi languages spoken in the area and authorities are obliged to advance use of the Sámi ­languages in their activities. Municipal authorities must use indigenous languages alongside Finnish in records and other main documents. By law, authorities in the homeland must ensure that personnel in their offices have the necessary language skills to serve Sámi-speaking customers in their own language (see e.g. Joona 2010; Näkkäläjärvi 2008). These policy initiatives consequently increase the demand for linguistically trained and proficient staff, including translators and interpreters, in several sectors such as government and administration, community social and health services, media, local retail and enterprises, in the tourist branch and the publishing industry. Miguel Strubell (1999) has described this effect using the metaphor of a Catherine wheel firework. The model aims to demonstrate that by increasing—artificially to start with—the demand for and supply of speakers of the minority language, the demand and supply will increase further. This is the result of the creation of new opportunities to speak and use the language, which in turn generates the demand and the desire to learn, speak and use the language (see Darquennes 2007). Confirmation of the Catherine wheel effect can be found in studies that look at cases where language policy has increased the market value of and demand for education in minority languages. For instance, legal requirements for bilingualism in administration and government are a huge boost for the translation and interpreting business and vice versa: Raine (2011; see also Raine 2010) investigates how educational investment into translation programmes stimulated and opened new markets for the Tibetan language. Folaron (2015), like Raine (2011), finds that “[t]ranslation can give global visibility and voice to texts written in restricted, local contexts, and in so doing allows both knowledge to circulate and the values of diverse cultures to engage substantively with more hegemonic ones” (Folaron 2015: 15).

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Translation policies can also boost the development of language processing toolkits and other translation technologies (see also Sultanova 2016). Involving minority languages with new translation technologies and software localisation is both a stimulus for these industries as well as proof that minority languages are equipped to cover the complex and technological demands of modern life.8 Raising a language’s market value in these new translation domains in turn demands that the language be continuously developed in terms of its core vocabulary and adaptability to new contexts and usages, which again increases labour market opportunities for language professionals in the publication and development of grammar books, dictionaries and other teaching materials as well as literary books. In the creative arts and culture sectors too, employment opportunities are created through minority-language planning strategies. For instance, Chalmers and Danson (2009) explore the growing economic importance of Gaelic in the local labour market within the culture and arts sectors; likewise, Karjalainen (2015) examines how the Sámi languages are exploited as commodities with significant exchange value in an international indigenous peoples’ film festival and as a core resource in the event’s language practices. These examples show how informal activities that stimulate small languages and local customs can also generate material benefits. Similarly, as we shall see, minority languages have considerable potential as an authenticating device in the tourism sector.

Tourism, Authenticity and Minority Languages The current desire for ‘new’ and ‘unspoilt’ destinations in cultural tourism opens up new possibilities for minority-language communities, which are often located away from large metropolitan areas. In many instances, speakers of small languages generate both material and cultural capital by supplying tourists with an authentic product in an ever more homogenised market.9 These tourist destinations attract revenue through commerce and technology, both of which also create new markets for various language skills to communicate with visiting travellers (Heller 2003; Kelly-Holmes et al. 2011). Tourism has become a significant employer and often an integral part of economic strategies in rural areas that have suffered from a decline of traditional industries. Commercial activities range from supplying accommodation and catering to transport, handcrafted products, retail, public services, as well as language-related businesses such as language schools and translation services. Tourism is one terrain in which minority languages can play a key role in adding distinction to particular minority-community regions, prod-

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ucts and services in the globalised and competitive world of this industry. This relates to the potential of minority languages as a distinguishing product. Signposting, naming restaurants and shops, and branding local food and crafts using signs and symbols are all common in minority-language sites (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011b, 2013; Pietikäinen et  al. 2016; ­Kelly-­Holmes and Pietikäinen 2014; Coupland 2012). In addition, the use of minority languages on products that are offered for sale serves to make the tourist’s visit more memorable and distinctive. In addition, the use of minority languages in encounters with tourists and on display in the regional linguistic landscape help to give coherence to the visitor’s experience of being in a culturally different space (Pujolar 2006). Moriarty (2015), for instance, shows how signage in Gaelic on the Dingle Peninsula in western Ireland has the effect of enhancing the experience of the heritage culture as well as inviting tourists to take part in activities such as the production of local handcraft. This economic and symbolic exploitation of language as capital in tourism is indicative of a change in the language’s use value to exchange value (Moriarty 2015; see Heller et  al. 2014, for further examples of ways of constructing linguistic capital). Such activities help to sustain communities in generating income and jobs, and thereby play a role in retaining young minority-­language speakers (see Phillips 2000, for figures in the Welsh context). This economic dimension also helps to strengthen pride and interest in heritage and to promote wider use of the language. One challenge is that minority languages are often used tokenistically or symbolically in tourism, rather than functioning in an everyday way for the purposes of communication. Many tourism providers seem to opt for a strategy of balance, using just enough of the minority language to add distinction but not too much, which might alienate tourists (Pietikäinen and Kelly-­Holmes 2011b; Kelly-Holmes and Pietikäinen 2014; see also Moriarty (2015) for tokenistic use of Irish in tourist encounters). But such tokenistic usage provides no evidence for ‘real’ language usage.10 In fact, Kelly-Holmes (2014b) describes this type of minority-language use as “visual multilingualism”, where text is used primarily as a visual stimulus rather than for its referential or instrumental meaning. In Sámiland, too, tourism has been welcomed as an expanding source of income and as a force that creates new options for locals to remain in these geographically peripheral regions and make a living. But there have also been worries and critiques that tourism transforms indigenous Sámi traditions and resources into kitsch commodities that can be simply displayed, marketed and experienced without any meaningful connection to ‘real’ Sáminess. This feeling manifests itself in a spectrum of responses to the use of Sámi languages in

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the tourism context: some welcome it as a chance to increase awareness and appreciation of the indigenous language; others equate it with ‘selling out’ Sámi heritage (Pietikäinen 2013).11 These varying perceptions point to the conflict that can arise between group rights and the activities of individual ‘merchants’ and to the “tensions between indigenous and introduced productive systems and goods, between indigenous and introduced media of exchange” (Appadurai 1986: 39). Careful policy and institutional support is essential in the negotiation of conflicting interests between local identity needs and the growing projection of the global market. Ideally, this support should include measures ensuring that the profits from the use of local identity resources in commerce stay within, or flow in part back to, the community (Pujolar 2006).

Marketing, Branding and Minority Languages Endangered languages that have been sheltered from market forces and that often exist in parallel and sheltered markets can acquire a certain distinctiveness and exclusivity following a period of protection and revitalisation. There are many examples that show how marketing minoritised languages can create a strong association between the place and the products, especially in relation to food.12 Crucially, support from above needs to match grass-roots initiatives that take the consumer rather than the manufacturer as their starting point (see Cunliffe et al. 2010, on e-commerce and minority languages). In order to compete in the market and to reach young speakers and customers, small producers operating in peripheral sites not only need to target a niche market, but also to distinguish their product from mass-produced commodities on offer as well as other niche products. Research (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011b) shows that minority-language branding often achieves this anchoring and distinguishing work with some ease. Typically, these products display a word in the minority language as the brand name, with further information, for example, about ingredients or instructions, in the majority language. The distinguishing work in the minority language adds a premium to the product by anchoring it to a particular place and emphasising the quality of the ingredients. This is particularly successful where the relevant majority language is English. Because of the ubiquity of English in global markets (de Swaan 2001), use of a minority language has a highly effective authenticating effect that links the product with the culture of origin (see Ngwenya 2011; Conradie and van Niekerk 2015; Heller et al. 2017; Kelly-Holmes 2014b; Kelly-­Holmes and Atkinson 2007; Kelly-Holmes 2005). Moreover, advertising strategies

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using minority languages often have transcultural functions as they creatively and intelligibly interact with the majority culture by drawing on unique features and combining them with elements of the majority culture (Lysaght 2009). The changing conditions of markets have also altered the possibilities for minoritised languages. Previously, the business focus was more on the mass market and trying to design products and messages that would appeal to standardised and homogenised needs of consumers. This type of approach naturally favoured ‘big’ languages with large numbers of speakers. The way in which media markets were constituted also supported this type of mass communication targeting the mainstream consumer. Pre-online media were more expensive to produce, so in this context there was only limited space—or political will—to create messages or products targeted at consumers who spoke minority languages. However, the era of social media has opened up possibilities for niche marketing, and this in turn has ushered in means of individualised and personalised marketing. We can think of the mainstream market as an upturned bell jar, with the mass of consumers in the middle filling up the bell and two long tails at either side which make up the periphery of the market. Previously, these peripheral markets and consumers were not viewed as economically attractive enough to target. However, with changing technology and market configurations, it has become possible to service and target these niche options. Another part of this puzzle is the changing media market. Because the means of media production have moved away, to a certain extent, from large centres, it has also become possible and profitable to target this market at the periphery (Anderson 2008). New marketing paradigms and practices give a much bigger role to consumers, and this applies as well to language-rich and language-conscious products. Previously, consumers were seen as the recipients of one-way messages from marketers and as buyers of finished products which had already been infused with value. These products were simply exchanged for cash and passed on intact to the consumer. Today, by contrast, consumers are often invited to co-produce value for goods. This is an ongoing and potentially long-term process whereby consumers carry out some of their own identity work. Thus, their purchase of a jam with an Irish name involves a contribution of their own, as does the serving of their gift to friends or its presentation when visiting.13 This activity involves not just cultural work, but commentary and reflection, whereby minority languages are exploited with commercial applications (Pietikäinen et al. 2016; Kelly-Holmes 2010). For example, T-shirts, previously marketed more as generic products for the mass consumer, are now located in the centre of the upturned bell jar mentioned

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above, in terms of the message conveyed. In the mainstream market, any language or image on a T-shirt would have been designed to be generic enough to appeal to the greatest number of consumers. Now, however, customers in the long tail of the wider market are prepared not only to pay for customised T-shirts in a particular language and culture. They are also prepared to do the identity work necessary to co-create the value for the product, for example, by explaining to others what the language and image mean. Doing this and wearing a T-shirt displaying an ‘exotic’ or lesser-known language creates value for the individual consumer, too, in terms of distinguishing them from this mass market (Pietikäinen et al. 2016). Such knowledge about goods and the ability or willingness to explain what these words mean are also seen as being at a premium in today’s market and even as having exchange value themselves. This is particularly the case since with outsourcing there is now a longer distance between production and consumption than in previous eras. Thus, knowledge about a minority language can be valuable for one’s own and others’ identity work. As Heller (2008) points out, “quasi-national groups find new ways of constituting themselves as regional markets of producers and consumers. In this process, they are turned into clients rather than citizens” (see also Pujolar 2007), meaning that their purchasing power as consumers is more important than their rights as citizens. In addition to the marketing of local products, minority and vernacular languages are now extensively introduced as tools for segmenting certain minority markets. In some contexts, multinational companies adapt the language in commercial advertisements using the minority language for goods such as food, drink, home cleaning products, cosmetics and cars in an attempt to increase consumption by identifying a product with a particular community (Redondo-Bellon 1999; Kelly-Holmes 2005; Pietikäinen and Kelly-­ Holmes 2013; Pietikäinen et  al. 2016). Heller et  al. (2017) show how performative and embodied use of minority languages in Sámi and francophone crafts and souvenir markets authenticates the products and exchanges not only in terms of the value of the product but also by turning the moment of purchase into an experience. Urciuoli (2016) argues that the use of minority languages in marketing disconnects these ‘marked’ languages from actual lived experiences of (in many cases) inequality and reframes them as potential added value for companies.14

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F uture Trends: Minority Languages in Expanding Markets Under the currently changing political, economic and cultural conditions around the world, minority languages are subject to multiple, overlapping and even contradictory discourses and practices of revaluation. Economic development can both introduce and expand existing use of minority language resources and frequently shifts the focus from questions of identity and politics to issues of products and profits (see Heller 2003, 2011; Kelly-Holmes and Pietikäinen 2014; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011b). In this process, new meanings, markets and usages for minority languages are opened up, while persistent and debated questions of legitimate access, fair distribution of profits and appropriate use of resources remain. In spite of various controversies, it seems that in many cases the usage of minority languages, even if tokenistic in prestigious domains such as commerce and media, contributes to processes of revaluation. The logic here is that the linguistic capital of the language increases, in the eyes of speakers and non-speakers alike, on the linguistic market when the language is associated with economic activities and domains which are normally reserved for the dominant or larger language. Pujolar (2013) also shows how, in relation to Wales, Catalonia and French-­ speaking Canada, the usage of the relevant minority language can be challenging and innovative, rather than simply commodifying heritage associations. Of course, not all minority-language situations are the same. For example, in the context of Wales, where roughly 20% of the population speak and understand Welsh, there are real possibilities for communicative interaction in market situations, as Cunliffe et al.’s (2010) research has shown. Likewise, in Ireland, where Gaelic is a core part of the curriculum during the compulsory years of schooling, the pool of potential producers and consumers of the education product is, naturally, considerable. Thus, where languages have been the object of medium- to long-term sustained language policy and planning initiatives that are ideally linked to economic development (for example, Basque and Catalan), we can begin to see a Catherine wheel effect taking place. These contexts are, however, in stark contrast to severely endangered or unrecognised minority languages, in which the primary struggle focuses on legal recognition and language-policy support and development. One distinguishing characteristic that minority languages seem to have which can be converted into economic capital is value of exclusivity and authenticity. McLaughlin (2013), with reference to French-speaking Canada, proposes that “peripheral coolness” obtains positive associations and distin-

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guishing functions in a homogenised world. This sentiment may be felt more where minority languages are located in majority-language contexts which involve major world languages (for example, the Celtic languages in the UK and Ireland; Breton in France; Basque, Catalan and Galician in Spain). Changing technological and market configurations which favour niche marketing, and individualised rather than mass marketing, also present new and diverse opportunities for minority languages now and in the future.

Notes 1. For a discussion of approaches to market theory, see Diaz Ruiz (2012). 2. See, for example, Wright (2000, 2003), Mac Giolla Chríost (2004), Gal (1989, 1993) in relation to the political economy of language. 3. See Moriarty (2009) in relation to Irish-language television station TG4. 4. See Amezaga and Arana (2012), Matsaganis et  al. (2011); see also Moring (2013) for a discussion of Grin et al.’s (2003) COD (Capacity, Opportunity, Desire) model for measuring the media effect on language. 5. See Moring (2013) and Matsaganis et al. (2011) for discussions of opportunities and challenges for ethnic media organisations as a result of digitalisation and globalisation. 6. See Kamwangamalu’s (2010) review of successful as well as unsuccessful, due to public resistance, cases of language-policy implementation. 7. See, for example, Briassoulis and van der Straaten (2013) and Ó Cinnéide and Keane (1988) on Irish-­language colleges’ contribution to local income generation and multiplication. 8. See Cronin (2003); for further studies of policy influence on various business sectors, see Edwards (2004) on Welsh and Maori and their role in media, education and government, and Walsh (2010) on the potential impact of new policy aims of the Údarás na Gaeltachta in Ireland. 9. See Heller et al. (2014) for a historical perspective on peripheral languages being turned into commodities; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes (2013) for different case studies on minority languages and tourism. 10. See Coupland (2012) for a critical review of language use as a tourist trope in the Welsh context. 11. See Heller et al. (2014) and Heller and Pujolar (2009) for further examples of ideological disruptions and tensions in similar contexts. 12. See Brennan and Wilson (2016) for a study of how place branding is exploited by minority-language speakers to overcome crises such as depopulation and recession by businesses in Ireland and Shetland.

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13. See also Ngwenya (2011) and Conradie and van Niekerk’s (2015) analysis of audience involvement and identity performance in English–Afrikaans advertisements. 14. See also Duchêne (2011) on entrepreneurial exploitation of multilingualism for commercial benefits; further, see Puzey et al. (2013) on bilingual corporate identity, Cunliffe et  al. (2010) on bilingual e-­commerce in relation to minority languages; and see Garai-Artetxe and Nerekan-Umaran (2013) on bilingual advertising agencies in the Basque country.

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12 Language Economics and Issues of Planning for Minority Languages in Africa Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu

Introduction Nearly 200 years ago, 7 European countries (Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) held a conference in Berlin, Germany, with only one item on the agenda: the geopolitical partition of Africa. The partition, which came to be known as the scramble for Africa, set in motion the issue that postcolonial generations of African policymakers and linguists have addressed over the years (and which is the focus of this chapter) namely, how to promote minoritized languages (in this case Africa’s indigenous languages) alongside majoritized languages, understood to be inherited colonial languages (such as English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese) as the media of instruction in schools in postcolonial Africa. Following Skutnabb-Kangas (1994), minoritized languages are languages that, though demographically majority languages, are perceived as minority languages due to their comparatively lower economic status vis-à-vis other languages in a polity. Africa’s policymakers have addressed the issue under consideration by concentrating on what Haarmann (1990) in his framework of prestige planning describes as the production of language planning, but they have hardly paid any attention to the reception of language planning. The former refers to legislation or official policy declaration about the status of languages in a polity, while the latter has to do

N. M. Kamwangamalu (*) Department of English, Howard University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_12

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with the population’s attitude toward the policy, that is, whether they accept the policy or reject it. Traditionally, in Africa, the production of language planning has consisted mainly in giving official status to selected indigenous languages to bring them, theoretically, to equality with inherited colonial languages. There is evidence, however, that the traditional approach to prestige planning for indigenous languages has not necessarily equalized opportunities for these languages and their speakers (Bamgbose 2000; Koffi 2012). On the contrary, this approach has provided a cover for what Pennycook (1994) called the planned reproduction of socio-economic inequality. Drawing on recent studies (Kamwangamalu 2013a, 2016), along with Haarmann (1990), the chapter proposes prestige planning based on the reception of language planning as the way forward to promoting use of Africa’s indigenous languages in the continent’s educational systems. The central argument of the proposed framework of receiver-based prestige planning is that any legislation aimed at promoting African languages as the medium of instruction in the educational system must simultaneously create a demand for those languages in the formal labor market if the intent is to succeed. I explore how the demand for indigenous languages can be created in the light of Bourdieu’s notions of capital, fields, and markets, and of theoretical developments in language economics—a field of study whose focus is on the theoretical and empirical analyses of the ways in which linguistic and economic variables influence one another (Grin 2006; Grin et al. 2010). But first, I provide a historical background to the issue under consideration. Next, I explain how the issue has been addressed in postcolonial Africa and why inherited colonial languages continue to inform language policy decision-­ making in the continent. In conclusion, I offer a survey of successful case studies of prestige planning in communities around the world in support of the proposal being made in this study for African languages.

 olonial and Postcolonial Language Policies: C A Historical Background Soon after European powers partitioned Africa, they confronted the question of what to do with the languages spoken by the people they conquered (Bamgbose 2000). In response, European powers all invariably used the ideology of the nation-state to impose their languages in the conquered territories. Edwards (2004: 4–5) traces the rise of the nation-state ideology to nineteenth-­ century Europe, when one dominant group at the core achieved political and

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economic control of the periphery. By definition, the ideology of the nation-­ state requires unitary symbols, among them one nation, one language, one culture, one belief system, one religion, and so on. Following this monolingual mindset at the core of the nation-state ideology, colonial authorities transported European views on language to the colonies, helping to perpetuate the monolingual myth (Edwards 2004: 5). Accordingly, although in Europe itself linguistic diversity lay just beneath the veneer of homogeneity, in their respective colonies, colonial authorities designed language policies that embraced monolingualism in a European language as the norm; treated the diversity of African languages as a problem and a threat to social order; and considered African languages themselves as primitive and inadequate for advanced learning and socioeconomic development (see, e.g., Fardon and Furniss 1994). Thus, English became the sole official language of the state in British colonies; French played a similar role in French colonies; and so did Spanish and Portuguese in Spanish and Portuguese colonies, respectively. If for the colonial authorities the question was what to do with the languages of the conquered people, for the elites who took power when colonialism ended, the question was what to do with the languages that the colonial authorities left behind. Inspired by the ideology of the nation-state, postcolonial African elites adopted continued use of former colonial languages as the sole official languages of their respective independent nations. It seems that depending on colonial ideals of language and development, without reference to the post-independence euphoria to promote the use of indigenous languages in the education system, African policymakers have found it difficult to become independent of inherited colonial language policies. The literature explains that policymakers retained inherited colonial language policies for various reasons, including the following: (i) to avoid ethno-linguistic conflicts in Africa’s multilingual polities, since choosing one African language as the medium of instruction would anger those whose languages were not selected (Newton 1972); (ii) to promote national unity because a former colonial language is ethnically neutral in the sense that it does not belong to nor privilege any specific indigenous ethnic group and, therefore, it assumingly (dis) advantages everyone equally, both socio-economically and politically (Weinstein 1990); and (iii) to use the language of wider communication, for instance English, for national socio-economic development because African languages apparently lack higher literacy forms and linguistic complexity that European languages have (Revel 1988; Spencer 1985).

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Africa’s policymakers not only have retained inherited colonial language policies but have also shown contempt for indigenous languages. Some African countries, for example, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, have adopted overt language policies constitutionally banning the use of indigenous languages in public domains. In these countries, proficiency in English (i.e., the ability to speak and write fluently in the language) is a requisite for election to public office. In the case of Uganda, for example, it is reported that children must be competent in English to qualify for admission into nursery schools. In this regard, Kwesiga (1994: 58) remarks sarcastically that “African mothers who have knowledge of English start teaching their children that language before they are born.” In other African countries, policymakers have demonstrated a negative attitude toward the use of indigenous languages in the higher domains, such as education, the government and administration, and so on. For instance, Bamgbose (2001) reports that legislators in Nigeria rejected the proposal that Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s national languages and mother tongue to about 90% of legislators, be used as the language of debate in the House of Assembly (Bamgbose 2001). The legislators themselves explain that they rejected Yoruba because “[the use of Yoruba in the House of Assembly] is capable of demeaning and reducing the intellectual capacity of legislators” (Bamgbose 2001: 190, my emphasis). The legislators’ contempt for Yoruba and the indigenous languages in general betrays their assigning official roles to those languages—a procedure intended to suggest an equal status with former colonial languages, while simultaneously not allowing the languages to be used, and the majority of their speakers to participate, in the conduct of the business of the state. Heine (1990: 176) remarks that in retaining former colonial languages as the medium of instruction in schools, policymakers expected that (a) the adopted European language would develop into a viable medium of national communication; (b) it would be adopted by the African populations; (c) it would spread as a lingua franca and perhaps eventually also as a first language by replacing the local languages, as was the case for Portuguese and Spanish in large parts of Latin America. Along these lines, Mfum-Mensah (2005) observes that policymakers viewed at independence, as they do at present, instruction in the language of the former colonial power as an approach that would lead to greater proficiency in that language, opening a further step toward economic development and participation in the international global economy. Contrary to the earlier and

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related expectations, and despite the fact that European languages have been used in African education for nearly 200 years, Mchombo (2014: 32) notes that use of these languages as the sole medium of instruction has not necessarily translated into massive academic success for the students. On the contrary, “it seems to have exacerbated the failure rate in schools, thereby undermining the development of the nation-states and seriously reducing the continent’s competitive edge” (Mchombo 2014: 32). Like Mchombo, Alexander (1997: 88) remarks that the social distribution of European languages in Africa remains very limited and is largely restricted to a minority elite group; economic development has not reached the majority of the continent’s population; and language-based division has increased. Also, there is a continuing increase in school dropouts (due to, among other things, the language barrier, i.e., learners find it difficult to study through the medium of a foreign language), and the illiteracy rates among the populace remain high. According to UNESCO (2003), in 1990, there were 138 million illiterate persons in sub-Saharan Africa. In a more recent report, UNESCO (2014) says that Africa has the highest illiteracy rates in the world, estimated in 2011 to be 41% and 30% for adults and the youth. Also, UNESCO (2013) reports that “of the 11 countries with the lowest recorded adult literacy rates in the world, ten are in Africa.” Further, the organization notes that, in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 1 in 3 adults cannot read, 182 million adults are unable to read and write, and 48 million youths (ages 15–24) are illiterate. Commenting on literacy in Africa, Djité (2008: 66) remarks that after 50 years of experimenting with European languages as the main and, in most cases, sole media of instruction in African schools, 80–90% of the population in most African countries have yet to learn how to speak the (official) languages of their former colonial masters. In agreement with Djité, Tollefson (1991, 2013) observes that though vast resources are directed toward language teaching and bilingualism involving European languages and indigenous languages, more people than ever are unable to acquire the language skills they need in order to enter and succeed in school, obtain satisfactory employment, and participate politically and socially in the life of their communities. What is at issue, as Bruthiaux (2000: 287) notes, is whether it can be deemed appropriate and economically justifiable to devote so many resources to education through the medium of a foreign language, such as English or French, especially since centuries of experimentation with Western education have not resulted in mass literacy development in the African continent. Against this background, Djité (2008) asks, “What price are we prepared to put on the good education of the African people?” (2008: 67) and “How many more centuries can Africans afford to

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wait” (2008: 180) to become literate in the languages of their former colonial masters? Any study interested in addressing these and related questions must explain why inherited colonial language-in-education policies persist in Africa’s educational systems, despite the fact that they have failed to deliver the expected literacy outcomes, as highlighted earlier. I contend that language economics, a field of study whose focus is on investigating the interplay between linguistic and economic variables, and critical theory, especially Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of capital, market, habitus, and social fields, offer the needed insights into why Africa’s policymakers have retained inherited colonial language policies.

 ersistence of Colonial Language Policies: Insights P from Critical Theory and Language Economics Tollefson (2006) describes critical language policy as an approach to language planning that investigates the processes by which systems of inequality are created and sustained through language. This approach highlights the concept of power in the reproduction of socioeconomic and political inequality. In critical language policy, power refers to the ability to control language for personal interest (Bourdieu 1991; Fairclough 1989, 1992; Foucault 1979; Gramsci 1988; Tollefson 2006). A critical theory approach to language planning acknowledges that although language planning is about choice, individuals do not actually have freedom of language choice, be it in education or in social life (Paulston 2003: 476). Accordingly, critical language policy researchers assume an adversarial model for social change, in which struggle is a prerequisite for social justice (Tollefson 2006). Their goal is to describe and explain hegemonic practices, which Gramsci (1988) defines as institutional practices that ensure that power remains in the hands of the few; to understand how dominant social groups use language for establishing and maintaining social hierarchies; and to investigate ways to alter those hierarchies (Tollefson 2002a). Along these lines, Bourdieu says that all human actions take place within social fields, that is, areas of struggle for institutional resources and forms of privilege and power. He notes that the individuals who participate in this struggle, Bourdieu calls them “agents,” have a set of dispositions or habitus, which incline them to act and react in certain ways. In other words, the dispositions give the agents “a feel for the game,” a sense of what is appropriate in certain circumstances and what is not (Bourdieu 1991: 13). Bourdieu notes

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further that not only do the agents have habitus but they also have different aims in their struggle for resources: some (e.g., the elites/policymakers) seek to preserve the status quo by legitimatizing some linguistic capital—in this case, former colonial languages, as has been the case since colonialism ended in Africa—and others (e.g., language activists and language professionals) seek to change the environment, each choosing differing chances of winning or losing, depending upon where they are located in the structured space of their respective positions in society (Bourdieu 1991: 14). Accordingly, individuals make choices about which languages to use in particular kinds of markets, which Bourdieu defines as places where different kinds of resources or capital are distributed. Bourdieu uses economic concepts such as market metaphorically to refer to the social context in which language is used. It seems that in postcolonial Africa (Kimizi 2009), as in postcolonial settings elsewhere (Hamid and Jahan 2015), the debate around the medium of instruction in schools is about inclusion and exclusion and related privilege and denial. In this debate, such former colonial languages as English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, for example, are what Bourdieu (1991) calls symbolic capital. The languages are symbolic in two ways: (a) they can be exchanged for material prosperity and mobility; and (b) they are an embodiment of material resources and social privileges that need to be invested to master those languages but are inequitably distributed in society (Hamid and Jahan 2015). In Bourdieu’s work, the concept of linguistic market refers to the fact that language use indexes [of ] social, political, and economic inequality and that different variants of a language (or, by extension, of languages seen as different) do not enjoy the same degree of prestige in a given place at a given time (Grin et al. 2010: 32). The choices that individuals make about which language to use in a given market, in the present case Africa’s educational s­ ystems, are informed by the economic value with which a language is associated. This is because, Bourdieu says, in any given linguistic market, some products are valued more highly than others. Bourdieu’s approach to language practices is in agreement with developments in language economics, a field of study that, as noted earlier, is concerned with the interplay between linguistic and economic variables. More specifically, language economics is concerned with the relevance of language as a commodity, in the acquisition of which individual actors may have good reason to invest; it considers language learning as a social investment that yields benefits for the investors and deals with the economic implications (costs and benefits) of language policies, whether these costs and benefits are market-related or not (Grin 2001: 66). Within language economics, linguistic products such as language, language varieties, utterances, and accents are seen

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not only as goods or commodities to which the market assigns a value but as signs of wealth or capital, which receive their value only in relation to a market, characterized by what Bourdieu calls a particular law of price formation (Bourdieu 1991: 66–7). Edwards (2004: 149) notes that “although language is part of our cultural capital, its market value is variable.” The market value of a linguistic capital such as language or language variety, says Coulmas (1992), is determined by a number of factors, all of which contribute to make language not only a medium but also an element of economic success (Coulmas 1992: 77–89). It is, as Strauss (1996: 9) notes, an index of the functional appreciation of the language by the relevant community. It follows that it is extremely important to understand the interplay between linguistic and economic variables, especially in the African context, for this understanding sheds light on why there is so much demand for foreign language skills in Africa’s formal labor market but virtually no comparable demand for African languages (Grin et al. 2010: 140). Both language economics and critical theory, especially Bourdieu’s work, allow scholars to understand why African parents, for instance, value and prefer such ex-colonial languages as English, French, and Portuguese over their own indigenous languages as the medium of instruction in the educational system. Parents evaluate ex-colonial languages as commodities that command an exchange value; they perceive them as more advantageous than African languages in the benefits that they can bring to the user or, in Bourdieu’s terms, they see linguistic capital inherent in those (ex-colonial) languages (Tan and Rubdy 2008). As I have observed elsewhere (Kamwangamalu 2013b), it seems that parents prefer an education through the medium of former colonial languages because it enhances individuals’ socio-economic status and prestige (Giri 2010) while education through the medium of an indigenous language does not. Thus, the dominance of ex-­ colonial languages in education and other higher domains has a significant impact on the distribution of linguistic resources, which, as Martin-Jones (2007: 174–5) aptly remarks, “are embedded in the economic, political, and social interests of groups and … have consequences for the life chances of individuals as well as for the construction of social categories and relations of power.” Against the background of language economics and critical theory, I argue that for African parents to accept an education through the medium of indigenous African languages for their children, that education must, like an education through the medium of former colonial languages, be associated with economic outcomes. In other words, parents might embrace their own indigenous languages as the media of instruction in schools if that education were

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as profitable as an education through the medium of a former colonial language such as English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish. On this view, Canagarajah and Ashraf (2013: 268) note pointedly that when local languages don’t have importance for tertiary education or, it must be said, for education in general, “this reduces the motivation among students and families to learn languages other than English,” or, I must add, any former colonial language. The authors comment further that “if parents and students see little or no functionality for less privileged languages, they will gradually veer toward the languages with more capital” (Canagarajah and Ashraf 2013: 269). In agreement with the above authors, Coupland (2013) argues, and rightly so, that the decisions that people make to invest in certain languages or leave them behind are functions of the utility with which the languages are associated. Likewise, Vaillancourt (1996: 81) remarks that “individuals invest in language skills for their children or themselves according to the benefits and costs associated with these investments.” The ideas summarized in this paragraph are useful in two significant ways. One, they offer the lens through which we can understand why African parents favor former colonial languages over African languages as the medium of instruction in the educational systems. Two, with this understanding, we can explore ways in which ex-colonial languages and African languages can coexist productively in education for the benefit of all rather than of select few, a minority of the elite class. This study proposes prestige planning for African languages as the way forward to making these languages economically viable media of instruction in the continent’s educational systems.

 restige Planning for Africa’s Indigenous P Languages Essentially, prestige planning is concerned with raising the prestige of any given language, in the present case African languages, so that members of the targeted speech community develop a positive attitude toward it (Haarmann 1990). But as noted earlier, prestige planning for Africa’s indigenous languages has, in general, consisted of only in elevating the status of selected indigenous languages by recognizing them as official languages of the state, but not allowing them to be used in the higher domains such as education, which remain the exclusive preserve for former colonial languages. South Africa, for instance, has given official recognition to 11 languages, including English and Afrikaans and 9 African languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Tswana,

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Venda, and Tsonga), while other African countries, among them Malawi, Senegal, and Tanzania, have given recognition to one language only, usually a former colonial language. However, no scholar disputes the fact that giving official status to nine indigenous languages in South Africa, for instance, to bring them to equality with English and Afrikaans has not necessarily resulted or has ever resulted in prestige status for those languages. Success in language planning, says Ager (2005: 1039), is about “succeeding in influencing language behavior, whether this is behavior in using language, identified in the phrase language-as-instrument, or behavior toward language, often described as language-as-object.” Ager (2005: 1037) goes on to note, pointedly, that “planning that does not influence behavior, that does not convince hearts and minds of the target of planning, is pointless, no matter how well-researched.” He links prestige planning with image planning, arguing that the prestige allocated by a community to a language constitutes part of the image the community has of itself—part of its attitudinal structure. Since both prestige and image are psychological attitudes, Ager says that attitudes need to be changed if planning is to be successful. He does not, however, explain how attitudes can be changed for planning to succeed. To resolve the tension between language-in-education policies and practices, Dominguez (1998) suggests that language policymakers must communicate the benefits that an education through the medium of indigenous languages carries and persuade the speakers of these languages to accept it. Other scholars suggest that language planners should adopt a plurilingual model indigenous to the region concerned (Canagarajah and Ashraf 2013: 258). More specifically, it is argued that rather than compartmentalizing languages and demanding equal competencies in each of them, such a model would allow for functional competencies in complementary languages for ­different purposes and social domains, without neglecting indigenous language maintenance. The issue, as I see it, is not so much whether languages should be compartmentalized but rather what outcomes would result from the proposed compartmentalization. In this chapter, I argue that negative attitudes toward African languages as media of instruction in schools might change if an education through the medium of these languages were associated with economic outcomes, such as access to employment. I propose prestige planning undergirded by language economics and critical theory, as already described, as the way forward to promoting use of Africa’s indigenous languages as the media of instruction in the educational systems. The central assumption of this proposal is concerned with promoting African languages in the education system as first and foremost an economic or marketing problem in the sense that,

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unlike former colonial languages, knowledge of African languages does not provide adequate compensation in the formal labor market. Viewing prestige planning for indigenous languages as a linguistic marketing problem entails developing, promoting, and associating these languages with an economic value to make them a commodity in the acquisition of which individuals may have good reason to invest. For a legislation designed to elevate the status of indigenous languages in the educational system to succeed, it must meet at least two intertwined conditions. First, the legislation must simultaneously create a market or demand for these languages to raise awareness of their value in the formal labor market. In other words, there is the need to vest the selected indigenous languages with some of the privileges, advantages, prestige, power, and material gains that have been for so long associated only with former colonial languages. Individuals who are interested in learning or being schooled through the medium of an African language must know what that education will do for them in terms of upward social mobility. Would it, for instance, be as rewarding as an education through the medium of an ex-colonial language such as English? Would it give the language consumer a competitive edge in the employment market? Or, as Grin (1995: 227–231) asks, what benefits would individuals actually reap, particularly in the labor market, because of their academic skills in an indigenous language? And how would these benefits compare to the benefits derived from the skills in a foreign language (such as English, French, or Portuguese)? I argue that the response to these questions lies in the relationship between language and economic returns. This explains, as Grin (1999: 16) observes, “why people learn certain languages and why, if they have the choice of using more than one, they prefer to use one or the other.” As economists would say, individuals respond to incentives and seek to acquire those language skills whose expected financial benefits exceed their expected costs (Bloom and Grenier 1996: 46–7). Associating an education through the media of indigenous languages with economic advantages and prestige might constitute an incentive for the speakers and potential users of these languages to study and be schooled through them in the educational system. Second, certified skills or knowledge, that is, school-acquired knowledge of African languages, must become one of the criteria for access to employment in the public and private sector, much as is the case for skills in ex-colonial languages. Thus, the value of ex-colonial languages such as English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish or of any language for that matter depends mostly not so much on “who is using it and in what context” (Ricento 2013: 134) but rather on the purpose or ends for which it is used. It follows that because

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of the ends for which they are used, ex-colonial languages have a higher market value and privileged status than local languages in the national curricula (Kamwangamalu 2000: 59), and proficiency in them serves as a marker of socioeconomic class (Ricento 2013). In an earlier study (Kamwangamalu 2004), I have argued that meeting the stipulated conditions does not mean removing former colonial languages from or diminishing their status in the educational system or in other higher domains. Rather, it simply means creating conditions under which the selected indigenous languages can compete with former colonial languages, at least in the local linguistic marketplace. After all, for the language consumer—the term refers to the receiver of language planning, that is, an individual whose language or speech community is the target of planning—the most central question is not so much whether or not the selected indigenous language should be used as a medium of learning. Rather, the consumer is interested in the outcome of an education through the medium of an indigenous language and how this would compare materially with the outcome of an education through the medium of a former colonial language (Kamwangamalu 2013c). In the proposed prestige planning framework, indigenous languages are seen as potential cash cows and as a commodity to which the market assigns a value. To view language as a commodity is, as Pennycook (2008: xii) notes, “to view language in instrumental, pragmatic and commercial terms, which is precisely the dominant discourse on language in many contemporary contexts.” Thus, at the core of the proposed prestige planning framework is “linguistic instrumentalism,” which Wee (2003: 211) describes as “a view of language that justifies its existence in a community in terms of its usefulness in achieving specific utilitarian goals, such as access to economic development or social mobility.” In this vein, I reiterate that for the African masses to embrace their own languages as the medium of instruction in the schools, they would want to know whether that education would accrue the benefits (access to resources and employment opportunities) that are currently associated only with an education through the medium of former colonial languages. As we see in the next and last section, the literature offers several case studies of prestige planning for minority languages around the world. I argue that with the political will to change the status quo, I see no reason why the proposed prestige planning framework would not succeed for minoritized majority languages in the African continent.

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 ase Studies of Successful Prestige Planning C for Minority Languages It seems that Africa does not have a history of successful prestige planning for indigenous languages, particularly not one that associates use of these languages in education with economic returns (Bamgbose 2000; Djité 2008; Kamwangamalu 2013a; Koffi 2012). As a matter of fact, in Africa, language planners have hardly taken economic considerations into account, especially as they relate to educational use of the indigenous languages (Heugh 2002; Wright 2002). There are, however, the cases of Somali in Somalia, Amharic in Ethiopia, Kiswahili in Tanzania, Ile Ife in Nigeria, and Afrikaans in South Africa that African scholars often reference as success stories in prestige planning (Alexander 1997; Bamgbose 2007; Batibo 2001). These cases are successful insofar as they demonstrate that children learn better when they are taught through the medium of a familiar language, which may or may not necessarily be their mother tongue/primary language, rather than through the medium of a foreign language. From the perspective of the prestige planning framework I am proposing, the success of these case studies, except of Afrikaans in South Africa, is a limited one, for the economic returns deriving from an education through the medium of either of the languages (Amharic, Kiswahili, Somali) are comparatively lower than those deriving from an education through the medium of a former colonial language, be it English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish. The literature has increasingly recognized the importance of the linkage between language and the economy in determining the success or failure of any given language planning and policy (Paulston 1988; Walsh 2006; Gopinath 2008). In particular, there is sufficient evidence that language planning and policy activities succeed if they lead to desirable economic outcomes. In recent publications (Kamwangamalu 2010, 2016), I have reported on several case studies of indigenous language promotion in education, showing that parents in particular support education in indigenous languages if it is associated with economic returns. In particular, I have pointed out that when a language becomes associated with an instrumental value, the population will strive to acquire or be schooled through that language without reference to whether it is an indigenous vernacular or a foreign language (Fishman 2006). Consider, for example, the case of the Macedonian language as reported in Tollefson (2002b). Tollefson notes that when the Republic of Macedonia was created within Yugoslavia, the Macedonian language served as the medium of government operations and education. The use of Macedonian in these

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higher domains guaranteed access to jobs in the administration and schools, and the communication industries enjoyed more clients for their books, newspapers, and music. Fishman (2006) makes a similar comment regarding prestige planning for the Basque language in Spain, pointing to the success of what he calls Basquecization activities, that is, activities intended to promote the Basque language in that country. He explains that Basquecization activities were successful because participation in these activities yielded certification at various levels of competence, entitling their bearers to qualify for promotions, higher wages, job tenure, and other perquisites of success in the workplace (e.g., Fishman 2006). In a related comment on the success of Spanish Basque, Le Page (1997: 16) drew attention to the considerable political will exerted to ensure the success of policies favoring use of the Basque language alongside Spanish not only in education but also in every domain as well as to the availability of financial resources to implement those policies. Additionally, Giri (2010) explains why speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages in Nepal are attracted to Nepali as the medium of instruction rather than to their own indigenous languages. She remarks that, in Nepal, Nepali and English are status symbols and, increasingly, serve as tools in the hands of the ruling elites who use those languages to create linguistic hegemony within the polity. As a result, speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages choose Nepali as their second language because their own indigenous languages do not have the same value as Nepali in the linguistic marketplace. Last but not least arguably, one of the most telling case studies of successful prestige planning for an indigenous language is the Malay language in Malaysia, a multilingual and multiethnic nation that obtained political independence from Britain in 1957. Soon after independence, Malaysia adopted a language policy replacing English with Bahasa Malaysia as the sole official and national language (Gill 2006). The policy has had its ups and downs: • English was replaced by Bahasa Malaysia as the official language of the state (1957–2002); • English was allowed restricted status as the medium of instruction for science and mathematics (2003–2009); • Bahasa Malaysia was reinforced as a tool for unity (from mid-2009); and, • Bahasa Malaysia replaced English as the medium of instruction for science and mathematics from 2012 onward (Ali et  al. 2011; Ting 2010: 399, 402).

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Despite these hurdles, which are, after all, part and parcel of a language planning exercise, prestige planning for Bahasa Malaysia has been successful. Malaysia has succeeded in promoting the status of an indigenous language, Bahasa Malaysia, while not denying the value of the former colonial language, English. Additional case studies of successful prestige planning for economically driven minority languages can be found in Kamwangamalu (2016) and include French in Canada (Vaillancourt 1996), Welsh in Wales (Edwards 2004; Ferguson 2006), Chinese Mandarin in Singapore (Gopinath 2008), and Gaelic in Scotland (Grin 1996).

Concluding Remarks In Africa, all past prestige planning activities, except prestige planning for inherited colonial languages, have concentrated only on the production of language planning, as defined earlier. The prestige planning framework being proposed in this chapter, however, requires legislation that not only gives official status to selected indigenous languages, hence the production of language planning, but also and most importantly changes hearts and behaviors of the target language community, hence receiver-based prestige planning. The legislation can achieve this double goal by associating an education through the medium of indigenous languages with economic returns and advantages. But, as Bourdieu (1991) reminds us, participants in language planning activities have different goals; some, including language professionals, seek to change the status quo, as argued in this study, while others, among them policymakers in particular, seek to preserve it by legitimatizing some linguistic capital—in this case, former colonial languages. In this regard, consider the experience I had some years ago at Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya, where I delivered a paper proposing prestige planning for the local indigenous lingua franca, Kiswahili. One member of the audience reacted to the proposal as follows: Professor, what you are proposing will not work. Let us move on. English has brought us development; it has brought us jobs; it has brought us education; it has brought us literacy; but what have African languages done for us? Nothing! Let us just move on! (Kamwangamalu 2013b)

This reaction sums up the elite’s attitude toward African languages as compared with former colonial languages, in the present case, English. Moving on simply means using English as the sole medium of instruction in schools. And yet, despite the early introduction of English into the education system and

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the resources invested in its promotion, there have been numerous claims of “falling standards” of English in educational institutions in English-speaking African countries, including Kenya (Mazrui 1997). Regarding Kenya, Mazrui (2013) quotes the vice-chancellor of a local university as saying that “many undergraduate students in that country’s [Kenya’s] public universities are functionally illiterate in English and could not even write a simple application for a job in the language” (Mazrui 2013: 149). It is telling that although Western education has not succeeded in spreading literacy in Africa, language-in-education practices in the continent as a whole continue to be informed by inherited colonial language policies. One must ask whether it is pedagogically justified to continue investing only in Western education, or what Coulmas (1992: 149) rightly describes as a “monolingual, elitist system,” even if that education, practiced for nearly 200 years, has failed to spread literacy among the populations in the continent. To change this state of affairs, and drawing on critical theory and language economics, I have proposed prestige planning for African languages if these languages are to become, like former colonial languages, instruments for upward social mobility. For prestige planning to succeed in Africa, the selected African languages must bear economic returns for their users, for the attribution of real value has been the key ingredient for the success of prestige planning elsewhere (Fishman 2006; Grin 2006; Coulmas 1992; Tollefson 2013; Walsh 2006). Only the linkage between African languages and the economy, a link that is frequently overlooked in the debate over the medium of instruction in African schools, would allow future generations of policymakers to break away from existing language policies, which have mainly, for far too long, benefited African elites at the expense of the masses. Prestige planning for African languages is in line not only with developments in language economics but also with the thinking in critical linguistics, a field of study that entails social activism (Fairclough 1989, 1992) and where, as Tollefson (2002a) explains, linguists are seen as responsible not only for understanding how dominant social groups (i.e., African elites) use language for establishing and maintaining social hierarchies but also for investigating ways to modify those hierarchies. If those hierarchies are to be altered in Africa, if, says Brock-Utne (2000), social and educational inequities are to be redressed, and if economic and technological development is to involve the majority of Africa’s population, the solution lies with its languages. The framework of prestige planning proposed in this chapter envisages associating selected indigenous languages with an economic value in the labor market and requiring academic skills in these languages as one of the criteria for access to employment. If Africa’s policy-

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makers embrace the proposed framework and make indigenous languages valuable and competitive with former colonial languages at least in the local formal labor market, they would have made a big leap in the right direction. If they move on with inherited colonial languages alone, then these languages will continue to serve, as Graddol (2006: 38) notes, as some of the mechanisms for structuring inequality in developing economies, particularly in the African continent. Put differently, unless African languages are given a market value, that is, unless their instrumentality for the process of production, exchange, and distribution is enhanced, as proposed in this study, “no amount of policy change at school level can guarantee their use in high-status functions and, thus, eventual escape from the dominance and hegemony of former colonial languages” (Alexander 2013: 108).

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13 Language Minorities in a Globalized Economy: The Case of Professional Translation in Canada Matthieu LeBlanc

Introduction This chapter of the handbook is devoted to the work of professional translators in a globalized economy and more specifically to the role translation plays for members of today’s linguistic minority communities. It looks at this through the lens of professional (as opposed to literary) translation, with a focus on the effects of changing working conditions for translators as a result of globalization. It pays particular attention to the Canadian context, with special emphasis on professional translation into French, the language of the officially recognized linguistic minority.1 The first part of the chapter examines the role translation plays for linguistic minorities in general. What is the impact of translation—and thus of translators—in the shaping of a minority language? Does translation contribute to the dissemination and development of minority languages? Or on the contrary, is translation a mere replica of the more dominant language(s)? Moreover, what do translation practices reveal in terms of power relations between linguistic communities? The second part of the chapter explores changing practices in professional translation, asking, for example, to what extent have working conditions— M. LeBlanc (*) Faculté des arts et des sciences sociales, Université de Moncton, Moncton, NB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_13

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rates of pay, deadlines, productivity requirements—changed for professional translators over the last quarter-century? How has globalization affected the work of translators? Furthermore, to what extent have the introduction and adoption of translation technologies changed the work of translators and, as a result, the end product, that is, the target text? What impact have these changes had on the target audience and, ultimately, the members of the linguistic minority, the principal consumers of translation? The third and final part of this chapter illustrates the tensions that arise when changes to the translation process and product are such that a linguistic minority, the consumers of translation, feel they are no longer being treated as citizens with rights equal to those of the linguistic majority. This examination ultimately shows that for members of minority linguistic communities, translation is intrinsically linked with language ideologies, language policies, power relations, language rights, and identity. The focus here is on the transformations that have marked the government of Canada’s Translation Bureau since the mid-1990s.

Translation and Linguistic Minorities As Branchadell states in his chapter on translation and minority languages in the Handbook of Translation Studies, translation has always been correlated with minority languages, but the link between the two, surprisingly, has not been examined as closely as one would expect in the field of translation studies (2011, p. 98). Cronin even goes so far as to say that minority languages have been long neglected by translation studies: “Translators working in minority languages have often been ignored in theoretical and historical debates on translation. […] the experiences of minority languages have much to reveal to other languages in a world increasingly dominated by one global language” (1998, p. 145), here meaning English. First, a definition of the term “minority language” is given here as it relates to the purposes of this chapter. According to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, “regional or minority languages are those 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, on the understanding that such definition (iii) does not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the state or the languages of migrants” (Branchadell 2011, p. 97).

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Branchadell suggests an even narrower definition than the one proposed by the Charter, wherein a minority language is “one that excludes true state languages such as French or German but still includes a merely symbolic state language such as Irish Gaelic” (2005, p.  2). While this definition may be defended by various motives, it does not always correspond to what is understood as a “minority language.” Scholars in the fields of translation studies, linguistics, and language policy have proposed broader, more encompassing definitions of “minority language.” Indeed, for many experts, the term “minority” can be used to refer to a much wider range of situations. As Venuti states, “I understand ‘minority’ to mean a cultural or political position that is subordinate, whether the context that so defines it is local, national or global. […] The terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ are relative, depending on one another for their definition and always dependent on a historically existing, even if changing, situation” (1998, p. 135). This broadens the definition, in that a language that can be considered as a majority language in some situations (e.g., French in France) can also be understood as a minority language in other settings (e.g., French in Canada or Switzerland). This is the definition I have adopted for the purposes of this chapter. In the same vein, Cronin deems that the “concept of “minority” with respect to language is dynamic rather than static. “Minority” is the expression of a relation not an essence. The relations can assume two forms: diachronic and spatial. The diachronic relation that defines a minority language is an historical experience that destabilises the linguistic relations in one country so that languages find themselves in an asymmetrical relationship” (1998, p. 86).

Cronin adds that the “majority status of a language is determined by political, ­economic and cultural forces that are rarely static and therefore all languages are potentially minority languages” (1998, pp.  86–87). Cronin uses Irish Gaelic as an example. These broader definitions of “minority languages” are in the end much better adapted to the situations and contexts described in this chapter.

Translating for Linguistic Minorities As Toury posits, it is “an established fact that minority language communities have often turned to translating in critical periods” (1985, p.  3) and that translation has thus contributed to “the development of these languages and

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their cultures” (1985, p.  3). This has been the case for modern Hebrew in Israel and for Gbaya in Central Africa, for example (Delisle and Woodsworth 2012). In such instances, translation can play an instrumental role in the dissemination and preservation of a minority language. It can in fact fulfill a variety of functions in the target language system, especially in cases where a strong majority language—for example, English—can have a displacing impact on the minority language(s) with which it is in contact. In such cases of asymmetry between majority and minority languages, “[i]f a minority language [group] wishes to resist displacement by the majority language of the community, it will seek to defend itself by strengthening each and every domain of language usage” (Toury 1985, p. 7). Translation into the minority language is one of the ways the minority language community can foster its survival in various domains of language use, at least partially: “translating may […] serve as a means for both actual preservation and development of a language—and enhancing self-esteem in its speakers, which is a necessary prerequisite for successful results: it is no doubt a good and highly economical way of developing new linguistic forms to their full utilization for all communicative purposes, but it may also be a reassurance for the community and its individual members that everything that has or can be formulated in other languages can also be formulated in the minority language in question, which may well be a cause for great comfort and real encouragement” (Toury 1985, p. 7).

What Toury highlights are the positive effects of translation in the development of minority languages. Along the same lines, Cronin believes that translation can be of utmost importance for linguistic minorities in the sense that it can be instrumental in the development and dissemination of the minority language. He does, however, point to an important problem that linguistic minorities often face: “Minority languages have a fundamentally paradoxical relationship with translation. As languages operating in a multilingual world with vastly accelerated information flows from dominant languages, they must translate continually in order to retain their viability and relevance as living languages. Yet, translation itself may endanger the very specificity of those languages that practise it, particularly in situations of diglossia. The situation of translation in the culture of a minority language is therefore highly ambiguous. The ambiguity is partly related to the functions of translation in the minority language culture” (Cronin 1998, p. 89).

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What Cronin emphasizes is the asymmetrical relationship in which languages find themselves, and the resultant power relations that are established between them. Often, as Cronin points out, translation is unfortunately “unidirectional” (1998, p.  90) or, if not, heavily dominant in favor of the minority language. Such is the case for Irish Gaelic in Ireland, French in Canada, and even Italian in Switzerland. While translation allows the speakers of minority languages to benefit from rights and/or privileges equal to those of speakers of the majority language, it also has the potential for introducing lexical or syntactical “interferences” into the target minority language, which in turn can transform the minority language into a “pallid imitation of the source language in translatorese” (Cronin 1998, p. 90). Toury (1985) has also signaled this risk of interference in the minority language. That being said, by suppressing all source language elements from their translations, translators also run the risk of “overdomesticating” the target text: “if they [translators] resist interference and opt for target-oriented communicative translations that domesticate the foreign text, the danger is one of complacent stasis. Translation no longer functions as an agent of regeneration in the target language” (Cronin 1998, p. 90). Overall, the relationships between the source and target texts on a microscopic level (and between the source and target cultures on a more macroscopic level) may be uncovered through an examination of translations and translation practices and processes. What are ultimately revealed are the power relations—more often than not asymmetrical—between the languages and thus the linguistic communities in contact (see Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002 on the “power turn” in translation studies). While translation may allow the dominant language to maintain its position of power and so serve to promote linguistic and cultural imposition, it can, on the other hand, also be used to combat domination: “[t]ranslation is an effective tool to change users’ perception of the symbolic and practical value of their own language, as a language into which translations are made is considered a useful one” (Diaz Fouces 2005, p. 102). In some respects, translation becomes a way of normalizing language use within the minority community, all the while giving members the opportunity—or the right—to use that language in various contexts and situations. Its role, although complex and sometimes paradoxical, is thus broad and ultimately essential. As García González suggests, “translation is an activity that has to be fostered and activated, as a mechanism to promote the language itself ” (2005, pp. 110–111). Its role in language planning and language maintenance cannot be underestimated. What we must not forget, she adds, is that its “role in language normalization processes (that is, in the attempts to cause a language to be normally used in all spheres of a speech

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community) can be of equal or even more importance for such languages than the communicative function itself ” (García González 2005, p. 111). This is, for example, the case for French in Canada in provinces other than Quebec.

Linguistic Minorities, Translation, and Globalization Since the 1990s, several translation studies scholars have written about the effects of globalization on translation. According to Shiyab, “[t]he effect of globalization [has] had a tremendous linguistic and social impact on translation and translation studies simply because globalization necessitated translation” (2010, p. 7). Globalization and technology are inextricably linked as the former is a consequence of technological advancement, “and the consequences of such globalized technology is the daily translation services we see everywhere” (Shiyab 2010, p. 9). The demand for translation has increased dramatically over the last three decades (Shiyab 2010; Cronin 2003), thanks in large part to technological advances. In fact, with the advent of the internet and new technologies, there has been an “exponential increase in information, and its centrality to the informational society has created a situation not where there is no work for translators but rather where there is in fact too much work” (Cronin 2003, p. 112). What this has meant—and still means—for linguistic minorities is a source of concern for some in the sense that, more than ever, minority languages are “under pressure” (Cronin 2003, p.  141) from powerful, major languages, most notably English. This is precisely what I will investigate in the next two sections of this chapter, beginning with an examination of the work of the translator in a globalized economy.

The Work of Translators in a Globalized Economy Translators have witnessed major shifts in their work landscape over the last 20 years. Similar to many other professionals, in this technological revolution they are adopting a variety of sophisticated tools, workflows, and procedures. These new tools have revolutionized the art and science of translating. No longer a “craft” as it had been for hundreds of years, professional translation has become more of an “industry,” to use Gouadec’s term (2007). The first part of this section discusses the technological changes professional translators have witnessed over the last 30 years; the second part examines the effects of globalization and industrialization on the practice of translation and on professional translators. The goal is to establish who is most concerned by these

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changes and how linguistic minority communities may or may not be affected by them.

The Technological Revolution in Professional Translation The advent of personal computers and sophisticated workstations in the 1980s and 1990s brought translation abruptly into the twenty-first century. Gone are the days when translators used typewriters, consulted paper dictionaries, spent hours searching through in-house libraries gathering scientific or technical documentation for their translations, or revised and edited translations with pen and paper. The adoption of technological tools by translators has been swift, and professionals today work in highly technologized environments. The modern translator workstation consists of a number of computer-­ assisted translation tools (CAT), some of which are simple reproductions of traditional tools (e.g., dictionaries) while others are new and complex. While word processors remain at the core of the translator’s workstation, many other tools are now also used, including online and electronic dictionaries, spell checkers (and grammar checkers), terminology databases, bitexts and concordancers, internet search engines, translation memory (TM) software, and machine/automatic translation (MT) systems (see Bowker 2002, and Kenny 2011, among others). Translators do most of their work directly at their workstations and spend many hours in front of screens. They work less and less with paper, and seldom consult traditional sources of documentation. In fact, “[p]rofessional translation has become a multi-activity task within a complex system of client expectations, technological aids, information sources, and organizational constraints” (Ehrensberger-Dow and Massey 2014, p. 199). The two tools that have most significantly changed the nature of the work of translators are translation memory systems and machine translation systems. A translation memory system is “a type of linguistic database that is used to store and retrieve source texts and their translations when translating a new source text” (Bowker 2002, pp. 154–155). TMs have been widely used for a number of years already—they were made commercially available in the 1990s—and are part of most translators’ toolkits, be they freelance or in-­ house, salaried translators. TMs offer numerous advantages in that they allow for increased productivity and improved consistency. Designed to retrieve existing translations, they help translators increase the number of words translated in a set period of time. They can also help to improve terminological and stylistic consistency, as well as reduce repetitive work. Finally, TMs constitute in and of themselves a text repository containing original text and their trans-

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lations; this searchable repository can be used as parallel corpora and thus be very useful for translators (Christensen and Scholdager 2010; LeBlanc 2013). TMs have significantly changed the translators’ relationship with the source and target texts (Garcia 2009; Mossop 2006a; Pym 2011). First and foremost, rather than work with whole texts, translators now deal with segments, more often sentences but also parts of sentences, as required by the software and sometimes by the clients themselves. The result of this sentence-by-sentence approach is that translation becomes a mere sentence-replacement activity that renders the holistic, whole-text approach difficult. The technological constraints are such that the act of translating is in some instances quite decontextualized. In cases where large parts of texts have been previously translated, only the non-translated segments appear, making it hard for translators to decode the meaning. Moreover, professional translators see many other drawbacks to TMs: they render translators increasingly passive; they affect the translators’ natural reflexes; they contribute to error propagation; they influence productivity requirements; and they subject translators to existing translations and sometimes encourage “blind” recycling (LeBlanc 2013; see also Pym 2011). Contrary to TMs, machine translation systems were only recently integrated into translator workstations. Although more and more commonplace, MT systems are not nearly as widespread as TMs. When applied to translator workstations, an MT system is often used in combination with TMs. There are fewer studies of translator interaction with MT systems, but what we know is that MT systems alone, without the help of a human translator, cannot produce translations that are of high quality and thus market-ready.2 In other words, texts produced by MT systems are revised or post-edited by professional translators before being delivered to clients. Although certain types of documents may be suited for MT because of their predictable and repetitive nature (Gouadec 2007), many text types are not suited for MT. The wide availability of MT systems on the internet (e.g., Google Translate) has cast a shadow on the translation profession, as it gives the mistaken impression that translation is—or will be—a fully automated activity. For example, Google Translate is used more and more by individuals and corporations instead of human translators; the end product is either unedited—which gives rise to unintelligible translations—or edited by a bilingual non-professional, a practice that may have deleterious effects on the quality of the target text. Overall, the integration of MT and TM has profoundly changed the relationship translators have with their texts. In general, many researchers concede that the nature of the translation task has been altered by translation technology as a whole (Jiménez-Crispo 2009; O’Brien 2012). As Pym suggests,

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“[t]he first thing you find is that the text is segmented, broken into units that sit one on top of the other. That is, the text is broken into paradigmatic form; its linearity is repeatedly interrupted. The translation mind is thereby invited to work on one segment after the other, checking for terminological and phraseological consistency but not so easily checking, within this environment, for syntagmatic cohesion” (Pym 2011, p. 3).

We are, according to Pym, moving away from linearity (2011, p. 4). The rapid technological changes that professional translation is undergoing makes it hard to predict what the translator’s—or post-editor’s—workstation might look like in ten or 15 years: “[c]hange is hardly expected to slacken, so attempting to envision the state-of-the art in 2020 would be guesswork at best” (Garcia 2014, p. 85).

The Industrialization of Translation While translation technologies have made life easier for translators in many ways, they also have made things more complicated, as we have seen. As Gouadec posits, “[c]omputerization has changed translation (…) into an industrial process. IT [information technology] has in fact encouraged and probably induced the industrialization of the translation profession by (a) significantly increasing the volumes of translatable material; (b) providing the tools needed to process such large volumes; and (c) accelerating the implementation of standardized procedures” (Gouadec 2007, p. 286).

We now refer to translation as an “industry”; in Canada, we commonly speak of translation as part of the “language industries” which include the development of translation technologies and second-language teaching—and translation now “bears all the hallmarks of an industrial activity” (Gouadec 2007, p. 297). Some of these hallmarks include the development of industrial methods, ­procedures, and work organizations; the standardization of the translation process itself through the use of templates; the development (and imposition) of specific translation tools and technologies; the internationalization, globalization, and offshoring of translation activities; the outsourcing of translation (which has led in some cases to the downsizing or outright closure of internal translation services or departments); the rapid development of private translation agencies and companies; the division of labor within translation agencies and companies (pre-translation, translation, editing, terminological services, etc.); the increase in productivity requirements

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for all translators; and finally an increased pressure on tariff rates (Gouadec 2007, pp. 297–298). The impact of this computerization and subsequent industrialization of translation has been felt by almost all professional translators since the 1990s (Gouadec 2007, p. 311; Mossop 2006a). According to Garcia, while the digital age has “affected all professions, […] change has been felt by translators more keenly than most” (Garcia 2009, p. 199). Forced to work almost exclusively in front of screens and more and more dependent on—if not subordinated to—translation tools such as TM and MT systems, translators are dealing not so much with whole texts, but more with segments. These segments have for the most part been pre-translated using MT and TM, transforming the translation task into more of a post-editing task (Gouadec 2007; Mossop 2006a; Garcia 2009). As Erhensberger-Dow and Massey confirm, “many comments made by professional translators suggest that language technology tools are unnecessarily constraining their creative autonomy. […] Some translation tools and aids might be pushing translation into the direction of a search and match or patchwriting task and away from interlingual transfer or meaning within a multilingual’s mind” (2014, pp.  202–203). Others, such as Garcia, deem that the “[translation] industry itself is being sidelined by technological advancement, and is proving slow to react” (2009, p. 210). This may have a negative effect on the professional status of translators (Katan 2009) or on the working conditions of translators as they compete with non-professionals, mere “amateur bilinguals” (Garcia 2009). Finally, as Gambier puts it, “[t]hese changes in the conditions and pace of work can ultimately demotivate translators, who become dispossessed of all power, forced to always be online or beholden to the tool imposed by the client” (2016, p. 894). All in all, translators who feel that technologies have in some ways led to a loss of control over their work tend to view technologies in a more negative light, as Marshman (2014) has shown in a study of technologies in the workplace. Only time will tell if the professional status of translators will witness a genuine revolution, or if the pressures of cost effectiveness will lead to the “deputizing of competent bilinguals in place of professional translators” (Garcia 2009, p. 208) in certain cases. Pym also wonders if “[p]rofessional translators and their organizations will concede market space to the volunteers and paraprofessionals able to post-edit machine translation output and apply translation memories” (2011, p. 5). What we do know, however, is that most changes “have been changes in translation as a business” (Mossop 2006a, p. 789; see also Mossop 2006b). As many have pointed out, the industrialization and globalization of translation activities have meant

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“translation companies [are] providing service to an international clientele and dealing with remotely located translations suppliers in many countries. The very production of translations is now sometimes globalized, in the sense that a text is received for translation at one location and divided into chunks which are sent to translators around the world” (Mossop 2006a, p. 789).

As a mere commodity, translation is in some situations regarded as a simple product, destined for a non-specific linguistic community. In some instances, very little thought goes into the role that the translated text plays in the target society. This brings us back to the role of translation for members of linguistic minorities. In this new climate (and in light of the new conditions under which professional translation is practiced) we need to ask: how are linguistic minorities affected by the forces of industrialization and globalization with regards to translation? The next section focuses more specifically on the Translation Bureau of Canada and on the significant corporate and technological revolution it has undergone since the mid-1990s.

 ranslation, Globalization, and Linguistic T Minorities: An Example from the Canadian Context The Translation Bureau of Canada The Translation Bureau (TB) of Canada is the “federal organization responsible for supporting the Government of Canada in its efforts to communicate with and provide services for Canadians in the official language of their choice” (Translation Bureau 2016). It is one of the leading translation organizations in the world and the largest employer of language professionals in Canada. Since its founding in 1934, the TB has become the federal government centre of expertise in translation and linguistic services. In addition to having been a service provider for more than 75 years, the TB plays a lead role in terminology standardization within the government of Canada, standardizing the vocabulary used in various areas of government activity. In addition, the TB is the exclusive supplier of translation, revision and interpretation services for Parliament. As a leader in the Canadian linguistic services industry, the Translation Bureau stays abreast of emerging trends and makes every effort to leverage technological advances and new technologies.

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Because of its rich culture of innovation, the Bureau increasingly stands out as a leader in language technologies. (Translation Bureau 2016)

From its inception in 1934 until 1995, all government agencies and departments were required to use the TB’s services, which were free. In 1995, the TB underwent major changes in its operations and became a Special Operating Agency (SOA) of the Treasury Board of Canada. From that point, agencies and departments were no longer required to use the TB’s services for translation; they could deal with outside language service providers (LSPs). Moreover, the TB, operating on a cost-recovery basis, was required to charge all its clients—agencies and departments—for its services (House of Commons 2016, p. 6). For the government, the goal of making the TB an SOA was to create a more cost-effective and competitive organization (House of Commons 2016, p. 13). From 2008, fewer and fewer government agencies and departments— or clients—dealt with the TB, preferring instead the private sector (House of Commons 2016, p. 14). Furthermore, staffing levels at the TB have declined progressively since 2011 due in large part to the increased use of translation technologies. The TB has been looking to modernize its operations and to decrease its operational costs. Most of the positions eliminated have been through attrition of workers due mainly to retirement (House of Commons 2016, p. 16). Ultimately, the TB underwent a seismic shift in the mid-1990s when the “commissioner—the government—decided to start using translation less as a major domestic cultural-political activity (as has been the case since the 1970s), or a minor constitutionally mandated legal requirement (as had been the case since the 19th century), and more as an economic activity in which Canada could do well both domestically and on the world stage” (Mossop 2006b, p. 3).

 he Government of Canada’s Machine Translation Tool: T Portage While the transformations at the TB had been the object of some concern among translators and the translation community, nothing attracted as much attention as the government of Canada’s decision in 2015 to make the TB’s machine translation tool, Portage, available to all federal public servants. Designed by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), Portage is a statistics-based translation software program. According to the NRC, “this technology, given adequate data, can automatically generate new

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machine translation systems for virtually any pair of languages and any domain of specialization” (National Research Council 2016). The goal was to increase translator productivity. Made available to all TB translators, Portage was now set to be made available to every public servant as it contains “millions of professionally translated government-specific terms and phrases (…) and (was) intended to make it easier for public servants to function effectively at work in their acquired official language” (House of Commons 2016, p. 21). The news of the government’s decision to provide universal access to Portage was met with dismay—and outrage—by professional translators, translators’ associations, language rights advocates, and several translator-training institutions. Federal government translators reacted negatively to the news in the fear that Portage would gradually replace a significant number of translators and that some would lose their jobs. However, what federal translators feared the most was the impact of such a decision on the TB’s reputation, which the Bureau had worked hard to build since its creation in the 1930s. The use of Portage by public servants who lack good knowledge of their second official language would have a major impact on the “quality of internal government communication to the point where it would ‘trample’ on public servants’ language rights” (Woods 2015). The union representing federal translators reacted vehemently and publicly by stating that the decision would “threaten the survival of the Translation Bureau and of the translation profession itself ” (Woods 2015). While federal translators have access to Portage and may occasionally use it to compose a first draft, all translations done with the software are revised by professionals and thus are never sent to clients without having been approved by a professional. The fear among translation professionals was that the move would give public servants the impression that the translations produced by Portage are of high quality, acceptable for release as is. Such is not the case, and the concerns raised by the translation community were in large part justified as some public servants unknowingly used Portage to translate documents intended for a general readership. The Translation Bureau’s management, however, defended its decision to allow all public servants to use Portage by stating that the tool should be used for “gisting” purposes, that is, for understanding the gist of a text written in another language. It could, according to the TB, help francophones and anglophones to better understand texts written in the other official language. The TB also believed the tool could be used for the “translation of short, unofficial internal communications” (Woods 2015). It was, however, clear for the Bureau that the oversight of professional translators would still be necessary for longer texts and all publications destined for the general public.

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Investigation of the Translation Bureau in 2016 In early 2016, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages undertook a study on the Translation Bureau “in light of concerning media reports about the TB, especially with regard to its reduced workforce and its announcement that it was introducing a machine translation tool within the federal public service” (House of Commons 2016, p. 3). Witness testimonies included those of professors and researchers in the fields of translation studies, language rights experts, linguistic minorities advocates, as well as representatives from the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (the union representing federal translators), the Language Technologies Research Centre, the Language Industry Association, and officials from the Department of Public Works and Government Services, which houses the Translation Bureau. Many of the witnesses had already reacted publicly to the federal government’s decision to allow the use of Portage by all federal public servants. The fears expressed by the majority of expert witnesses revolved around Portage’s limitations and the fear that its use would become widespread in the federal public service. As the tool cannot be used to produce quality translations, the witnesses insisted on the role that professional translation plays in safeguarding Canada’s linguistic duality. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages was reminded that under the Official Languages Act of Canada, English and French have equality of status and equal rights and privileges in federal institutions. The Act also guarantees that federal institutions must provide Canadians with services in the official languages of their choice, services that are required to be of equal quality. In this respect, all translations produced, be they in English or French, must be of the same quality as the original text. Furthermore, witnesses also pointed out that although English and French are, in designated bilingual regions of the country, considered under Part V of the Act as official languages of work, there is an important discrepancy in the use of the two official languages in federal institutions. English has always been the main, common language of work in bilingual settings (LeBlanc 2014). Ongoing reports by the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada clearly show that English remains the primary language used for drafting documents, for meetings, and for training in regions designated as bilingual for language-of-work purposes (e.g., the National Capital Region or the province of New Brunswick). Many reports and studies have revealed an erosion of bilingualism in the federal public service, and in their testimonies, witnesses were quick to point out that French remains a language

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of translation. The proportion of texts translated from English into French stands between 85% and 90%, a figure that shows that French is rarely used for drafting documents. The widespread use of English as a language of work within the public service has always been a concern for language rights advocates and minority-­ community interest groups. The functioning of English as the dominant language of work is seen as a threat to the vitality of the French linguistic minority community. This is where the role of translation into French, the language of the minority, comes into play. In the federal public service, translation is not just a vector for conveying information in another language; it is a means of contributing to the presence—and to the vitality—of the minority language and as such it plays a capital role in the dissemination and promotion of that language. The quality of the translations is thus of paramount importance for members of the linguistic minority. Reactions to the use of Portage by public servants were almost unanimous. In fact, between June 2015 and May 2016, a large number of newspaper articles and editorials were written about the TB’s decision about Portage. References were made to the fact that machine translation would not simply be used as a “language comprehension tool” but as a “translation tool,” the effects of which would be extremely detrimental to the quality of French in the public service on the one hand, and even more so to the right of francophones to access texts of equal quality on the other. Some commenters and witnesses questioned whether the Translation Bureau, whose mandate is to help Canada fulfill its constitutional obligations with respect to the equality of English and French, was not indirectly doing a disservice to members of the linguistic minority by encouraging non-professionals, often members of the unilingual anglophone majority, to use a machine translation tool of whose limitations they are unaware. Finally, some questioned whether such a move was not a major step backwards in terms of linguistic equality for members of the francophone community. At the end of the hearing, the Standing Committee on Official Languages produced a report, Study of the Translation Bureau, containing seven recommendations. It was stipulated that “the Government of Canada recognize the essential role that translation and translators play in Canada’s linguistic duality” (House of Commons 2016, p.  30, Recommendation 3) and that “the Portage language comprehension tool be used solely by federal public servants for the purpose of understanding a text and not for disseminating public or internal documents for information” (House of Commons 2016, p.  30, Recommendation 5). It also stated clearly that users of Portage, that is, federal public servants, should be made fully aware that the tool was to be used “solely

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for the purpose of comprehension rather than communication” (House of Commons 2016, p. 30, Recommendation 7).

The TB’s Shift from Culture to Business The important ideological shifts that the TB has undergone since the mid-­ 1990s, coupled with the public service-wide release of Portage, clearly show that over the years, translation has indeed become less and less of a “sociopolitical” activity for the government of Canada. As Mossop states, following the introduction of Canada’s Official Languages Act in 1969, “[t]he government’s translating work was seen by the government itself, and by others, as part of the state’s action on society. It was a component of the bilingualization process, which, among other things, sought to bring about a cultural change, that is, a change in how Canadians conceived of the country and an enhanced role for the French language in Canadian public life” (Mossop 2006b, p.  6; see also Delisle 1984, p.  71; Delisle and Otis 2016, pp. 425–437).

As mentioned previously, most of the translation was done from the language of the linguistic majority (English) into the language of the linguistic minority (French) and thus translators and the Translation Bureau as their employer played an important role in ensuring the presence and vitality of French both in the public service and in public life. A Translation Bureau publication from 1978 reads that “because a huge proportion of French writings in Canada are translations, careless translation is a major source of Anglicization. As a result, the English-to-French translator plays a non-negligible role in the destiny of the French language in Canada” (Translation Bureau 1978, p. 8; quoted from Mossop 2006b, p. 7). With its increasing focus on cost recovery, productivity, and the use of translation tools, the TB gradually adopted a business model similar in many ways to that of a translation agency. Over the years, as the TB bore more and more of the hallmarks of an industrialized activity (Gouadec 2007; Mossop 2006b, pp. 10–11), less and less time was devoted to quality control. In other words, the quality of service became more important than the quality of its final product—the texts produced (Mossop 2006b, p. 21). The introduction of TMs, and gradually of MT, brought about new challenges concerning quality. To summarize, Mossop states that

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federal government translation in Canada is now being done increasingly under the sign of economic policy whereas previously it was done mainly under the sign of socio-cultural policy. In other words, the driving force behind the government’s translating activity is becoming the economics of translation, by which I mean the use of translation to support other sectors of industry wishing to export their products, or make them available on both French and English markets in Canada, but translation as itself an economic activity. (Mossop 2006b, p. 25; author’s emphasis)

Mossop concludes that [t]he socio-cultural goals enshrined in the Constitution and the Official Languages Act are still operative and still proclaimed. But, I suggest, they are no longer the driving goals, the source of initiatives. Economic goals (providing employment and profit) now appear to have the upper hand. The contention here has been that when translation comes to be treated as an economic end in itself rather than a socio-cultural activity which incidentally provides people with a living, this has an impact on linguitic output. (Mossop 2006b, p. 25)

The tensions resulting from this shift in policy mirror what emerges from the study conducted by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages. Overall, we see that Canada’s translation “industry” is not immune to the effects of industrialization and globalization: “[t]he traditional Canadian translation industry is being challenged by both globalization pressures to cut costs and claims by statistical machine translation (MT) providers. […] A new trend is that clients are willing to accept a ‘good enough’ translation without revision if it is fast and low price. Quality used to be evaluated by means of a revision process, which is now eliminated to cut costs or because no revisers are available” (McClintock et al. 2017).

Conclusion This chapter’s main goal has been to discuss the role translation plays for linguistic minorities. An additional focus on the role of professional translation into French in the Canadian context clearly illustrates the complexities of the translational activity in linguistic minority contexts. There are naturally countless other examples from all across the globe that would illustrate alto-

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gether different dynamics and different power relations. As Cronin says, “[e] ach minority language is involved in a particular translation dynamic, a dynamic that varies from language to language” (2003, p. 161). The picture I have painted would be very different in the case of a minority language that is not, like French, a major world language, or of a minority language that has no official recognition at all, for instance, most of Canada’s numerous aboriginal languages. While there is a desirability for a theory of minority language translation (Branchadell 2011, p.  100), much work remains to be done in order to grasp the multitude and complexity of comparable situations worldwide. That being said, the example of professional translation as practiced in the Canadian context does allow us to shed light on the role of translation in a minority language setting. Translation—or more specifically the directionality of translation—is to a large extent a barometer of the asymmetrical linguistic relations and the weight languages carry in a given social and political context. In many cases, members of the linguistic majority, at least in the Canadian context, worry very little about the effects of translation on their community, on their language, on their rights. In the eyes of the majority, translation is for the minority. As we have seen, working conditions for translators have changed tremendously since the 1990s and more changes are to come. With industrialization and globalization, volumes of work have increased while deadlines have been tightened. Translation, as for many other sectors, has not been shielded from the effects of globalization. Technology is now at the core of the translating profession, and professional translators are feeling the effects of the shifting business practices that are being observed in many translation environments across the world. These changes are of particular concern to linguistic minorities as they are the principal consumers of translation, and as such it is “unwise and unhelpful to sunder technological developments from the political and economic contexts of language use” (Cronin 2003, p. 119). This is precisely what has been illustrated in the last section of this chapter. When the Canadian government decided to make MT available to all public servants, members of the linguistic minority reacted negatively, as translation represents an activity that is essential in many respects to the development of Canadian francophone language and community. The two cannot be separated. An increased automation and mechanization of the translation process is seen as a threat to the language as much as to the quality of the final product, and as such is considered as a form of minorization or assimilation. These are concerns from which members of the linguistic majority are sheltered, for obvious reasons.

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In the end, although we have been witnessing more and more interest in minority language translation in recent years (Branchadell 2011, p. 99), we need to further investigate and reflect upon the role of translation in minority settings and more importantly the effects—positive or negative—that it has on the minority community. Acknowledgment I would like to thank my research assistant, Marc-André Bouchard, for his tremendous help, as well as Karen Spracklin for revising the manuscript.

Notes 1. The official languages of Canada are English and French. Enacted in 1969, the Official Languages Act of Canada gives English and French equal status throughout the government of Canada. English is the official language of 58% of the population, and French is the official language of close to 22% of the population. Close to 21% of Canadians have a mother tongue that is neither English nor French. For example, there are more than 60 aboriginal languages in Canada grouped in 12 different language families, the largest of which is Algonquian, followed by Inuit. These languages, however, have no official recognition in the Canadian Constitution. Only the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, two of the three territories located in the Canadian North, have conferred official status to certain aboriginal languages. None of the ten Canadian provinces have followed suit. Besides English, French, and the numerous aboriginal languages, there are, across Canada, over 200 other mother tongues spoken in Canada (immigrant mother tongues). The most important ones are Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Punjabi, Spanish, Italian, German, Tagalog, Arabic, Polish, and Portuguese. 2. For more information on computer-aided translation tools, that is, translation memory and machine translation, please refer to Garcia (2014) and Kenny (2011).

References Bowker, L. (2002). Computer-Aided Translation Technology: A Practical Introduction. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Branchadell, A. (2005). Introduction: Less Translated Languages as a Field of Enquiry. In A.  Branchadell & L.  M. West (Eds.), Less Translated Languages (pp.  1–23). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

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Branchadell, A. (2011). Minority Languages and Translation. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies (Vol. 2, pp.  97–101). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Christensen, T. P., & Schjoldager, A. (2010). Translation-Memory (TM) Research: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? Hermes – The Journal of Language and Communication, 44, 1–3. Cronin, M. (1998). The Cracked Looking Glass of Servants. Translation and Minority Languages in a Global Age. In L. Venuti (Ed.), Translation and Minority [Special Issue of The Translator, 4(2)] (pp. 145–162). Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Cronin, M. (2003). Translation and Globalization. London/New York: Routledge. Delisle, J. (1984). Bridging the Language Solitudes. Translation Bureau 1934–1984. Ottawa: Department of Supply and Services. Delisle, J., & Otis, A. (2016). Les douaniers des langues. Grandeur et misère de la traduction à Ottawa, 1867–1967. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Delisle, J., & Woodsworth, J. (Eds.). (2012). Translators Through History (Revised ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Diaz Fouces, O. (2005). Translation Policy for Minority Languages in the European Union. Globalization and Resistance. In A. Branchadell & L. M. West (Eds.), Less Translated Languages (pp.  95–104). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Ehrensberger-Dow, M., & Massey, G. (2014). Translators and Machines: Working Together. In W.  Baur, B.  Eichner, N.  Keβler, S.  Kalina, F.  Mayer, & J.  Ørsted (Eds.), Man Vs. Machine. Volume I. Proceedings of the XXth World Congress of the International Federation of Translators (Berlin, 4–6 August 2014) (pp. 199–207). Berlin: BDÜ Fachverlag. Gambier, Y. (2016). Rapid and Radical Change in Translation and Translation Studies. International Journal of Communication, 10, 887–906. Garcia, I. (2009). Beyond Translation Memory: Computers and the Professional Translator. JoSTrans – The Journal of Specialized Translation, 12, 199–214. Garcia, I. (2014). Computer-Aided Translation Systems. In S.  W. Chan (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology (pp. 68–87). London: Routledge. García González, M. (2005). Translation of Minority Languages in Bilingual and Multilingual Communities. In A. Branchadell & L. M. West (Eds.), Less Translated Languages (pp. 105–123). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Gouadec, D. (2007). Translation as a Profession. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. House of Commons of Canada. (2016). Study of the Translation Bureau. Report of the Standing Committee on Official Languages. Ottawa: Parliament of Canada. Jiménez-Crispo, M. A. (2009). The Effect of Translation Memory Tools in Translated Web Texts: Evidence from a Comparative Product-Based Study. Linguistica Antverpiensia, 8, 213–232.

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Katan, D. (2009). Occupation or Profession? A Survey of the Translators’ World. In R. Sela-Sheffy & M. Shlesinger (Eds.), Profession, Identity and Status: Translators and Interpreters as an Occupational Group [Special Issue of Translating and Interpreting Studies, 4(2)] (pp.  187–209). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kenny, D. (2011). Electronic Tools and Resources for Translators. In K. Malmkjaer & K. Windle (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (pp. 544–472). Oxford: Oxford University Press. LeBlanc, M. (2013). Translators on Translation Memory (TM). Results of an Ethnographic Study in Three Translation Services and Agencies. The International Journal for Translation and Interpreting Research, 5(2), 1–13. LeBlanc, M. (2014). Language of Work in the Federal Public Service: What Is the Situation Today? In R.  Clément & P.  Foucher (Eds.), Fifty Years of Official Bilingualism. Challenges, Analyses and Testimonies (pp. 69–76). Ottawa: Invenire. Marshman, E. (2014). Taking Control: Language Professionals and Their Control When Using Language Technologies. Meta, 59(2), 380–405. McClintock, B., McKenven, É., & Williams, M. (2017). Quality in the MT Era: Importance and Measurement. Circuit [Online] No. 133. Available at: http:// www.circuitmagazine.org/dossier. Accessed 25 Jan 2017. Mossop, B. (2006a). Has Computerization Changed Translation? Meta, 51(4), 787–793. Mossop, B. (2006b). From Culture to Business. The Translator, 12(1), 1–27. National Research Council of Canada. (2016). Machine Translation [Online]. Available at: http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/solutions/advisory/machine_translation.html. Accessed 5 Sept 2016. O’Brien, S. (2012). Translation as Human–Computer Interaction. Translation Spaces, 1(1), 101–122. Pym, A. (2011). What Technology Does to Translating. The International Journal for Translation and Interpreting Research, 3(1), 1–9. Shiyab, S. M. (2010). Globalization and Its Impact on Translation. In S. M. Shiyad et  al. (Eds.), Globalization and Aspects of Translation (pp.  1–10). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Toury, G. (1985). Aspects of Translating into Minority Languages from the Point of View of Translation Studies. Multilingua, 4(1), 3–10. Translation Bureau. (1978). La Traduction au service de l’État et du pays. Ottawa: Secretary of State. Translation Bureau. (2016). Translation, Terminology and Interpretation [Online]. Available at: http://www.bt-tb.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/btb.php?lang=eng. Accessed 3 Oct 2016. Tymoczko, M., & Gentzler, E. (2002). Translation and Power. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Venuti, L. (1998). Introduction. In L. Venuti (Ed.), Translation and Minority [Special Issue of The Translator, 4(2)] (pp. 135–144). Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Woods, M. (2015). Canadian Translators Worry Wider Access to Software Will Lead to “Hundreds” of Job Losses. Metro News [Online]. Available at: http://www. metronews.ca/news/ottawa/2015/06/08/government-translators-worry-wideraccess-to-software-will-lead-to-hundreds-of-job-losses.html. Accessed 4 Jul 2016.

Part V Education, Literacy, Access

14 Indigenous Children’s Language Practices in Australia Samantha Disbray and Gillian Wigglesworth

Introduction The languages and language practices of Australian Indigenous children have received growing research attention in recent years. As a result, we know a good deal more about the diverse linguistic contexts in which these children grow up and the rich language repertoires they develop (Simpson and Wigglesworth 2008). In very remote areas of Australia, some are growing up speaking their traditional language and hearing it from parents and grandparents while learning English as a foreign language in school. Others, in ­middle-­class settings, speak Standard Australian English (SAE). Some live in cities that were dispossessed from their ancestors over 200 years ago. In some country towns, there are community elders who recall some words from their traditional language learnt in childhood. Many also recall being punished for speaking their language in the school playground (Briscoe 2008). In many areas, traditional languages are no longer spoken as languages of everyday communication, and styles of Aboriginal English and other contemporary varieties fulfil this role in in-group communication. Recent research has documented a wide range of new contact languages, spoken as first and additional S. Disbray (*) Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] G. Wigglesworth University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_14

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languages and dialects by children. Particularly in more remote areas, the languages the children are learning present a ‘moving target’ in the sense that language change and shift is occurring at the same time the children are learning these languages. Nonetheless, family, in-group networks, and distinct cultural practices and worldviews remain tight. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people constitute approximately 2.8% of the population of Australia. The greatest number live in New South Wales, while the greatest proportion live in the Northern Territory, where they make up 26% of the overall population, with the majority living in remote or very remote areas. It is this remoteness that has an important role to play in the maintenance of traditional Indigenous languages. An estimated 270 languages were spoken across the Indigenous nations of precolonial Australia (Walsh 1991). According to the 2016 census data, 63,800, or 10%, of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians reported speaking or knowing some of their heritage languages. Some 150 languages are named, reflecting both a diverse and an extremely fragile language ecology, with significant language endangerment which makes Australia one of five language endangerment hotspots worldwide. Two National Indigenous Languages Surveys (NILS), conducted nine  years apart, demonstrated the extent of the endangerment of traditional languages in Australia. The first reported 18 languages still being learned by children (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies 2005), whereas the later survey, NILS2 (Marmion et  al. 2014), reported that, nine years later, only 13 could be considered strong. Although NILS2 used a different methodology, some decline in use of the remaining traditional languages is clearly occurring. Several drivers have motivated growing attention to Indigenous child language practices in Australia. Descriptions of the acquisition of traditional languages and contemporary languages have mapped specific languages and language situations and are important for providing a clearer picture of the linguistic vitality and innovation in Australia. Research in Australia also addresses the bias towards European languages and monolingual settings in first language acquisition and socialisation studies. Kelly, Kidd, and Wigglesworth (2015b, p. 279) observe that: a comprehensive theory of language acquisition must explain how human infants can learn any one of the world’s 7000 or so languages. As such, an important part of understanding how languages are learned is to investigate acquisition across a range of diverse languages and sociocultural contexts.

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There is a degree of urgency surrounding this task due to the vulnerability of Australian languages, which remain under pressure from, and respond to, the impacts of colonisation. Some Australian research has focussed on the language practices of Indigenous youth, observing innovative language practices, styles, and interactions with multimodalities, including electronic media in changing social contexts. As this work explores new identities, codes, and practices, it overlaps with, and has the potential to contribute to other fields in the sociology of language such as language and mobility (Canagarajah 2017). Phenomena evident in colonialisation settings, such as issues of language loyalty, change, and shift, and complex multilingualism, occur in contexts of geographic mobility. A further important motivation for research is the interface between home language and schooling. The elucidation of Indigenous child language practices can address some of the challenges and opportunities for Indigenous students, teachers, and other education professionals in the provision of quality education in Australia, where significant public attention is often drawn to the low rates of academic achievement levels among Indigenous students, particularly those in remote Australia (Disbray 2015). The development of a Framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Languages as part of the newly released Australian National Curriculum presents a new affordance for teaching and learning traditional languages among Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous students, particularly for second language speakers in language revitalisation contexts. Conversely, however, the opportunities for speakers of traditional languages to learn through their first language remain limited. While the Northern Territory Bilingual Education programme was vibrant throughout the 1970s and 1980s, increasing cuts to funding (including for teacher training) and lack of political will have seen these programmes dwindle. Traditional language-speaking students rarely have access either to programmes in their mother tongue or to specialised English as an additional language programmes. This is equally true for speakers of new contemporary varieties, such as the creoles spoken widely across Northern Australia. In many settings neither their home languages nor their learning needs as (Standard Australian) English language learners are acknowledged and addressed in education policy and practice research. Outside the political realm, research efforts have been dedicated to better understanding the language repertoires of, and community aspirations and appropriate pedagogy for, Indigenous children. Methodologically, there is a broadening spread of studies. Researchers have drawn on sociocultural and acquisition, formal descriptive, variationist, pol-

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Tiwi Islands

Torres Strait Islands

Galiwin’ku

Darwin

Maningrida

Wadeye NORTHERN

Kalkaringi TERRITORY

Yakanarra

Lajamanu Yuendumu

Ipmanker Alice Springs

WESTERN

Utju AUSTRALIA

Milyirrtjarra

Tennant Creek

Pukatja

QUEENSLAND

Ltyentye Apurte Mimili

Brisbane

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

NEW

Perth

SOUTH

WALES

Adelaide

Sydney

Canberra

Shepparton Mooroopna

ACT

Melbourne VICTORIA

Hobart

TA S MA N I A

Fig. 14.1  Places named in the chapter. Map created by Brenda Thornley

icy analytic, discourse analytic, and experimental methods, addressing challenges that small speaker numbers can pose for rigorous empirical research (Kelly et al. 2015a). The remainder of this chapter addresses the issues raised in this introduction and reviews key Australian research on Aboriginal child language practices. The final section considers new research directions (Fig. 14.1).

Language Socialisation and Child-Directed Speech Child language socialisation, particularly in remote contexts, has been the focus of several studies. Annette Hamilton’s early study (1981) of traditional child-rearing practices among the Anbarra in the multilingual community of

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Maningrida in Northeast Arnhem Land highlights a set of key cultural tropes that appear in the literature across sites and time. The interrelated concepts of sociality, autonomy, and the centrality of kin are perhaps the most universal. Lowell et  al. (1996) describe ‘the incessant communicative interaction in which young children participate, and the large number of people with whom they interact’ (p. 109) among Yolngu at multilingual Galiwin’ku in Northwest Arnhem Land. This is a recurrent depiction in the literature (Western Desert of West Australia in Jacobs 1988; among Warlpiri in Central Australia in Bavin 1993; O’Shannessy 2011; Musharbash 2016; and in the Northern Australia Wadeye among Murrinhpatha in Forshaw 2016, p. 11). With respect to autonomy, studies note that young children are given great freedom to explore their environment and are encouraged to be independent, to make their own decisions and choices, and to assert themselves in the large social groups they inhabit (Lowell et  al. 1996, p.  135; Forshaw 2016; Hamilton’s 1981 work in Maningrida and later among the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara at Mimili in northern South Australia). As Bavin (1991, p. 93) notes: Adults [give children verbal demands and] expect the appropriate behavioural responses, but are not upset if the child does not respond as expected. It is assumed that children will eventually take responsibility for their own actions.

When exploratory behaviours among infants and children must be curbed, scary routines such as stories of malevolent beings rather than punishment or forced acquiescence have been observed (Eickelkamp 2004; Kral and Ellis 2008; Musharbash 2016; Tjitayi and Lewis 2011). O’Shannessy too writes of the freedom of behaviour extended to children at Lajamanu, who from age five to six spend ‘most of their time playing with other children and only return home for meals and to sleep’ (2011, pp. 132–133). With such autonomy comes social responsibility, as children take responsibility for themselves and for younger children. As Gillian Shaw (2002, p. 96) reports in her study of Ngaanyatjarra (at Warburton, Western Desert) child-rearing practices: Children know themselves and what they need, and that they will grow up in their own way. An adult’s role is to meet the child’s demands where possible, and to hold the child as part of the family.

Being part of the family is a core value. This manifests in myriad ways in social life and in children’s early language practices in both urban and traditionally

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oriented settings. Traditional Indigenous languages have complex kin and classificatory kin (‘skin’) systems, which reflect the importance of kinship by encoding aspects of it into the lexicon and/or syntax as a specialist domain or ‘kintax’ (Evans 2003). Children hear explicit and staged instruction about kinship in baby talk registers in Central and Northern Australian languages (Kral and Ellis 2008; Laughren 1984; Musharbash 2011; Turpin et al. 2014; Bavin 1991, 1993; Davidson 2017; Lowell et al. 1996). Several studies report on ways that children mobilise their developing language knowledge in play as ‘imitative of adult social practice’ (Ngaanyatjarra Lands—Ellis, Green, and Kral, 2017, p. 4; in Lajamanu—O’Shannessy 2011; but cf. Tjitayi and Lewis 2011—Ernabella). The centrality of socialisation to a kin network is also observed in urban contexts, where children speak English, as in Shepparton and Mooroopna in country Victoria (Andrews 2008), and in Aboriginal English styles in Western Australia, which commonly retains or innovates traditional conceptualisations, as observed in children’s narrative practices by Malcolm and Sharifian (2002). Studies of baby talk registers in traditional languages have also typically found patterns of phonological reduction, lexical and structural simplification, and repetition (Jones and Meakins 2013; Laughren 1984; Lowell et al. 1996; Machbirrbirr 1990; Turpin et al. 2014). Child-directed speech to older children in traditional languages has been investigated at Galiwin’ku (Lowell et al. 1996). Reeders (2008) analyses the collaborative construction of knowledge in learning interactions between adult and child Djambarrpuyngu speakers in Northeast Arnhem Land. To co-construct knowledge with children, adults used repetition, listing and modelled rules for contribution and recaps that affirm consensus about contributions. In contrast to frequent claims in the research that questions are avoided in Indigenous speech pragmatics, Reeders found that both adults and children asked questions, though not all questions are expected to be answered. However, speech events, such as statements followed by a tag, triggered responses. The speech directed towards young children (2–5 years of age) in contact language settings has been the focus of further studies. Moses and Yallop (2008) examined question routines in adult-child interactions in the Kimberly community of Yakanarra, finding, similarly to Reeders, a high volume of questions but different speech pragmatics in interactions than those typically reported in Standard English. Disbray (2008) analysed interactions during joint story construction among Wumpurrarni English speakers in Tennant Creek and found that as children mature, caregivers increasingly encouraged co-construction. Further studies in these communities explore the use of features of the traditional languages in adult-child interactions (Disbray and

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Wigglesworth 2008; Morrison and Disbray 2008) and conversational load (Vaughan et al. 2015). They reveal diversity in caregiver speech styles in terms of the amount and length of talk but shared patterns of traditional language insertional code-switching (in Walmajarri in Yakanarra and Warumungu in Tennant Creek). Insertions include common nouns, some directionals and verbs, and in Wumpurrarni English some semantic case marking sourced from Warumungu. This input leads to the production of traditional language tokens by children, which constitutes evidence of language maintenance practices in local contact languages (Morrison and Disbray 2008). Investigations of children’s understanding of lexical items from their local traditional languages (Meakins and Wigglesworth 2013; Loakes et al. 2012) using experiment and testing found children’s knowledge to increase with age and the frequency with which the items appeared in the contact language, demonstrating the importance of maintaining some access to the traditional language.

F irst-Language Acquisition and Child Language Development Acquisition studies in two polysynthetic1 traditional languages have contributed cross-linguistic insight. Forshaw’s (2016) study of five children’s acquisition at Wadeye in the Northern Territory traced the acquisition of the complex verbal system by young children. They were aged between the ages of one year nine months and four years three months at the beginning of a two-year data collection (Language Acquisition in Murrinhpatha Project, LAMP; cf. Kelly et  al. 2015a). In Murrinhpatha, verb stems are constructed of two distinct parts: a classifier stem that carries extensive grammatical information and the lexical stem that shows the meaning. This results in long and complex verbs, which pose understandable challenges to the language-acquiring child. Indeed, Forshaw (2016) found the system was too complex to allow for abstract rule-based acquisition of the patterns, but also too large to rely on rote learning of each marked form. Rather, Forshaw posits that children begin by ‘using a small core of rote learned inflected forms and gradually expand verb paradigms along predictable pathways relying on low level analogy and semi-regular patterns of inflection’ (2016, p. iii). In Central Australia at Yuendumu, Edith Bavin and Tim Shopen investigated how Warlpiri children aged three–seven years become social communicators (Bavin 1991; Bavin and Shopen 1991) and acquire the forms and

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structures of this nominally complex ergative-absolutive language (Bavin 1992, 2013). Using a range of experimental approaches, they examined the development of case frame and ergative marking (Bavin 2013; Bavin and Shopen 1985, 1989), in which ellipsis of subjects and objects is common, and knowledge of the verb’s semantics and case frame allows interpretation (Bavin 2000). They show a long developmental trajectory, as children must learn and operationalise interrelated systems of verbal semantics, case frames, along with high levels of allomorphy and homophony, optional case marking for first- and second-person singular pronouns, free word order, and frequent argument ellipsis. ‘The child must have a certain amount of input in order to make generalizations about the use of case markings’, and this takes time (Bavin and Shopen 1985, p. 609). More recently, O’Shannessy has investigated the role of children in linguistic innovation and later child language development among children in another Warlpiri community, Lajamanu, where a new mixed language known as Light Warlpiri has emerged. Its nominal structure is from Warlpiri, its lexicon from Kriol/English and Warlpiri, and it has an innovated auxiliary system which expresses information about tense and subject. Children are central to O’Shannessy’s account of the emergence of Light Warlpiri. This account shows that children heard extensive code-switching in the language input to them, which they received as one code. Over time, they reanalysed, regularised, innovated, and conventionalised the input to create a new code. Through this, speakers express their distinctive geographic and generational identity. Children and young adults demonstrate subtle and masterful linguistic and sociolinguistic awareness in their code choices (O’Shannessy 2013, 2015), and they acquire both Light Warlpiri and Warlpiri, with the codes separated by age nine (2008, p. 279). Further studies in contact language settings have investigated specific aspects of children’s first language development. Meakins and Algy  (2016) devised a task to gauge Gurindji Kriol speaking children’s knowledge of cardinal expressions, a complex yet central lexical domain in traditional Gurindji. Children gave significantly more correct responses on the east/west axis which suggests continuing attention to geocentric cues but fewer correct responses than adults overall, revealing a transformation in the expression of spatial relations. In a study of child discourse development in Wumpurrarni English, Disbray (2016a) looked at the ways that children aged between 5 and 13 years maintained and switched reference to characters to structure discourse in narrations of a picture story prompt (the Frog Story, cf. Berman and Slobin 1994b), revealing developmental and language-specific findings. There was a clear developmental change in children’s ability to maintain the same strategy

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irrespective of the changing referential load of the story, with some eight-year-­ olds and children aged ten and over managing this aspect of the task at adult levels. A subset of the narrations was performed in children’s Standard English, which is a second dialect/variety. Results here showed this posed an additional cognitive load. The discourse strategies used in the English narrations were less mature than the productions in Wumpurrarni English by like-aged children. With respect to language-specific features, adults and accomplished child narrators frequently used full lexical nouns to maintain reference, as repetition and recasting are valued in narration in this variety. Children’s language practices in peer interaction have been examined in both contact and traditional language settings. Eickelkamp (2008a, 2008b), Ellis et al. (2017) and Kral and Ellis (2008) have paid particular attention to the  multimodal games  that children in western desert settings play. These include sand storytelling, a practice of inscribing symbols on the ground— often desert iconographic symbols common in traditional body and contemporary fine art—which accompany the unfolding narrative. They argue that these practices in verbal arts provide children the opportunity to imagine and explore inner lives and to socialise, explore, reproduce, and innovate social identities and knowledge. Kral and Ellis (2008) also observe the use of alphabetic symbols in sand storytelling and explore literacy social practices in Ngaanyatjarra children’s lives. Dixon (2015) used discourse analysis methods to investigate children’s peer interactions at Murray Downs in northern Central Australia. Children speak a contact variety, Alyawarr English. In a joint play session with toys, a group of girls between five and eight years of age negotiate and establish a set of rules for entitlement to and ownership of the objects of play. Expressions of ownership and entitlement comprise of set of verbal, intonational, and gestural moves, with imperatives used as a frequent means of assertion. Other means include membership categorisation phrases like ‘I’m all the grey ones’ to support a claim for a specific toy.

Youth and Language Practices The language and language practices of youth in Indigenous Australia are important sites of study due to the role children and youth play in language innovation. New styles and varieties may emerge among young speakers, and these can mature and stabilise with their speakers and become the code of a generational cohort, passed on to and innovated by their children (McConvell 2008; reference to Gurindji Kriol and other contemporary varieties including

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Dhuwaya, cf. Amery 1993; Meakins 2008; O’Shannessy 2013). These processes, both social and linguistic, have been most extensively described in Carmel O’Shannessy’s work on Light Warlpiri (2015, in particular). The following studies focus on teens rather than children. Langlois (2004, 2006) has described wordplay practices and linguistic features in an innovative youth lect among Pitjantjatjara teens at Areyonga in Central Australia. These young speakers draw on resources from Pitjantjatjara and some from English to create their distinct style. They borrow English words, but unlike speakers in other age groups, their borrowing retains English sounds, giving their style a distinct sound. There is simplification to case marking allomorphy and changes in the distribution of preferred word order, with subject-verb-object patterns more frequent in teenage speech than Traditional Pitjantjatjara. Young teenage girls also have an in-group speech style they call ‘short-way language’. Based on a systematic wordplay, it is distinct from the speech of older and younger generations and somewhat incomprehensible to them. The teens drop the first syllable of words and also the first part of reduplications. The monosyllabic words that result have a long vowel, and so the general principle of the Pitjantjatjara sound system that requires a word to have two syllables or sound parts is upheld. Short-way language is illustrated below (Langlois 2006, p. 186): Traditional

Teenager Pitjantjatjara

kutjara maku miita-miita

Tjara Kuu Taa

‘two’ ‘witchetty grub’ ‘spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend’

Langlois (2004, p. 182) observes that: the small size of the Pitjantjatjara population, and its lack of political and economic power, minimise its chances of survival, especially where, historically speaking, assimilation has been synonymous with monolingualism. However, language maintenance is also linked to people’s attitudes to their language.

A continued strong sense of Pitjantjatjara identity across generations and the limited need to use English in daily life at Areyonga may provide a buffer from excessive pressure on the fragile bilingualism that exists in this remote community, and help sustain support for the ongoing maintenance of (contemporary and traditional) Pitjantjatjara language use. Mansfield’s (2014) detailed sociolinguistic account of the culture and speech style or slang of young men (‘kigay’) at Wadeye describes linguistic and sociolinguistic features that bear some resemblance to those observed in

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Teenage Pitjantjatjara. However, the innovative use of phrasal verb constructions instead of the polysynthetic verb, the merging of morphological tense-­ aspect categories and the reordering, and variable absence, of inflectional morphology in the polysynthetic verb (p. 4) are specific to the youth style in this highly complex language. Like young Pitjantjatjara people, young men in Wadeye use English/Kriol-derived lexicon integrated into Murrinhpatha phonology in various ways. Considering the source and import of such borrowing, Mansfield (p. 471) writes: [T]his does not reflect linguistic or cultural contact with mainstream Australia, or at least not in the sense of face-to-face, social interaction. Rather, it reflects a mediated engagement with national and global cultural artefacts [predominately relating to action movies, metal music and Australian rules football] discoverable on television, CDs, and increasingly via mobile phones. For example, kigay were able to inform me that their core subcultural term ku spidi, meaning the heavy metal band one affiliates to as a group or private totem, derives from the subgenre label “speed metal”, showing that this quite specialized term was at some point acquired, before being given a local semantic twist. There are many other cases of borrowed vocabulary being semantically modified to create in-­ group terms that belong neither to traditional MP, nor to whitefellas, but to the kigay.

The importance of new semiotic and multimodal practices mediated by technology uptake and use among young Indigenous people in remote Australia is explored in work by Kral, Ellis, and colleagues (Carew et al. 2015; Kral and Ellis in press; Kral and Schwab 2012). Kral and Ellis (in press) observe that social media and digital communication technologies provide opportunities to develop communicative competence, often with a blurring of the b­ oundaries between speech and writing. Songwriting and music recording, film-­making, language documentation, and subtitling, as well as tagging and annotating in digital heritage archives enable such new modes of cultural production. Digital technologies for languages teaching and learning are gradually finding their way into education settings, discussed next as we move on to consider child language practices in schools.

Language Practices in Schools A good deal of the literature dedicated to Indigenous children and their languages in education settings focuses on matters of policy and education infrastructure and how these tackle, meet, or fail different language teaching and

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learning aims. Recognition of, and access to, traditional languages in education are significant to many Indigenous people in Australia as a means of recognising first nations’ languages and speakers’ rights to learn, reclaim, transmit, and maintain these. Mismatches between policy rhetoric supportive of traditional languages in education on the one hand, and a lack of access by Aboriginal children to instruction on and in their home and/or heritage languages in schools, have received attention (Disbray 2015, 2016b; McKay 2011; Truscott and Malcolm 2010). Research has documented first/heritage language teaching and learning in enrichment, revitalisation, reclamation, and renewal settings for Indigenous learners and non-Indigenous second language learners. Three edited volumes have been dedicated to exploring Aboriginal language programmes in first-­ language, heritage, and revitalisation programmes, providing rich accounts of programme establishment, pedagogy, curriculum, and resource development (Hartman and Henderson 1994; Hobson et  al. 2010; Devlin et  al. 2017). Recently, a National Curriculum Framework was released to support teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages as first, heritage, and second languages. The impacts of this are yet to be seen. Electronic resources designed to document, teach, and learn Indigenous languages have proliferated, particularly in language revitalisation contexts and are likely to continue to do so with the introduction of the National Curriculum. Resources include interactive dictionaries; word, or sound lists; phrase books; flash cards; interactive whiteboard resources; mobile/tablet apps wordlists dictionaries, or learning games; ebooks and other objects (First Languages Australia 2014). Their uptake and efficacy in school settings and their impact on child language practices warrant research and evaluation. A further area is the use of student’s first language as a medium of instruction, in bilingual or bi-dialectal programmes. Particular attention has been paid to the Northern Territory Bilingual Education programme, which sought to provide initial education and literacy development in first languages, in overwhelmingly traditional language-speaking communities, with staged development of and transfer to English as the main language of instruction (cf. Devlin et al. 2017). This ambitious programme operated in 25 remote Northern Territory schools between 1973 and 2008, when policy changes effectively closed it down (Devlin 2009; Disbray 2014; Simpson et al. 2009). In addition to bilingual skills development among students, some key achievements of the programme were the development of local curriculum (Christie 2017; Disbray and Devlin 2017; Disbray and Martin 2018; Disbray and O’Shannessy 2017; Morales et al. 2018) and the large literature in Aboriginal languages it produced (Christie et al. 2014), now publicly available on the

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Living Archive of Australian Languages.2 Changes in policy mean that currently only five schools operate bilingual programmes, though new policy and programme documents are in development in the Northern Territory in response to the introduction of Australian languages in the Australian Curriculum. The invisibility of contact languages in policy and pedagogy has been the topic of further analysis (McIntosh et al. 2012), with research, policy analysis, and professional learning programmes dedicated to addressing the specific English language learning needs of contact language-speaking students (Angelo 2013b; Angelo and Carter 2015; Dixon 2013; Dixon and Angelo 2014; Government of Western Australia 2012; Malcolm 2011, among further publications). The use of a high-stakes standardised instrument, the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), administered annually to children across Australia for assessing English literacy and numeracy development has been shown to be inappropriate for assessing Indigenous children from either traditional language backgrounds or from the contact language backgrounds examined (Angelo 2013a; Wigglesworth et al. 2011). A limited number of studies have investigated English language teaching and learning for students who speak new or traditional Indigenous languages as their first language(s). In many communities, the learning context is very much a foreign-language-learning context, as the language of classroom instruction, SAE, is not spoken among classmates, their families, or as the everyday language of communication in the (immediate) community. New languages, such as Aboriginal English and creole varieties and their speakers’ second language/dialect learning needs are often completely unrecognised. These characteristics are very different to the second-language-learning experience of migrant and refugee students. Such learners are generally immersed in the second-language speech community outside of their homes, and the languages involved and the learning context are relatively well understood. Studies of language practices in schools provide evidence and justification for attention to language and education policy and practice. Moses and Wigglesworth (2008) explore dysfunctional classroom interactions as Alyawarr-English-speaking students struggle to guess the rules of the communication game in their teacher’s information elicitation routine and focus on the challenges faced by the teacher in seeking to understand and teach these students. This study resonates with previous investigations into classroom communication (Christie and Harris 1985; Gardner and Mushin 2016; Lowell and Devlin 1999; Malcolm et al. 2003). With respect to English as an additional language learning, Kenny (2015) investigated the oral English language production of Pintupi-Luritja speaking

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children in Central Australia. The children were around six years of age, with only one or two years of English language tuition in school. Kenny examined mean length of utterance and the order of acquisition of several grammatical morphemes. He found the children to be in the early stages of English language learning, with (no) evidence of stable mastery of any of the features examined. The crucial finding of the study was the mismatch between the language-learning trajectory of the students and the proscribed language progression and standards set by certain Education Department documents. A further study of English language development examined the development and use of SAE determiners (Fraser et al. 2018). Determiners are interesting as their function and distribution do not wholly overlap in Australian contact languages and SAE. The study of six children in a majority Aboriginal school in regional Queensland, whose home language is a Queensland Aboriginal English variety, spanned three years. It set out to investigate whether the frequency of SAE determiners in the children’s production increased over time and if frequency varied under certain conditions such as in interactions with the teacher, or in curriculum content focussed activities as compared to interactions with peers. Overall, Fraser et al. found the proportion of SAE and non-SAE article and demonstrative productions remained relatively steady over the three years. Children did use SAE forms more in literacy activities but did not appear to incorporate this use into a growing awareness of the distinct languages around them or their more general English language competency. The authors conclude that: simply applying mainstream, best-practice literacy teaching that assumes students are already proficient in SAE did not lead to any measurable language learning […] young speakers of Aboriginal English varieties [need] to be actively supported throughout their schooling to learn the standard variety used in their classrooms for learning and assessment. (pp. 261–262)

In a further paper, Dixon (2018) has explored bi-dialectal development of Alyawarr English and SAE in the home and school language productions of young children at Murray Downs in the Northern Territory. Dixon examines several potentially ‘camouflaged’ language features, those which involve the same or similar word form, but which have subtly different functions in related languages. Such features are often overlooked by teachers and learners alike in school contexts, which do not attend to the specific additional dialect-­ learning needs of speakers of contact languages. Rich domains for such features in the children’s speech include aspectual morphology,3 transitive marking,4 and subject pronouns. Her findings show that not all grammatical features are created equal in terms of their potential to be camouflaged forms, and in terms of their ‘learnability’.

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The use of translanguaging by bilingual and multilingual children, particularly in the classroom, has been a recent focus of investigation. The term itself (García 2011; García and Li Wei 2014) refers to speaker’s ability to draw on all of their linguistic repertoire as ‘an integrated system’ (Canagarajah 2011, p. 401). Translanguaging theorists in the education sphere emphasise the use of ‘speakers’’ construction and the use of original and complex interrelated discursive practices that cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditional definition of a language but that make up the speakers’ complete language repertoire’ (García and Li Wei 2014: p.  22) and contrast this with established conceptualisations of ‘code-switching’. Translanguaging in classrooms—that is, children using all the linguistic resources available to them— has now been reported in a considerable number of studies (e.g. Creese and Blackledge 2010, 2015; Palmer et  al. 2014), including those involving Australian Indigenous children (Poetsch 2018; Wilson et al. 2018). Poetsch’s (2018) analysis of emerging Arrernte-English bilingual children’s language practices in a classroom at Santa Teresa demonstrates how students make full use of their languages throughout a math lesson. In this context, she argues that translanguaging is the children’s natural linguistic behaviour. While in this study She found that the students provided each other with support in understanding the learning activities in the classroom, and she points out that if the teacher was bilingual, and could translanguage where necessary, it would ‘ensure efficient learning and effective development of L1 and L2 vocabulary and constructions relevant to the topic and concepts in any given lesson’ (Poetsch 2018, p. 165). Finally, in a detailed study of two Torres Strait Islander children in a preschool setting, Wilson et al. (2018) also found that the children drew extensively on their multilingual repertoire, which consisted of Modern Tiwi, English, and Kriol; these authors argued, however, that the children did not (at least at this stage) appear to have a dominant matrix language as previously described in bilingual contexts by Myers-Scotton and Jake (1995, 2000). While it is difficult to predict where the youngsters will end up in terms of their language use, the patterns pointed out in this paper bear considerable similarity to those explored and discussed in the context of translanguaging behaviour.

Conclusion: Future Directions This chapter has sought to provide a rigorous overview of the research and research directions on Indigenous child language practices in Australia. While this research has grown in recent years, many gaps remain. Systematic atten-

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tion has been paid to the acquisition of only two traditional languages. The development of and language practices in contemporary varieties, mixed languages, Aboriginal Englishes, and creole varieties have been the focus of recent studies. Many of these varieties remain undescribed, but it is increasingly clear that each is locally distinct to its speech community. Schools are an important site for language teaching, learning, and maintenance efforts; however, more information about home and community language practices are required to appraise and predict how these efforts impact on language development and use by future generations (cf. Hinton 2013). And new developments in language teaching policy and practice, such as the release of a National Curriculum document and the rise of digital language teaching technologies in classrooms, also warrant attention. The development of language assessment tools and practices, such as those reported in Meakins and Wigglesworth (2013) and Loakes et al. (2012), will additionally be needed. Few studies have investigated language practices in schools or second-­ language/dialect development in English in or out of school, though the ­studies from the volume by Wigglesworth et al. (2018), in particular, make a strong start on this programme. Significant attention has been directed to the high rates of hearing loss commonly due to otitis media among Indigenous children (Galloway 2008; Jervis-Bardy et  al. 2014; Cameron et  al. 2014), though empirical research into its impact on first or additional language development has been limited (although see Walker and Wigglesworth 2001; Verdon and McLeod 2015; Timms et al. 2014). In this chapter, we have referenced rather than reviewed the literature on language revitalisation programmes. As the public and policy discourses are increasingly acknowledging the national value of Australian Indigenous languages and heritage, such programmes are also providing Aboriginal children (and adults) with the opportunity to engage with and learn their traditional languages, an opportunity extended to many non-Aboriginal children. The Australian Curriculum Framework of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages may see this increase. This area warrants a chapter in its own right and future research attention. As we have shown in the foregoing discussions, the language repertoires of Australian Indigenous children and their ecologies are both varied and dynamic. Language shift, emergence, and change are happening at rapid rates. Revitalisation and renewal appear to be slower processes but also change the national ecology. At the same time, an increasing research focus on how children acquire still vital Aboriginal languages and the ways in which children are reinventing and changing language will provide us with unique insights which will contribute to both our theoretical understanding of language acquisition and to the potential universals entailed.

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Acknowledgements  The paucity of Indigenous researchers investigating child language practices represents a crucial shortfall, both in terms of the quality and type of such work from an insider’s perspective of someone with first language skills and of decolonising methodologies (Smith 1999). The studies reported here bear out the importance of scholarship and collaboration with Indigenous investigators. These studies reviewed could not have been carried out without the input of the Indigenous researchers who participated in the fieldwork, data collection, data analysis, and paper writing. Those named in this chapter are Julie Andrews, Cassandra Algy, Apri Campbell, Lizzie Ellis, Gurrimangu, Gordon Machbirrbirr, Barbara Martin, Betty Morrison, Nyomba, Katrina Tjitayi, and Yingi. While what has been achieved to date is limited, without their input, and that of others not named, it would be negligible.

Notes 1. Polysynthetic languages are typified by multiple morphemes constituting a word so that a whole sentence can be a single word. 2. http://www.cdu.edu.au/laal/ 3. Aspect of a verb indicates how an action, event, or state is marked in relation to time, for example, ‘she is running’ (progressive) versus ‘she was running’ (past progressive) or ‘she has run’ (present perfect) versus ‘she had run’ (past perfect). 4. Transitive verbs (e.g. to want) require an object whereas intransitive verbs do not.

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Jones, C., & Meakins, F. (2013). The Phonological Forms and Perceived Functions of Janyarrp, the Gurindji ‘Baby Talk’ Register. Lingua, 134, 170–193. Kelly, B. F., Forshaw, W., Nordlinger, R., & Wigglesworth, G. (2015a). Linguistic Diversity in First Language Acquisition Research: Moving Beyond the Challenges. First Language, 35(4–5), 286–304. Kelly, B. F., Kidd, E., & Wigglesworth, G. (2015b). Indigenous Children’s Language: Acquisition, Preservation and Evolution of Language in Minority Contexts. First Language, 35(4–5), 279–285. Kenny, L. (2015). Mapping Early Speech: A Description of Standard Australian English in the First Two Years of School in Four Very Remote Central Western Desert Aboriginal Communities. Western Sydney: Sydney University. Kral, I., & Ellis, E. M. (2008). Children, Language and Literacy in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. In J.  Simpson & G.  Wigglesworth (Eds.), Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language Use at Home and School (pp.  154–172). London/New York: Continuum. Kral, I., & Ellis, E. M. (in press). Language Vitality In and Out of School in a Remote Indigenous Australian Context. In T. McCarty, S. Nicholas, & G. Wigglesworth (Eds.), World of Indigenous Languages: Politics, Pedagogies and Prospects for Language Revitalization and Maintenance. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Kral, I., & Schwab, R. G. (2012). Learning Spaces: Youth, Literacy and New Media in Remote Indigenous Australia. Canberra: ANU E-Press. Available at: http://epress. anu.edu.au/titles/learning-spaces%EF%BB%BF Langlois, A. (2004). Alive and Kicking. Areyonga Teenage Pitjantjatjara (Vol. 561). Canberra: The Australian National University. Langlois, A. (2006). Wordplay in Teenage Pitjantjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 26(2), 181–192. Laughren, M. (1984). Warlpiri Baby Talk. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 4, 73–88. Loakes, D., Moses, K., Simpson, J., & Wigglesworth, G. (2012). Developing Tests for the Assessment of Traditional Language Skill: A Case Study in an Indigenous Australian Community. Language Assessment Quarterly, 9(4), 311–330. Lowell, A., & Devlin, B. (1999). Miscommunication Between Aboriginal Students and Their Non-Aboriginal Teachers in a Bilingual School. In S.  May (Ed.), Indigenous Community-Based Education (pp.  137–159). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Lowell, A., Gurrimangu, E., Nyomba, H., & Yingi, M. (1996). Communication and Learning at Home: A Preliminary Report on Yolngu Language Socialisation. In M. Cooke (Ed.), Aboriginal Languages in Contemporary Contexts: Yolngu Matha at Galiwin’ku (pp. 109–152). Batchelor: Batchelor College. Machbirrbirr, G. (1990). Burarra Baby Talk. Ngoonjook, 4, 15–20. Malcolm, I. (2011). Learning Through Standard English: Cognitive Implications for Post-Pidgin/−Creole Speakers. Linguistics and Education, 22(3), 261–272. Malcolm, I., & Sharifian, F. (2002). Aspects of Aboriginal English Oral Discourse: An Application of Cultural Schema Theory. Discourse Studies, 4(2), 169–181.

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Malcolm, I., Kessaris, T., & Hunter, J. (2003). Language and the Classroom Setting. In Q.  Beresford & G.  Partington (Eds.), Reform and Resistance in Aboriginal Education (pp. 92–109). Melbourne: Benchmark Publications. Mansfield, J.  (2014). Polysynthetic Sociolinguistics: The Language and Culture of Murrinh Patha Youth. Unpublished PhD Thesis, The Australian National University. Marmion, D., Obata, K., & Troy, J.  (2014). Community, Identity, Wellbeing: The Report of the Second National Indigenous Languages Survey. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). McConvell, P. (2008). Language Mixing and Language Shift in Indigenous Australia. In J. Simpson & G. Wigglesworth (Eds.), Children’s Language and Multilingualism. Indigenous Language Use at Home and School (pp. 237–260). London/New York: Continuum. McIntosh, S., O’Hanlon, R., & Angelo, D. (2012). The (In)visibility of “Language” Within Australian Educational Documentation: Differentiating Language from Literacy and Exploring Particular Ramifications for a Group of “Hidden” ESL/D Learners. In R. Baldauf (Ed.), Future Directions in Applied Linguistics: Local and Global Perspectives – 35th Applied Linguistics Association Congress. Brisbane: The University of Queensland Press. McKay, G. (2011). Policy and Indigenous Languages in Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 34(3), 297–319. Meakins, F. (2008). Unravelling Languages: Multilingualism and Language Contact in Kalkaringi. In J. Simpson & G. Wigglesworth (Eds.), Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language Use at Home and School (pp.  283–302). London: Continuum. Meakins, F., & Algy, C. (2016). Deadly Reckoning: Changes in Gurindji Children’s Knowledge of Cardinals. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 36(4), 479–501. Meakins, F., & Wigglesworth, G. (2013). How Much Input Is Enough? Correlating Passive Knowledge and Child Language Input. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(2), 171–188. Morales, G., Vaughan, J., & Ganambarr-Stubbs, M. (2018). From Home to School in Multilingual Arnhem Land: The Development of Yirrkala School’s Bilingual Curriculum. In G. Wigglesworth, J. Simpson, & J. Vaughan (Eds.), From Home to School: Language Practices of Indigenous and Minority Children (pp.  69–98). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morrison, B., & Disbray, S. (2008). Warumungu Children and Language in Tennant Creek. In R.  Amery & J.  Nash (Eds.), Warra Wiltaniappendi = Strengthening Languages. Proceedings of the Inaugural Indigenous Languages Conference (ILC) 2007 (pp. 107–111). Adelaide: University of Adelaide. Moses, K., & Wigglesworth, G. (2008). The Silence of the Frogs: Dysfunctional Discourse in The ‘English-Only’ Aboriginal Classroom. In J.  Simpson & G.  Wigglesworth (Eds.), Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language Use at Home and School (pp. 129–153). London/New York: Continuum.

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15 Minorities, Languages, Education, and Assimilation in Southeast Asia Peter Sercombe

Introduction: Southeast Asia The focus of this chapter is language education policy in Southeast Asia (SEA), and, more particularly, the ways in which it applies to indigenous minority groups and how these groups have fared, from a social justice perspective (cf. Piller 2016). Some initial background to SEA is provided, followed by discussions of language education policy in the region and of its application to indigenous minorities. SEA is a sub-region of Asia, the world’s largest continent, and can be physically divided between a mainland and a maritime, or insular, region (see Map 1). The mainland includes Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and West Malaysia, while island SEA comprises Brunei, East Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Timor Leste (East Timor). SEA’s population is currently just under 700 million. Around half of Southeast Asians are Indonesians, citizens of the world’s largest Muslim country, among whom Javanese comprise the largest ethnic group at over 140 million people (Musgrave 2014). Brunei has the smallest national demographic, at around 430,000, and Singapore has the smallest land area of the 11 nations of SEA, yet is the wealthiest nation in the region. Apart from Timor Leste, the other ten nation-states of SEA are also members of the ‘Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN), an institution of increasing significance to its members and the region, as discussed later. P. Sercombe (*) School of ECLS, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_15

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Background to Southeast Asian Language Policy States of SEA are generally seen ‘as “nations” […] implying that the peoples of each state form only one national group’ (Lee 1980: 122), yet every nation in SEA is highly diverse in terms of ethnicity, language, religion, population size, land area, material resources, and social structure. The region is second only to the African continent in terms of its (ethnic) diversity. This diversity has evolved over millennia, enriched by early inward migration from China and India which commenced over 4000 years ago (Ricklefs et al. 2010). Nowadays, Chinese and Indians in SEA tend to be found in its urban rather than rural regions. They may still be viewed as non-indigenous by SEA governments regardless of the duration of their residence in these areas, with Singapore being an exception in terms of its pluralistic approach to social structure. The earliest inhabitants of SEA, however, were negrito nomadic hunter-­ gatherers, of whom there are still a few living in the region, including the Malay Peninsula, Thailand, and the Philippines (Ricklefs et al. 2010). As is common among hunter-gatherers, they adapted their lifestyles to the local physical environments as jacks-of-all-trades (or ‘bricoleurs’, cf. Fortier 2012), farming incipiently rather than reshaping their surroundings through deliberate manipulation of the landscape, as is more typical of settled peoples, who in this region were mainly rice-farming agriculturalists. At the end of the twentieth century, there were thought to be around 20,000 forest-based hunter-gatherers (Endicott 1999), among whom, in Borneo, there are now likely to be no more than a few hundred (Sellato and Sercombe 2007). These peoples are mostly viewed as indigenous minorities and are distinguished from so-called immigrant minorities (i.e. Chinese and Indians) discussed earlier. These indigenous minorities mostly inhabit non-coastal, upland areas and are tropical rainforest dwellers who traditionally foraged for their subsistence, although there are also nomadic sea-dwellers. Despite being accepted as indigenous, they inevitably represent political minorities in their own countries, chiefly for the following reasons: they are removed from (urban) centres of political power, with a concomitant lack of participation (and influence) in national affairs; they are frequently materially poor; groups are of relatively small numbers; and they tend to be distinctive from politically major groups in terms of social organisation, often being acephalous (i.e. not having an officially designated group leader), with an accompanying animistic belief system, rather than being socially hierarchical and subscribing to a national reli-

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gion. The low social status of these minorities has tended to increase over time, from the period prior to colonialism’s arrival, as colonialism flourished, and following its decline (Hughes 2003), in the mid-twentieth century (Fig. 15.1). From the mid-sixteenth century, SEA underwent a period of European colonisation, apart from Thailand, and this led to rapid and intense immersion into processes of globalisation across the region. This process began with

Fig. 15.1  Southeast Asian nations (except for East Timor). (DMaps: Map of Southeast Asia. http://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=5268&lang=en Accessed 18 June 2018)

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the arrival of the Portuguese in Malacca on the Malay Peninsula in the 1500s, to be followed by other Europeans and, later, North Americans in the Philippines. The colonialists’ primary motive was access to products much in demand in the West, particularly spices. This impacted considerably on the region, as a result of capitalist economics and the imposition of new types of political administration across SEA.  Ethnic categorisation was a significant administrative and political feature of colonialism throughout this area (Tupas and Sercombe 2014), but it was by no means necessarily accurate (Hirschman 1986). This practice of categorisation was later adopted from colonisers by newly independent SEA nations, becoming a widespread institutional tool (as discussed later). Across SEA, colonisation was also accompanied by the imposition of foreign languages (as instruments of administrative power) and led to a reduction in linguistic diversity in the region. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, for example, the British control of SEA included Burma, Malaya (or West Malaysia), and North Borneo, where English use was imposed for legal and administrative purposes (Ostler 2005; Steinhauer 2004). Where there was an element of anti-colonial struggle in SEA, minority groups frequently coalesced around a local majority whose language variety became a mouthpiece for resistance to colonialism. In Myanmar, for example, the language of the majority Bamars provided a conduit for the interethnic unification of anti-colonial sentiment up until independence was gained in 1948. When local majority Bamars became politically dominant across the country, their ascendancy led to decades of oppression of other groups in Myanmar, representing an especially acute example of this dynamic in SEA (Khin and Sercombe 2014). Following World War II (1939–1945), in the period up to the 1960s, political independence was either granted or fought for and achieved, across SEA. Since independence, nation-building has been treated as a priority, and language has been drawn on to help underpin and facilitate this through the development of language policy and the implementation of state-provided education. SEA states tend to be premised on and presented as ‘national’ communities, comprising dominant groups and national languages that are explicitly linked to these groups. As during the time of colonialism, there has been a further ongoing reduction in cultural and linguistic diversity in SEA since independence, along lines similar to historical processes of monolingually dominant nation-state building in Western Europe (cf. Dorian 1998). SEA nations, nonetheless, faced a number of considerable nation-building challenges in ‘seeking to establish their state-ideas’ (Lee 1980: 122), including political turmoil, for example, the Vietnam War, Myanmar’s isolationism,

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Marcos’ authoritarian rule in the Philippines, the Malayan emergency, the Brunei revolt of 1962, and the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation of 1963–1966. Governments of the region consequently tended to adopt, nominally at least, political forms similar to those of the West (Ricklefs et al. 2010; Giordano 2014) in attempts to unify populations and minimise internal dissent. During the post-World War II period, following the independence of nations across SEA, considerable security concerns arose due to, inter alia: the Vietnam War, Myanmar’s isolationism, the authoritarian rule of Marcos in the Philippines, the Malayan emergency, the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation of 1963–1966, and the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Understandably, there was, and continues to be, a deep aspiration to reduce tensions and eliminate conflicts and to bring about greater cooperation and a sense of regional unity across SEA. Emerging in 1967 out of these very real challenges was the formation of ASEAN as a means to defuse national tensions, unite the SEA region, and facilitate trade. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand were founding members. Brunei became affiliated to ASEAN in 1984 (in the same year it became independent of British protectorate status). Vietnam joined in 1995, Laos and Myanmar in 1997, followed by Cambodia in 1999. Since ASEAN was first established, there has been a gradual increase in convergence among nations across SEA, in terms of economic integration and ease of movement between nations in the region (Hill 2014). More recently, ASEAN has also drawn explicit connections between the development of member states’ economies and English, while Malay is spoken by over half the citizens of ASEAN, most of these being in insular SEA, primarily in Indonesia. In spite of being the language of the region with the highest number of speakers, Malay was considered too closely associated with Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and, to a lesser extent, Singapore (cf. Kirkpatrick 2010) to be viable as ASEAN’s official lingua franca. The role of ASEAN has since expanded considerably across the region, with substantial effects on individual member nations in terms of increasing policy centralisation, as in the case of language education, along with the continued assimilation of minority groups and a shift towards market-driven economies. In a later section of this chapter, one minority ethnolinguistic group is discussed as an illustration of broader language education policies and trends and more particularly of how these have impacted ethnolinguistically minor groups in SEA.

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Language Policy Trends in Southeast Asia The cumulative effects of Western colonialism in SEA continue to resonate and remain relevant to ways in which policies in the region, including those relating to language, have been shaped in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially with reference to the English language and its role in language education. SEA, as with other regions of the world, is part of a global system of languages. This system can be viewed as an ecosphere that comprises different sets and levels of linguistic ecosystems (Calvet 1999, cited in Hult 2010: 13). In drawing on this perspective, this chapter situates language-in-education policies within the context of SEA’s broader historical trends as a means of understanding how state policies have been shaped by local, national, regional, and global forces, especially the latter two (i.e. ‘regional’ and ‘global’ forces). Regarding ‘language planning’ and ‘policy’, it has been suggested that these comprise three main aspects (Spolsky 2004): • language management and how authorities intervene to regulate language; • language beliefs or ideology, regarding what a community believes should happen with language; and • language practices and ways in which language(s) is actually used in a particular environment. However, language policy does not necessarily lead to what has been prescribed since the ‘policy situation of a community is realised via the multitude of actors, contexts, processes, interpretations, negations and contestations of official policy directives’ (Albury 2016: 358). Furthermore, it can be argued that communities’ own ideologies may be influential enough to regulate language in society beyond official policy (cf. Pennycook 2013, in Albury 2016: 358). Bearing this in mind, it is useful to ask how language policies relate to lived sociolinguistic circumstances (Hornberger and Hult 2008: 285). The salience of this question should be emphasised, given that a ‘major failing of much contemporary language policy is that the sociolinguistic ordering around notions of ethnicity and nation does not fit easily with the multilingual dynamics of late modern societies’ (Stroud and Wee 2007: 254). As Albury (2016: 355) suggests, ‘[l]anguage policies are born amidst the complex interplay of social, cultural, religious and political forces’. Thus, it is useful to view SEA language policy development ecologically, given the range

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of influences outside of language that impinge on them. ‘Ecology’, coined by Haeckel (1866) with regard to natural science, became socially salient as a term following its adoption by Haugen (1972) regarding language (see also Nash, this volume; Mühlhäusler 1996; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 2007). From an ecological perspective, linguistic and sociocultural diversity often exist in a symbiotic relationship (cf. Mühlhäusler 1996; Nettle and Romaine 2000), whereby the most linguistically diverse contexts can also be the most culturally diverse. This is, for instance, exemplified in Malaysia, with its estimated 136 languages (https://www.ethnologue.com/country/MY), with greater ethnolinguistic diversity in the eastern parts of the country, Sabah and Sarawak, alongside diverse religions and cultural practices engaged in by citizens of these East Malaysian states. By prescribing a language as the national and official code, for example, Bamar/Burmese in Myanmar (Khin and Sercombe 2014), the (many) other languages extant across the nation have become minoritised and devalued even if they continue to be widely used. Between 1990 and 2011, SEA saw an estimated 3% rise in primary school attendance (United Nations 2013). Text literacy rates for the same period were relatively high compared to other parts of the world, with only those in East Asia, Central Asia, and developed nations being higher than in SEA. These rates have increased from the low or mid-90s percentile for females and males, respectively, to around 97% (ibid.; see also Robinson, this volume). This is all the more impressive, given the increase in the size of populations across SEA and the consequent ‘rapid growth of Southeast Asia’s populations in the second half of the twentieth century [which] created exceptional demand for education and health services and also put pressures on labour and housing markets’ (Hirschman and Bonaparte 2012: 33). However, while modernisation and its benefits are widely heralded in SEA media, Vandana (1991) points out two calamities that came to the fore in the 1980s in Asia. These include the threat to the environment, as a result of state-endorsed deforestation (among other hazards), and the undermining of ‘social structures that make cultural diversity and plurality possible as a democratic reality in a decentralized framework’ (ibid.: 11) through, for example, cultural homogenisation. Both these trends tend to be in evidence throughout SEA. Nonetheless, processes of modernisation in SEA are seen to have helped raise material living standards for millions, according to Rigg (2003), and education is virtually universally accepted as a way out of poverty and a core feature in the facilitation of development. Development, however, largely tends to be seen in SEA as material, as an increase in gross domestic product (GDP) (Romaine 2009), rather than, for example, as an increase in human rights (cf. Sen 1999).

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 outheast Asian Language Policy and Minority S Groups Schools in SEA, as elsewhere in the world, tend to be settings in which the promotion of national cultures and languages is vigorous. National languages are supported through planning, a deliberate intervention intended to influence language or language use. Blommaert (1996: 207) extends this idea such that language planning aims ‘to cover all cases in which authorities attempt, by whatever means, to shape a sociolinguistic profile for their society’. As ‘the organized pursuit of solutions to language problems’ (Bamgbose 1991: 109), language planning is often centrally focused on efforts to ensure that a population acquires the national language. Minority language planning also exists, but this tends to be more common in Europe (cf. Coluzzi 2007), for example, than in SEA. Language planning objectives usually have a social, political, or economic basis, and from planning comes the implementation of language policy in terms of prescribed language curricula. The sorts of formal education open to most minority language speakers in SEA are largely monolingual, or transitionally bilingual (Tupas and Sercombe 2014), in the respective national language. There tend to be three main ways in which a minority language may be offered (if it is, in fact, recognised, or taught, at all): as a school subject; via provision of vernacular literacy programmes; or its integration ‘as an official language of the nation state’ (Liddicoat 2008: 2). However, such integration can negatively entrench an indigenous language in prevailing sociopolitical structures, by positioning it as ‘minor’, and reinforcing an impression of low status and ‘leaving only official, dominant languages with symbolic power’ (ibid.: 12). Policymaking relating to language in conflict-affected societies, such as Myanmar and Southern Thailand, has been perceived as a challenge within both administration and politics (Lo Bianco 2016; see also Nic Craith and McDermott, this volume). While Lo Bianco’s focus is on the link between SEA states’ policies and language, he also makes reference to a range of other national problems leading to dissent or rebellion that arose soon after independence was gained across SEA. These include land tenure and, later, resource extraction (in particular, deforestation) as major points of contention, given indigenous minorities often ‘live in areas of rich natural resources’ (Romaine 2009: 127). Commercial deforestation, from which most minorities directly gain little or nothing, has led to anti-government sentiments and efforts to resist, such as through the blockading of logging roads in East Malaysia. Deforestation has been catalogued for over three decades in the press (e.g. Far

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East Asian Economic Review 1985, albeit now defunct). The documentation of resistance and/or armed conflicts in Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand (Lo Bianco 2016: 1) exemplify settings where there have been calls for some degree of language and culture recognition as a means of compensation for prior wrongs and as an attempt to alleviate interethnic and intergenerational inequalities. SEA governments typically invoke the primacy of national unity and economic efficiency in defence of homogenising policies, and challenges to official policy tend to be treated as seditious, politically. The unity argument has expanded such that ASEAN’s (2014) ‘State of Education Report’ declares ‘[o]ne vision, one identity, one community’ for the region. Politically minor groups in SEA (both indigenous and immigrant) have become caught up in processes of cultural assimilation and the renunciation of identity to gain some level of recognition. While ASEAN’s increased regional power has helped underpin the governments of member states and their policies of assimilation, some minorities have, nevertheless, resisted the policies of their governments. A number of national macro-level examples help illustrate the trajectory of national culture and language policy trends extant among countries of the SEA region. For example, Brunei, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam have each tried to impose a nationalistic notion of a dominant ethnic group, and its associated language, as symbolically reflective of the whole nation, an implicit consequence of which is the idea that diversity is a problem (Romaine 2009). The examples below illustrate how nationalistically oriented policy trends are manifest across the region: • Brunei’s national ideology explicitly espouses and promotes the ideal of a nation as a single ethnic group with one religion and one ruler (cf. Pennycook 2006). All Bruneian children educated within the state system, regardless of language background need, first of all, to become proficient in Malay (the official language of the country since 1959) to function at school. They also need knowledge of English, as the medium of education from year one of primary school for Information and Communications Technology, Mathematics, and Science (Coluzzi 2011). Assimilation is the specific purpose of this language policy, which aims to bring all citizens within a single Muslim Malay community (Sercombe 2014; see also Gunn 1997; Martin 2005; Wellen 2006). This can be exemplified through, for example, the Brunei government’s national ideology, Melayu, Islam, Beraja (‘Malay Islamic Monarchy’), through which Malay language and culture are elevated to and assume the level of national culture (cf. Albury 2016:

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358, citing Pennycook 2006), whereby some ‘communities may be so influential that they regulate language in society beyond official policy’—in this case, the Malays, the ethnic and political majority. • Myanmar (Burma) is a particularly acute example of intra-ethnic tensions among the nations of SEA due to the longevity and intensity of its violent internal conflicts and concomitant issues, including low life expectancy and relatively high infant mortality. The institutionalisation of Burmese as the national language and medium of instruction was a core aspect of ‘Myanmarisation’ following the military junta’s takeover in 1965, when minority groups were made to assimilate to the dominant Burmese-­ speaking ethnic group (Khin and Sercombe 2014), although change that allows for far greater language inclusivity is taking place (Lo Bianco 2016). Thailand’s process of ‘Thai-sation’ has been ongoing since standard Thai became the only national language of the country in 1940, compounding its effective status for a century as the only language medium prescribed for schools. Von Feigenblatt et  al. (2010) show how efforts to maintain the domination of the Thai elite have encompassed attempts to assimilate minorities. Only in 2010 was language diversity finally accepted as a national reality (Kosonen and Person 2014), but there had already been serious consequences as reflected by violent dissent among the minority and separatist Muslim Malay population in the south of the country, who felt their entitlement to a level of ethnic and linguistic autonomy had been long ignored. Throughout ASEAN, language education policy has evolved to be based more and more on the idea that English is critical for development. The most ­powerful example of this in SEA is Singapore, where ‘language policy is premised on the idea that English is necessary both as an inter-ethnic lingua franca and for global economic competitiveness. This makes it vital that English be ethnically neutral’ (Stroud and Wee 2007: 256). Albury (2016: 357) notes that ‘English has come to index a cosmopolitan social and economic mobility’. It has been promoted as a neutral means to achieve regional unity, an argument which effectively positions language diversity as problematic. Brunei’s Deputy Minister of Education (2013) stated: ‘Use of the English language will serve to unite all ASEAN member countries as a common working language’. But, as Romaine (2009: 128) argues, ‘language is never just neutral’. With the increasing role of ASEAN in member states’ affairs, a centralising tendency in terms of language education policy has increased—ASEAN forging policy for regional members—with the explicit endorsement of member

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states. Hill (2014: 1) asserts: ‘Now into its 47th year, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, is the most durable and effective regional economic and political grouping in the developing world’. Under ASEAN, schools in SEA nations that were colonised by the UK are expected to either affirm the role of colonial languages (particularly English) in society or move towards greater use of English as an educational medium or, at least, an increased percentage of mandatory English being included in school curricula. English has gained increasing importance through explicitly articulated links to economic development. The language has also come to be seen as a form of development in its own right, indicative of modernity, the rhetoric for which is embedded in market-driven principles and practices. Article 34 of ASEAN’s charter (2007: 29) declares: ‘The working language of ASEAN shall be English’, explicitly elevating the language’s pan-regional role, above all other languages of the region. The portrayal of English’s neutrality is emphasised by foregrounding language rather than the associations of English with privilege and power, as a language spoken by those in positions of political influence. As ‘English is still a mark of the elite’ (Ostler 2005: 507), the children of elites are most likely to be educated in English-medium schools or English-speaking countries. English thus poses little existential threat to ASEAN’s most powerful groups, who share knowledge of, and/or have easy access to, the language.

A Minority Group Example: The Penan of Borneo There are relatively few communities that continue to live as full-time foragers, globally or in SEA. However, minorities including foragers in SEA have all been affected by the increasing reach and grip of the nation-state (Sercombe 2010a). Among minorities throughout the entire region, none has been more challenged, socially and culturally, than groups traditionally reliant on hunting and gathering (or ‘foraging’). They are small in number yet disproportionately marginalised. Across SEA, nearly 40 distinct groups are listed as inhabitants of the region who live primarily by foraging (Fortier 2012). As in other parts of the world, foragers generally occupy the lowest social rungs of a given society while generally living in the territories richest in valuable flora and fauna (cf. Romaine 2009). Transition to settlement, generally through state ‘encouragement’, has almost inevitably meant a shift to the lowest social position among settled peoples (cf. Rousseau 1990).

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The Penan in Borneo (in Brunei and East Malaysian Sarawak) exemplify a range of SEA social, cultural, and language-specific issues, even if they do not necessarily fully reflect the challenges that minorities face across SEA.  Consideration of the circumstances of Penan groups in Brunei and Malaysia, however, reveals points of concern common to indigenous minorities across SEA, as well as globally. These include the domination of the Penan and their territories by governments and governmental proxies, with this intervention generally being positioned by the state as benevolent, and as linked to the greater national good, thereby trumping concerns voiced by the minorities themselves (Sellato and Sercombe 2007). The Eastern Penan reside in East Malaysian Sarawak and southern Brunei. They total around 5000 people (Sellato and Sercombe 2007; cf. Brosius 2007), including only one small community of around 60 people in Brunei. They are distinct from the Western Penan, as well as the Punan, in terms of social structure, the Eastern Penan being largely egalitarian and pacifist in nature (see Needham 1972). The Eastern Penan in Sarawak have become highly politicised, mainly due to the perceived negative effects of logging and extensive deforestation in the areas in which they live (Sercombe 1996), with little or no consultation of local Eastern Penan residents. They (i.e. the Eastern Penan) find it incomprehensible that both the state and the Malaysian federal government can allow, let alone support, what the Penan see as the outright plunder of the rainforest they depend on for survival and to which they claim residents’ rights—a situation which undermines the idea that a government’s function is that of a national caretaker (Sercombe 2008). Members of these Eastern Penan communities rarely fulfil their potential in formal education and may well drop out before completing primary school (Sercombe 2010b). When Eastern Penan children enter primary education, they are plunged into an environment in which communication takes place in either a second or foreign language(s), as children in Sarawak are taught in Malay throughout their school years. In Brunei, primary education is in both Malay and English from year one, theoretically at least. However, meaningful interaction generally demands the use of an at least partially shared language, generally Iban or a form of Malay (Sercombe 2010b). Penan children thus come under pressure to be multilingual in Malay (the national language in both Malaysia and Brunei) and then English if they are to progress in education. School curricula in Malaysia and Brunei do not include Penan history, stories, myths, pictures, language, or songs, thereby overlooking the value of their oral traditions (cf. Harrison 2007), reducing the ethoglossic (or ‘communicative’) functions of Penan, and implicitly devaluing the language and

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associated cultural aspects of Penan. In this sense, a socially just approach to bilingual education that utilises resources available in children’s communities is precluded in both Brunei and Malaysia, effectively negating an opportunity to capitalise on intellectual resources available in children’s communities (cf. Moll 1992). In the southern Brunei district of Sukang, where a single Penan community resides, configurations of language are dissimilar to those in Brunei’s coastal areas. The district constitutes an areal speech community, and it comprises three smaller discrete language groups: the Dusun, the Iban, and the Penan. ‘Sukang is one of the few areas in Brunei where a form of Brunei Malay does not fulfil the role of lingua franca’ (Martin and Sercombe 1996: 307), except among teachers posted there, who come from coastal parts of Brunei. The lingua franca in Sukang is Iban for informal, and some formal, interethnic communication (Nothofer 1991; Martin and Sercombe 1996). Iban holds a somewhat neutral position (if a language can ever be ‘neutral’) because the Iban hold no political power, are not appointed to positions of responsibility in Brunei’s administration, and are not considered indigenous to Brunei. Dusun are the smallest group, comprising less than 40 people, in Sukang. However, they are officially considered puak jati (i.e. ‘indigenous group’) and are thus seen as part of the broader Malay community. Like the Iban, the Penan are not officially considered to be indigenous. The Dusun and Penan speak Iban fluently. The following table shows language use patterns in Sukang, whereby it can be seen that Iban is the most widely used language (Sercombe 2010b: 627–8) (Table 15.1). Simultaneously, there are two non-local languages within Sukang: English and standard Malay (SM). These have mainly (prescribed) institutional functions (Sercombe 2010b: 628). SM (or Bahasa Malaysia, ‘Malaysian language’) is the official national language of Brunei (as well as Malaysia and Singapore) and is also referred to as Bahasa Melayu (‘Malay language’, with implicit suggestions of ethnic exclusivity, in contrast to Bahasa Malaysia). Brunei Malay (BM) is the national lingua franca of Brunei; in Sukang, its use is confined to teachers who originate from outside Sukang District and who are first-­ language speakers of BM. However, it is SM whose designated role is that of the medium for use in formal education, while BM holds a powerful yet more symbolic position among most Bruneians as the informal yet ‘de facto national dialect in the country’ (Martin 1996a: 36; see also Saxena and Sercombe 2002, and Giordano, this volume), in coastal parts of the country. English has no function for natural interpersonal communication among Sukang’s residents, which stands in marked contrast to its role in national media and in coastal areas, where there are large numbers of first- and second-­

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language speakers of English among both elite locals and expatriates (Saxena and Sercombe 2002). Consequently, there are five separate languages in the district: three ‘Sukang’ languages (Iban, Dusun, and Penan) and two ‘non-­ Sukang’ languages (English and Malay). The district’s language ecology is separate from that of coastal Brunei. English and Malay are superimposed supraregional and national languages, respectively (Sercombe 2010b: 629). Furthermore, no primary school teachers in Sukang, or elsewhere in Brunei, know the Penan language or even attempt to use it. In addition, the Penan are little exposed to the national lingua franca, BM, or to English in a relatively remote part of the country where electricity is partial, with non-existent access to the Internet. English is largely extraneous where the Penan live, except other than in a formal role in the local primary school. The artificial and official educational roles of Malay and, more particularly, English create a ­somewhat ‘artificial ecology’ in the district (cf. Mühlhäusler 1996: 326). The following points help illustrate how the Penan, especially in the geographically remote area of Sukang, are unlikely to benefit from formal education in ways that others might. Challenges they face are compounded by significant issues that contribute to poor educational attainment, including • the relative material poverty of Penan families; • the stigma of being from a socially marginalised group and the effect of this on the Penan, who are derided for being from a foraging background; • drop-out rates of the Penan linked to low achievement, between the third and fourth year of primary school in Brunei (and between primary and secondary school in Malaysia). And yet ‘out-of-school children (OOSC) … remain a pervasive global problem … borne disproportionately by the poorest … strong equity and efficiency arguments in favour of endowing OOSC with quality primary education’ (Thomas, with Burnett 2015: vi); it is the poorest sectors of society that are over-represented among OOSC, with poverty being a ‘major underlying cause of non-enrolment’ (ibid). The Table 15.1  Patterns of language use in Sukang Primary School Non-Sukang teachers Pupils Sukang district teachers

Non-Sukang teachers

Pupils

Sukang district teachers

BM E, SM SM

SM D, I, P E, I, SM

SM E, I, SM

Adapted from Sercombe (2010b) BM Brunei Malay, SM Standard Malay, D Dusun (officially classified as a dialect of Malay), I Iban (officially classified as non-indigenous), P Penan (officially classified as non-indigenous)

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authors argue enrolling OOSC is not only a moral duty but a necessary investment for the benefit of these groups as well as for wider society (ibid.); distance from home to school, particularly for those transiting to secondary education where the nearest appropriate school may be a journey of a day or more away; the consequent challenge of prolonged separation from families, particularly in life of the close-knit nature of Penan families: if a child does progress to secondary school, there is no option of being a day pupil; the cost of transport from home to secondary school; lack of Penan engagement with school staff in Sukang; and the frustration of some teachers from an urban background that arises from being posted to a remote rural school without many of the amenities commonly available on the coast.

However, despite the relatively weak educational experiences of Penan children, stemming, in part, from the difficulties of dealing with education in English, many Penan adults endorse the value of the English language (Sercombe 2002). Although few Penan nowadays have more than the most basic knowledge of English, those in Malaysian Sarawak, in particular, also associate English positively with an earlier period of British colonial administration (cf. Brosius 2007). Lin and Man (2009, 2–3) suggest, ‘hegemony’ can ‘explain why some ex-colonial peoples seem to embrace their former ­colonizers’ cultures and languages … [and the idea] that English is … superior to their own native language, or is the marker of civilized, modern citizenship’. None of these issues is exclusive to the Penan. As with other previous or current foragers, for example, the Orang Asli in West Malaysia (see e.g. Shamsul 1996), the Penan occupy the lowest social rung among ethnolinguistic groups in Brunei and Malaysia. They are also materially the poorest members of society, besides being representative of those indigenous minorities who have benefitted least from social policies enacted across Malaysia and SEA, more broadly. Furthermore, ‘research in SEA found many ethnic minorities identified language as a major constraint in accessing health services …[where the] “national language” was in effect a “foreign language”’ (UNESCO 2012: 26). There is also the simultaneous appropriation, idealisation, and commodification of indigenous minority cultural features for tourism purposes, for example,. The Sarawak Cultural Village, outside Kuching in East Malaysia (see https://www.scv.com.my/), the profits of which do not filter down to minority communities (see also Pietikäinen et al., this volume).

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Conclusions For all minorities, one can argue that ‘major causal factors in minority students’ underachievement are sociopolitical in nature: specifically, the coercive pattern of dominant-subordinated group relations in the wider society and the ways in which these coercive relations of power are manifested in the micro-interactions between educators and students (Cummins 2000: 103). From reports available, the Penan attainment in Bruneian and Malaysian formal education shows relatively little progress over 20 years, much to the frustration of Penan spokespersons and their evaluations of state-provided education (Sercombe 2008). However, this situation should not necessarily be seen as surprising in SEA, where the role of English has been as a conduit for processes of globalisation. As has been suggested by Coupland (2003: 466), ‘[i]t would be naïve to assume the linguascapes of globalised societies will be less unequal’. Similar to most other parts of the world, language diversity in SEA is in decline. This chapter has attempted to contextualise and account for this decline. As the only SEA nation with four official national languages (English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil), Singapore is singular in its history of accommodating cultural heterogeneity, at least to an extent. However, English is privileged in Singapore as the sole medium of education due to its status as a supranational language. This situation has contributed to the decline of Malay (together with Chinese ‘dialects’ and other Indian languages) in Singapore, despite the language’s spread in other maritime SEA contexts. Brown and Ganguly (2003) observe that Southeast Asian elites tend to prioritise their own concerns to the detriment of the poor and those in rural areas. This sentiment is echoed by Giordano (2014: 251), who argues that the manner in which policies have been and continue to be devised and implemented in a largely authoritative fashion favouring those in power points to the notion that ‘elites have become ethnocracies’. Furthermore, commentators have suggested that SEA is too diverse to have a uniform policy, and that the regionally articulated desire for standardisation can be seen as an ‘expression of strategic policy choices by Asian governments to avoid strengthening human rights protections’ (Saul et al. 2011: 107; cf. Nasu 2011). Common causes of intranational tensions can be linked to state-prescribed differences of ethnicity, especially when these are also characterised by language differences (Lo Bianco 2013) and reflected in policy. As Baldauf (2012: 240) puts it, ‘There is a growing realisation that governments may not be suitable as micro language planners in all instances and that some language planning activities must take place at the local level if they are to happen at all’. Overall, social cohesion—

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which is perceived as that which binds citizens into a community of sorts—‘is derived at least in part from a society which is working towards reducing disparities and inequalities’ (Hernandez and Malderez 2015: 44) rather than increasing these social differences. So far, SEA’s centralising political tendencies increasingly require obeisance or conformity from citizens, and ‘whoever controls the language of poverty controls the agenda on poverty’ (Romaine 2009: 128). In terms of ways in which poverty is conceived and how it might be addressed, as Romaine rightly states, solutions to tackling social and material deprivation are often claimed as being soluble only by those in power rather than by the poor themselves.

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Sercombe, P.  G. (2008). Small Worlds: The Language Ecology of the Penan in Borneo. In A.  Creese & P.  W. Martin (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Vol. 9, Ecology of Language (2nd ed., pp.  183–193). Amsterdam: Kluwer. Sercombe, P. G. (2010a). To be or Not to Be: Challenges Facing Eastern Penan in Borneo. In M.  Florey (Ed.), Language Endangerment in the Austronesian World: Challenges and Responses (pp. 191–203). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sercombe, P. G. (2010b). Language and Education: The Experience of the Penan in Brunei. International Journal of Educational Development, 30(6), 625–635. Sercombe, P.  G. (2014). Brunei Darussalam: Issues of Language, Identity and Education. In P. G. Sercombe & R. Tupas (Eds.), Language, Education and Nation-­ Building: Assimilation and Shift in Southeast Asia (pp.  22–44). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Shamsul, A. B. (1996). Debating About Identity in Malaysia: A Discourse Analysis. Southeast Asian Studies, 34(3), 476–499. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Phillipson, R. (2007). Language Ecology. In J. Verschueren & J.-O. Östman, with E. Versluys (Eds.), The Electronic Handbook of Pragmatics (Vol. 15, pp. 1–26). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Spolsky, B. (2004). Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinhauer, H. (2004). Colonial History and Language Policy in Insular Southeast Asia and Madagascar. In A. Adelaar & N. P. Himmelmann (Eds.), The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar (pp. 65–86). London: Routledge. Stroud, C.  S., & Wee, L. (2007). Consuming Identities: Language Planning and Policy in Singaporean Late Modernity. Language Policy, 6, 253–279. Thomas, M., with Burnett, M. (2015). The Economic Cost of Out-of-School Children in Southeast Asia. Paris: United Nations, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Tupas, R., & Sercombe, P. G. (2014). Language, Education and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia: An Introduction. In P. G. Sercombe & R. Tupas (Eds.), Language, Education and Nation-Building: Assimilation and Shift in Southeast Asia (pp. 1–21). Basingstoke: Palgrave. UNESCO. (2012). UNESCO Language Matters for the Millennium Development Goals. Bangkok: UNESCO. United Nations. (2013). The Millennium Development Goals Report 2013. New York: United Nations. Vandana, S. (1991). The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London: Zed Books. von Feigenblatt, O. F., Suttichujit, V., Shukri Shuib, M., Faisol Keling, M., & Na’eim Ajis, M. (2010). Weapons of Mass Assimilation: A Critical Analysis of the Use of Education in Thailand. Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 1(2), 292–311. Wellen, K. A. (2006). Melayu Islam Beraja: Brunei’s Tripartite Ideology. In S. Chong, K.  Harun, & Y.  Alas (Eds.), Reflections in Borneo Rivers: Essays in Honour of Professor James T. Collins (pp. 227–241). Pontianak: STAIN Pontianak Press.

16 Literacy in My Language? Principles, Practices, Prospects Clinton Robinson

Low literacy rates, in general, combined with high levels of linguistic diversity, leave minority communities with little opportunity to acquire literacy competence in any language, and often no opportunity to acquire it in their own language. According to the Global Education Monitoring Report 2016 (UNESCO 2016), levels of adult literacy across the so-called developing countries stand at 82%, just three percentage points below the weighted world average of 85%. However, in regions of relatively high linguistic diversity, such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, literacy rates are lower—at 68% and 60%, respectively. In certain countries of high linguistic diversity, literacy rates often fall below regional or global averages, for example, in Cameroon (271 languages1) 71%, Nigeria (510 languages) 51%, or Papua New Guinea (PNG; 839 languages) 63%. These headline statistics mask disparate sub-­ national realities and so serve only to highlight the need to closely examine access to literacy in relation to linguistic diversity on the basis that high ­diversity signifies that many language communities have ‘minority’ status. The statistics do not necessarily give an indication of a causal relationship between low literacy and high linguistic diversity since access to literacy depends on multiple other factors also—economic, political, social, and contextual. The complexity of the relationship in contexts similar to those mentioned must lead instead to a discussion of what is meant by ‘linguistic minority’, to a clarification of what is meant by ‘literacy’, and to an examination of how literacy and languages interact on the ground. C. Robinson (*) Consultant in International Education and Development, Vancouver, BC, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_16

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This chapter addresses these questions in relation to the development of concepts in the field, draws on broader international statements, and illustrates relevant issues of policy and practice from two multilingual countries in Africa—Cameroon and Senegal—and one in the Pacific—PNG.

Languages and ‘Minority’ Definitions of a ‘minority’, whether in social or linguistic terms, make the assumption that a smaller group with particular characteristics faces a much larger group—the ‘majority’—who do not share those particular characteristics. There is often a further assumption that minority status may be defined by smaller numbers or by less powerful status, or, very frequently, by both (see also de Varennes and Kuzborska, this volume). Thus, in language terms, a minority is a numerically smaller group speaking a language different from the majority whose language affords greater access to the levers of socio-­ economic and political power (World Bank 2005). These assumptions about numbers and power apply in many contexts, including those of indigenous languages in the Americas and Australasia, the lesser used languages of Europe, and some languages in Asia. In these cases, there is clearly a majority speaking a different, more powerful language, and the status of the minority language is defined in relation to that majority. However, there are many contexts where these assumptions about what constitutes minority status do not apply. As I argued over two decades ago (Robinson 1993), some multilingual countries in Africa and Asia have no single language group that constitutes a majority, whether in terms of numbers or power. Rather, the majority of the population is made up of a large number of groups speaking quite different languages—the 1993 article listed 44 countries where the largest language group represented 50% or less of the population. Other languages, most frequently foreign languages imposed by colonial powers, became the languages of power but were spoken only by a relatively small elite. In such situations, ‘it is not a question of “protecting” minorities in the face of some clear majority group, but of acting equitably to all groups’ (Robinson 1993: 59). Addressing the same definitional issue with regard to the educational dimension of language use, Benson (2014) argues for the use of the terms ‘dominant language (DL)’ and ‘non-dominant language (NDL)’ in order to address the complex multilingualism common in most Southern contexts and to avoid the ambiguities of the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’:

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The NDL-DL clarification also helps us avoid using the terms “minority” and “majority”, which confound numerically smaller or larger groups with marginalised or dominant social status. Use of the latter terms has plagued discussions in African countries of people’s home languages (spoken by the vast majority) vs. ex-colonial languages (spoken by tiny minorities). (Benson 2014: 14)

The NDL-DL dynamic captures both the relative societal roles that different languages play, as well as the parameters that structure individual language behaviour. Societal roles may be expressed in language policy by assigning functions to different languages or categories of languages—as official languages for educational, legal, or administrative use. These roles are often part of what defines a DL, with NDLs being ‘linguistic varieties with minimal institutional legitimacy’ (Reyes 2010: 398). Individual language behaviour reflects the extent to which people must learn and use multiple languages to access new opportunities, be they educational, economic, or political. This discussion adopts Benson’s terms—NDL and DL—in order to maintain a clear focus on linguistic realities, with the understanding that other terms, such as local, minority, or indigenous languages, may be used to refer to the nexus of linguistic, geographic, social, or cultural parameters in some contexts.

Languages and Literacy As literacy definitions have evolved, the issue of language choice for the purposes of literacy has come to greater prominence. Older practices of regarding someone as ‘literate’ only if they can read and write in the officially recognised language of education or government have given way to more diverse understandings (cf Rassool 2007). However, it is still the case that literacy statistics mostly do not indicate the language in which literacy has been achieved, leaving a question mark over what kind of literacy is being measured. Ethnologue data (Lewis et  al. 2016) attempt to capture differential literacy rates in ­dominant and non-dominant languages but can only present an incomplete picture as relevant data are lacking. International definitions of literacy, as articulated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for example, have left open the question of the language of literacy, although they have increasingly focused on the impact of the use of literacy rather than merely encoding and decoding text. The most recent ‘working definition’ of literacy from UNESCO moved to a broader understanding, but it still did not make explicit mention of the language of literacy:

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Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with various contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve his or her goals, develop his or her knowledge and potential, and participate fully in community and wider society. (UNESCO 2005a: 21)

In a review of national literacy definitions, the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report (UNESCO 2005b: 157) noted three ways in which the language criteria of literacy were expressed, listing 19 countries where no mention of language was made, 9 countries which referred to reading and writing a simple sentence in specified languages, and 19 countries referring to the ability to read and write in any language. Given the fundamentally language-­dependent nature of literacy, it is noteworthy that multilingual countries are found in all three categories, even the first. The emphasis on context in UNESCO’s working definition above is built on research on literacy as social practice, culturally embedded and differing according to context in its purposes, uses, and languages, as well as in its place in networks of communication (Street 1995, 2005). This led to the understanding that literacies are multiple (or ‘plural’ UNESCO 2004) and that there can be no single, universal definition of literacy. Further, research on the social practices of literacy set its acquisition and development firmly in the dynamic of the exercise of power—written communication as one means of expressing, achieving, strengthening—and contesting—the dominance of institutions and elites. This dynamic is most obviously seen in the languages in which literacy is promoted; witness the differences in policies which stress official languages and those that give space to local or indigenous languages (see case studies below). The use of non-dominant languages is a manifestation of approaches recognising multiple literacies, enabling learners to acquire literacy on their own terms, within a multilingual approach which subsequently gives access to other languages. It is clear that minority communities are among those whose literacy needs may require the most attention to diversity—of purpose, of culture, and, most importantly, of language (cf Robinson 2016). It is crucial to set literacy in an NDL in its multilingual context. The educational and cultural benefits of acquiring literacy in the mother tongue have been attested by research in many different contexts (cf UNESCO 2005b) and constitute principal arguments for its promotion. As Benson (2014: 20) states, ‘…there is increasing recognition in the context of educational development in the South that non-dominant languages play an essential role in improving opportunities for learners’. However, these arguments are often

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countered by claims stressing the greater benefits of literacy in languages of wider communication, be it at the national or international level. In discussing here the status, principles, practices, and prospects of NDL literacy, this chapter’s approach is founded in a multilingual framework, stressing that ‘teaching the minority language implies bilingual education because it is not about replacing the majority language completely, but to come ‘alongside’ or at ‘equal footing’’ (Gorter et al. 2014: 3).

International Frameworks Given the localised nature of many non-dominant languages, literacy in those languages, if available, is acquired and exercised at the local level in thousands of communities, within the framework of the (more or less) multilingual policies of national governments. These policies are illustrated in the three case studies later. Beyond the national level, the international discourse on literacy, languages, and multilingual approaches to education is also a significant vector in structuring national policies and thus, ultimately, in enabling relevant, NDL/multilingual opportunities for learners. We thus sketch out here the recent developments in the international discourse. In 2000, at the start of the 15-year period of the EFA movement, the Dakar Framework for Action (UNESCO 2000: 13) stated the ‘importance of local languages for initial literacy’, with no further elaboration. The annual EFA Global Monitoring Report addressed the issue only five years later in the 2006 edition (UNESCO 2005b) and since then continued to raise concerns about the need for adults to be able to access literacy in the languages they know best, most frequently their mother tongue. The final report on achieving the EFA targets (UNESCO 2015) adduced the lack of consistent use of mother tongues as one of the reasons why adult literacy goals had not been met. UNESCO, as the only international body with a specific mandate for adult literacy, coordinated the UN Literacy Decade (2003–2012) and consistently stressed the centrality of language choice in general, and the use of the mother tongue in particular, within a multilingual approach. As an example of the many pronouncements, the International Strategic Framework for Action for the second half of the decade (UNESCO 2009) advocated: Promoting multilingual approaches in literacy provision, using the mother tongue or first language of the learner as medium of instruction and as a basis for learning national and international languages and acquiring literacy in these languages. (UNESCO 2009: 24)

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During this same period, development agencies and civil society produced reports which also advocated for the use of mother tongues in education, whether for children or adults, within the approach that has become known as mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE); these agencies and civil bodies included the World Bank (2005), the Ibero-American States Organization for Education, Science, and Culture (OEI 2006), Save the Children (Pinnock 2009), and SIL International (2008a, b). The current international education agenda is enshrined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (goal 4 in particular) (UN 2015) and expressed in more detail in the Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action (WEF 2015), which was adopted by over 160 countries at the 2015 World Education Forum in Incheon, Republic of Korea. The agenda reflects the heightened attention to languages in education by calling for language policies to address exclusion and for multilingual approaches including the mother tongue and by specifying in adult literacy programmes that ‘particular attention should be paid to the role of learners’ first language in becoming literate and in learning […] including through the provision of context-­related bilingual and intercultural literacy programmes within the framework of lifelong learning’ (Incheon, 2015: 20). If taken up by the 160 countries that adopted the Incheon Framework for Action, this appeal provides the strongest international basis yet for developing multilingual policies in adult literacy. A note of caution must, nevertheless, be sounded. As mentioned earlier, there is a critical need to assess literacy levels2 by language—otherwise ­governments and literacy providers can have no realistic knowledge of the extent to which people can use different languages for the diverse literacyrelated purposes in their lives and communities. If plans are afoot for reporting on the ‘percentage of students in primary education whose first or home language is the language of instruction’ (UNESCO 2016: 396), a similar indicator needs to be designed for adult literacy programmes, with the proviso that it should also indicate how far practice is embedded in a multilingual approach.

Policies and Practices This section serves two purposes: first, it provides illustrations of policies and practices in three different countries, two in sub-Saharan Africa and one in the Asia/Pacific region. Second, it seeks to answer the question as to how far literacy in non-dominant languages is supported, what its purposes are, and what the parameters are which make it feasible. In each case, the literacy and

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language policies give an indication as to how governments perceive the multilingual context of the country and how they seek to take advantage of it (or not) in promoting adult literacy. The practice of literacy on the ground provides insights into how far policies and practices are aligned and how literacy in the non-dominant language—my language as the chapter title puts it—is perceived and used in local communities. The three countries have been selected in order to illustrate both comparable and contrasting features with regard to policy and practice. Cameroon and Senegal are both multilingual countries of sub-Saharan Africa but manifest rather different trajectories with regard to literacy in the languages of the country. PNG, in the Asia-Pacific region, is one of the most—if not the most—multilingual countries in the world, having many more languages within its borders than Senegal and Cameroon combined. Its experience of literacy in its many languages is different again and serves as an example of committed policies based on multilingual approaches to literacy.3

Cameroon Cameroon is one of the highly multilingual countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated 271 indigenous languages (Lewis et al. 2016), all of which may be considered to be non-dominant. Several languages, including Fulfulde (northern regions) and Ewondo (southern and parts of central regions), serve as lingua francas, as does Wes Cos (West African pidgin), but none of them is used over the whole country. As a result of dual colonial occupation, both French and English are official languages in Cameroon, with educational and administrative systems using them in the larger eastern and smaller western parts of the country, respectively. This led to the promotion of an ‘official bilingualism’ which took no account of the people’s mother tongues. The official adult literacy rate improved from 57.9% in 1990 to 71.3% in 2000 (UNESCO 2002) and then stagnated in the decade 2005–2014, remaining at 71% (UNESCO 2016), based on national data.4 Improvements in the literacy rate in Cameroon are largely attributed to increases in enrolment in and completion of primary schooling, and the stagnation in the literacy rate since 2000 may be due to a trend that has seen fewer children successfully complete primary education—as a rough indication, the survival rate to grade 5 in 1999 was 80.7% (UNESCO 2003), while the intake to the last grade of primary school in 2014 was 72% (UNESCO 2016). This trend merits further research, but it is clear that the pool of young people and adults without adequate literacy competence has grown—from 2,432,000 in 2000

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(UNESCO 2003) to 3,319,000 in the decade 2005–2014 (UNESCO 2016). These literacy statistics refer to literacy in the languages of schooling, French in the eastern part of Cameroon and English in the two western regions; the emphasis on promoting literacy in the two official languages left little policy space for NDL literacy. The statistics show that the size of the challenge of promoting adult literacy is increasing, and this poses questions regarding how strategies can address this situation and how the use of languages is structured. Projects aiming to use Cameroonian languages in the education system started in the colonial era but had largely disappeared by the time of independence in 1960. Such literacy activity using local languages as existed at the time was conducted outside the education system, on an informal and local basis, by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), churches, and missions. Some communities, for example, the Fe’efe’e-speaking community, developed their own cultural associations whose aims included literacy in the local languages.5 After independence, language policy continued to privilege the official languages in education, and even when positive government pronouncements were made on the use of local languages from the late 1980s onwards (Robinson 1996), no implementation followed, in spite of the internationally supported PROPELCA: Programme Opérationnel pour l’Enseignement des Langues au Cameroun (Operational Programme for the Teaching of Languages in Cameroon) initiative,6 a major experimental university project which blazed a trail in bilingual primary education (local language/official language) and had considerable success (Gfeller and Robinson 1998). In the six decades since independence, adult literacy promotion has not figured high on the list of government priorities. It was under the responsibility of the Ministry of Youth and Sports from the 1970s onwards, and in the ensuing two decades at least, literacy efforts were limited to small catch-up literacy courses in the official languages (French and English) for out-of-­ school children and unschooled adults. In 1990, a National Literacy Committee and Programme was established but was under-resourced and not able to address the literacy challenge. In 2012, departments were created under the Ministry of Basic Education7 to cover the promotion of adult literacy, the ‘fight’ against relapse into illiteracy, and, for the first time, the promotion of local languages.8 While the promotion of adult literacy and the educational use of local languages are now integrated institutionally into broader educational strategies, it is not clear how far new initiatives have been undertaken. Indeed, as Chiatoh (2008: 132) commented, ‘…the future of mother tongue-based bilingual education and literacy in Cameroon, at least for now, rests with local communities’.

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Recent research on non-formal education concludes that Cameroon’s language policy with regard to literacy devalues anything other than literacy in the official languages of French and English (Monkam Towo 2015: 292–293): In fact, the notion of ‘illiterate’ should be re-examined in the Cameroon context. Why is a person who can speak, read and write their mother tongue considered illiterate just because they cannot speak French or English, the official languages? […] Language policy in education in Cameroon can be challenged, asking if it is legitimate, decades after independence, that Cameroon exclusively uses French and English for education.

Hesitancy in adopting local languages as the medium for initial literacy instruction meant that rural communities and particularly women were effectively excluded, and literacy efforts did not address the needs of these learners. In this context, adult literacy programmes on the ground have been the almost exclusive preserve of civil society, with NGOs focusing on local-level initiatives using local languages. One such NGO was the National Association of Cameroon Language Committees (NACALCO), originally formed in the 1980s with support from the University of Yaoundé and SIL International (Kamwangamalu et  al. 2013). Guided by principles of local organisation and with few outside resources, NACALCO promoted adult literacy on the basis of local language, culture, and learning needs, providing facilitator training and support for local material production. Participation in the programme depended on local communities taking initiative to set up a committee and to determine what its literacy needs are and how to meet them. Modest in its scope, NACALCO sought, above all, to respect the diversity of literacies that communities may identify as having value in their local context. Other NGOs such as SIL International gave support to programmes in specific languages.9 Lack of sustained support beyond what limited resources communities themselves can provide, however, leaves NACALCO’s future in doubt. Despite the growing challenge of adult literacy in Cameroon and the failure of official-language literacy initiatives, efforts to offer literacy instruction in the mother tongues of local communities remain small and scattered. Cultural, religious, and instrumental/economic considerations constitute motivations for mother-tongue literacy, but programmes lack the support of anything more than a rhetorical national commitment to either literacy or mother tongues that is not supported by any resource allocation.

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Senegal In 2012, the overall literacy rate in Senegal was estimated to be 59.1% (République du Sénégal 2012), with illiteracy standing at 31.7% for women and 49.7% for men. According to the EFA Global Monitoring Report (UNESCO 2002, 2014), the national adult literacy rate increased from 37.4% in 2000 to 50% in the period 2005–2011.10 The number of local languages in Senegal is given as 31 (Lewis et al. 2016) or as 27 ‘inventoried languages’ (République du Sénégal 2013: 53), depending on how they are counted and, in particular, on how far detailed sociolinguistic surveys have been carried out. Six languages are listed by name in the Constitution, of which Wolof is a widely spoken second language in the country, serving as a lingua franca among the various linguistic communities. Given its nationwide use in contrast to the localised use of other Senegalese languages, Wolof occupies an intermediary position between French as the dominant language and the other, non-dominant languages. In terms of languages with the potential to be used for literacy, 21 languages are described as ‘codified’—in other words, as having an established writing system. Based on the provisions of the 2001 Constitution, this condition confers the status of being recognised officially and thus able to be used in the education system (République du Sénégal 2001, 2012). The government literacy data presented earlier refer to the use of one of three languages (French, Arabic, and Wolof ). The Constitution further calls on ‘all national institutions, public and private, […] to provide literacy instruction to their members and to participate in national literacy efforts in one of the local languages’ (Article 22). In terms of practical support for local languages, Senegal has had a government department with a brief for promoting local languages since the 1970s, but ‘promotion’ has not always been linked closely to educational purposes or mother-tongue literacy; rather, this ‘promotion’ has tended to focus on asserting identity through the preservation and celebration of Senegal’s cultural heritage as much as it has advocated for local languages. A description of the role and objectives of the department in 2000 (République du Sénégal 2000) made reference only to introducing national languages into formal education, not to adult literacy. Senegal also developed other structures responsible for both adult literacy and local languages, backed by legal provisions and political will, but their effectiveness was undermined by frequent re-organisations— the institutional arrangements changed six times between 2000 and 2011 (République du Sénégal 2012). One reason adduced for the lack of steady

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progress is the marginal status of adult literacy within the educational structures due to a lack of resources and qualified personnel. With the support of the African Development Bank in the mid-2000s, the government created a number of Multi-function Educational Resource Centres for Adults at the local level in order to provide a space for both learning and the promotion of the literate environment in local languages, but the aims and implementation of these initiatives were limited and vague. In spite of the rather uncertain institutional context, the government explored new ways of practically implementing literacy programmes. In the 1990s, it re-examined its approach to national development and moved towards putting communities at the centre of development efforts. This process led to a commitment to work with the diversity of Senegal’s communities and to seek ways of conjoining the efforts of the state with those of civil society, the private sector, and communities themselves. This required partnerships based on principles of transparency, responsibility, equity, effectiveness, efficiency, rule of law, and corruption control (Diagne and Sall 2006). In the area of adult literacy promotion, this gave rise to a new strategy based on outsourcing to organisations of civil society—national and international NGOs and community-based organisations. Under this outsourcing strategy, called faire faire in French, literacy programmes were implemented at the community level in accordance with local needs and conditions, using local languages and drawing on cultural patterns of community organisation. This model introduced flexibility into literacy programming, giving literacy providers freedom to design the process of literacy learning, to produce local materials, and to link literacy with the livelihoods and other needs as defined by local people. Thus, decisions about the choice of language were left to the local level, and the most common approach of civil society/NGOs was, in fact, to offer initial literacy acquisition in the language of the community. In 2012, 19 local languages were reported as being used in adult literacy, on the basis that these languages were already developed in written form, as well as literacy provision in French. There is no breakdown of the numbers using each language for literacy acquisition, and so no indication of how many learners access literacy in their own language is available. This strategy, however, was a factor in enabling more women to access literacy, given the higher proportion of women who do not have access to languages other than their mother tongue. Two organisations were particularly instrumental in promoting local-­ language literacy—the NGOs TOSTAN and ARED.11 In addition, SIL International also supported literacy in local languages among a number of

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communities, focusing not only on development-related objectives but also on links with cultural identity and expression (Trudell and Klaas 2010). TOSTAN’s programme focuses on building local initiative and using local knowledge through a three-year non-formal education programme with two principal phases. In the first phase, facilitators draw on local oral traditions such as song, poetry, and drama to spark debate about issues affecting the community’s well-being. Literacy learning follows in the second phase, where participants learn to read and write in their own language, improve their maths, and gain management skills. TOSTAN runs this programme in 6 languages in Senegal (and in a further 19 languages across Africa). ARED has focused on the issue of providing reading materials in local languages. In programmes for speakers of non-dominant and recently written languages, the question of materials is always an issue—there is hardly any point in learning to read an NDL if there is little to read or no chance to write and be published. In Senegal, ARED has developed 189 titles in Wolof, the lingua franca, and four other languages. More recently, ARED has leveraged this experience to promote bilingual education based on children’s mother tongue in the formal education system, with significant results in terms of better learning outcomes. Programmes run under the outsourcing approach have been effective in providing multidimensional educational experiences for local communities. Alongside the basic acquisition of literacy, cultural confidence and self-esteem have grown, and local knowledge has found a new place in development efforts. As a downside, however, the long chain of relationships from central government to community programme has meant that proper accountability has, in some cases, not been adequately ensured. In Senegal, demand for literacy is high and, as in many multilingual contexts, is often focused on acquiring literacy in the language perceived to offer the best economic opportunities, in this case, French. These attitudes, in Senegal as elsewhere, tend to reflect a failure to demonstrate the value and viability of multilingual approaches based on initial mother-tongue literacy acquisition and the later learning of French. However, the role of local languages is seen to be crucial in increasing access to literacy and education more broadly, particularly through the written development (‘codification’) of more Senegalese languages and through the development of the literate environment in local languages. Based on Senegal’s long history of asserting that local languages have a crucial role to play in educational and socio-economic development, there is a need for Senegal to apply this policy to all aspects of adult literacy programming.

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Papua New Guinea The language situation of PNG is unique, as the country has the largest number of languages of any in the world—839 (Lewis et al. 2016); it is important to stress that these are distinct languages, not dialects, and are recognised as such by the government (Department of Education 2004). English is the official language, and two languages of wider communication or lingua francas are also recognised: the pidgins Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. Tok Pisin is the most commonly used language for interethnic communication. As indicated earlier regarding Wolof in Senegal, Tok Pisin falls between the dominant position of English and the non-dominant status of all the other languages. Government estimates put the literacy rate (15+ years) at 56.2% in 2000 (National Department of Education 2008: 7), and the UNESCO estimate for 2011 was 62%: 65% male and 59% female (UNESCO 2014). The development of literacy policy, and of educational policy more generally, has been closely associated with the language question. The 1975 PNG Constitution includes a clause on literacy promotion and exhorts ‘all persons and governmental bodies to endeavour to achieve universal literacy in Pisin, Hiri Motu or English, and in local languages’ (‘tok ples’ in Pisin) (PNG Constitution 1975: 3). This established the principle at the dawn of independence that literacy in any one of PNG’s languages is considered to contribute to the achievement of a literate society. Such a clear expression of support for local-­ language literacy12 is unusual in a Constitution, and all the more so in a country of such high linguistic diversity. In 2000, a policy for adult literacy was published, clearly linking the acquisition of literacy with the linguistic situation of the PNG population: four of the five goals for literacy are related to the choice of language, with the goal of making literacy accessible in the languages people speak. The policy starts from the premise that literacy, as communication, is a language-based activity, and that therefore the question of the language of literacy is fundamental to understanding the aims of literacy learning: 1. All Papua New Guineans should develop and maintain effective literacy skills; 2. Speaking, reading, and writing the vernacular languages of PNG, as well as national languages, must be substantially expanded and improved; 3. The vernaculars must be the beginning language of instruction for children, out-of-school youth, and adult literacy programs through basic literacy and numeracy;

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4. Language services provided by interpreters and translators, the print and electronic media, and libraries should be expanded and improved; and 5. All Papua New Guineans must be encouraged to become print literate in their own language and one of the two national languages, Tok pisin or Hiri Motu. (Source: Department of Education 2000: 10) This unequivocal emphasis on local languages within a statement of literacy policy is unique and reflects the fact that local identity and culture are recognised as critical to development at the community level. PNG, perhaps because of its high diversity, avoided the common perception in many other countries that a multiplicity of languages is necessarily detrimental to the construction of national unity. Rather, the country has chosen the path of giving space to each community to draw on its own cultural resources in contributing to national development.13 Nevertheless, the country’s high number of languages has led many to doubt the feasibility of using local languages in education, in spite of the positive impact of using a language that learners speak. While there is agreement in PNG that the acquisition of literacy in the lingua francas and English is a universal aim, the debate continues as to whether education, particularly schooling for children, should start with the local language and at what point English instruction should be introduced. As far as adult literacy is concerned, there is broad acceptance of the approach that enables adults to access literacy first in their own language. The 2008 report on adult education notes an increase in the use of Tok Pisin and lists a further 13 languages that serve as regional lingua francas within the country (National Department of Education 2008). It is not clear how far these trends affect the delivery of literacy ­programmes, largely because of how literacy has traditionally been provided in PNG. Literacy promotion began in the nineteenth century at the initiative of Christian missions, who used local languages as people understood nothing else, and this continued as the national church became established. From independence (1975) until the present time, a number of NGOs have given further support to literacy efforts (NLAS 2012). There has also been active community support for developing and using local languages in schooling, including the development of materials, the selection of teachers, and input into the curriculum (Litteral 2001). Community involvement was both possible and necessary in the context of decentralised educational planning and implementation and was often supported by NGO initiatives and personnel. Given the strong engagement by non-state actors in adult literacy, the PNG government did not invest directly in this sub-sector. In spite of positive

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­ olicy pronouncements, adult education in general has been neglected in govp ernment policies and programmes; formal education has been the overwhelming priority of the government’s education efforts (National Department of Education 2008). This position with regard to adult literacy was again stated in 2012, with the observation that the government ‘does not consider these sub-sectors as their responsibilities’ (NLAS 2012: 10). The relative roles of English, the two lingua francas, and local languages are dynamic and changing. This situation motivates both government and some members of communities to support the continued use of PNG’s many languages, while at the same time leading others to push for greater and faster adoption of English. These dilemmas are by no means unique to PNG and will continue to be the subject of research and debate. Further efforts to promote adult literacy in PNG will best build on the experience of literacy strategies and programmes undertaken hitherto, by strengthening both government commitment and local engagement. These efforts should include at least three fundamental components: first, reaffirmation at the policy level of an approach to adult literacy based on the MTB-­ MLE approach; second, the inclusion of adult literacy goals in educational planning, with a stronger government commitment (capacity and financial resources); and third, the continued mobilisation of non-state actors, including communities themselves, in coordinated adult literacy efforts. PNG has set notable precedents in local-language literacy in the context of a highly diverse linguistic landscape. The educational reasons for this were clearly articulated and have remained so even in the face of political considerations such as the concern for national unity, for the country’s ‘modernisation’, and for its place in the world. The country’s experience offers a degree of hope that adult literacy can be shaped according to learners’ profiles and offer a chance for the local to have an important place in the face of globalising forces.

Comparative Notes The three countries exemplify linguistic diversity but at different levels: 31 languages (Senegal), 271 languages (Cameroon), and 839 languages (PNG), and almost all of these languages may be defined as non-dominant. The promotion of adult literacy in these languages across the three countries displays both comparable and contrasting features, particularly in the areas of their conceptions of multilingualism, the expressions of policy, and the structure of programmes.

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Conceptions of Multilingualism In examining conceptions of linguistic diversity and multilingualism, it is important to distinguish between two fundamentally different perspectives. Using these perspectives as a yardstick for the three countries discussed here, PNG has most consistently recognised both the diverse linguistic identities of its many communities and the need for education to foster multilingual competence—in the local language, in the lingua francas, and in the international language of English. While the debate about the relative place of each language in literacy and education continues, PNG has a long history of embracing its diversity in a positive way. Senegal moved towards a similar position after independence—its attention to the ‘promotion’ of local languages is an indication that there was a need to overcome the colonial reluctance (or refusal) to develop and use local languages for educational purposes. In terms of the two differing perspectives, Senegal has moved from seeing linguistic diversity as a problem to recognising both the communicative and cultural value of the languages that people actually speak. Cameroon, on the other hand, maintained a management perspective after independence, fearing that the development of its many languages could act as a brake on the development of a unified state. With two official languages, there was also a concern to promote their use through education, again as a sign of national unity. However, the more recent pronouncements show a greater openness to viewing the multilingual reality more positively and to espousing the use of local languages in education, even though the practical implementation of such ideas by the government is not yet visible.

Expressions of Policy Both Senegal and PNG have long expressed support for the use of local languages in education, be it formal education for children or non-formal literacy programmes for adults. In Senegal, this political support led first to government efforts to implement multilingual literacy programmes based on the mother tongue and later to the outsourcing strategy, supported by government funding. Senegal thus demonstrated that it sought to put policy into practice, underpinned by a government ministry whose mandate expressly included the promotion of local languages. Parallel commitments to the use of local languages were expressed in PNG but were not followed by governmental action to implement programmes. Without explicitly adopting a strategy of outsourcing, PNG has in effect gone down that

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route but without the commitment to allocate funding. In other words, Senegal’s national literacy strategy deliberately engaged and supported civil society programmes, while PNG chose to leave the sub-sector to civil society, acknowledging the latter’s long tradition of effective work in literacy. Of the three countries, Cameroon has been the most hesitant to embrace its linguistic diversity, even though its Constitution of 1972 opens by expressing pride in the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity as a backdrop for stating the unity of the state (Cameroon Constitution 1972). Both before and after independence, the promotion and use of local languages was always possible through non-governmental channels but lacked any accompanying support. The more recent linking of literacy with the promotion of local languages by the creation of a government department with that double mandate augurs well, but it has yet to bear fruit in terms of new programming or tangible support for existing programmes. Nevertheless, it is a sign that policy is moving towards a greater recognition, on the one hand, that linguistic diversity is a critical aspect of implementing education and, on the other hand, that government has some responsibility for implementing programmes based on the mother tongue.

S  tructure of Programmes All three countries have taken a path that relies on civil society organisations for the delivery of adult literacy programmes but from very different starting points. The government of Senegal recognised that a large national programme was not appropriate to address the literacy needs of its diverse communities; this, instead, required an approach from the bottom-up where the differences and complexities of local realities could be factored into literacy programming from the start. Thus, the outsourcing strategy deliberately engaged actors whose proximity to the community gave them the knowledge to structure locally relevant programmes. Use of the local language, already supported by government policy at the central level, followed from this approach. In both PNG and Cameroon, civil society organisations have been prominent in literacy delivery—almost by default. In PNG, the long tradition of civil society leadership in literacy provision meant that the government, faced with many urgent priorities including the development of the formal education system, accepted the status quo and continued to give these organisations the freedom and the mandate to assume responsibility for literacy programmes in the local contexts where each organisation was active. At the central level,

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policy pronouncements on literacy and language stressed the educational and cultural value of using the local language of the community, thus encouraging the use of any and all languages in the country. It is worth noting that over 400 languages are in use in educational settings in PNG (Malone and Paraide 2011). In Cameroon, civil society organisations have long organised adult literacy programmes, largely in the absence of anything more than rhetorical support for such initiatives from the government. No barriers were put in the way of such initiatives, which most frequently found their support in local communities and the various development agencies working at that level, and their approaches to literacy stressed use of local languages and, frequently, local knowledge and culture. It remains to be seen how the more positive policy changes noted earlier manifest themselves in increased government attention to literacy in local languages.

Prospects for Minority Language Literacy This chapter illustrates the ambivalent positions and pervasive dilemmas of efforts to address the possibility of ‘literacy in my language’, and the three countries described illustrate the often tentative and gradual nature of the steps taken to facilitate such literacy. Viable prospects will be based on a multilingual approach which neither confines people in a monolingual ghetto nor leaves them vulnerable to gradual language loss in the face of a powerful, and often expanding, dominant language. A multilingual approach enables the full local rooting of learning through the local language, as well as a full opening to other horizons through other languages. It is, therefore, pertinent to conclude by asking what would make a difference in achieving a thoroughgoing mother tongue-based multilingual approach to adult literacy. Four areas emerge from this discussion: policy considerations, community engagement, the learning process, and the instrumental and symbolic roles of languages.

1. Policy Considerations Much research and debate in recent years have addressed multilingual policies in formal education (e.g. Benson 2014; Kosonen 2013; Pinnock 2009; Trudell 2016), but the debate around the use of multiple languages in non-formal literacy programmes has not attracted the same energy.14 On the one hand, this may be a sign that it is accepted, if not assumed, that adults should be given a choice regarding the language in which they wish to acquire literacy competence, allowing great flexibility to respond to learner needs and percep-

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tions. On the other hand, it has meant that, at the policy level, little attention has been given to generating rigorous models of effective multilingual literacy teaching/learning, which has effectively rendered support by government or development partners vague. A further factor in the lack of attention paid to adult literacy is its neglect, relative to formal education, by the international community and particularly by the bilateral and multilateral agencies able to support educational development (cf UNESCO 2015). Attempts to define language policy in literacy (cf Robinson 2016) have often been limited to the open-ended commitment to use the most appropriate language(s) at the local level rather than an expression of a structured design of a multilingual approach. Questions of language policy for adult literacy connect with the purposes and content of what is learnt; as Benavot (2015: 8) states. ‘Tailoring literacy contents to the demands of adult learners, so as to improve relevancy and enhance sustainability, remains a major policy challenge’. More explicit policies which articulate the functional, educational, and cultural reasons for MTB-MLE approaches to adult literacy would give added impetus to existing initiatives and stimulate further investment by governments and their partners.

2. Community Engagement In linguistically diverse societies where non-dominant languages are spoken by relatively small populations, the way forward must include full engagement by the community itself. In addition to practical and logistical support at the local level, it is the commitment of the community to develop its linguistic and cultural resources that will strengthen multilingual literacy approaches where the mother tongue has a key role, including efforts to harness ‘local knowledge’ in educational processes (Norton 2014). Supported by a positive policy environment and, potentially, by technical input, these approaches have the best chance of success where local engagement is expressed through an institutional structure, such as a cultural association or language committee (Robinson and Varley 1998; Trudell 2006; Trudell and Klaas 2010).

3. The Learning Process The way in which literacy is taught shapes how learners understand the use and purposes of literacy, for example, as merely consuming text or also as a means of self-expression. Thus, learning literacy in my language, mediated through a participatory process based on dialogue, can send powerful messages about self-confidence, cultural self-esteem, and an affirmation of local

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identity as a starting point for exploring and analysing the world. Street and Leung sum up this dynamic (Street and Leung 2010: 305): In educational contexts, for instance, the ways in which teachers or facilitators and their students interact around learning to read and write are already social practices that affect the nature of the literacy being learned and the ideas about literacy held by the participants, especially the new learners and their position in relations of power. […] This raises questions that need to be addressed in any literacy programme: What is the power relation between the participants? What are the resources? Where are people going if they take on one literacy rather than another literacy? Who has the power to define and name what counts as literacy? How do recipients challenge the dominant conceptions of literacy?

The nature of the learning process, therefore, has broad impacts on the self-­ perceptions and sociopolitical status of a community speaking an NDL. The links between literacy and political participation were given prominence in the work of Paulo Freire (1973), who conceived of literacy becoming a means of liberation and resistance to oppression. Bartlett (2010) investigated these claims through a study of a Freire-inspired programme in Brazil and found that there is indeed a connection. It is not, however, a direct connection between learning to read and write and participating politically. Rather, it is the type of pedagogy—the process of literacy learning—that provided a pathway for political participation: a questioning, critical pedagogy enabled learners to understand the sociopolitical context in new ways and thus motivated at least some of them to political action. As a corollary of this, the literacy learning space itself became a locus of political participation, not so much because literacy was being acquired but rather because the learning event provided the opportunity for dialogue, questioning, and reflection.

4. Languages: Instruments and Symbols To conclude, it is crucial to stress that an understanding of languages as both instruments and symbols provides the only solid foundation for the full development and use of linguistic diversity. If language in general—and so all languages—serves for communicative purposes and as a means of expression, learning, and so on, languages are also symbols of culture and identity (O’Reilly 2003). In examining multilingualism, Edwards stressed the need to recognise this dimension of language as a key value underpinning diversity: …all discussions of the social life of language are ultimately discussions about group identity. The very diversity of languages […] is a testament to the desire to maintain particular and unique windows on the world. (Edwards 2012: 114)

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For minority communities speaking NDLs, the neglect of their language in education is yet another demonstration of inequity, marginalisation, and subordination by more powerful actors and institutions. Such attitudes ­ become internalised in personal and damaging ways. An anecdote from personal experience illustrates the depth to which marginal status may be felt: On one occasion, during a visit to a local-language literacy and research project in south-eastern Cameroon, a villager I met on the road asked me what the project was about. As I explained, his response took me by surprise and showed just how internalised such negative perceptions can become – after a moment’s thought, he said: “So perhaps we are worth something after all.” (see https:// www.linkedin.com/pulse/developing-country-what-we-should-call-them-clinton-robinson?articleId=7857834918897693760)

Multilingual literacy programmes using NDLs will be a powerful force not only in providing the best educational opportunity and cultural affirmation for those without literacy competence in minority communities but also as a means of establishing their equitable place in society.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise specified, country language statistics are drawn from: Lewis et al. (2016). 2. Assessing literacy must be based on a continuum of competence, not on the literate/illiterate dichotomy used in the past, and still today, as the basis for literacy statistics. More recent assessment methods reflect the continuum of literacy based on levels of competence (UNESCO 2017; UIL 2013). 3. This section draws on two research projects commissioned by UNESCO, some of whose results were published in Robinson (2015, 2016) and UNESCO (2017). 4. UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) provides an estimate of 74.99% for 2015 based on a projection: http://data.uis.unesco.org/ 5. http://nufi-cameroun.org/index.php/fr/la-langue-fe-efe/pedagogie 6. PROPELCA: Programme Opérationnel pour l’Enseignement des Langues au Cameroun (Operational Programme for the Teaching of Languages in Cameroon). 7. http://www.minedub.cm/index.php?id=18 8. In francophone Africa, the term ‘langues nationales’ refers to local, indigenous languages, in contrast to the official languages, French and English. Given the ambiguity of ‘national languages’ in English, the term ‘local languages’ is used here as the equivalent of the French term. 9. http://www.silcam.org/ 10. The precise year of the estimate is not given.

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11. TOSTAN means ‘breakthrough’ in Wolof; ARED = Associates in Research and Education for Development. TOSTAN: http://www.tostan.org. ARED: http://www.ared-edu.org 12. Note that the term used in PNG for local languages is ‘vernaculars’. 13. We should note that PNG has experienced some separatist movements, but these were based on competition and control of resources and not directly on assertion of identity. 14. UNESCO Bangkok (2007) addressed the design of multilingual literacy programmes.

References Bartlett, L. (2010). The Word and the World: The Cultural Politics of Literacy in Brazil. Cresskill: Hampton Press, Inc. Benavot, A. (2015). Literacy in the 21st Century: Towards a Dynamic Nexus of Social Relations. International Review of Education, 61(3), 273–294. Benson, C. (2014). Adopting a Multilingual Habitus: What North and South Can Learn from Each Other About the Essential Role of Non-dominant Languages in Education. In D. Gorter et al. (2014a), pp. 11–28. Cameroon Constitution. (1972). Available at: http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/constit/ cm1996.htm Chiatoh, B. (2008). Cameroon: Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education and Literacy – The Community Response Framework. In C. Benson (Ed.), Improving the Quality of Mother Tongue-Based Literacy and Learning: Case Studies from Asia, Africa and South America (pp. 124–133). Bangkok: UNESCO. Department of Education. (2000). National Literacy Policy of Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: Department of Education. Department of Education. (2004). Achieving a Better Future: A National Plan for Education 2005–2014. Port Moresby: Department of Education. Diagne, A., & Sall, B. (2006). Eléments de bilan de la stratégie du ‘faire faire’ en alphabétisation. Association pour le développement de l’éducation en Afrique. Biennale de l’éducation en Afrique (Libreville, Gabon, 27–31 mars 2006). Edwards, J.  (2012). Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity. London: Continuum. Freire, P. (1973). Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Continuum. Gfeller, E., & Robinson, C. (1998). Which Language for Teaching? The Cultural Messages Transmitted by the Languages Used in Education. Language and Education, 12(1), 18–32. Gorter, D., Zenotz, V., & Cenoz J.  (2014). Introduction: Minority Language Education Facing Major Local and Global Challenges. In Gorter et al. (2014), pp. 1–10.

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Hornberger, N., & McKay, S. (Eds.). (2010). Sociolinguistics and Language Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kamwangamalu, N., Baldauf, R., & Kaplan, R. (Eds.). (2013). Language Planning in Africa: The Cameroon, Sudan and Zimbabwe. London: Routledge. Kosonen, K. (2013). The Use of Non-dominant Languages in Education in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back. In C.  Benson & K.  Kosonen (Eds.), Language Issues in Comparative Education: Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Non-dominant Languages and Cultures (pp. 39–58). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Lewis, M., Simons, G., & Fennig, C. (Eds.). (2016). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (9th ed.). Dallas: SIL International. Available at: http://www.ethnologue. com. Accessed 25 Nov 2016. Litteral, R. (2001). Development in Papua New Guinea. Radical Pedagogy, 3(1). Available at: http://www.radicalpedagogy.org/radicalpedagogy.org/Language_ Development_In_Papua_New_Guinea.html. Accessed 11 Mar 2014. Malone, S., & Paraide, P. (2011). Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education in Papua New Guinea. International Review of Education, 57, 705–720. Monkam Towo, A. (2015). L’éducation des adultes peu qualifiés dans le contexte socio-économique du Cameroun: de l’insertion à l’intégration socioprofessionnelle des acteurs du secteur informel. Université Paul Valéry  – Montpellier III.  Available at: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01243998. Accessed 16 Nov 2016. National Department of Education. (2008). National Report on the State-of-the-Art of Adult Learning and Education in Papua New Guinea: A Situation Analysis. Port Moresby: Department of Education. NLAS (National Literacy and Awareness Secretariat). (2012). Government of Papua New Guinea National Progress Report: Follow-up of CONFINTEA VI. Port Moresby: NLAS. Norton, B. (2014). Introduction: The Millennium Development Goals and Multilingual Literacy in African Communities. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(7), 633–645. O’Reilly, C. (2003). When a Language Is ‘Just Symbolic’: Reconsidering the Significance of Language to the Politics of Identity. In G. Hogan-Brun & S. Wolff (Eds.), Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects (pp. 16–33). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. OEI [Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura]. (2006). Plan Iberoamericano de Alfabetización y Educación Básica de Personas Jóvenes y Adultas 2007–2015 [Ibero-american Literacy and Basic Education Plan for Youth and Adults 2007–2015]. Madrid: OEI. Pinnock, H. (2009). Language and Education: The Missing Link—How the Language Used in Schools Threatens the Achievement of Education for All. London: CfBT [Centre for British Teachers] and Save the Children Alliance.

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PNG Constitution. (1975). Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. Available at: http://www.unesco.org/education/edurights/media/docs/60 0e78096209b63b86f0135f52694b257b4b0c0e.pdf Rassool, N. (2007). Global Issues in Language, Education and Development: Perspectives from Post-colonial Countries. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. République du Sénégal. (2000). Présentation de la Direction de la Promotion des Langues Nationales. Dakar: DPLN. République du Sénégal. (2001). Constitution de la République du Sénégal. Dakar. République du Sénégal. (2013). PAQUET (Programme d’Amélioration de la Qualité, de l’Equité et de la Transparence) : Secteur Education Formation 2013–2025. Dakar. République du Sénégal: Ministère de l’Enseignement Elémentaire, du Moyen Secondaire et des Langues Nationales (MEEMSLN). (2012). Projet de document de politique d’alphabétisation, d’éducation non formelle et de développement des langues nationales. Dakar: MEEMSLN. Reyes, A. (2010). Language and Ethnicity. In Hornberger, N., & McKay, S. (Eds). (2010), pp. 398–426. Robinson, C. (1993). Where Minorities Are in the Majority: Language Dynamics Amidst High Linguistic Diversity. AILA Review, 10, 52–70. Robinson, C. (1996). The Use of Languages in Rural Development: An African Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Robinson, C. (2015). Languages in Adult Literacy: Policies and Practices During the 15 Years of EFA (2000–2015). Background Paper for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2015. Available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0023/002324/232467e.pdf. Accessed 11 Nov 2016. Robinson, C. (2016). Languages in Adult Literacy: Policies and Practices in Education for All and Beyond. Prospects, 177(XLVI–1), 73–91. Robinson, C., & Varley, F. (1998). Language Diversity and Accountability in the South: Perspectives and Dilemmas. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2(2), 189–203. SIL International. (2008a). Why Languages Matter: Meeting Millennium Development Goals Through Local Languages. Dallas: SIL. SIL International. (2008b). Multilingual Education: Mother-Tongue-First Education in a Multilingual World. Dallas: SIL. Street, B. (1995). Social Literacies. London: Longman. Street, B. (Ed.). (2005). Literacies Across Educational Contexts. Philadelphia: Caslon Pub. Street, B., & Leung, C. (2010). Sociolinguistics, Language Teaching and New Literacy Studies. In Hornberger, N., & McKay, S. (Eds). (2010), pp. 290–316. Trudell, B. (2006). Local Agency in the Development of Minority Languages: Three Language Committees in Northwest Cameroon. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 27(3), 196–210. Trudell, B. (2016). The Impact of Language Policy and Practice on Children’s Learning: Evidence from Eastern and Southern Africa. Nairobi: UNICEF.

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Trudell, B., & Klaas, A. (2010). Distinction, Integration and Identity: Motivations for Local Language Literacy in Senegalese Communities. International Journal of Educational Development, 30, 121–129. UIL (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning). (2013). Second Global Report on Adult Learning and Education: Rethinking Literacy. Hamburg: UIL. UN (United Nations). (2015). The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations. UNESCO. (2000). The Dakar Framework for Action: Education for All – Meeting Our Collective Commitments. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2003). Gender and Education for All: The Leap to Equality. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003/4. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2004). The Plurality of Literacy and Its Implications for Policies and Programmes. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2005a). Aspects of Literacy Assessment: Topics and Issues from the UNESCO Expert Meeting 10–12 June 2003. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2005b). Literacy for Life. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2006. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2009). United Nations Literacy Decade: International Strategic Framework for Action. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2014). Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2013/4. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2015). Education for All 2000–2015: Achievements and Challenges. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2015. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2016). Education for People and Planet: Creating Sustainable Futures for All. Global Education Monitoring Report 2016. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2017). Reading the Past, Writing the Future: 50 Years of Literacy Promotion Marking the 50th Anniversary of the International Literacy Day. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO Bangkok. (2007). Promoting Literacy in Multilingual Settings. Bangkok: UNESCO. WEF (World Education Forum). (2015). Education 2030: Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action Towards Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Lifelong Learning for all. Paris: UNESCO. World Bank. (2005). In Their Own Language… Education for All. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Part VI Media, Public Usage, Visibility

17 Minority Language Media: Issues of Power, Finance and Organization Tom Moring

This chapter examines challenges to minority language media arising from the irresistible growth of online media. The question of how the daily life of minority-language users is supported in multicultural contexts is discussed with particular focus on national minorities in Europe and developments caused by a changing media environment. Particular attention is paid to the fundamental change in public and private life due to the growing proportion of services and their consumption that are carried out on digital platforms; and to recent developments towards individualized forms of media use in an open market. An emerging paradox is detected, between individually rewarding multilingual behaviour of language-savvy minority-language speakers and its aggregated negative effects on the minority media supply. Against this background the chapter also takes issue with existing forms of financing and organization of media services for minority-language communities.

Introduction The concept of media has taken on new functions as people carry out more and more of their daily lives through digitized services. Social connectivity has been complemented or even dominated by today’s media habits. Journalism is trying to redefine itself in the surge towards consumption of content created through social media networks. T. Moring (*) Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_17

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Policies are lagging far behind these fast developments. Overall, international organizations have been slow to define enhancement and promotion of linguistic minorities in a situation where the free market sets the scene. The centre of power has changed, with multinational commercial enterprises running global networks that form the most influential power brokers in the media sector today. Linguistic minority as a concept is challenged, not only by the expansion and reorganization of media as part of the public space, but also by tensions that arise from various reconfigurations of people whose objective situation through migration, or subjective sense of belonging and status in a new public environment, is all but clear. In the literature, different notions such as indigenous, ethnic, national or autochthonous versus migrant or diasporic minorities are used and evoke different understandings.1 Furthermore, in this turbulence, the finance and organization of traditional media is challenged as their traditional business and audience models are rapidly eroded. Conventional regimes of supporting media and journalism for minority languages are under threat. New forms of financing and organizing media are developing at a rapid pace, and often outside the realms of traditional media outlets. As yet, minority language media have not found their proper place in the new environment, whereas the global media actors are seizing their opportunity to capture more and more of the audience attention that guarantees advertising revenues. This chapter starts with a brief overview of relevant concepts and earlier research. The focus is on perspectives of minority-language media and their position as vehicles in support of participation in public life. The challenges that emerge through digitalization are discussed against the background of eroding regulatory regimes and the partial financial and organizational breakdown of many of the fundamentals that have underpinned policy models in the past.

Minority-Language Media in Research The study of minority-language media has emerged relatively recently. Browne and Uribe-Jongbloed (2013, p. 11) see the beginnings of this field of research in the last decades of the twentieth century. Then, as now, work tended to focus more on community and ethnic media, leaving aside aspects of language as many ethnic minorities are defined only partly (if at all) by a common language. Work by scholars on minority-language media has gone through a development that is similar to that in other emerging research areas (Cormack and

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Hourigan 2007; Jones and Uribe-Jongbloed 2013). Starting from descriptions of particular cases (e.g., Riggins 1992; Browne 1996; Wilson et  al. 2008), efforts were then made to arrive at a research agenda allowing for more comparative and theoretically oriented work. Following a seminal article by Cormack (1998), studies started to focus on the nature of interactions between minority languages and media supply in these languages. Cormack (2007b, p. 66) found that “the role that media can play in the more direct forms of language maintenance (that is, actually encouraging people to use a language) should not be overestimated”, further stating that it is, “in many respects, an unusual task to give to the media”. In his view, the media’s effect on stimulating language use is part of a larger package. Accordingly, media alone are not the solution for language maintenance or vitalization; media take effect in combination with participative activities to build community and identity. The relative neglect of media research among sociolinguists follows from scepticism regarding the potential impact of media on language (Fishman 2001). Priority has been given to home and community, education and language use at work (Fishman 1991; Cormack 2007b). According to established understanding, media are more likely to interfere with minority language intergenerational transmission than to support it.2 The greater quantity of media output in dominant, majority or global languages tends to take over in the media market. This has led to warnings against “mass-media fetishism” in approaches to how corporate media can support minority language (Fishman 2001). Cormack (2007b, p.  58) presents two statements that he finds (at best) unproven: “A greater amount of media content in a minority language must help the survival of that language”, and “[a] wider range of media in a minority language must help language survival”. Both are prone to ecological fallacy. Media supply is not identical with use. Or, as also noted in that volume (Moring 2007, p. 18), an institutionally rich (or “complete”) media environment is a “necessary but not sufficient” condition for the normalization (or “functionally complete”) use of media in a minority language. Cormack’s earlier attempts (in 1998) to identify conditions under which autochthonous minority-language media can survive were subsequently extended by Uribe-Jongbloed (2014). An elaborate approach emerged that applied a set of factors to a broader geography: density of users (instead of Cormack’s number of users); political campaigning; leadership and organization of the minority-language community; political culture of the state; political weakness of the central government; symbolic status of the language; and international trends. Here, the international perspective was expanded to include

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not only European policy benchmarks such as those of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), but also those of other international or regional covenants, declarations and benchmarks (see, e.g., Cormack 1998; Uribe-Jongbloed 2014, pp. 38; 44–48). From a policy perspective (as outlined in the 2003 Guidelines on Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media), minority protection (and giving minorities a voice) is an important part of conflict prevention. Quoting Guyot (2007, p. 42), the integrative function of minority-language media is important as “media can participate in the social integration of individuals belonging to a minority [whose] presence in the media also [enhances] public visibility and consequently contributes to full citizenship”. In addition to the interest in availability of, and access to, media in minority languages, recent research has focused on media and language issues in terms of their dependence on broader societal relations and in interaction with social change (Coupland 2014). Androutsopoulos (2014, p. 247) suggests that research should draw on a variety of languages and contexts, and that the idea of media ought to be broadened to include “institutions, technologies and practices of mediation as elements of the sociolinguistic condition of late-modern societies”. Pietikäinen (2014, p. 515) has focused on discursive aspects of minority languages in contexts where languages are “mixed and moulded”. Comparing media genres in what she sees as “heterogenic communities of indigenous language speakers”, she discusses how discursive reflexivity is manifested in “careful and strategic use of genres, for example in enhancing the status of Sámi language as informative resources (news genre) or using genre to create an alternative, counter space of Sámi media representations (TV comedy show)” (ibid., 2014, p.  535). Moriarty (2014, p.  481) considers how new media formats in Ireland (the Irish-language television channel TG4, or a rap artist) “alleviate the stigmatized out-dated image of the Irish language”. She argues that the changes to the Irish-language mediascape “have helped to confer the language with new legitimacy as it becomes associated with positive and desirable role models”. In the same vein, Porsanger (2017) analyses visual images that represent indigenous minorities to themselves from the perspective of “visual sovereignty”, where traditional portrayals of young indigenous people are challenged and moulded to respond to an updated self-­representation of identity. Finally, Vincze and Joyce (2018) discuss identity issues in the light of the digitalization of the media world and the increasing use of social media, particularly among the young. The concept of bilingualism becomes challenging for linguistic minorities in small states, as their internet use tends to cover

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three languages. In this context, identities are moulded in novel ways. The authors suggest that “the internet is perhaps a more powerful component of the social context than past researchers have given it credit for being”, adding that “the process of linguistic identification is not only one of acculturation, but also one of global citizenship and multilingualism” (ibid., pp. 96–97).

 enchmarks and Selected International B Instruments With regard to national minority languages and their presence in the media, the following documents stand out as key formulators of principles: the ECRML (ETS 148, 1992), the FCNM (ETS 157, 1995), the Oslo recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National minorities (1998), the Guidelines on Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media (2003), the Bolzano/Bozen Recommendations on National Minorities in Inter-State Relations (2008) and the Ljubljana Guidelines on Integration of Diverse Societies (2012). Principles of more general scope, such as those in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Human Rights or the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, have their particular bearings on minority languages and have, by and large, been incorporated in the more specific documents mentioned above. In article 11 of the ECRML, a set of alternatives is established which means that countries may choose to support minority-language media. These options are, however, dependent on explicit ratification by the state party, which has to define each set of alternatives for every particular regional or minority language. State parties who ratify the ECRML are free to decide whether to apply all, parts or none of their tasks in support of media supply. Provisions range from full service in the form of a newspaper, a radio station and a television channel to single newspaper articles and/or programmes on radio and television. The ECRML is constructed to stimulate a varied offering of media services. It may also, in terms of daily language use, be important to maintain a generic variety in the media supply in minority languages, for example in the form of services targeted at different audience segments (such as age groups). However, the ECRML (in its article 11, paragraph 1) expressly uses the word newspaper and newspaper articles (see Dunbar and Moring 2012, p. 378). Accordingly, a requirement should be that newspapers or newspaper articles—including broadcasting services and content on the internet in minority languages— cover not only cultural events and entertainment, but also issues relevant to polity and power.

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An example of the problems that may arise in this regard is given by Hettema (2016, p. 69) in his study of Frisian broadcasting. He notes that The services of Omrop Fryslân have more to do with the representation of the Frisian identity and language than with journalism. In general, journalism is not the main subject of interest, since the three key outlets of Fryslân are concerned with surviving in a rapidly commercializing and digitalizing media environment. A move to replace journalism with a focus on ‘fun’ items to connect with or attract new audiences may lead to a folkloristic imagining of the Frisian identity.

Hettema notes that Frisian society is changing and that new ways have to be discovered to make the Frisian identity desirable and useful in daily practice. To fulfil this goal, serious journalism is required that offers a common platform where identity can be expressed and common matters discussed. Since the ECRML was set up before the internet had penetrated the media field, it leaves digital developments uncovered. However, the various undertakings regarding media in the ECRML are so prominent that internet media should be included and monitored on the same grounds as other types of media services (Dunbar and Moring 2012). The Guidelines on Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media (OSCE 2003) were developed at a time when the relations between and within states were being challenged to respond to a new global constellation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of its objectives was to reinforce principles of respect for the flow of information over borders with populations speaking the same language in neighbouring states. Another concern had to do with undue regulations of broadcasting for the state language with the purpose of legitimizing a decrease in minority-language broadcasting. The ethos, formulated in the introduction of the Guidelines, is based on fundamental human rights principles such as freedom from discrimination and the full and free development of individual human personality in conditions of equality. Accordingly, “civil society should be open and fluid and, therefore, integrate all persons, including those belonging to national minorities”. Moreover, insofar as the objective of good and democratic governance is to serve the needs and interests of the whole population, it was presumed that “all governments seek to ensure the maximum opportunities for all those within their jurisdiction, including persons belonging to national minorities, to access the media and impart and receive information including in their own language”. This follows, inter alia, from the “principles of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness and from the special role of independent and

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pluralistic media, which is a basic condition for free, open and democratic societies” (Guidelines on Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media 2003, p. 4). According to these guidelines, the challenges can be met through public service media or, in a changing media environment, with private resources. In any case, the obligation is on the state; or, as it is formulated in the second part (on policy, paragraph 8), “[s]tate policy should facilitate the establishment and maintenance by persons belonging to national minorities of broadcast media in their own language”. The Bolzano/Bozen Recommendations on national minorities in interstate relations were issued in 2008. At that time social media had already begun to affect the media environment. The impact of these changes is also reflected in the recommendations. Its main focus is on how states may support minorities residing in other countries. According to its article 14, “[t]he free reception of trans-frontier broadcasts, whether direct or by means of retransmission or rebroadcasting, may not be prohibited on the basis of ethnicity, culture, language or religion. Limitations are restricted to broadcasts that use hate speech or incite violence, racism or discrimination.” The 2012 Ljubljana Guidelines clearly reflect a need to react to the changing media environment, although the focus is predominantly on how states can react to content-related problems when the internet is used for derogative purposes. According to these guidelines, state policies should promote intercultural exchange in the media and challenge negative stereotypes and intolerance: “media policies, self-regulatory frameworks and licensing regimes should aim to create an enabling environment for an independent and pluralistic media conducive to the communication of ideas and information that reflects and is responsive to the needs of different communities”. The Ljubljana Guidelines specify some important principles. They warn against disproportionately curtailing the right to use a minority language as an effect of measures to promote the state or official language (article 49). They also require that the potential of new technologies to facilitate the reception of programming in minority languages that have been produced in neighbouring countries are recognized and encouraged. However, they “should not substitute locally produced programmes in minority languages” (paragraph 13, moment 2). This principle, also included in the Guidelines on Use of Minority Languages in Broadcasting, is of vital importance. It is directly related to questions of the functionality of the language in the public domain, as it concerns the inclusion of minorities in the polity where they live.

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F urther Efforts Required to Address New Media Developments Potential problems related to new media developments were already anticipated in the late 1990s when this field’s instruments were drawn up by the Council of Europe. There is farsightedness in the way media is approached in the explanatory report of the ECRML: “The time and space which regional or minority languages can secure in the media is vital for their safeguarding. Today no language can maintain its influence unless it has access to the new forms of mass communications. The development of these throughout the world and the progress of technology are leading to the weakening of the ­cultural influence of less widely-spoken languages” (ECRML, Explanatory report, paragraph 107). Today we see that the predictions that were made in the 1990s have materialized. However, the nature and scope of the emerging issues were less easy to foresee. Among the main challenges are the emergence of a new type of social media that allows for racist discourse and hate speech that is often directed at cultural and linguistic minorities, and the lack of measures to restore lost minority-language domains that follow from the digital shift. While policymakers have begun to address racist and aggressive content that has emerged on different social media sites, they are still looking for a starting point to enhance the use of the internet with its social media outlets in minority languages (McGonagle and Moring 2012). The final part of this chapter looks at initiatives required to address these challenges, and the implications of using minority languages in the public domain and for self-determination of minority-language speakers.

The Challenge of Media Development Time spent on media mostly means time spent with language. And time whiled away with media has increased with internet browsing and social media, particularly among the young. In the Nordic countries, average daily media use ranges between five and a half to eight hours (Nordicom 2015). According to a report by British Ofcom (the UK’s communications regulator), the average daily media-related use in the British population is eight to nine hours. According to this report, “it is the 16–24 years old age group who spend the greatest amount of time on media and communications. They are cramming over 14 hours of media and communications activity into nine

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hours each day by multi-tasking, using different media and devices simultaneously” (Ofcom 2014). The way this time is shared between media use in different languages is important, and for minority languages it is crucial to defend their share of language use through media also in the new digital environment. These findings are significant since, at the same time, use of legacy media is eroding, particularly among young people. According to a report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2016 (covering 19 European countries, plus Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Turkey and the USA), “[a]cross our 26 countries, we see a common picture of job losses, cost-cutting, and missed targets as falling print revenues combine with the brutal economics of digital in a perfect storm. Almost everywhere we (witness) the further adoption of online platforms and devices for news— mostly supplementing broadcast but often at the expense of print” (Newman 2016, p. 7). Where minority-language media are maintained, mainly by public service broadcasters (as is the case, for example, in most European countries), the job losses may occur to a lesser extent. But the audience surge towards the global digital content industry is a reality wherever access and mobile devices are in place. These developments are the source of several problems. Firstly, the measures to promote minority-language media have mostly (as pointed out in OSCE’s Broadcasting Guidelines cited above) required economic support in order to secure content in minority languages that does not emerge under pure market conditions. However, the content flows on the internet are characterized by free market mechanisms. In many cases, online media content in minority languages has been dependent on the public service broadcaster’s willingness to expand into the sector in this direction. As earlier research has shown, minority-language media outlets have not been front runners in the digital field. Based on comparative data going back to 2009 of online media development in ten European minority languages,3 Zabaleta et  al. (2013, p. 1655) note that minority languages are under-represented, stating that “it was quite surprising to see that a relatively high percentage of public institutions that owned and/or controlled media outlets had let those news organizations lag behind in terms of online accessibility”. In addition to these media sector developments we can observe significant contextual changes. Internet-driven social media and global services such as search engines, music and cinema platforms as well as game providers affect use patterns dramatically. What was earlier possible to regulate nationally has now increasingly become international. New outlets with specific target audiences form communities of interest. Earlier ways to support minority lan-

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guages by enhancing their presence in the press, on radio and television fall short among much of the younger audience that is served by big actors in a global market. At the same time, in some cases, traditional media have become more restricted because of geo-blocking of digital signals carrying radio and television programmes that could once (in an analogue age) freely flow over national borders. Moreover, as noted at the outset of this chapter, today much of public and private life is carried out through media applications that substitute what used to be carried out through personal contact. With this development, the effort to identify conditions under which minority-language media can thrive and develop, in order to safeguard a relevant linguistic space for such languages, tends to become increasingly challenging. And, as many analysts have already pointed out (c.f. Cormack 2007b, 2013; Hourigan 2007; McGonagle and Moring 2012), earlier policy schemes in this area tend to fall short in reacting sufficiently to these changes.

A Media Policy for Minority Languages Cormack notes in the edited volume on social media and minority languages (by Jones and Uribe-Jongbloed 2013, pp.  255–265) that the question of media impact on audiences has to be reconsidered. The new environment that is emerging requires heightened attention. At the same time, as mentioned above, legacy media that offer services in minority languages still remain central to many of the users of these languages and to the development of their community and culture. However, legacy media are in decline, and minority media tend to lag behind in digital development. Established principles of fairness (as specified in the international instruments of soft law described above) can, in principle, offer a benchmark for policy measures in the digital media realm. However, in their wording, many of these principles are limited to legacy media. Moreover, new digital media that tend to predominantly develop on the market are at the same time depriving the legacy media of their traditional resources (Moring 2016). Yet policy responses have been slow to address the drastic changes in the media sector that have affected the position of minority languages in the public domain since 2000. As stated earlier, the sustainability of a public sphere where a minority language can thrive is intrinsically linked to the level of success in the organization of service provision. Ideally, digital services in minority languages need to be offered in such quantity and quality that they can keep a minority-language community functionally intact.

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Many researchers are preoccupied with the current position of minority languages in the media (see Jones and Uribe-Jongbloed 2013; Cormack 2007a and b), but there are also optimistic voices (cf., Williams 2007; also Hourigan 2007; Ní Bhroin 2014). The latter point to the possibility that minority language communities could well benefit from harnessing digital media developments through proactive initiatives in a market where services are relatively cheap to run. Unfortunately, success in this field has so far been limited, leading to stronger predictions in the opposite direction. For example, Kornai (2013), estimates that “[o]f the 7,000 languages still alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for another century. With only 250 digital survivors, all others must inevitably drift towards digital heritage status (e.g. Nynorsk) or digital extinction (e.g. Mandinka).” This projection is based on empirical observations of the slow development of digital services in minority languages (see also Cunliffe, this volume, on the potential for digital communication to play a role in maintaining a language even if it does not fully digitally ascend).

Individual Versus Community Interest Minority communities and the conditions under which their languages exist tend to be case specific. But there are also common features and some lessons that can be learned. In recent studies carried out in Finland, Norway and Scotland (see Vincze and Moring 2013; Vincze and Moring 2017; Graffman and Moring 2016), certain features that affect social media use among adolescents speaking minority languages were evident. A first observation is that many young speakers of autochthonous minority languages are at least bilingual. Where the minority language is their first language, usually the state language is at least almost as familiar and convenient in daily use. Speakers of autochthonous minority languages in smaller countries often use at least three languages (their first language, the state language and a lingua franca such as English). According to studies of language use among adolescents in Finland and Romania, the minority language tends to be reserved traditionally for intimate contexts among family and friends. Young speakers of these minority languages used several languages when they were browsing and seeking information. For example, Swedish speakers in Finland and Hungarian speakers in Romania used three different languages (their own mother tongue, English and the national majority language). When they were writing, they more often did so in their primary (minority) language, but also here a linguistic

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spread was found (Vincze and Moring 2017, pp. 115–116; see also Cunliffe, this volume, on claimed benefits of social media for minority languages). In contrast, native majority-language speakers appear to predominantly use that language (Vincze and Moring 2013, p. 52). Thus there is an asymmetry between majority and minority language use. On an individual level, young minority-language speakers have an advantage. They have some fluency in three languages, which means there is a richer menu of media at their disposal and they can use a wider spectrum of internet sources. Hence they are well equipped to move around in linguistic and ­cultural contexts where their native majority-language-speaking compatriots would find themselves less familiar or even excluded. However, this individually beneficial multilanguage competence among minority-language speakers also constitutes a threat to the language community. The market for minority-language media suffers with the use of these languages ebbing away on the Web. In the market-driven environment that is typical in the social media sphere, this appears to lead to a decline in the use of minority languages in the public domain as well. Naturally, some of the examples given here represent situations where media supply is available to greater numbers of minority-language speakers from kin states where the minority language has a stronger position. This dramatically increases the content available in the minority language. For example, Swedish speakers in Finland can avail themselves on the Web of media content in Swedish, and Hungarian speakers in Romania content from Hungary. In such settings the minority-language media environment remains intact (though possibly not the community’s culture) even with declining numbers of speakers in the diaspora. The picture changes dramatically, however, when we look at isolated languages such as Scottish Gaelic or Sámi (Ní Bhroin 2014; Graffman and Moring 2016). The tendency, in these contexts, to switch away from the minority language on social media causes worries for the future of the languages concerned. Evidently, supply plays a key role in the further use of these languages over social media. Other important components for success are related to the status of a language, and to technical factors such as the availability of language support, keyboard solutions on computers and mobile devices that support the language (see also Cunliffe, this volume, on factors that influence bilinguals’ language behaviour on social media). As noted in the outset of this chapter, several criteria can be applied to define a minority. The focus here has been that the minority is identified through a language that is different from the language spoken by the majority.

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The threat towards this particular component of the minority culture becomes even more obvious when main providers of media content for minority-­ language communities turn from services in the languages towards offering services on and about the language and its related culture—but offered in the majority language. These tendencies have been observed, for example, in how the Swedish public service media (Sveriges Radio and Sveriges Television) have argued for their own service provisions to Finnish, Tornedalian Finnish and Sámi communities in Sweden (Moring 2017). Services for other language communities are today reorganized because of the changing role of public service broadcasters. These broadcasters tend to seek a broader role as public service media with a strengthened focus on content provisions on the internet. For example, in spring 2017 the Swedish-­ language television services by the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) were mainstreamed to shared channels with Finnish-language broadcasting while more focus was given to developing services on the Web (Honka 2015). Media services in Frisian are under threat as the Dutch public service system is reorganized, while no statutory guarantees are in place to secure the future in the Frisian language of the services by the main media service provider, Omrop Fryslân (Hettema 2016, p. 44). The changes in the public service broadcasting sector may also stimulate positive effects for linguistic minorities in the emerging new media environment. According to the IWA Wales Media Audit, broadcasting in Welsh has suffered due to cuts in the funding of the Welsh television service S4C. However, investments in online Welsh-language services (delivering content, and made available through apps, for example) have had positive effects on Welsh-­language use on the Web (IWA Wales Media Audit 2015, pp. 65–68; 103–104). As noted in a research report commissioned by BBC Cymru Wales, S4C and the Welsh government, “[a]lthough use of Facebook and Twitter is more restricted in Welsh than in English, there is less of a difference between [the use of these] languages than with other channels and media” (Beaufort Research 2013, pp.  85–86). This would point to potential benefits in terms of increased activity in minority languages through the development of services in this contested media sector by relevant provisions in minority languages. However, public financing is required for such services in minority languages to emerge in the professional media domain (Moring 2016). In a European context, these examples show developments that would encourage a more holistic view of the media sector.

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 onclusions: Policy and Its Justification C in a Minority-Language Context This study of minority-language media policy at the international and national levels, and examples of its execution, shows that changes in the media sector are manifold and complex. As media functions expand to new areas of daily life, policies are required that support communicative processes in the minority languages, including minority-language provision in kindergarten and schools, to ensure the vital position of the language in the public domain. Minority-language media play an essential role in securing the functional presence of the minority language on all these stages. The usability of minority languages in the public domain will in many cases be severely reduced if these languages are not actively supported in the transition to the digital age. In autochthonous minority-language communities, benefits of multilingual skills at an individual level may lead to cultural erosion at an aggregate level. As social media move more and more into a free market realm, the media environment offers possibilities but also severe threats for minority-language communities and their public sphere. If these languages are going to survive this process, minority-language service provisions, based on traditional legacy media outlets, are still important. Equally vital is their extension into the digital realm, and their expansion to sectors that are becoming media driven. The most urgent challenge, however, appears to be how to counter a losing grip particularly of the younger section of the population. The global media environment offers many new and interesting opportunities to linguistically competent young people. Competition for audiences has led to public service broadcasters reducing their services in minority languages or beginning to offer such services in forms that are more attractive to a broader audience (Moring 2017). This process of power-broking in society affects the position of minority-language media and of minority-language journalism. The literature in this field has shown that the task of supporting media for national minorities has mainly been catered for by publicly funded media— that is, public service or state broadcasting—with a lesser role for press subsidies. Today, the border between the publicly funded and the commercial system is eroding, particularly when it comes to digital media. This calls for new initiatives to install policies of public support to enhance and develop a whole new set of media services in minority languages that respond to the new situation.

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Notes 1. See the contribution by deVarennes and Kuzborska (in this volume) for an indepth discussion of understandings of minority-related concepts. The discussion in this chapter of minority-language media uses the definition of a minority as “a group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members—being nationals of the State—possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language” (see ibid., on Francesco Capotorti). 2. See also, e.g., on meditization and sociolinguistic change, https://books.google. co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_oDnBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP5&dq=min ority+languages+and+the+media&ots=3SXXqnwfYR&sig=nAiyXGepQT7E GY6_E_yGA2RIIKc#v=onepage&q=minority%20languages%20and%20 the%20media&f=false. 3. These are: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Corsican, Breton, Frisian, Irish, Welsh, Scottish-Gaelic and Sámi.

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Cormack, M. (2013). Concluding Remarks: Towards an Understanding of Media Impact on Minority Language Use. In E.  Jones & E.  Uribe-Jongbloed (Eds.), Minority Languages and Social Media: Participation, Policy and Perspectives (1st ed., pp. 255–265). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cormack, M., & Hourigan, N. (Eds.). (2007). Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies (1st ed.). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Coupland, N. (2014). Language Change, Social Change, Sociolinguistic Change: A Meta-Commentary. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(2), 277–286. Dunbar, R., & Moring, T. (2012). Article 11. Media. In A. Nogueira López, E. Ruiz Vieytez, & I. Urrutia Libarona (Eds.), Shaping Language Rights. Commentary on the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in the Light of the Committee of Experts’ Evaluation (Regional or Minority Languages No. 9, pp. 373–424). Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. ETS 148. (1992). European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (European Treaty Series 148/1992). Strasbourg: Council of Europe. [Online]. Available at: https://rm.coe.int/168007bf4b. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. ETS 157. (1995). Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (European Treaty Series 157/1995). Strasbourg: Council of Europe. [Online]. Available at: https://rm.coe.int/168007cdac. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. Fishman, J. (1991). Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, J. (2001). From Theory to Practice (and Vice Versa). In J. Fishman (Ed.), Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Laguage Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective, Multilingual Matters 116 (1st ed., pp. 451–483). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Graffman, K., & Moring, T. (2016, June). Språken som Internet skulle rädda. Medievärlden Premium. Guidelines on Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media. (2003). The Hague: OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. [Online]. Available at: https://www.osce.org/hcnm/32310?download=true. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. Guyot, J. (2007). Minority Language Media and the Public Sphere. In M. Cormack & N.  Hourigan (Eds.), Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies (1st ed., pp. 34–51). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Hettema, L. (2016). Vulnerability of Frisian Media Services in Time of Change. Analysis of Non-regulation and Self-sustainability of Public Media for a People in the Netherlands. Master’s Thesis, Sámi University of Applied Science, Kautokeino. Honka, N. (2015). Ylen hallintoneuvosto päätti televisiouudistuksesta. Helsinki: Yle. [Online]. Available at: http://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2016/10/25/ylen-hallintoneuvosto-paatti-televisiouudistuksesta. Accessed 7 Jan 2017. Hourigan, N. (2007). Minority Language Media Studies: Key Themes for Future Scholarship. In M. Cormack & N. Hourigan (Eds.), Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies (1st ed., pp. 88–106). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

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IWA Wales Media Audit. (2015). [Online]. Available at: http://www.iwa.wales/click/ wp-content/uploads/IWA_MediaAudit_v4.pdf. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. Jones, E., & Uribe-Jongbloed, E. (Eds.). (2013). Minority Languages and Social Media: Participation, Policy and Perspectives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kornai, A. (2013). Digital Language Death. PLoS ONE, 8(10), e77056. McGonagle, T., & Moring, T. (2012). Minorities and the Media: Present, Probing and Pressing Questions. Special Focus: Minorities and the Media Introduction. In European Yearbook of Minority Issues (Vol. 9, 2010, pp. 369–376). Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Moriarty, M. (2014). Súil Eile. Media, Sociolinguistic Change and the Irish Language. In J.  Androutsopoulos (Ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change (pp. 464–486). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Moring, T. (2007). Functional Completeness in Minority Language Media. In M. Cormack & N. Hourigan (Eds.), Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies (1st ed., pp. 17–33). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Moring, T. (2016). Identity: Minority Language and Community in the Age of Digital Communication. In R. Picard (Ed.), What Society Needs from Media in the Age of Digital Communication (1st ed., pp. 71–92). Lisbon: Media XXI. Moring, T. (2017, October). In the Language or on the Language  – Paradoxes in Media Policy for Minorities. Multiethnica nr 36–37, pp. 33–42. Newman, N. (2016). Overview and Key Findings. [Online]. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2016. [Online]. Available at: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/DigitalNe w s - Re p o r t - 2 0 1 6 . p d f ? u t m _ s o u rc e = d i g i t a l n e w s re p o r t . o r g & u t m _ medium=referral. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. Ní Bhroin, N. (2014). Lost in Space? Social Media-Innovation and Minority Language Use. PhD Thesis, University of Oslo, Faculty of Humanities. Nordicom. (2015). Daily Media Reach in Finland, Norway and Sweden 2005–2015. [Online]. Available at: http://www.nordicom.gu.se/sites/default/files/medieforskning-statistik/10500_dailymediause_2005_2015.xls. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. Ofcom. (2014). The Communications Market Report, Summary. [Online]. Available at: http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/news/cmr-2014/. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. Pietikäinen, S. (2014). Circulation of Indigenous Sámi Resources Across Media Spaces. A Rhizomatic Discourse Approach. In J.  Androutsopoulos (Ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change (pp.  515–538). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Porsanger, J. (2017). Negotiating Culture on the Visual Front. An Analysis on the Cover Photographs of Sámi Youth Magazines. Master’s Thesis, Sámi University of Applied Science, Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino. Riggins, S. (Ed.). (1992). Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective. London: Sage. The Bolzano/Bozen Recommendations on National Minorities in Inter-State Relations. (2008). The Hague: OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. [Online]. Available at: www.osce.org/hcnm/66209. Accessed 5 Jan 2017.

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The Ljubljana Guidelines on Integration of Diverse Societies & Explanatory Note. (2012). The Hague: OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. [Online]. Available at: www.osce.org/hcnm/66209. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. The Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities & Explanatory Note. (1998). The Hague: OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. [Online]. Available at: www.osce.org/hcnm/66209. Accessed 5 Jan 2017. Uribe-Jongbloed, E. (2014). Minority Language Media Studies Beyond Eurocentrism: Cormack’s Seven Conditions Revisited. Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 6(1), 35–54. Williams, G. (2007). From Media to Multimedia: Workflows and Language in the Digital Economy. In M.  Cormack & N.  Hourigan (Eds.), Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies (1st ed., pp.  88–106). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Wilson, P., Stewart, M., & Córdova, A. (Eds.). (2008). Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics (1st ed.). Durham/London: Duke University Press. Vincze, L., & Joyce, N. (2018). Online Contact, Face-to-Face Contact, and Multilingualism: Young Swedish-Speaking Finns Develop Trilingual Identities. Communication Studies, 69(1), 85–102. Vincze, L., & Moring, T. (2013). Towards Ethnolinguistic Identity Gratifications. In E.  Jones & E.  Uribe-Jongbloed (Eds.), Minority Languages and Social Media: Participation, Policy and Perspectives (1st ed., pp.  47–57). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Vincze, L., & Moring, T. (2017). Trilingual Internet Use, Identity and Acculturation Among Young Minority Language Speakers: Some Data from Transylvania and Finland. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies, 12(2017), 111–123. Zabaleta, I., Gutierrez, A., Ferre-Pavia, C., Fernandez, I., Urrutia, S., & Xamardo, N. (2013). Website Development and Digital Skill: The State of Traditional Media in European Minority Languages. International Journal of Communication, 7, 1641–1666.

18 Minority Languages and Social Media Daniel Cunliffe

Introduction In 2000, David Crystal wrote “… I am sufficiently convinced of the potential power of electronic technology to make it one of my six postulates for progress in language maintenance, notwithstanding the limited role it has been able to play in this domain hitherto” (Crystal 2000, p.  191). This positive viewpoint has been sustained and perhaps even strengthened by the emergence of social media. Social media are arguably a more effective tool for supporting minority language use than traditional websites, as they are more similar to face-to-face communication, more interactive, and are likely to be more directly embedded in the everyday lives of speakers. For these reasons and others, the potentially important role of social media in maintaining and revitalising minority languages has been highlighted in the academic literature (e.g. Jones and Uribe-Jongbloed 2013; Keegan and Cunliffe 2014; de Graaf, van der Meer and Jongbloed-Faber 2015; Stern 2017). This potential role has also been recognised within governments (e.g. Welsh Government 2012; Consejo Asesor del Euskera 2016), effectively legitimising the claim and giving it effect through language planning and policy.

D. Cunliffe (*) School of Computing and Mathematics, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science, University of South Wales, Pontypridd, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_18

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The term social media is used here to refer to a variety of software platforms which typically support personal user profiles, the creation of content by users, and the sharing of content through a network of social connections. Social media is dominated by commercial social media platforms, which in many cases compete against each other for users. These commercial social media platforms encourage their users to reveal private data, commoditising relationships and profiting from the behavioural, profile, and connectivity data revealed (van Dijck 2013). Commercial social media platforms are generally aimed at large markets, which are typically majority language-speaking markets. Among the most globally familiar social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Of these, Wikipedia stands out as the only not-for-profit, non-commercial platform and one which has an explicit mission to include minority languages. There are many other social media platforms that are significant in particular regions or among particular groups of people. There were estimated to be 7.74 billion mobile phone subscriptions in 2017 (ITU 2017). The rapid increase in ownership of mobile phones and the increasing reach of mobile phone networks has fuelled the popularity of social media, enabling and encouraging people to maintain a constant connection with their online social networks. Generally, these mobile phones are personal, private devices allowing young people in particular to make choices about the media they consume, free from the influence of traditional gatekeepers, such as parents or broadcasters. Social media appear pervasive, with an estimated 2.62 billion users in 2018 (Statista 2018a). Many social media platforms have hundreds of thousands of users; YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger each have more than a billion active users and Facebook has more than two billion (Statista 2018b). However, it is important to recognise that social media use can vary greatly between different parts of the world and between different communities. Social media will only have significance for minority languages where they are a part of the daily lives of the minority language community. Where social media use is pervasive and ubiquitous, it will often be seen as being emblematic of modernity. The use of a minority language within social media can therefore serve to associate the language with modernity and demonstrate the relevance of the language to modern lifestyles (Eisenlohr 2004). However, if a minority language is not used in social media and thereby fails to demonstrate modernity, the language may be seen as increasingly anachronistic and irrelevant, particularly among the young (UNESCO 2003). There are three main characteristics of social media which it is claimed may benefit a minority language. First, that social media provides a new domain in

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which the language, and particularly written language, can be used. Second, that it connects speakers; this may have particular significance where speaker density is low or there is a diaspora. Third, that there are affective benefits; the association of the language with social media may be seen as modern and ‘cool’ and this may have particular appeal for young people. However, each of these characteristics also has the potential to strengthen the dominance of the majority language. Generally, minority languages exist alongside majority languages in social media platforms. A social media platform which provides a new domain for a minority language also provides a new domain for a majority language. Social media is as likely, if not more likely, to be dominated by majority language content. Most social media platforms should therefore be viewed as sites of language contact and of possible conflict. Social media platforms facilitate social connections with non-speakers of a minority language as easily as they do with speakers of that language. In multilingual contexts, the online social networks of minority language speakers are likely to include both speakers and non-speakers, which will influence the choice of which language they use. In social media platforms with large numbers of users, it may be difficult to find or identify those who speak the minority language or to locate content in that language (Cunliffe and ap Dyfrig 2013; Scott Warren and Jennings 2015). If a minority language lacks visibility in a social media platform which is judged to be ‘cool’ by the young speakers of that language, or if the young speakers choose not to use their minority language, perhaps because they do not wish to appear ‘uncool’ in their newly expanded social networks, then the affective benefits associated with use of that platform may instead become associated with the majority language. Use by young people is seen as particularly important in maintaining minority languages (Morris 2010). Furthermore, a lack of visibility on social media may influence the perception of the overall vitality of the language by non-speakers, commercial organisations, the media, and government. Using a minority language on social media may undermine the perceived status and utility of that language in other ways. Different languages are supported to different extents in the interfaces of social media platforms and also in the devices used to access them. These imbalances mean that employing the majority language will often result in a more complete, efficient, and pleasant experience for the user (Lackaff and Moner 2016). Claims regarding the potential role of social media in maintaining and revitalising minority languages should not be accepted uncritically. The use of social media by a minority language community may have a number of

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­ ifferent outcomes, including negative impacts on the maintenance of the d language. As the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages observed, “…new media, including broadcast media and the Internet, usually serve only to expand the scope and power of the dominant language at the expense of endangered languages” (UNESCO 2003, p. 11).

Digital Language Vitality Frameworks for assessing linguistic vitality are important for minority languages in order to capture the current state of a language, plot trends over time, and target potential interventions. In many frameworks, for example, the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS; Fishman 1991) or the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (Lewis and Simons 2010), the role of digital media is not explicitly addressed. Whilst these frameworks include traditional mass media, Jones (2013) argues that social media needs to be considered as distinct from mass media and institutional language. She suggests that, in terms of GIDS, social media are better viewed as demonstrating literacy in the home and community, outside of formal and official contexts. More recently, frameworks specifically focussed on digital language vitality have been proposed. Kornai (2013) presents a framework for assessing the digital vitality of a language and proposes a process of digital ascent, “whereby a language increasingly acquires digital functions and prestige as its speakers increasingly acquire digital skills”. Kornai’s framework identifies four levels of digital vitality: Thriving—extensive digital use by both native and foreign speakers and well supported by software resources from both Apple and Microsoft. Vital—digital use by native speakers, but lacking software support from Apple and Microsoft. Heritage—there are archived digital materials for the language, but no current digital communication by native speakers. Still—there is no observed digital use of the language. Any languages which are Thriving or Vital are judged capable of achieving digital ascent. Kornai contends that the vast majority of the world’s languages (over 96%) are no longer capable of digital ascent and that only between around 170 and 310 languages will ever ascend.

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However, the extent to which digital ascent is necessary for a language’s survival will depend on the significance of digital communication for the overall communication needs of that language community. Digital communication may still have a role to play in maintaining a language even if it does not fully digitally ascend. Gibson (2015) also suggests that it may be premature to make a judgement of digital stillness in contexts where the widespread use of technology has still to be established. According to Kornai, passive consumption of digital material is irrelevant to the survival of a language, and active engagement in “digitally mediated interaction” is needed for digital ascent. The use of a language on social media certainly constitutes digitally mediated interaction, and the use of a language on Wikipedia is one of the factors used by Kornai in assessing a language’s digital vitality. Gibson presents a stronger case for the significance of social media, arguing that texting and social media messaging are in fact an essential and key stage for digital ascent to occur and proposes an extended version of Kornai’s framework to reflect this. Thriving Vital Heritage Emergent—community use of texting and social media, digital use mainly private and informal Latent—digital ascent is still possible but not currently evident Still—there is no observed digital use of the language and digital use is very unlikely to occur in the future. In Gibson’s extended framework, the Emergent level—and the use of a language in social media—is seen as a precursor to other forms of writing taking root and more widespread digital use of the language in more public and formal settings. This positioning of social media is very similar to that of Jones (2013). Unlike the Heritage level, the Emergent level potentially provides a pathway towards digital vitality and digital ascent. Inspired by existing work on measuring digital and non-digital language vitality, Soria et al. (2016) report work towards the development of a Digital Language Vitality Scale with a seven-point scale from ‘pre-digital’ to ‘digitally thriving’. The indicators associated with the scale are based on proxies representing digital usability, the quality and amount of digital use (including social media), and the digital prestige of a language. One role for this type of framework is the targeting of interventions by activists or policymakers. Based on the work of Diki-Kidiri (2008), Paricio-­

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Martín and Martínez-Cortés (2010) propose a planning model for ensuring the presence of a language in cyberspace, in which Action 9 is “Community development: social networks, forums and chats”. The Digital Language Vitality Scale being developed by Soria et al. (2016) will be accompanied by Digital Language Survival Kits containing actionable guidelines which can be implemented to improve digital vitality as well as a Road Map for Digital Language Diversity aimed at language stakeholders and policymakers. Current work on defining and measuring digital language vitality is essential in better characterising the role of social media in digital ascent and its impact on language vitality in general. The availability of these tools and associated strategies and interventions will provide a greater understanding of when and how social media can be used as an effective tool for supporting minority languages.

Permissibility and Policy Gibson (2015) further identifies three critical enabling factors for digital ascent: • Active intergenerational transmission • An available model of writing in the language • Sufficient software support to write the language easily These factors echo those proposed more generally for language survival. For example, Grin (2003) argues that people must have the capacity to speak the language, there must be opportunities for them to do so, and they must have the desire to use the language and to subsequently pass it on to the next generation. The relationship between opportunity and desire is important. It is not enough that an opportunity simply exists; the opportunity needs to be recognised and then it needs to be taken. Stern (2017, p. 793) describes the existence of a Balinese language Facebook page, “Lestarikan Bahasa Bali”, as “…a message about the permissibility of using Balinese on Facebook”. This notion of permissibility is useful as it reflects a speaker’s perception that not only is using a minority language possible (opportunity), but that it is welcomed or even encouraged (desire). Considered uncritically, social media would appear to offer a permissive environment for using minority languages. However, a minority language speaker will not necessarily be drawn to social media for this reason or p ­ erceive

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social media to be a permissive environment. The motivations for minority language speakers joining social media platforms and their expectations of using their language on those platforms are rarely studied. Jones et al. (2013) found that the factors motivating Welsh speakers to use Twitter did not appear to differ significantly from those motivating speakers of other languages. Social and informational motives dominated; the top four motivating factors being to connect with others, curiosity, to share information, and for business or work-related reasons. A specific desire to connect with Welsh culture and community was reported as a motivating factor in less than 5% of the cases. The majority of respondents also expected to both read and write in Welsh on Twitter prior to using it. For the Welsh speakers in this study, Twitter was regarded as a permissive environment in which the Welsh language could and would be used. These expectations may be based on their experience of using the language in other domains, particularly on other social media platforms, in information technology, or other forms of digital communication. It seems reasonable to suppose that a speaker who expects to use their minority language on a social media platform before they join it is more likely to do so once they have. While the notion of permissibility is helpful in considering how a person perceives the opportunities afforded by social media, a simple characterisation of social media as permissive environments also fails to recognise the complex realities of what are often highly regulated linguistic environments (de Bres 2015). Social media are often imagined as unregulated, multilingual spaces where the use or non-use of a minority language is simply a matter of personal choice—social media platforms are seen as language-apathetic.1 In practice, language-apathetic social media platforms propagate existing imbalances between majority and minority languages through a variety of implicit and explicit language policies operated by different actors. Language policy is taken here to mean “any activity in which a social actor attempts to modify the language practices, language ideologies, or, indeed, language policies of others” (de Bres 2015, p. 310). Many of these actors and their policies would traditionally be characterised as ‘bottom-up’ (enacted by the users of the social media platforms, rather than by the owners of the platforms), though as Lenihan (2014) observes, bottom-up actors may behave in top-down ways within their specific sphere of influence within social media. Informal peer-to-peer language regulation may occur through people’s responses, or non-responses, to messages posted in a language other than the ‘normal’ expected language, that is, the majority language (Axelsson et  al. 2003). When the Welsh footballer Aaron Ramsey (who was playing for the English club Arsenal at the time) tweeted a wedding photograph on his first

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wedding anniversary (8 June 2015) with a three-word caption in Welsh, “Un flwyddyn heddiw” (A year ago today) on his otherwise almost exclusively English language Twitter account, he was ridiculed by some Twitter users (BBC News 2015; WalesOnline 2015a; The Daily Mirror 2015). This in turn prompted a number of responses from those who were supportive of the language and its use. The Daily Mirror included a poll for readers with its online report on the story, asking “Should Aaron Ramsey be allowed to tweet in whatever language he wants?” with the options “Yes” and “Obviously yes”. On 18 June 2015, Ramsey tweeted “Thanks for all the nice and supportive tweets about the Welsh language. Proud to speak it and will continue to use it on Twitter!” The positive reporting of the story by the traditional news media and the endorsement of a minority language by a celebrity speaker may help to enhance the permissibility of social media. A message posted to a Facebook group ‘Welsh people… Better people…’2 in 2007 in response to a message posted in Welsh read “C’mon guys this is a group for all Welsh people, and unfortunately most Welsh people aren’t Welsh speakers. Can you please translate your posts so all Welsh people can read them, or start a Welsh language group”. In this case, minority language use is framed as deliberately exclusive and discourteous and something best practised away from the community of non-speakers. In contexts where minority language speakers also speak the majority language, the use of the minority language may be labelled as a political act rather than a linguistic choice and rejected as inappropriate (Fernandez 2001). Typically, peer-to-peer regulation will favour the majority language which has the effect of normalising the use of the majority language on a language-apathetic social media platform and diminishing or excluding the minority language. Some social media platforms provide spaces which can be ‘owned’ and moderated, such as groups on Facebook. It is then possible for the owner to enact language policy within that space. These moderated spaces are often private and are therefore difficult to study. Ostler (1999) provides an example from the “Peace in Ireland” message board where the manager posted, “This board is designed for English speakers and Gaelic postings are not allowed […] posts in Gaelic [even with an English translation] will be removed without further recourse to the person who posted it”. However, regulation in moderated spaces can also be used to favour a minority language, creating language-empathetic enclaves within the otherwise language-apathetic platform. Stern (2017) reports that administrators of the “Lestarikan Bahasa Bali” Facebook group have occasionally ousted people who insist on using English or Indonesian when Balinese use is actively promoted. These moderated spaces can therefore provide places where the use of a minority language can

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be normalised within a social media platform, even when the more public spaces on that platform are dominated by the majority language. Social media platforms themselves may also operate what are in effect implicit language policies, for example, in the choice of interface languages they provide or through the processes by which different language versions of the platform are created (Scannell 2012; Lenihan 2014.). While this in itself is unlikely to prevent the actual use of an unsupported language on that platform, and other technological workarounds may be possible (Scannell 2012), the decision not to support that language may put restrictions on other services offered to users. In 2015, WalesOnline reported that business had been “banned from advertising in Welsh on Twitter” after Twitter refused to allow its Twitter Ads service to be used by a company that tweeted mainly in Welsh (WalesOnline 2015b). Whilst individual Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary, are rare examples of language-empathetic social media platforms, Wikimedia has an explicit language policy that governs proposals to establish new language versions of Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia 2018). Among the requirements for eligibility are that the language must have a valid ISO 639 code, that the language is sufficiently unique (excluding regional dialects and different written forms of the same language), and that there are “a sufficient ­number of living native speakers to form a viable community and audience”. The decision of whether a particular language has a sufficient number of living native speakers “depends on discussion”. Whilst it may be argued that these requirements set a relatively low threshold for a language community, they still form a basis upon which a particular language could be excluded. In the case of minority language-empathetic social media platforms, there will typically be an explicit language policy in favour of a minority language. The Irish language messaging app AbairLeat3 which describes itself as “The world’s first exclusive minority language Messaging App” has a requirement that over 70% of each exchange must be in Irish. Traditional macro-level language policy agents may also regard social media as a legitimate object for the application of language policy and regulation. For example, the Welsh Government’s 2012 strategy for the Welsh language (Welsh Government 2012) identifies social media as increasingly important, associating them with communities and in particular with young people and recognising them as part of the “Welsh language infrastructure”. The Welsh Language Commissioner has powers to enforce upon certain organisations legal compliance with a series of Welsh Language Standards (e.g. National Assembly for Wales 2015) which include standards specifically relating to the use of the Welsh language on social media. Failure to comply can result in a

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civil penalty of up to £5000. Official language policy and regulation may serve to promote or restrict minority language use on social media, depending on the nature of the policy and regulations being enforced. The extent to which a language-apathetic social media platform actually provides a permissive environment for using minority languages will vary greatly according to the different language policies that are being applied. The implicit and explicit language policies operated by different actors within language-apathetic social media platforms typically favour the majority language, though there is scope for the application of policies which favour minority languages. Where these policies enhance the visibility of the minority language or create minority language-empathetic spaces, permissibility will be enhanced.

Language Behaviour On language-apathetic social media platforms, the minority language speaker is faced with a ‘choice’ regarding the language(s) of their profile and the language(s) they use when communicating with the members of their social network. While the use of one language or another is typically referred to as a choice, this is not meant to necessarily imply a conscious, deliberated decision on the part of the speaker. In many cases, this choice will simply be a subconscious element of the communication act. This makes it difficult to determine the factors which influence the choice, as insights generally rely on post hoc rationalisation of past behaviours or introspection with regards to hypothesised future situations. Whilst recognising these caveats, it seems reasonable to suggest that this choice is influenced by a variety of factors, some of which operate as an overall context affecting all of a person’s communication on the social media platform and some of which specifically influence the choice of language at the level of an individual message. A study by Mentrau Iaith Cymru (2014) identified a number of factors which Welsh speakers believed inhibited the use of Welsh in social media. Among the factors were: • a lack of confidence and perceived lack of self-proficiency, particularly in writing the Welsh language; • a fear of having one’s Welsh language proficiency judged, particularly in a public medium;

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• other people’s lack of proficiency in the language, a message in English will be understood by a wider audience; • other Welsh speaker’s lack of use of the language on social media, particularly lack of use by famous or influential Welsh speakers; • a lack of Welsh language content on social media as compared to English language content; and • a lack of Welsh language interfaces and support for the language in technology generally. Similar contextual factors have been observed in other minority languages, for example, Frisian (Jongbloed-Faber 2015) and Irish (Lackaff and Moner 2016). These factors can be seen as providing an overall context which influences the perception of permissibility and frames the language choices a speaker will make on social media. The choice of which language (or occasionally languages) to use for a particular message depends on a number of different factors including the sending person’s confidence or self-perceived ability in using the language, their attitude towards using the language, knowledge about the receiver’s language ability and preferences, and any previously established language norms between the sender and receiver. Some of this complexity is captured by Jongbloed-Faber in her Schematic Language Choice Model for Frisian and Dutch on Social Media (Fig. 18.1). A consideration of the audience has been identified by several researchers as having a particularly strong influence on language choice in social media. This is especially evident in the difference between messages intended for a specific audience or individual, as opposed to those intended for a wider, general audience. In Morris et al. (2012) and Cunliffe et al. (2013) analyses, Welsh speaking respondents reported that the language used when writing private messages or wall posts to an individual on Facebook, and other social media, reflected the language used for face-to-face communication. This suggests that the language used between two individuals does not change according to the medium of communication. Cunliffe et al., therefore, describe their respondents’ language use on social media as an extension of their language use in their daily lives. This has a number of consequences for language choice in social media. Jones et al. (2013) report that the top three factors Welsh speakers reported would make them more likely to post a particular tweet in Welsh were the intended audience, the topic (which is likely to determine the intended audience to some extent) and that tweeting in Welsh felt natural.

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Fig. 18.1  Schematic Language Choice Model for Frisian and Dutch on social media. (Jongbloed-Faber [2015], translation provided by Lysbeth Jongbloed-Faber)

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Johnson (2013) noted that there were differences in the frequency of using Welsh on Twitter between original tweets (typically aimed at a general audience) and responses to tweets (aimed at a specific audience). English was used more frequently when making a tweet to a general audience. The likelihood of using English increased as the number of non-Welsh speakers in a person’s social network increased. Jongbloed-Faber (2014a) similarly notes that tweets aimed at a specific audience are more likely to be in Frisian than tweets aimed at a general audience. Lackaff and Moner (2016) report that nearly half the respondents in their survey never use the Irish language in public posts on social media. Those respondents who used Irish frequently were more likely to do so in private messages than messages aimed at groups or public messages. Morris et al. (2012) and Cunliffe et al. (2013) also found that English was more likely to be used on messages intended for a wider audience, even in some cases where the social network was mostly Welsh speaking. The reason given for this was that everyone in their social network could understand English and that using Welsh could be considered impolite. This ‘language politeness’ can be seen to mirror face-to-face language behaviour (Jones and Morris 2007). Similar findings are reported for the Irish language by Lackaff and Moner (2016), who also found that nearly half of their respondents agreed that their friends would be annoyed if they used Irish on social media. Johnson (2013) noted English was also used in tweets aimed at a specific audience when their Welsh proficiency was not known. The majority language, English, is the default choice as the Welsh speaking audience are also proficient in English. Johnson suggests that a desire to reach a wide audience on social media mitigates against the use of a minority language, particularly where the majority language is an international language such as English. In some contexts, it may be possible to deliberately create an audience for the minority language. Lillehaugen (2016) describes the Voces del Valle project in which speakers of Oaxacan languages are encouraged to develop their writing skills through the use of their language on Twitter. Writers are paired with readers (who may not speak the language) who provide encouragement and support. Cunliffe et al. (2013) speculate that the young people in their study may feel pressure to conform to the use of English as the language of the wider Internet. Fleming and Debski (2007) reported that young fluent Irish speakers considered English to be the language of digital communications, although they spoke Irish with their friends and contacts in face-to-face encounters. The effect of audience on language choice may vary across different social media platforms. Jongbloed-Faber (2015) observed differences in the likelihood of Frisian being used on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, suggesting

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that the platforms support different types of audience. Jones et  al. (2013) report the perceived difficulty in using Welsh on social media varied by platform and that frequency of Welsh language use also varied by platform. Cunliffe and ap Dyfrig (2013) noted that many Welsh speakers appeared relatively unconcerned that their Welsh language content uploaded to YouTube may be viewed by non-Welsh speakers. In some cases, the non-Welsh-­speaking audience was explicitly addressed in the textual description accompanying a Welsh language video, for example, to give a brief synopsis. Cunliffe and ap Dyfrig suggest that this might in part be due to the less critical role of language in the predominantly audio-visual nature of YouTube content as opposed to the often highly textual nature of many other social media platforms. An understanding of the factors influencing language-choice behaviour can be used to direct interventions in support of a minority language. Jongbloed-­ Faber (2015) describes how Frisian language tweets by famous Frisians (model and actress Doutzen Kroes, weather presenter Gerrit Hiemstra, and cyclist Lieuwe Westra) are used to provoke reaction on Twitter. While this reaction is not all in Frisian and is not all positive, it does provide a short-term upsurge of interest and use of Frisian on Twitter. Another possible way to encourage people is via specific events. Jongbloed-Faber (2014a) reports that on the second Frisian Twitterday almost 10,000 tweets were sent with the hashtag #frysk. On a typical day, only around 10% of tweets by Frisian speakers were in Frisian; on Twitterday this rose to 53%. This upsurge in use does not appear to persist, however. In order to achieve more durable changes in behaviour, different approaches need to be tried, for example, de Graaf et al. (2015) mention teachers using Twitter activities in their classes, asking pupils to tweet in Frisian and to correct the Frisian tweets of their peers. Work on interventions around social media are at a relatively early stage but can be seen in a context of increasing interest in applying techniques from behavioural economics to language behaviour (Keegan and Evas 2012; Evas and Cunliffe 2016).

Language Change The use of a language on social media may cause changes to the language itself. Some of these changes may be fairly localised to use on social media, while others may have a wider impact. Where a language does not have an established written form, social media can provide a space where non-­standard forms can be used. Rajah-Carrim (2009) discusses the case of Kreol (Mauritian Creole), suggesting that its use in computer-mediated communication is

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l­eading to emergence of written norms for the language. Social media may provide a space where traditionally oral languages can be promoted and developed as written languages. This can be situated within the Emergent level of Gibson’s extended framework, where the use of a language in social media is seen as a precursor to other forms of writing. Even where written forms are well established and a language has a strong written tradition, contact with social media is likely to cause change. The emergence of ‘text talk’ or ‘net speak’ for brevity, speed, or effect has been long recognised within majority language use on social media and other forms of digital communication (e.g. Crystal 2006). This phenomenon has also been observed in minority languages. Jones (2007) provides examples from the Welsh language including “t i v” (ti i fi—you to me) which not only follows the common pattern seen in English of shortening by dropping vowels, and the use of phonetic spelling, but uses the letter ‘v’ from the English alphabet which is not part of the Welsh alphabet. Thus, this example of text talk reflects the bilingual linguistic repertoire of the user. More substantial code switching between languages on social media is also frequently observed, for example, in Puerto Rican Spanish (Carroll 2008), Irish (Lynn et al. 2015), and Frisian (Jongbloed-Faber et al. 2016). Jones (2007) and Bouvier (2012) suggest that complex code switching between languages may have an important role to play in the overall construction of identity among bilinguals on social media. Harwood (2015) observes young Māori living in Australia using a mix of English, Māori, text speak and slang on social media and again suggests the importance of this in identity construction. Languages may be adapted in other ways to make them easier to use on social media. Stern (2017) notes the emergence of ‘Facebook Balinese’ which is described as a “flattened, less stratified, semi-formal” form of the language which avoids some of the difficulties associated with the choice of register on social media. Jongbloed-Faber (2014a, 2015) reports that Frisian on Twitter is often written phonetically and without diacritics, especially by young people. She speculates that either they do not know how to write Frisian correctly or that they do not think it is important on social media. Other changes may be due in part to the technology itself. Lynn et  al. (2015) suggest that one of the reasons for people omitting diacritics in Irish language tweets may be that they do not know how to write them using their device. The lack of availability of a social media platform interface in the minority language may also result in the borrowing of terms from the interface when describing elements or actions of the social media platform. Carroll (2008) gives examples from Puerto Rican users on the English language

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MySpace.com, “gracias por add” (Thanks for the add—referring to the action of adding someone as a friend). While some may argue that social media are leading to the use of a debased form of the language, others would argue that it demonstrates vitality in the language. Torres (2004) suggests that the emergence of Catalan net speak provides unambiguous signals of linguistic revitalisation and that the linguistic creativity demonstrated is an indication of the health of the language. These new forms of a language may, however, produce divisions within the language community. Harwood (2015) cautions that they may be difficult for older speakers to understand and engage with, which may pose challenges when these older speakers are the main repository of the language.

Social Networks A social network formed of relationships between users is at the core of most social media platforms. The audience formed by this network has a strong influence on the choice of language used, as described earlier. The creation and management of the social network provides the user with a degree of control over who is in their audience and whose audience they are a member of. Often the members of this online social network will be members of the users preexisting offline social networks (Ellison et al. 2007). Other members may be added due to shared interests, celebrity status, and so on. While the structure of social networks and the patterns of influence and information flow within those networks have been studied extensively, the work focussed on language is limited and that focussed specifically on minority languages, even more so. Eleta and Golbeck (2014) identify two important research questions—in what ways are language communities connected within the social networks of multilingual speakers, and how does the language composition of a multilingual speaker’s social network influence their choice of language. While Eleta and Golbeck frame these questions within the context of Twitter, they clearly have relevance for other social media platforms. They propose five categories of bilingual social network structure based on the degree of connection between the language groups, the degree of integration of one language group within another, and the relative sizes of the language groups. Catalan is the only minority language discussed in their work, with the network showing the Catalan language group integrated in the Spanish language group and having connections to the English language group. These models and their work towards modelling the factors that influence language choice in social

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­ etworks provide potentially useful tools for understanding the composition n and influences within the social networks of other minority language communities. Eleta and Golbeck suggest that the language composition of a social network influences a multilingual’s language choice but also that their language choice may attract followers with a specific language profile. This second point may have particular significance for minority languages, suggesting that speakers of a minority language who use it on social media will form a connected network. Paricio-Martín and Martínez-Cortés (2010) note the creation of social networks where Aragonese, the shared minority language, is the main connection between members. Jones et al. (2013) report that the majority of Welsh-speaking Twitter users in their study were more likely to follow someone on Twitter if they tweeted mainly or entirely in Welsh. They suggest that this will lead to networks that are not based solely on friendships or shared interests but that are based on a shared minority language. This raises the interesting possibility that the connections making up the social networks of majority language speakers (and possibly minority language speakers where the language is of sufficient size) may be qualitatively different to those making up the social networks of speakers of smaller minority languages and that the majority and minority language speaking audiences in the social network of a bilingual speaker may be constructed on a different basis. In addition to these naturally emerging networks of minority language speakers within social media, there may also be various forms of intervention aimed at purposefully engineering connections between speakers. These effectively try to create an audience in which speakers of the minority language dominate. Parallels can be drawn between these language-empathetic social media enclaves and Fishman’s “breathing spaces” where a minority language can be “predominant and unharassed” (Fishman 1991, p. 58). These enclaves can be grouped into three main types: those which occur within language-­ apathetic (majority language dominated) mainstream social media platforms, those that extract and aggregate minority language content from a language-­ apathetic social media platform, and minority language-empathetic social media platforms.

Network Building on Language-Apathetic Platforms The facilities of language-apathetic social media platforms can be used to create networks of minority language speakers within those platforms. Minority ­language networking building can take a number of different forms. Honeycutt

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and Cunliffe (2010) identified a set of 236 Facebooks groups, linked by overlapping membership, where the Welsh language was used. In more than 40% of these groups, Welsh was the only language used, a policy enforced through informal peer-to-peer language regulation. The groups in which Welsh was used had more than double the proportion of Welsh speakers than the general population. Twitter provides several examples of network building activities. Scott Warren and Jennings (2015) mention the use of the hashtag #jerriais by L’Office du Jèrriais. The use of a language hashtag may be effective in identifying content and speakers for very small language communities. The #bloeddybore tweets made by @lleoldotcymru appear to be providing a form of #FF (Follow Friday) service for Welsh speakers, tweeting the accounts of Welsh speakers on Twitter, presumably with the intention that other Welsh speakers then follow them. Yr Awr Gymraeg4 @YrAwrGymraeg encourages companies, organisations, and events to promote themselves on Twitter through the medium of Welsh on Wednesdays between 8 and 9 p.m. using the hashtag #yagym and propagating these messages through their own social network. The hashtag #PethauBychain5 is used by people on Twitter to highlight the ‘little things’ they are doing to increase the everyday use of the Welsh language.

Aggregators Aggregators are not themselves social media platforms, rather they draw their content from other social media platforms based on the language used. Some aggregators present the actual content, whilst others present directories of the people using the language on a particular social media platform. This allows minority language speakers to avoid the problem of having to find content in their language on platforms dominated by the majority language; it also potentially allows those speakers to identify other speakers and to connect with them on those social media platforms. Several active and inactive examples of this can be observed. Now inactive, Ffrwti6 combined original Welsh language news articles on Welsh culture and technology with Welsh language content drawn from Twitter. It also provided trending data for Welsh language tweets and a list of people who tweet in Welsh. Similarly, Blogiadur7 aggregates content from Welsh language blogs (Cunliffe and Honeycutt 2008). Umap8 provides a directory of people who tweet in the Basque language. It includes trending

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data, rankings, and organises the directory by category, including individuals, culture and media. Indigenous Tweets9 provides a directory of people who tweet in a particular language for more than 180 different languages with the aim of allowing speakers from small language communities to discover each other more easily (Scannell 2012). Indigenous blogs10 provide a similar directory of bloggers for more than 80 languages. In both cases, speakers are able to see statistics about the people (e.g. how many tweets, what proportion are in the language), and link through to their Twitter account or blog. The extent to which these aggregators are known about and are actively used by people to find minority language content and other minority language speakers to network with is unclear.

Minority Language-Empathetic Platforms Lackaff and Moner (2016) argue that there may be a benefit in creating exclusively minority language social media platforms in some language contexts. They suggest that the necessary prerequisites are firstly, a sufficient number of speakers and secondly, speakers who are used to operating across a range of different social media platforms. This second prerequisite is necessary because speakers won’t want to give up on their existing online social networks which they have already established on other platforms and some members of their online social networks will be excluded from an exclusively minority language social media platforms due to their lack of language skills. Several such platforms have been created. Abairleat was originally a desktop microblogging site for the Irish language, described by Mac Thómais (2012) as a Facebook equivalent. The platform is now a messaging app designed to facilitate social engagement in the Irish language. Maes-e,11 established in 2002, provides a number of exclusively Welsh ­language message boards, covering a number of topics including music, sport, computing, and language. It has nearly 4500 registered members, but appears to have been largely inactive since 2017. Clecs12 is an exclusively Welsh language social media platform similar to Twitter but with the intention of adding community pages and learning resources. It had 5000 registered users as of September 2016 (BBC Cymru Fyw 2016). There is some current activity on the site, but it appears to have tailed off significantly since launch.

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Both bespoke minority language-empathetic platforms and aggregators require significant funding for development and maintenance. Aggregators are also particularly vulnerable to technical changes in the underlying social media platform. There appears to be evidence to suggest that these platforms may struggle to attract a sustainable community given the dominance and appeal of mainstream social media platforms. If these alternative minority language-empathetic platforms are not viable, then issues of how minority language spaces can be created and maintained within mainstream, language-­ apathetic social media platforms and how they are negotiated with those who do not understand the language become central. The audience formed by the social network on a social media platform has a strong influence on a user’s choice of language. More work is needed to understand the linguistic composition of the social networks of multilingual users and the extent to which various forms of intervention aimed at engineering connections between speakers might be effective.

Geo-Spatial Analysis The use of a minority language on social media offers the potential for new forms of analysis and insight. Many of the devices used to access social media have the ability to determine their location through the use of global positioning systems (GPS). Some social media platforms take advantage of this and offer users the option of geo-tagging their messages with their longitude and latitude when they are posted. This appears to afford the opportunity to analyse where people are when they use their minority language on social media. This insight into the geographical distribution of minority language use might potentially have application in language planning and policymaking, for example. It may have particular relevance in contexts where language distribution information is not otherwise available. This form of analysis of minority language communities is relatively new and unexplored. It is not yet clear how best to analyse or interpret the available data. There are also concerns regarding the reliability of the data, which may ultimately limit the value of any such analysis. The location from which a social media message was posted can be determined in several ways with varying degrees of precision. The most accurate is the automated geo-tagging of the message by the user’s device with longitude and latitude of the location from which the message was posted. However, the number of messages that are geo-tagged is typically very small, largely because this feature is off by default. An analysis of some 9 million Welsh language tweets13 found that

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approximately 0.34% were geo-tagged. Where messages have not been geo-­ tagged, it may still be possible to estimate a location. However, the issue of how reliable these estimates are and what forms of analysis can reasonably be performed based on them remain unresolved. Current research in this area has focussed on geo-spatial analysis of minority language use on Twitter, making use of data from Scannell’s Indigenous Tweets project. Two main forms of spatial analysis have been performed: a mapping of tweet origin locations and an analysis of the locations of users involved in Twitter conversations. Tweet origin maps have been produced for the Māori language (Keegan et al. 2015) and by Higgs for the Welsh language (see Fig. 18.2). In both analyses, the highest densities of tweets correspond very broadly to urban areas, which is unsurprising given the language contexts. However, there may still be value in this type of analysis. Keegan et al. do note a significant number of tweets originating from locations that do not have high concentrations of Māori language speakers, identifying that these may merit further research. Higgs’ analysis of the Welsh data suggested that there was evidence of a positive relationship between the ratio of Welsh to English tweets in an area and the percentage of the population who can speak, read, and write Welsh according to census data. Tweet origin mapping may have more expressive power in contexts where languages are less evenly distributed across a country. Scannell (2013,14 in Jongbloed-Faber 2014b15 and in Keegan et al. 201516) has also performed some analysis of minority language Twitter conversations within the Indigenous Tweets data. The conversation maps include those tweets in a given minority language by a user whose location can be estimated which mention another user whose location can be estimated. The conversation map then plots a line between these two locations. While the maps are based on estimates of users’ locations, the maps are only intended to provide city-level analysis. As Scannell notes, the relative novelty of these conversation maps makes them difficult to interpret. While the international reach of the Irish conversation map (Fig. 18.3) could suggest a more active Irish-speaking diaspora, the compact conversation map for Welsh (Fig.  18.4) may be indicative of the vitality of the Welsh-speaking Twitter community within Wales. Tweet origin maps and conversation maps provide a tantalising glimpse of the types of visualisation and geo-social analysis that might be possible for minority language use of social media. However, selection of estimated locations may limit the accuracy of any such analyses, revealing only crude patterns in the data. It is also necessary to be cautious about extrapolating from

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Fig. 18.2  Point density maps of geo-tagged tweets in English and Welsh by users who tweet in Welsh. (Unpublished analysis by G. Higgs, University of South Wales, on data provided by K. Scannell, Saint Louis University, 2014)

Fig. 18.3  Irish language Twitter conversations, among top 500 tweeters (Scannell 2013)

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Fig. 18.4  Welsh language Twitter conversations, among top 500 tweeters (Scannell 2013)

data about minority language use in social media to minority language use per se; apparent patterns may also reflect other factors—for example, non-use of social media, lack of access to technology, network coverage, unaffordability, and so on. Patterns in languages with a small number of social media users can also be heavily influenced by a few highly active users (Keegan et al. 2015).

Conclusion Social media are increasingly embedded in the in the day-to-day lives of many minority language speakers. Therefore, social media are already having an influence on the maintenance of minority languages. Whilst claims for a ­positive role for social media appear reasonable when a minority language is considered in isolation, a complete view must recognise that social media provide a powerful mechanism for reinforcing the dominance of majority languages. The concept of digital ascent and frameworks for assessing digital linguistic vitality are valuable in better understanding the potential role of digital communication and social media in the maintenance and revitalisation of specific

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minority languages. When combined with route maps and intervention plans based on an understanding of the context and speakers’ language behaviours, they may provide a means by which digital vitality can be enhanced and progress made in maintaining the language. However, this requires that a language is ‘digitally ready’ (Soria et  al. 2016), having a range of tools and support mechanisms, but most importantly a critical mass of speakers who have the digital competence and the confidence to use their language in social media and other digital communications (Keegan and Cunliffe 2014). For those languages which are not digitally ready, digital communications seem likely to only hasten their decline. It is important to recognise and understand those cases where social media, and digital communications in general, are not delivering benefits for the minority language. Sperlich (2005) claims that technology is not providing the promised assistance for maintenance and revitalisation for the Niuean language. Mato and Keegan (2013) suggest that the argument that Twitter provides an opportunity for the Maori language to flourish is not as convincing as it is for some other minority languages. Where minority languages are able to embrace social media, there may be additional benefits for language maintenance and revitalisation efforts, for example, by providing a new corpus for linguistic analysis and thereby supporting the development other linguistic resources such as dictionaries and spellcheckers. Paricio-Martín and Martínez-Cortés (2010) observe that the Aragonese language Wikipedia is the largest digitally available corpus for Aragonese, both in terms of length and scope. Lillehaugen (2016) notes the intention of the Voces del Valle project to publish a compilation of the resulting tweets in Oaxacan languages as a language resource. The benefits may also extend beyond the narrow issue of language. Molyneaux et al. (2014) highlight the important role that social media can play in community resilience, while O’Carroll (2013) points to their increasing popularity as tools for maintaining cultural and social connections, again strengthening the community. It seems inevitable that most, if not all minority languages will have to face the opportunities and challenges posed by social media. Social media does appear to offer minority language communities the opportunity to create ­virtual breathing spaces, but those communities also need the capacity and the desire to do so. The way in which minority language communities respond to these opportunities and challenges will ultimately determine the effect that social media has on the maintenance of their languages.

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Notes 1. Language-apathetic is preferred to language-neutral or language-agnostic as such social media platforms do not attempt to provide balance or neutrality, rather they are essentially unconcerned about languages. This is contrasted with language-empathetic where a social media site has a strong positive attitude towards a particular language. 2. https://www.facebook.com/groups/2213525466/ 3. http://www.abairleat.com/ 4. http://cymraeg.gov.wales/news/index/yagym?lang=en 5. http://cymraeg.llyw.cymru/More/projects/LittleThings/?lang=en 6. http://ffrwti.com 7. http://www.blogiadur.com 8. http://umap.eus/ 9. http://indigenoustweets.com 10. http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/ 11. http://maes-e.com 12. https://www.clecs.cymru/ 13. Unpublished analysis by G. Higgs, University of South Wales, on data provided by K. Scannell, Saint Louis University, 2014. 14. Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish, and Manx languages. 15. Frisian language. 16. Māori language.

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Keegan, T. T., & Evas, J. (2012). Nudge! Normalizing the Use of Minority Language ICT Interfaces. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 8(1), 43–53. Keegan, T. T., Mato, P., & Ruru, S. (2015). Using Twitter in an Indigenous Language: An Analysis of te reo Māori Tweets. Alternative: An International Journal for Indigenous Peoples, 11(1), 59–75. Kornai, A. (2013). Digital Language Death. PLoS ONE, 8(10): e77056. [online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077056. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. Lackaff, D., & Moner, W.  J. (2016). Local Languages, Global Networks: Mobile Design for Minority Language Users. In SIGDOC’16 Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication. Silver Spring, MD, USA. Lenihan, A. (2014). Investigating Language Policy in Social Media: Translation Practices on Facebook. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (Eds.), The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet (pp.  208–227). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, M. P., & Simons, G. F. (2010). Assessing Endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, LV(2), 103–119. Lillehaugen, B.  D. (2016). Why Write in a Language that (Almost) No One Can Read? Twitter and the Development of Written Literature. Language Documentation and Conservation, 10, 356–393. Lynn, T., Scannell, K., & Maguire, E. (2015). Minority Language Twitter: Part-of-­ Speech Tagging and Analysis of Irish Tweets. In Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop in Noisy User-generated Text. Beijing, China, pp. 1–8. Mac Thómais, U. (2012). Language Planning in a Digital Age. In T. Ka‘ai, M. Ó Laoire, N. Ostler, R. Ka‘ai-Mahuta, D. Mahuta, & T. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings FEL XVI: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century: Globalisation, Technology and New Media. Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Mato, P., & Keegan, T. T. (2013). Indigenous Tweeting for Language Survival: The Māori-Language Profile. International Journal of Technology and Inclusive Education, 2(2), 184–191. Mentrau Iaith Cymru. (2014). The Welsh Language and Social Networks. Llanrwst: Mentrau Iaith Cymru. Molyneaux, H., O’Donnell, S., Kakekaspan, C., Walmark, B., Budka, P., & Gibson, K. (2014). Social Media in Remote First Nations Communities. Canadian Journal of Communication, 39(2), 275–288. Morris, D. (2010). Young People and Their Use of the Welsh Language. In D. Morris, ed., Welsh in the Twenty-First Century. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 80–98. Morris, D., Cunliffe, D., & Prys, C. (2012). Social Networks and Minority Language Speakers: The Use of Social Networking Sites Among Young People. Sociolinguistic Studies, 6(1), 1–20.

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National Assembly for Wales. (2015). Welsh Statutory Instruments, 2015 No. 996 (W. 68), Welsh Language, the Welsh Language Standards (No. 1) Regulations 2015. [online] Available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/wsi/2015/996/pdfs/ wsi_20150996_mi.pdf. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. O’Carroll, A. D. (2013). An Analysis of How Rangatahi Māori Use Social Networking Sites. MAI Journal, 2(1), 46–59. Ostler, N. (1999). Fighting Words: As the World Gets Smaller, Minority Languages Struggle to Stake Their Claim. Language International, 11(2), 38–39, 45. Paricio-Martín, S.  J., & Martínez-Cortés, J.  P. (2010). New Ways to Revitalise Minority Languages: The Impact of the Internet in the Case of Aragonese. Digithum, 12, 1–11. Rajah-Carrim, A. (2009). Use and Standardisation of Mauritian Creole in Electronically Mediated Communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 484–508. Scannell, K. (2012). Translating Facebook into Endangered Languages. In T. Ka‘ai, M. Ó Laoire, N.  Ostler, R.  Ka‘ai-Mahuta, D.  Mahuta, & T.  Smith (Eds.), Proceedings FEL XVI: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century: Globalisation, Technology and New Media. Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Scannell, K. (2013). Mapping the Celtic Twittersphere. [online] Available at: http:// indigenoustweets.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/mapping-celtic-twittersphere.html. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. Scott Warren, A., & Jennings, G. (2015). ‘Allant Contre Vent et Mathée’: Jèrriais in the Twenty-First Century. In M. C. Jones (Ed.), Endangered Languages and New Technologies (pp. 141–149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soria, C., Russo, I., Quochi, V., Hicks, D., Gurrutxaga, A., Sarhimaa, A., & Tuomisto, M. (2016). Fostering Digital Representation of EU Regional and Minority Languages: The Digital Language Diversity Project. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T.  Declerck, S.  Goggi, M.  Grobelnik, B.  Maegaard, J.  Mariani, H.  Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016). Portorož, Slovenia. Sperlich, W. B. (2005). Will Cyberforums Save Endangered Languages? A Niuean Case Study. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 172, 51–77. Statista. (2018a). Number of Social Media Users Worldwide from 2010 to 2021 (in Billions). [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. Statista. (2018b). Most Famous Social Network Sites Worldwide as of January 2018, Ranked by Number of Active Users (in Millions). [online] Available at: https://www. statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-ofusers/. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. Stern, A. J. (2017). How Facebook Can Revitalise Local Languages: Lessons from Bali. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(9), 788–796. The Daily Mirror. (2015). ‘I’m Proud to Speak Welsh’: Aaron Ramsey Thanks Supporters After Abuse for Tweeting in Own Language. [online] Available at: http://www.mir-

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ror.co.uk/sport/football/news/im-proud-speak-welsh-aaron-5908002. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. Torres, M. (2004). The Use of the Internet for the Linguistic Revitalization: The Case of the Catalan Language. Proceedings of Internet Research 5.0 Ubiquity? Sussex. UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages. (2003). Language Vitality and Endangerment. [online] Available at: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ ich/doc/src/00120-EN.pdf. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. WalesOnline. (2015a). Welsh Footballer Aaron Ramsey Tweets in Welsh, Is Abused for Not Speaking English. [online] Available at: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/ wales-news/welsh-footballer-aaron-ramsey-tweets-9463234. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. WalesOnline. (2015b). Businesses Banned from Advertising in Welsh on Twitter Prompting Complaints from Firms. [online] Available at: http://www.walesonline. co.uk/news/wales-news/twitter-ads-welsh-language-ban-9883899. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. Welsh Government. (2012). A Living Language: A Language for Living. Welsh Language Strategy 2012–2017. [online] Available at: http://gov.wales/docs/dcells/ publications/122902wls201217en.pdf. Accessed 13 Mar 2018. Wikimedia. (2018). Language Proposal Policy. [online] Available at: https://meta. wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy. Accessed 13 Mar 20.

19 Linguistic Landscapes and Minority Languages Durk Gorter, Heiko F. Marten, and Luk Van Mensel

 he Contribution of Linguistic Landscapes T to Minority Language Research The field of Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies has as its focus the representation of language (or languages) in public space. Its main object of inquiry is ‘signs’, that is, visible written attestations of language and how people—those who read and those who produce —interact with these signs. In this chapter, our aim is to illustrate how the study of LL can contribute to a further understanding of minority languages. Before we move onto these illustrations, we briefly wish to outline why LL studies can offer a particular lens for minority language research that can be highly illuminating. D. Gorter (*) Department of Theory and History of Education, University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Donostia-San Sebastián, Guipuzkoa, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain H. F. Marten DAAD Information Centre, Riga, Latvia Rēzekne Academy of Technologies, Rēzekne, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] L. Van Mensel NaLTT, Université de Namur, Namur, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_19

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First, LL research can provide empirical data on the presence or absence of ‘languages’ in the public sphere, and plot both the geographical and the historical dimensions of such presence, revealing that a change in the public sphere can be due to change in a language policy regime, for instance. As such, it can inform us about the visibility of minority languages, a point that has often been mentioned as important with regard to the survival of a linguistic variety. Edwards (2010), for instance, argues that the LL is one of the “domains of necessity” for language revival. Some of the earlier LL research suggested a possible link between the visibility and the ethnolinguistic vitality of a language community (e.g. Landry and Bourhis 1997), but other voices have questioned this point of view. The LL may be more usefully regarded as a ‘carnival mirror’ (Gorter 2012) of linguistic power relations in society, magnifying the importance of some languages and linguistic varieties and minimizing others. The link between visibility and vitality should thus be investigated rather than taken for granted. For instance, one of the critical points with respect to the visibility of minority languages is their so-called tokenistic use (Van Mensel et  al. 2012), when an increased presence of certain linguistic varieties in the public domain merely reflects a wish to be identified as ‘authentic’, in order to attract tourists and consumers alike (see, among others, Marten 2012; Moriarty 2012; 2015; Stroud and Mpendukana 2009). Second, LL research discusses material traces of language policies but also of contestation of these same policies. It looks at how the LL works as “a mechanism of policy” (Shohamy 2006), how it shapes and is shaped by policy regulations and decrees (Gorter et al. 2012a), and at instances of contestation, when people resist official policies whether in favour or against minority language use. Note that such an approach to research on minority languages aligns with recent trends in, for example, language policy and planning research, which has been characterized by a pragmatic turn (Darquennes 2013), focusing more explicitly on policy practices and the actual implementation of policies. On a methodological level, this has led to an increased interest in ethnographic methods (Johnson and Ricento 2013), a trend that is also reflected in LL research. Examples of contestation, meanwhile, include not only the erasure of certain linguistic forms on public and private signage, but also the production of linguistic signs that run counter to official policy. As Shohamy (2015) has argued, LLs can thus play an important role in the enhancement of language policy awareness and even the fomentation of activism against such policies. As a result, LL research has been conducive to gauging people’s reactions to policy measures and, more generally, to unveil their language ideologies. For instance, pictures of signs have been used to serve as triggers in order to elicit interviewees’ positioning towards language use in their environment (Mettewie and Van Mensel forthcoming).

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Third, LL research depicts and investigates the manifold and intricate ways in which linguistic diversity manifests itself in contemporary (often urbanized) society, a diversity that increasingly problematizes the traditional notion of minority languages as being strongly linked to ethnolinguistic identity and territoriality. Despite this, power issues continue to be negotiated in and through language, and the use of a particular language variety can still lead to considerable disempowerment in particular circumstances (Rubdy 2015). LL methodology has proven to be useful for the analysis of such power relations, and in particular it is sensitive to what happens on the micro-level, the instances of languaging ‘in place’, while acknowledging that these instances are part of a larger discourse (Moriarty 2012). LL research is therefore well suited to tackle recent concerns with respect to the status and use of minority languages in a globalized world. Indeed, one way to avoid a priori assumptions about the existence of language groups may be to look at instances of conflict and contact on display in the LL. Finally, the interdisciplinary nature of LL research (Van Mensel et  al. 2016; Gorter and Cenoz 2017) aligns well with a main tenet in minority language research, namely to take into account the multiplicity of forces that act upon the vitality and status of minority languages, including political, ideological, sociological, economic, and educational forces. If the lack of a common theoretical ground in LL research has sometimes been highlighted for criticism (see e.g. Jaworski and Thurlow 2010), the kaleidoscopic nature of LL research should in our opinion be regarded as an asset in this sense, as it leaves ground for theoretical cross-fertilization as well as the implementation of (combinations of ) various types of methodology. Given the (perception of ) increased fluidity of language practices related to superdiversity (Vertovec 2007), the study of language-minoritized communities in the twenty-first century may well be bolstered by such an interdisciplinary approach. As Flores, Spotti, and Garcia (2016) argue, “while language plays a crucial role in the perpetuation of social inequalities, […] sociolinguistics cannot be expected to have all of the tools necessary to challenge inequality. Yet, it can be open to incorporating tools from other disciplines, […], in further illuminating the role of language”. LL studies are very much part of such agendas. Research on LLs has proliferated during the last decade, with a number of edited volumes, numerous journal articles (see, for instance, the more than 600 entries in the online LL bibliography made available by Troyer on Zotero [www.zotero.org/groups/linguistic_landscape_bibliography]), the organization of nine international LL workshops and dedicated panels at other conferences, which have contributed to the development of a community of active LL researchers, and, since 2015, a dedicated journal. A summary of general

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developments in the field of LL studies is offered in publications by Backhaus (2007), Gorter (2013), Gorter and Cenoz (2017), Shohamy (2012), and Van Mensel, Vandenbroucke, and Blackwood (2016). A fair number of these studies can arguably be said to deal with issues and questions that may interest the minority language researcher, particularly if we adopt a broader interpretation in terms of (language-minoritized) communities that include all speakers of languages other than the dominant language(s) and all language practices that are being marginalized or symbolically ‘peripheralized’ (Busch 2013). In what follows, we present a number of examples of LL studies and discuss some of them in more detail. In the first part of this chapter, we are concerned with the relation between LL and language policies, in particular with regard to the promotion, protection, and revitalization of minority languages. The second part deals with examples of conflict and contestation. A volume that specifically focuses on linguistic minorities and the LL was edited by Gorter, Marten, and Van Mensel (2012b), and some of the chapters are discussed later to exemplify possible research lines.

 inority Languages, Linguistic Landscapes, M and Language Policy General Issues As indicated earlier, language policy is one of the major factors which influence the presence of minority languages in the LL. At the same time, the LL is frequently an arena for the negotiation of language policies between different societal actors. Language policy in a broad sense includes all major categories of language policy and planning: status planning, corpus planning, acquisition planning, usage planning, prestige planning, and discourse planning (cf. Hornberger 2006; Darquennes 2013; Jernudd and Nekvapil 2012; Marten 2016). According to Spolsky (2004, 2009a, b, 2012), language policy consists of three parts: language management (i.e. active intervention), practices by the speech communities, and beliefs about language(s). Language policy takes place both bottom-up and top-down, that is, it encompasses policies by the state, by semi-official institutions, educational institutions of all kinds, private organizations and companies, as well as by grassroots movements and individuals (cf. Kaplan and Baldauf 1997; Jernudd and Nekvapil 2012; Marten 2016). Policies of all types and by different actors interact and collectively

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shape the roles which minority languages take on in the LL. These roles are subject to negotiation and to conflict (see the section ‘Minority Languages and Conflict, Contestation and Exclusion’). Existing state language policies often stand in sharp contrast to the interests and needs of the speakers of minority languages. The ideology of privileging one national language is the basis of many states which, in turn, frequently implies the marginalization of minority varieties. France is an example of a country where a strong language law restricts the presence of minority languages in the official LL (Blackwood and Tufi 2015). In countries without a strong language policy tradition such as Germany, discourses on the normality of monolingualism (e.g. Gogolin 2008) may create a societal climate in which the presence of minority languages in the LL is rare or restricted to less prestigious contexts (Cindark and Ziegler 2016). For many speakers of a minority language, important policy aims are therefore its promotion, protection, maintenance, and/or revitalization, that is, measures oriented towards safeguarding the future vitality of a variety. Within the context of the LL, these aims are closely related to the desire to increase the visibility of a variety. Such a visibility often indicates that the variety enjoys a certain degree of attention, and at the same time public presence again raises awareness. As indicated in the section ‘The Contribution of Linguistic Landscapes to Minority Language Research’, speakers of minority languages often perceive a direct link between their language, their traditional areas of settlement, and their identity as a distinct linguistic and/or ethnic group. Visibility may therefore have effects on the attitudes of a variety’s speakers and on their self-security in their struggle for the use of their language being recognized as ‘normal’. Simultaneously, visibility shows the majority that another linguistic group exists in a given territory, which can ideally foster respect of its distinct language use. The presence of a minority language in public space is frequently considered to be an important symbol that may be connected to non-linguistic symbols, thereby creating a link between the LLs and a broader Semiotic Landscape. For instance, the public recognition of a flag, which is associated with a linguistic, regional, and/or ethnic minority, is often seen as an ­important step towards recognition of minority rights (e.g. in the cases of the Corsican flag [Blackwood and Tufi 2015] or the Latgalian flag in Latvia [Marten and Lazdiņa 2016]). Busch (2013) analyses how even a diacritical sign such as the haček on graphemes such as č or š may turn into a symbol of the acceptance of a multilingual and multiethnic environment, such as in the case of the Slovene minority in Austria.

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At the same time, the visibility of a minority language in the LL should not be reduced to tokenistic presence (cf. also section ‘The Contribution of Linguistic Landscapes to Minority Language Research’). Public signage in a minority language, in particular on government and other official signs, may lead to the majority considering policies in favour of the minority language to be sufficient: it’s visible; therefore, the language must be in a healthy state. However, the mere existence of a minority language in the LL does not in itself necessarily contribute to more respect towards its speakers’ wishes for more extensive promotion through such measures as the increased presence of the language in the educational system or its use by public authorities. This misjudgement occurred, for instance, in the case of autochthonous minority languages in Germany: North Frisian and Sorbian have a presence in government signage in the areas where they have traditionally been spoken, but signage in these languages by private institutions and individuals is rare. In both cases, the respective regional authorities have, through top-down measures such as laws and administrative orders, accommodated demands by the minorities for public visibility (which they consider as important symbols), but the effects on language maintenance and acceptance by the German-­speaking majority population are limited (cf. Marten 2008). In cases where public signage is regulated by law (frequently as a result of long-term activism and compromise), minority activists often emphasize that public signage of their language is not the end of a process but rather the start of a new phase of policies (cf. e.g. the 2005 Gaelic Language Act in Scotland or Sámi policies in the Nordic countries, Puzey 2012; Marten 2009). Tokenism in the LL is often related to the commodification of a minority language in touristic contexts (cf. e.g. Hornsby 2008, on Breton, or Kallen 2009, on Irish), which may on the one hand create new contexts of contemporary use and thereby increase the value of a minority language but on the other hand may assign to it a role as a museum exhibit and thereby even further detach the language from contemporary functions and prevent important steps for survival (cf. Salo 2012). Closely related to the implications of the presence of minority languages in the LL is their presence in the virtual LL of cyberspace (Ivkovic and Lotherington 2009). Similar implications as for the physical LL apply ­regarding the presence of a minority language on the websites of governments, educational institutions, private companies, and on private websites, which are indexical of the attitudes and ideologies which shape specific language policies, the popular understanding of such policies, and resistance to them.

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 ategories of Language Policy and the Linguistic C Landscape Status planning, that is, the decision as to which varieties are assigned which functions in society, is of utmost importance in the context of minority languages in the LL. The LL is influenced by and reflects the official and de-facto status of varieties (which may, in fact, be contradictory). Examples of how official policies influence the presence or absence of minority languages in the LL are, most prominently, laws which regulate which languages are required or allowed on public signage; in such ways, minority languages may either be systematically promoted (e.g. Catalan in Catalonia or French in Quebec which have through consistent long-term policies of promotion largely lost their character as minority languages, at least on a regional basis) or their use may be discouraged or restricted (e.g. the minority languages of France, cf. Bogatto and Hélot, 2010, on Alsatian or Blackwood and Tufi 2015 on Occitan, Corsican, and others). Most official regulations deal primarily with those parts of the LL to which the authorities have direct access, that is, signage at schools or government buildings, on official road signs, and in similar contexts. Minority speakers and activists may react to such top-down policies ‘from below’, for example, on private message boards or in private companies. An analysis of the LL, accompanied by an analysis of how official laws, government regulations, and language policy documents contrast with demands by NGOs, can reveal conflicting ideologies and policies in a specific territory (cf. also section ‘Minority Languages and Conflict, Contestation, and Exclusion’). Language practices by the minority and majority communities can be seen as part of these policy negotiations; speakers, may, for instance, produce transgressive signs which add a minority language to the LL or which cross out a language. A famous example of a year-long battle in an increasingly violent conflict was the ‘Ortstafelstreit’ (“dispute of topographic signs”) regarding Slovene signs in Carinthia (Austria). Here, the monolingual nation-state ideology of the linguistic majority (German) clashed with the wish by a minority to make its variety more visible (Rasinger 2014). Status planning is related to discourse planning. Public discourse on languages can establish the presence of a variety in the LL as normal, desired, or undesirable. The LL may trigger opposing discourses on languages (e.g. nationalist monolingual vs. multilingual; cf. Moriarty 2012; Szabó-Gilinger et  al. 2012). Official policies may try to influence attitudes and ideologies through active discourse planning, either in terms of encouraging tolerance

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towards minorities where multilingualism and an open society are challenged by nationalists or by questioning the presence of languages other than the main variety. At the same time, the LL contributes to discourse, as the frequent visibility of a language can serve as a strong symbol of the normality of its use. Acquisition planning is relevant to the LL, for instance, with regard to the ability of both traditional native speakers and learners or new speakers of a minority language to read public signage in that language. In particular in educational spaces, the presence of a variety in the LL is often a direct indicator of acquisition opportunities—the regular visibility of a language may encourage acquisition (Cenoz and Gorter 2008). Here, educational policies as well as status, prestige, and acquisition planning interact (cf. the section ‘Minority Languages and Conflict, Contestation, and Exclusion’ on the role of Basque). Corpus planning may promote the use of a specific variant of a minority language. The presence of certain lexical or grammatical items in the LL may contribute to spreading one variant to the detriment of another or be indicative of efforts to resist the privileging of a certain variety.

 he Presence of Minority Language Policy According T to Domains of Language Use One possible approach to understanding both the impact of and implications for language policy and planning in the case of minority languages in the LL is by conducting a domain analysis (cf. e.g. Marten 2016). The presence of a minority language in the LL of public bodies is usually indicative of its official recognition, promotion, or at least tolerance towards it. In the educational domain, the official use of a minority language in the LL indicates its presence in educational institutions, one of the core domains of language maintenance (Edwards 2010). However, official signage or the naming of institutions in the educational field has to be distinguished from non-­ official signage. For instance, the name of a school in a minority language points at official support, whereas its presence inside a schoolscape indicates internal policies that promote the minoritized language. It is important to consider whether a language is publicly used only in a specific part of the school (e.g. the department where the language is taught as a separate subject, possibly only to a small number of students), if it is integrated into information on other subjects or if it features on the main school information or students’ message boards (cf. Gorter and Cenoz 2015 on LL inside schools; Brown 2012 is an example of a contested schoolscape in the Võru area of South Estonia).

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The economy often acts as a good indicator of attitudes towards a language in society, since official regulations concerning private businesses are usually less strict than those regimenting state institutions. At the same time, commercial signs rank among the domains with the highest numbers of text items in the LL, a dynamic which informed the focus of many earlier (e.g. Cenoz and Gorter 2006, on Donostia-San Sebastián and Ljouwert) as well as more recent LL studies (e.g. Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael 2016, on Berlin) on commercial city centres. The presence or absence of a minority language in shop windows, company names, and advertisements can in certain contexts point to its economic strength and prestige. Differences between locally based, national, and international companies, meanwhile, can illuminate variations in the local, regional, and international awareness of a variety. In an effort to appeal to customers from other regions, and tourists in particular, minority languages are often prominently drawn on as a source of attractive differentiation or of an exotic flair which adds to the touristic value of a place (cf. Kallen 2009; Kelly-Holmes et al. 2011; Pietikäinen 2014; Lazdiņa 2013). Private signage such as small-scale individual notes on message boards shows how language policies can also figure into bottom-up practices, including reactions to official regulations. The practice of naming private homes in the minority language traditionally spoken in an area can point to the link between the language, a place, and the identity of its speakers. A lack of private signage or of house names in a minority language, meanwhile, can be indicative of a lack of confidence among its speakers, a lack of prestige accorded to the language, or a tendency to avoid conflicts by the minority. Restrictions on the use of the minority language even on private signage, moreover, can indicate an extremely prohibitive language policy regime. In some cases, though, the use of a minority language in private signage can appear low in spite of official tolerance. This situation has been discussed in terms of ‘legal hypercorrection’ based on the circulation of discourses discouraging the use of the language (Marten 2012), which can result in speakers using their language to a lesser degree than theoretically possible. At the same time, if there is a considerable difference between the distribution of ­languages in official and private domains, such a discrepancy may suggest that official policies are not considering the wishes of the speakers. The domains of the media, culture, art, heritage, and religion are of interest because they often represent areas in which a minority language is relatively present in the LL. For instance, explicit policies of increasing the visibility of a minority language put in place by media companies, individual shops, or cultural institutions such as theatres and museums can be drawn on as a symbolic tool for raising awareness. At the same time, the presence—or lack—of

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a minority language beside the majority language at such institutions can be noteworthy, potentially pointing to the restricted use of the minority language in specific niches or to its mobilization in certain sectors as a counterbalance to language use in domains which are controlled by the state. Research in the major Sorbian town of Budyšin/Bautzen in Germany, for instance, shows that Sorbian cultural institutions and Sorbian media create a distinct Sorbian LL in generally highly German-­dominant public space, effectively drawing attention to societal segregation and the lack of inclusion of the minority language and its speakers into mainstream affairs. Finally, international and exterior language policies need to be mentioned; these categories include the promotion of a language by a state outside its borders, such as in the case of cultural institutes such as the British Council or the Goethe-Institut. The very existence of such institutions is symbolic of the presence of a country and its languages in the semiotic space. A minority language may, for example, be included in the promotion of cultural activities by a state or taken up by organizations which promote languages related to each other, for example, the cooperation between different Celtic languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic or networks of Finno-Ugric languages. Private initiatives and state funding can cooperate in increasing the visibility of minority languages in linguistic and semiotic spaces, for example, through short-term projects such as festivals.

 inority Languages and Conflict, Contestation, M and Exclusion Many of the language policy issues raised in the previous section are—more or less overtly—indicative of conflict, contestation, and exclusion, dynamics which are the topic of this section. A minority language group is by definition in contact with a majority language group, and conflict and contestation over language use are almost unavoidable. Nelde (1987) emphasized this in his well-known one-liner “language contact means language conflict”. Shohamy (2006) portrayed the LL as an arena of struggles over power, control, national identity, and self-expression. Or, in other words, “the public space is not neutral but rather a negotiated and contested arena” (Shohamy and Waksman 2009). Authorities often try to regulate language use on official signs (and sometimes also on unofficial signs), and thus the LL can function as a mechanism for imposing some language(s) as dominant and others as dominated

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through language policies. Often such policies can be enforced, but sometimes they will be resisted. For the display and visibility of a minority language in an LL, several leading studies were produced in areas characterized by open and strong linguistic conflict including struggles over signage, such as Israel, Canada (particularly the province of Québec), or Belgium (notably its capital Brussels). Different authors have pointed to the relevance of these three sites for LL studies (see Backhaus 2006; Shohamy 2015; Van Mensel et al. 2016). A number of investigations into the relation between minority languages and the LLs in these three language conflict zones are presented next. Some of the studies illustrate the early LL work and others show that dynamic and thought-provoking work has continued to come from those three areas over the past decades. In other urban or rural areas when minority languages are displayed on signage, language policy can similarly lead to conflict or exclusion; this is made clear with some further examples from around the world in the last subsection.

Israel: Dominant Hebrew Versus ‘Minority’ Arabic From a sociolinguistic perspective, Israel is a country characterized by the revival of Hebrew and the ensuing conflicts over the use of Arabic, English, and other languages. Arabic and Hebrew are both official languages, but Arabic plays a marginal role and is treated much like a minority language, while Hebrew is a strongly supported dominant language (Spolsky and Shohamy 1999). A precursor of later LL studies was a project carried out by Rosenbaum and her colleagues (1974, 1977) that examined the spread of English in Israel. Their study included a focus on the use of Roman and Hebrew scripts on the shop signs in a busy street in Jerusalem. They reported that about one-third of the signs used Hebrew only, one-third used less Roman script (i.e. English) than Hebrew, and one-third comprised balanced bilingual signs with both scripts. They did not focus on Arabic as a minority language. Some years after, the LL was examined again as part of a general sociolinguistic study of the languages of Jerusalem. Spolsky and Cooper (1991) demonstrated that a detailed qualitative analysis of Hebrew, Arabic, and English on just one pair of street signs could provide insights into the dominance of languages through a focus on placement (specifically, the question of which language is on top), which is related to the historical change of the rulers of the city in different eras (see also Backhaus 2007; Calvet 2006; Spolsky 2009a, b). They also included a more quantitative analysis of the characteristics of signs as part of a theory of language choice.

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Starting in the late 1990s, Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, and their colleagues have carried out investigations of LLs in different cities in Israel. In reporting on their own work, Ben-Rafael et al. (2006) criticize Landry and Bourhis (1997; see below) for conceiving the LL as a kind of predefined and ‘given’ context and for not looking into the dynamics or factors that influence its development. Further, they agreed with Spolsky and Cooper’s (1991) focus on change but added that only taking changing political regimes into account overlooks the many other actors involved in shaping the LL.  In their analysis of the Arabic, Hebrew, and English linguistic objects that mark the public space, Ben-Rafael et al. (2006) demonstrated that conflicting power relations emerge as important. Not only power but also economic interests and identity markers must be taken into consideration to explain the perception of LLs as structured, albeit at times chaotic, spaces. Trumper-Hecht (2009) conceives of the language battle between Arabic and Hebrew on signage as an instrument within a wider status struggle between the two national groups in the so-­ called mixed city of Upper Nazareth in Israel. In a case study of one shopping mall, she analysed the legal battle that followed the Supreme Court decision in 1999 which ordered the addition of Arabic to all public signs. The decision was not implemented in Upper Nazareth, and Trumper-Hecht (2009) presents contrasting points of view about the legal decision: a hegemonic stance among Jewish politicians and efforts to keep a low profile among the Arab community. In another study, Shohamy and Abu Ghazaleh-Mahajneh (2012) found a huge contrast between the use of Arabic on the signs in one town, Ume El Pahem, where Arabic is vital and dynamic, and its use on signs in the University of Haifa, where Arabic is almost non-existent. Based on their findings of unequal representation, these authors challenge the concepts of minority (and majority) and conclude “in the case of Arabic in Israel, the term ‘minority’ cannot be detached from politics, context, history, struggle and the conflicts of Arab and Jews as well as the future visions of coexistence” (Shohamy and Abu Ghazaleh-Mahajneh 2012).

Canada: English Versus French as Minority Language The struggle of the Francophone minority for the recognition of their language is well documented in Canada. French speakers are a minority in the country as a whole but a majority in the province of Quebec. Their struggle resulted in the Official Language Act (Bill 22, 1974), which made French the only official language of Quebec. This status was elaborated in the Charter of

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the French Language (Bill 101 1977) and later amendments, which include provisions about the obligatory use of French on commercial signs and only allow for other languages if French is clearly predominant. In this context, some early work on the ‘paysage linguistique’ or the LL was carried out. Leclerc (1989), for example, provided an overview of legal regulations about language use on signs around the world, while Monnier (1989) surveyed the paysage linguistique in the commercial sector of Montreal. Landry and Bourhis (1997) explicitly mention their awareness at the time that the ‘LL’ (paysage linguistique) was emerging as a notion in francophone publications on language planning, and they wanted to draw attention to the significance of signage for language policy and the ethnolinguistic vitality of French as a minority language. They provide some reflections about the LL as an “immediate index of the relative power and status of linguistic communities inhabiting a given territory” (Landry and Bourhis 1997). Their insights and in particular their definition of the LL were picked up in later publications. However, they themselves did not include actual language use on signs as part of their study, because they were foremost interested in the perceived vitality of French among secondary school students in Canada. Some years later, Dagenais and her colleagues (2009) used the LLs in Montreal and Vancouver as a resource for research on the literacy practices of elementary school children and their awareness of the linguistic items in their urban environment. This study widened the focus from questions centred on the minority language French, to issues of multilingualism and language diversity. It was an example that inspired other researchers in non-minority contexts, such as Clemente and her colleagues (2012) who employed a similar strategy in a primary school in Portugal for a project called “learning to read the world, learning to read the linguistic landscape”.

 elgium: Dutch as a Minority and French as a Majority B Language Language conflict is often seen as a distinctive trait of Belgium (Janssens 2015). Standard French was historically the dominant language, with Flemish (Dutch) and Walloon (French) positioned as dominated vernaculars. Over a long period, legal arrangements were put into place, which effectively divided Belgium into officially French and Dutch monolingual territories, with a small area in the eastern part where German is an official minority language. The main exception is the capital of Brussels, which is officially bilingual. Historically it was a Flemish city, but over time French has taken a more

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prominent position. Local language policy dictates strict equality in the use of Dutch and French on official signage. However, unlike in Québec, language choice on private signage is left unregulated. In 1976, Tulp (1978) undertook a pioneering study of the Brussels LL. She focused on the distribution of Dutch and French on about 1200 large advertising billboards and found that over a quarter (27.7%) was in Dutch, with substantial differences between neighbourhoods. She concluded that the overall image of the city is predominantly French, not bilingual (Tulp 1978). She also points out that there is no code-switching between Dutch and French due to the social conflict over those two languages. Tulp’s study was partially replicated in 1992 by Wenzel (1998), who then found that almost 10% of all posters were in English (only) and less than 1% were bilingual Dutch-English or French-English. She suggests that using English could be a way to “avoid Brussels’ language problems” (Wenzel 1998). In a study carried out in 2009–10, Vandenbroucke (2015) found that French remains the dominant language in Brussels, but in some locations Dutch and English have similar levels of visibility at around 20% of signage. In recent years, one of the most heated language battles has been fought in the so-called Flemish periphery of Brussels, where some special services for the numerical minority of French speakers are in place. Janssens (2012) found that local authorities try to enforce the use of Dutch in the LL through campaigns (the soft approach) and by blurring the legal limits of federal legislation (the hard approach). In recent quantitative and qualitative work on Brussels, Vandenbroucke (2015, 2016) studied the increased language diversity generated by demographic shifts and the impact of globalization in relation to the presence of English. She observes that the diversity of the population, particularly in light of the arrival of many different migrant minority groups, is “not fully or representatively reflected in the visually displayed landscapes of the city” (2015), and she concludes that different forms of globalization lead to variability in the use of English in the LL (2016). The LL studies in Brussels point to the dynamics of the language conflict between Dutch, numerically the minority language, and French as the dominant language. The studies also demonstrate that over a period of four decades, English has spread throughout the public space. English may in quantitative terms be in a minority position, but it increasingly serves majority functions. Van Mensel, Vandenbroucke, and Blackwood (2016) conclude that “in a city like Brussels it is rather difficult – if not almost impossible – to come across a street or square where there is no English to be seen in the landscape”. This implies a dramatic change from 1976, when there was hardly any English. Several other languages such as Chinese or Arabic have also become regular

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features of the LL. Today the LL of Brussels can be characterized as diverse, multilingual, and an “intelligible chaos” (Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael 2012). In Brussels, as in almost any city around the world, due to globalization and other forces, English accompanied by a diversity of other languages have increasingly gained a remarkable presence in LLs, often at the cost of the visibility of local languages. Van Mensel and Darquennes (2012) discussed the case of the German minority in eastern parts of Belgium, under the title “All is quiet on the Eastern front”. They could not anticipate that in the autumn of 2014 and spring of 2015, conflict over languages used on signs would briefly flare up. In this case, billboards placed along the main motorways coming from Germany were painted over because the word ‘Walloon region’ was used instead of ‘German community’ in combination with the word ‘Welcome’ in four languages.1 The strict regulations about language use on signage in both Brussels and Montreal have led to linguistic practices that succeed in avoiding the legal limitations by using signs that can be read bilingually. Mettewie and her colleagues (2012) call those ambiguous signs “bilingual winks” (clins d’oeil), citing such examples as the use of bootik (for French boutique and Dutch boetiek) in Brussels and chouchou (for a shoe shop) in Montreal. The phenomenon of winks is more prominent in Montreal than Brussels, likely due to a certain extent of the differences in language policy and language policing. In Brussels, all official signage is strictly bilingual while private or commercial language choice is left unregulated, but in Montreal Law 101 imposes French as the dominant language in commercial as well as public signage. These bilingual winks can reflect local power relations or serve as expressions of identity (see also Lamarre 2014 for a more elaborate analysis of ‘winks’ in Montreal).

 he Basque Country, Friesland, and Other Minority T Language Communities As was suggested earlier, the use of minority languages in the LL may be contested, suppressed, or even neglected. We made clear that language legislation and policies are often designed to protect and promote the use of minority languages in certain domains, which often include signage in public space. Cenoz and Gorter (2006) studied the LLs of a main shopping street in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country (Spain) and in Leeuwarden-­ Ljouwert in Friesland (the Netherlands) and then compared the use of minority languages (Basque and Frisian) alongside the state language (Spanish and Dutch) and English as an international language. One of the outcomes of

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their study is that the strong language policy to promote Basque as a minority language in the Basque Country contributes substantially to its greater visibility. In contrast, the use of Frisian is much more limited because the language policy is relatively weak and does not include signage as an important issue. They argued that the LL is ‘bidirectional’ because, on the one hand, it reflects the relative power and status of the different languages. On the other hand, however, the LL can also serve to contribute to the construction of the sociolinguistic context. Tufi (2016) presents an interesting case of a minority that achieved legal recognition, but not equality, in the LL by focusing on the visibility of Slovenian in Italy. Her study is a follow-up to a large-scale LL study in various cities and islands in Mediterranean coastal areas in Italy and France (Blackwood and Tufi 2015). That study also includes information on the minority languages Corsican, Catalan, and Occitan, as well as less well-known languages like Genoese (from Genoa), Monegasque (from Monaco), Neapolitan (from Naples), Nissart (from Nice), Sardinian (on the island of Sardinia), Sicilian (on the island of Sicily), and other migrant languages. Slovenian is a minority language in the province and the city of Trieste in an area along the Italian border with Slovenia, where it is the official majority language. The area has a history of severe conflict, including displacement, discrimination, oppression, and violence between ethnic Slavs and ethnic Italians. After World War I, the city of Trieste (Trst) became an Italian territory, and the conflict about the border only reached a conclusive legal settlement in 1954. Today the Slovenian minority is socially, economically, and culturally well organized. However, in the city of Trieste, where about 10% of the inhabitants are of Slovenian origin, the Slovenian language is hardly visible in the LL, and the local variety Triestino is almost entirely invisible. In contrast, in the surrounding province, there is a much higher number of markers of Slovenian for all kinds of uses, even though monolingual signs on their own are uncommon. Certain local social actors seek to position Slovenian as a majority language, but the relative quantities of private signs in Slovenian in Trieste fall far below the numbers for majority languages that Blackwood and Tufi (2015) found in other comparable shopping streets in other cities. Tufi (2016) concludes that “the LL articulates the awareness that Slovenian is not the dominant language in the local linguistic market”. This example illustrates not only the importance of visibility for minority languages, but also general factors that play a role in many other minority language contexts, such as long-term historical and political developments, contrasts between urban and rural areas, socioeconomic organization and identity.

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In another study on minority languages, Mendisu, Malinowski, and Woldemichael (2016) focused on the visibility of two local languages, Gedeo and Koorete, on public signage in two towns in Southern Ethiopia. Federal policies in the 1990s led to the recognition of some 90 regional languages in Ethiopia, which increased the use of at least a number of these languages in education, official documents, and the media. The same official recognition included a ‘re-profiling’ of the LL and accord a presence to some minority languages not displayed before. This was already shown in a study by Lanza and Woldemariam (2009) in relation to the Tigrinya language in Mekelle, a regional capital in the north of Ethiopia. In that context, Tigrinya obtained a relatively high presence in the LL, but other minority languages in the region, such as Iron, Kunama, and Agaw, remained absent. Mendisu et al. (2016) found that Gedeo has only a minor position as it is used on less than 8% of all signs while Koorete is completely absent from the local LL. They conclude that this can “raise serious questions about possibilities for representation, rights and the meaning of ‘multilingualism’ in and for Ethiopia’s future”. These studies on Ethiopia also illustrate the unequal treatment different minority languages can receive, even within the same state. The edited collection by Rubdy and Ben Said (2015) deals with different studies related to conflict, exclusion, and dissent. The exclusion of minority languages from the LL is the topic of studies on the Irish language in the town of Ennis (Thistlethwaite and Sebba 2015) and on Spanish in the town of Independence, Oregon, in the US (Troyer et al. 2015). Although Irish is the first official language of Ireland, in daily life it functions much as a minority language. Thistlethwaite and Sebba (2015) carried out an analysis of the ­signage and conducted interviews with shop owners in a small town on the West Coast of Ireland. They state that the amount of Irish on signage may seem substantial, but the number of Irish signs placed on display as a result of private initiative is very small and influenced by governmental campaigns. This is what the authors call the “passive exclusion of Irish” from the LL. In a similar study Troyer, Cáceda, and Giménez Eguíbar (2015) discuss the use of Spanish in the LL in a small rural town in the Western US. Spanish is spoken by a minority of the population of 8500 inhabitants, of whom 35% reports Spanish as their home language. The authors used a quantitative method to establish language distribution on the signs and interviewed a limited number of business owners. They found that 11% of all public signs contained Spanish, most in combination with English and exceptionally on its own. The interviews revealed a general lack of awareness of the importance of language choice in the LL. The reasons given for the exclusion of Spanish on the signs were related to intolerance of and negative associations with Spanish on the part of Anglo-Americans, which confirms the minority position of Spanish.

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Conclusions and Future Perspectives In this chapter we argue that the study of the LL—signs in (semi-) public space and people’s interactions with those signs—can contribute greatly to research into minority languages and minority communities (see also Gorter et al. 2012b). The kaleidoscopic nature of the LL field, in terms of both theoretical and methodological approaches, will prove to be a valuable asset for the investigation of minority languages in the future, as globalization processes of various kinds (political, social, cultural, economic) continue to impact on how people use languages and experience multilingualism. But perhaps an even more important asset of the LL field is its own ‘playground’—the material instances of language in public space—as it represents an arena in which a range of these globalization processes (or rather the traces thereof ) can be observed. The omnipresence of ‘global English’, processes of urbanization, increased mobilities, the opening (and closing again) of borders, and digital connectivity are just some of the phenomena that are likely to have an impact on minority languages and their speakers around the globe. Moreover, these phenomena are all happening at the same time, and, interestingly, their linguistic traces can all—and simultaneously—be observed in the LL. One can thus argue that it is precisely the nature of the field’s object of inquiry that makes it ­ideally suited to tackle issues of simultaneity. Also, and related to the previous point, LL research often (but not always) starts by looking at the micro-level, that is, at the heterogeneity of languaging practices in the public space, before moving onto macro-interpretations. If research on minority languages follows recent trends in the field of language policy and planning, in which attempts are being made to combine micro- and macro-perspectives (e.g. Johnson and Ricento 2013), the LL is obviously one of the aspects that can and should be looked at. Minority languages and communities have traditionally been defined by strong links between language, ethnolinguistic identity, territoriality, and the state. One of the consequences of globalization is that these links have become less clear, and as we discussed before, what constitutes a majority or a minority is not as easily identifiable as it was before. Many minority groups continue to adhere to an essentialist perception of their identity. Often members of minorities know well what they consider to be their ‘heartland’, even if many of them live elsewhere. The gradual erosion of what may be called a modernist view of linguistic minorities does not take away a fundamental concern with speakers who are marginalized through language. For instance, even if we can see that “the commodification of language and ethnicity as a condition of globalized marketplaces (Heller 2003, 2011) touches all language varieties

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and speakers alike, the weakest are likely to suffer most from this development” (Van Mensel et al. 2016), and the discussion of tokenism we presented earlier should be understood in the same light. In a similar vein, Piller (2016) reminds us of the fact that linguistic diversity is rarely neutral but instead is most often accompanied by linguistic stratification and subordination. Therefore, as Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes (2013) argue, the complex interplay of various processes of globalization “call for examination of the different ways in which peripheralization and centralization happen, forcing us to ask how a particular kind of multilingualism in a particular kind of site becomes constructed as peripheral or as central, with what kind of consequences, driven by whom, and with effects for whom”. This is an interesting avenue for future research on minority languages and communities, and in our opinion, the study of the LL can definitely contribute to this endeavour. Those studies can also look into such matters as reactions to globalization among minority language groups in relation to the contemporary multiplicity of identities or reactions to majority policies or processes of glocalization. LL scholarship looks at investigating ‘signs-in-place’, that is, LL scholars analyse the social and cultural placement of signs and aim to describe “the social meaning of the material placement of signs and discourses” (Scollon and Scollon 2003). As a result, questions of authorship, readership, and ­function automatically emerge. Put simply, researchers consider the ‘who?’, ‘why?’, and ‘why here?’ of the presence of particular signs in particular places, as well as the reactions that these signs trigger, questions that clearly echo Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes’s concerns mentioned earlier. As a corollary, LL studies can provide important insights with respect to the language ideologies that underlie processes of centralization and peripheralization. Not so much in the sense that the LL can to a certain extent (rightly) be considered a reflection of these ideologies but, as Moriarty (2012) illustrates, because language ideologies regarding the use of minority languages are often negotiated and performed in the LL.  In contrast to synchronic studies, the LL can thus become a tool to investigate how ideologies develop over time, how they are asserted, contested, and negotiated, or, in other words, how they contribute to the construction of minority versus majority or centre versus periphery. In sum, the study of the LL has considerable potential for research on minority languages and communities, and in the future more research in the field could be conducted along the lines outlined earlier, including foci on language policies and on contestation, conflict, and exclusion. Since the LL is clearly one of the sites where processes of minoritization take place, LL data are likely to make their way into studies that focus on issues of social and linguistic injustice in the future.

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Note 1. http://ostbelgiendirekt.be/jetzt-auch-schild-in-lichtenbusch-beschmiert-67737, http://www.sp-dg.be/blog/2014/11/20/servaty-willkommen-inder-dg-belgiens-passt-besser/

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Shohamy & D.  Gorter (Eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery (pp. 189–205). New York: Routledge. Lazdiņa, S. (2013). A Transition from Spontaneity to Planning? Economic Values and Educational Policies in the Process of Revitalizing the Regional Language of Latgalian (Latvia). Current Issues in Language Planning, 14(3–4), 382–402. Leclerc, J. (1989). La guerre des langues dans l’affichage. Montreal: VLB Éditeur. Marten, H. F. (2008). Recent Language Legislation at the Margins of the Nordic World: Why Is Frisian Policy in Schleswig-Holstein so Moderate? In A. Nikolaev & J. Niemi (Eds.), Two or More Languages: Proceedings from the 9th Nordic Conference on Bilingualism, August 10–11, 2006, Joensuu, Studies in Languages (Vol. 43, pp. 147–157). Joensuu: Faculty of Humanities, University of Joensuu. Marten, H. F. (2009). Languages and Parliaments: The Impact of Decentralisation on Minority Languages. München: Lincom. Marten, H.  F. (2012). “Latgalian Is Not a Language”: Linguistic Landscapes in Eastern Latvia and How They Reflect Centralist A. In D. Gorter, H. F. Marten, & L. V. Mensel (Eds.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape (pp. 19–35). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marten, H. F. (2016). Sprach(en)politik. Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Narr. Marten, H. F., & Lazdiņa, S. (2016). Latgalian in Latvia: How a Minority Language Community Gains Voice During Societal Negotiations About the Status of Two Major Languages. In M. Pütz, & N. Mundt (Eds.), Vanishing Languages in Context. Ideological, Attitudinal and Social Identity Perspectives (Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft) (pp. 177–194). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Mendisu, B.  S., Malinowski, D., & Woldemichael, E. (2016). Absence from the Linguistic Landscape as de facto Language Policy: The Case of Two Local Languages in Southern Ethiopia. In R. J. Blackwood, E. Lanza, & H. Woldemariam (Eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes (pp. 117–130). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Mettewie, L., & Van Mensel, L. (forthcoming). Readers on the Streets: Interpreting the Linguistic Landscape. (Submitted to Linguistic Landscapes). Mettewie, L., Lamarre, P., & Van Mensel, L. (2012). Clins d’oeil bilingues dans le paysage linguistique de Montréal et Bruxelles: Analyse et illustration de mécanismes parallèles. In C.  Hélot, M.  Barni, R.  Janssens, & C.  Bagna (Eds.), Linguistic Landscapes, Multilingualism and Social Change (pp.  201–216). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Monnier, D. (1989). Langue d’accueil et langue de service dans les commerces à Montréal [Welcoming Language and Language of Service at Merchant Locations in Montreal]. Québec: Conseil de la langue française. Moriarty, M. (2012). Language Ideological Debates in the Linguistic Landscape of an Irish Tourist Town. In D. Gorter, H. F. Marten, & L. V. Mensel (Eds.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape (pp.  74–88). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Part VII Endangerment, Ecosystems, Resilience

20 Resilience for Minority Languages David Bradley

Introduction Through human history, minority groups have been assimilated into larger groups, whether when either their traditional territory comes under the dominance of another group or members of minority groups migrate to new locations where another group dominates. This process has accelerated with the development of centralized nation-states, most of which promote one national language at the expense of all others and with increasing urbanization around the world. The resulting loss of human linguistic diversity is a major problem for the ecology of humanity, parallel to biodiversity loss and changes in ecosystems (see also Nash, this volume). Some of the consequences are discussed in the conclusion. Resilience thinking (Walker and Salt 2006, 2012; Gunderson et al. 2010) is a developing paradigm in ecology which recognizes ecological challenges and tries to identify and quantify the factors behind them. Accepting that some changes are irreversible once a threshold is crossed, it sets out to ameliorate the situation of an ecosystem through changes in the ways humans use and interact with that ecosystem and to reach a new stable state. Resilience thinking accepts that there will be “uncertainty, novelty and experimentation” (Walker and Salt 2006: 113) during periods of change and that it may not be easy to reach a desirable outcome. D. Bradley (*) La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_20

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Human language is also a complex adaptive system which goes through phases of stability and growth and also through phases of change; our challenge as linguists is to help communities to make and implement informed language-related choices that meet their new needs in a changed world, and where possible lead to renewal of the language and preservation of its cultural riches, and to develop more positive attitudes about the language and its users, both within the community and outside. In many places around the world, minority groups have started to be concerned about loss of their language and culture; the problem is what to do about this and how a community and linguists should work together to approach this problem in a maximally effective way. Resilience linguistics is a developing approach; for some other examples, see Bradley (2010, 2011a, b), Roche (2017), and the sources cited there.

How Does It Happen? This is not the place to enumerate the degree of language shift which is going on around the world; some estimates are that up to 90 percent of the languages in the world are endangered to some degree and that up to half of them may cease to be spoken this century. There have been several attempts to quantify and document this (see e.g. Brenzinger 2007; Moseley 2007, 2010, and Simons and Fennig 2017). For an extended discussion of the major factors (demography, geography, economy, history, politics, and culture) that relate to this shift, see Bradley and Bradley (2018, Chapter 6), also acquisition of the language and domains of language use (Ibid., Chapter 5), linguistic factors (Ibid., Chapter 7), and, perhaps most crucially, attitudes and identity (Ibid., Chapter 4). Other, more specific and localized, factors may also be relevant for particular minority languages. Demography includes both absolute group and speaker populations, percentage and age distribution of language knowledge within the population, trends in population increase or decrease, the proportion of the population of the minority group’s traditional area who are members of the group, information on what other groups live in the area, and what proportion of the local population they are. Migration has a long history, and the demographic aspects of migration also need to be understood. For some groups, the migrant population is a substantial proportion of the group, and the migrants may be a major resource for the group and may remain in regular contact with those who have remained behind and may continue to use and transmit the language or not. Thus it is relevant how many migrants there are and, of those outside the traditional area, how much active or passive language knowledge they have.

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As to geography, one extremely important factor is recognition of rights to land; is there a recognized territory that is designated as belonging to the minority group? The exact location and characteristics of the traditional area, whether recognized or not, are relevant: is the language spoken in one remote village in the Himalayas where everyone speaks the language, like Kanashi in the Malana village in India, or was it traditionally more widespread? Is the group mainly sedentary, or do its traditional lifestyle and demographic increase require frequent moves into new territory, such as with swidden agriculture? How possible is it for outsiders to move into the area, and are they doing so? Is the area isolated by mountains, rivers, deserts, and so on, or are there fewer or no barriers between the group’s area and those of other groups? How good are local communications, and how have they changed recently? For example, in Thailand 50 years ago, there were many minority villages of distinctive non-Thai groups in remote mountainous areas which had no roads and which were mainly self-sufficient, but now roads reach everywhere, and cash crops and wage labor have become widespread. Thus geographical change has also led to economic change, which also has an impact on the vitality of the minority language in question. Concerning migrants who leave the traditional area, do they tend to follow a chain and congregate in specific locations: a neighborhood of a particular city, for example, or are they more dispersed? If they congregate, what proportion of the local population of their neighborhood do they form? How visible are they in their diaspora locations—do they have their own social organizations, religious institutions, shops, restaurants, and so on? For that matter, how visible are they in their own area—are their house and village arrangements and architecture, agricultural and animal husbandry practices, religious buildings, and so on distinctive? The economy of a minority group is of course closely linked to its geography; a group whose land is productive and whose economy is therefore self-­ sustaining is in a stronger position to maintain its language and culture. Furthermore, if the area is remote and uninviting, there is less likelihood of outside influence. A combination of desirable and productive land or other resources and good communications can favor economic development but also an influx of outsiders. Even where communications are difficult, some minority groups are integrated into a cash economy; where communications are easy, with good road, river, sea or other access, and with increasing linkage into national education and other networks, opportunities arise for wage labor and economic migration to towns and cities and perhaps eventually international migration. Migrants are often a major source of financial support for their home communities; many villages in Nepal have for nearly two

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centuries relied on remittances from local men from a number of minorities serving as Gurkha soldiers,1 many of whom eventually return to become leading figures in their communities and others of whom remain overseas and establish international networks for their minority and its economic and social advancement. Every community and group has its own history; sometimes this is formalized in a long tradition of written or oral records of the group as a whole or of specific parts of the group such as districts, villages, clans, or individual families. Such history is a source of pride and one of the main supports for the identity of many groups and their connection with their land. History may also be embodied in epic poetry about ancient rulers and cultural heroes, religious, and other song cycles such as migration history within psychopompic funeral songs, clan and family records of genealogy, and so on. Where written or oral history does not exist, some groups may attempt to reconstruct or create it; for some examples, see Bradley and Bradley (2018, Chapter 6). One major aspect of the historical status of many groups with a long written tradition, minority and other, is the literary riches which the written tradition contains. Many small minority groups with no tradition of writing or a recently developed writing system may have a similarly rich oral literature of songs, proverbs, stories, song cycles associated with life cycle events (birth, maturity, marriage, death), and so on. This kind of oral literature is often more at risk than the associated spoken language, as it may be in an archaic or distinctive style and is likely to change or disappear with education, literacy, and cultural change. It is necessary to distinguish between the political status of minorities and the policy concerning their languages. Increasingly in many parts of the world, there is some official recognition of minority groups and their status and rights; specific territories may be assigned to minority groups, as reserves, reservations, autonomous areas, and so on, and there may be some provision for minority-group leaders to exercise some control in these areas and to be represented at the regional and national levels. This does not necessarily lead to positive moves to protect or reclaim the languages of these groups; the leadership may be drawn from the elite part of the group which has assimilated and progressed within the national society and who may not be very concerned about language; they may be among the minority-group members who no longer speak the traditional language or speak it less than fluently. With decolonialization and increasing minority assertiveness for their language rights, many nations have moved to recognize a far wider range of minority languages for official purposes, though in most cases not all of the languages are indigenous to the country; language policy which also supports

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the continued use of migrant languages exists in some developed nations. For more discussion of language policy and how it has been implemented for and affected minorities, see Bradley and Bradley (2018, Chapter 8). One aspect of government policy with a profound impact on minority languages everywhere is local administration and the provision of government services such as schools and health care, almost always through the national language. At the international level, UNESCO and UNICEF have been promoting a policy of early mother-tongue education for all, including linguistic minorities, since 1952, but this has hardly been implemented anywhere in the world. Despite nominally supportive minority language policies in many countries, the resources to implement such a policy are rarely available. Culture is a very broad and locally diverse phenomenon, so it is difficult to generalize too much. However, there are some universal factors which are relevant everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree: family structure, marriage patterns, and type and extent of local social networks; religion(s), type and degree of influence, and other festivals and celebrations, such as feasting; traditional and new work patterns and means of production; traditional and new trade and other types of contacts; distinctive and diffused material culture; ecological knowledge about climate, soils, plants and animals, types of domestic animals and cultivated plants, and so on; and local medicinal expertise. Knowledge in many such areas is being lost around the world, but in many societies there is a pleasant and nostalgic memory of and interest in former lifestyles which can impel a community to document and maintain their language, which contains and embodies all information about them. The process of language shift proceeds in these areas: decrease in the domains where the language is used, decrease in the number of children learning the language in childhood, and in how thoroughly they learn the language. New domains such as the internet, government domains such as school, health care, and direct contact with government workers, and also trade and other contact domains where outsiders who do not speak the language are numerous and increasing; local in-group domains are decreasing. The last domains where some languages survive may include traditional religion and the family and local community; Of course once outsiders start to move into the local community, even this domain may shift. In some communities the liturgical language of religion is the only survival of the earlier community language, as in the case of Coptic in Egypt; Hebrew is of course an example which shows that a liturgical language can be reclaimed into a modern language. For detailed examples of the use of an endangered language in various domains, see case studies of the nation of Malawi and of the Minangkabau area in western Indonesia by Bradley and Bradley (2018).

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As has been indicated elsewhere in this chapter, mother-tongue acquisition in the home as a child is the normal and most effective mechanism for language transmission. In many communities, this has broken down. This may be due to migration, an influx of outsiders, greater integration into a national society, and many other factors, but it ultimately comes down to parental choice: parents often make a decision not to speak their language to their children. This leads to age-graded differences in language knowledge within a society and to gradual loss of the language. In many societies, recognition of the fact that the language is endangered is substantially delayed as the older people may still speak the language to each other and may not be concerned about their children’s and grandchildren’s lack of ability (Schmidt 1990); in other cases the older people may even view this as a sign of progress (Ladefoged 1992). Reclamation activities often start with language learning in non-home settings, as we see; this is not ideal, but may be necessary, especially where the language transmission breakdown is long-standing and the parent generation is non-speakers of the language. One way around this is to encourage the active use of fluent language skills and transmission of cultural knowledge from the grandparent generation to their and others’ grandchildren; this is a basis for many reclamation efforts. One key component of a minority group’s identity is its group name; often there is an in-group autonym and one or more majority-group exonyms, like Kernewek and Cornish, or Euskara and Basque. Recognition of a group’s autonym to replace exonyms, which often have pejorative connotations, is one step in solidifying its identity. There are also minority place, family, and ­personal names, which may have been replaced in a nation-building name assignment process or assigned when a child enters the national language medium school. These can be reclaimed; the rock formation Uluru in Central Australia was officially known as Ayers Rock from 1873 to 1993, when it became Ayers Rock/Uluru, and in 2002 Uluru/Ayers Rock, though the traditional name is now more widely used alone; however, the nearby airport is still called Ayers Rock Airport, code AYQ, or sometimes Connellan Airport. Another key factor is defining minority-group membership: who can claim minority status? In some parts of the world, many people with minority ancestry have passed into the majority and ceased to identify as members of the minority. Where minority status again becomes positive within a society, as in China in the 1980s when minority people were given various special rights—local control of education and culture, more children, lower university entrance marks, and so on—minority status is widely reclaimed. In China there were minority population increases from 1982 to 1990 ranging up to 714 percent for the Gelao, 116 percent for the Manchu, 114 percent for the

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Tujia, and so on, with a nationwide 31 percent increase for minorities, as compared to the Han Chinese majority increase of 11 percent. In some places, minority-group membership is officially recognized by the government or carefully controlled by a local in-group organization; elsewhere it is a matter of personal choice, particularly for children of current or past mixed marriages. Identity is of course a composite based on a variety of factors, many of which have been briefly discussed earlier. Attitudes are the individual and group evaluations; those most relevant to languages can be divided into five subareas: 1 . overall ethnolinguistic vitality; 2. to what degree language is seen as a core component of ethnic identity; 3. attitudes concerning bilingualism; 4. specific attitudes concerning the in-group minority language and the various other languages present in the wider society; and 5. views about the status and appropriate function of these various languages. Attitudes are reflected in conscious cognition about languages, in unconscious feelings about languages, and in actual language use in a variety of domains. The key goal of all human endeavor is well-being and happiness, and improving the self-esteem and pride of minority groups through developing positive identity and attitudes about themselves and their languages is certain to assist. For further discussion, see Bradley (1983, 2002). The relevant linguistic factors include the linguistic relationship of a minority language and the dominant language: are they genetically close and, if so, how close? Are they structurally similar, sharing typological characteristics, perhaps due to contact and convergence in an area? How much shared vocabulary is there, whether due to borrowing or genetic relationship? Is there a tradition of bilingualism or multilingualism in the area, and what is the hierarchical position of the minority language in this? One of the factors in some scales of endangerment is how well a language is documented by linguists; this bears no relation to the social importance of the language to its community and its identity or other aspects of its current situation, though it is relevant when reclamation from an advanced stage of language shift is to be attempted. It is possible to create numerical scales for degrees of endangerment by assigning numerical values on such scales for each minority language on some or all of these factors, and there have been various attempts to do so, as

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­ iscussed by Bradley and Bradley (2018, Chapter 2), on five-, eight-, ten- or d more point scales. Any such scale is artificial, as a similar situation for a given factor may have different degrees of impact in different communities. The situation can also be highly dynamic: seemingly minor changes can result in abrupt transmission failure and rapid language shift or tip (Dorian 1989: 9), some groups may overcome what seem to be insurmountable obstacles and maintain their language, and some groups may manage to reclaim it and decrease the level of endangerment of their language. Furthermore, different families, neighborhoods, villages, or areas often proceed on a different trajectory at the same time, so a minority language is more vital in some places and less so in others. It is even possible that a minority language may persist in a migrant diaspora setting more than in the original homeland, as with some languages of eastern Indonesia which have persisted better in the Netherlands (van Engelenhoven 2002) and many others. Furthermore, isolated outlier individuals may continue to have unused language skills long after the rest of the community has lost all knowledge of their language (Evans 2001), which constitutes a valuable resource for linguists and communities.

How Can We Reverse It? Language reclamation is a difficult process, especially where the language shift is far advanced. The first prerequisite is a positive community attitude, valuing its identity and culture and the language which embodies it. A supportive government policy is also important but is not alone enough. Other factors discussed in the previous section are also relevant. Crucial is sufficient knowledge of the language, preferably by living members of the community or at least in well-documented linguistic data from the past when the language was spoken. Well-designed language learning materials and appropriate educational and wider community strategies to use them, as well as enthusiastic teachers and community leaders, are very important but may also not be sufficient. Most linguists would say that an endangered language is only fully reclaimed into a new stable equilibrium once substantial numbers of children are again learning and using the language in the home during early childhood and continuing to use it for the rest of their lives, but this goal is not always realistic. It is also possible that community desires and needs may be met with a new equilibrium that values the group and its identity and culture and have some symbolic heritage use and official public recognition of the language and some presence of the language within the formal education system but without widely spoken use for all purposes within the community.

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If a minority language is endangered, there are usually some existing internal or external issues with the group’s identity and attitudes that have led many members of the group not to speak or transmit their language; thus, a successful reclamation effort may require changing attitudes, refocusing these so that language figures again among the key component of group identity. Another major component of reclamation is securing official recognition of minority status and government support: changing the attitudes of the leading figures in the majority to agree that minority groups have a distinctive and valuable identity which forms a part of the national whole and is worth protecting and fostering. Widely held negative majority attitudes are often the ultimate source of negative in-group minority attitudes, and may be more difficult to change quickly, but once the minority has visibility, pride, and a clear linguistic and cultural focus, the majority view may eventually change. Although for most of human history spoken language has been the primary communication channel, our increasing reliance on literacy and the status conferred by having a written language now mean that nearly all languages need to be written in order to be successfully maintained and disseminated, due to the social acceptance and possibility for official recognition which this brings. In particular, education and government rely heavily on written language. While there are a few minority communities who have specifically chosen not to have or not to use a written language, the vast majority of communities whose languages are endangered will require a standardized written language. Where this already exists, even if there are some problems with the writing system, it is better for outsiders not to attempt any changes. In the case of Jinghpaw in Myanmar/Burma, China, and India, which does not indicate the tones and glottal stop of the language in its orthography devised in the late nineteenth century, attempts to add these in the 1980s failed and were abandoned. In the case of the Lahu in Myanmar/Burma, China, Thailand, and Laos, the creation of a separate Lahu Si orthography for one variety of Lahu in the 1990s again led to major disagreements, which are ongoing as the Lahu Si persist with their new orthography. For groups whose language lacks a writing system, care still needs to be taken in creating one. There is a large literature on orthography development; the basic principle is that the community members should be involved from the beginning and should make the decisions about their script, for example, in an interactive process now often called an Alphabet Design Workshop (Easton and Wroge 2012) which many linguists and communities have been using for a long time. Another factor here is transfer: where possible, the script chosen should also support learning of the necessary national language. This

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may also be politically desirable as governments are more likely to recognize and accept scripts based on those of the national language. However, this may pose difficulties for a minority which lives in several countries with different national languages using different scripts: the minority can be divided by creating distinct local scripts, as in the case of the Bisu in Thailand, Burma, and China (Person 2018), or one can unify to use one script across borders, as in the case of the Iu Mien in the United States, China, and elsewhere (Purnell 1987). At some stage in the reclamation process, the minority community may need additional resources for the language to support their efforts. While scholars have prepared dictionaries for a wide range of languages and purposes, the dictionary for use by a community whose language is endangered may need to be somewhat different. Firstly, it cannot be monolingual; if all the definitions and explanations are in the language, it will be impossible for early learners to use. It needs to be at least bilingual and possibly replace the national language and some other international language where appropriate. Given the demand for learning English, it may well be useful to include English even for languages spoken in countries where English is not a ­dominant language. Secondly, it needs to be without excessive technical terminology: no assumption can be made that speakers of any language know linguistic terminology (if indeed this exists in the minority language at all). Thirdly, it needs numerous sentence examples drawn from real use of the language, giving information about the cultural background. Fourthly, where realistic, it is useful to have illustrations of plants, animals, and local material culture—tools, containers, house architecture, and so on. Finally, it needs to be available using appropriate technology: not just through internet access but also as a hard copy for use in remote communities whose internet access is often restricted. Moreover, a dictionary is an important symbol of group prestige. For current pedagogical use, for the community’s reading needs, and to document the culture, it is now normal for linguistic researchers to record, transcribe, annotate, and archive a wide range of texts. In the past, most of this was narrative: one person telling a story, explaining how to do something, talking about some aspect of the minority’s culture, about their personal, family, clan, or group history and migrations, and so on. Another frequently observed genre is traditional oral literature in all its subvarieties, usually again with one main participant or at most two or three. When reclaiming a language, conversational material is also essential: how two or more people interact appropriately in daily life. However, until recently, most linguists did not collect much conversational material, though this is changing. The absence of such data may require a new conversational style and vocabulary to be ­created,

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as in the case of the renativization of Hebrew after two millennia of mainly liturgical use. Once texts are transcribed and available, they can later be used to reclaim a dormant language; many indigenous minority languages of North America which were intensively studied by anthropologists led by and including Boas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now being reclaimed in the twenty-first century using old research materials. This is why it is important to maintain complete metadata—information about, by whom, to whom, when, where, why, and so forth, a text was spoken—for future use. The glossing (word-by-word and morpheme-by-­morpheme translation) of texts also needs attention to support their use by minority community members. Furthermore, some texts need copious explanations: for proper names, deliberate ambiguity and double meaning, cultural background, and so on. The third leg of the Boas trilogy for the documentation of a language is grammar. Like dictionaries and texts, the grammar has traditionally been written by a linguist for linguists, using linguistic terms of art and sometimes framed within a particular linguistic theory that may be lost on the ­community. When minority community members attempt to write grammar, they often apply a framework such as that of Latin, Sanskrit, or some other classical language, delivering information that may not always be useful. For reclamation, a basic learner’s grammar tends to be more helpful if it is functional rather than prescribed, avoiding judgments about the way some speakers actually do say things. An overly prescriptive grammar would risk to force a language into an unjustified and even internally inconsistent “standard”, to the detriment of its ongoing use. Respect for dialect, social, and age-based differences should ideally be built in; this is particularly necessary for endangered languages as they tend to show more variation and more rapid change. Of course language ability needs to be balanced across different skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. In some communities, the decision not to use a written form of the language means that materials for this are not required, but this is unusual. Schools normally use written materials and aim at teaching literacy (see also Robinson, this volume). Teaching materials need to be carefully designed according to the level of language skills of the learner groups, which may be diverse and often less than maximally fluent due to breakdown of home transmission. Where literacy is a goal, and an agreed and suitable alphabetic orthography exists, a pictorial alphabet chart with each letter and an associated common noun that starts with that letter are the first steps; this is of course not possible for logographic scripts with thousands of characters like Chinese and may be problematic for syllabic scripts with very large numbers of syllables like Nuosu with 819 (Bradley 2001). Literacy

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­ rimers with neutral content are needed; in some parts of the world, the only p literacy materials also have religious content and may be problematic for use in government schools, a problem now being confronted in Myanmar with the widespread introduction of mother-tongue education for the 134 recognized minority groups. There also needs to be material for learners to read, at all levels starting with big books (a large culturally relevant picture with a very small amount of simple text below it), more advanced but still simple texts, materials on subject areas other than the language if the education system teaches content through a minority language, and more advanced reading materials including practical information of various kinds (e.g. on health, agriculture and animal husbandry, current affairs), and new creative prose and the minority group’s own traditional literature: songs, stories, proverbs, family history and genealogy, traditional culture and group history, and more. In numerous minority societies around the world, there is very little intermediate-­ level material available for use by learners before they can move on to read those highly complex things that may exist, such as traditional epic poetry or religious literature, when they reach the highest level of teaching materials. Another issue in materials preparation as well as in documenting language and culture is the consequence for oral literature and other forms of performance such as music and dance of having one or a few written, recorded, or video versions: this risks fossilizing the traditional forms and reducing the need for regular performance as the documented version becomes “authoritative”. This is of course better than not having the traditional performances documented at all, but it is far from a trivial issue; there is a substantial discussion of “museumification” in anthropology, but few linguists have participated in this debate, with rare exceptions such as Becquelin et  al. (2008). Folklorization, the mobilization of traditional arts, crafts, and performance as a symbol of identity and for outside consumption, often by majority-group tourists, is also a double-edged sword: it brings some economic benefits to the minority group but risks commodifying and spectacularizing culture and is open to outsiders taking over. For example, Harrell et al. (2000) write about the commodification of traditional lacquerware among the Nuosu in China, and its mass production by outsiders, or similar trends in “hill tribe fashion” in Thailand, where minority-group motifs are integrated into new styles for tourist consumption, such as non-traditional tall conical pointed “Lisu” hats, mostly not produced by members of the minority group. The gatekeepers in most language reclamation efforts are local authority figures; in some societies, without their support, little can happen. Many communities can draw on insider enthusiasts who pursue their goals, sometimes including documenting and maintaining the minority language. Many

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of them may need to be trained and guided and are an invaluable internal resource. Local teachers also play a key role; ideally this is someone from the area who has knowledge of the minority language, but this tends to be the exception around the world. An issue is that majority-group teachers assigned to teach in minority-area schools often view this as a hardship posting and some may have little empathy with these students and their community. A better option is for local people to return to their home area after teacher training and assist students with their transition to the mainstream national language curriculum while also helping them to reclaim the local minority language where desired. In some countries like China, admission of all university students including teacher trainees favors students who are members of a minority, and part of the recruitment process of future teachers and other language workers at most minzu (minority) universities in China includes a language test in the minority language; local recruitment of teachers also gives strong preference to local teachers, and the national policy is for three years of transitional bilingual education in minority areas, gradually shifting from minority language to Chinese and in some cases continuing to teach the minority language as a subject above primary level 3. For the languages of some large minority groups, there is also an education stream up to university level taught in that language as the medium of education for language and some other subjects, for example, for Nuosu Yi in Sichuan Province with two Nuosu-medium universities. In communities where young people and even their parents have little or no knowledge of the traditional minority language, unusual and creative forms of learning may be helpful. One is a preschool immersion program with older fluent speakers, sometimes called a language nest as in New Zealand where the first such programs started for Maori in 1981 (Benton 1989); this initiative has now spread very widely worldwide and overcomes the problem that older speakers may lack the formal qualifications to be employed as teachers. Another is an established long-term learning relationship between an older fluent speaker and a younger enthusiastic young adult community member, usually called a master and apprentice, which was initiated in California in 1992 (Hinton 2001); the successful apprentice can later become a teacher for others. Continuing and expanding such initiatives into the school and the community can however be problematic. School authorities may be reluctant to devote resources to minority languages and doubtful about teachers and materials for them; parents may feel that they do not want to “disadvantage” their children with bilingualism; such attitudes need to be overcome. Also, fully trained teachers may be unavailable; so teacher aides

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who are fluent speakers may work alongside trained teachers, or older speakers may take groups of older children away from school to carry out traditional activities and learn traditional knowledge, as in many schools in Australian Aboriginal communities (see also Wigglesworth et al. this volume). Bringing language back to post-school adults, who are the carers for the current generation of children who are learning language skills in school and related settings, but who themselves may not have learned the minority’s language during their childhood, is another challenge which is staring to be met, for example, for Aanaar Saami in Finland (Olthuis et al. 2013).

Types of Language Reclamation Bradley and Bradley (2018) outline a typology of language reclamation which starts from the current situation of a minority language within a community and suggests how reclamation strategies and the goals for achieving a new stable equilibrium may differ according to how endangered it is. There are five subtypes of reclamation; starting from those with the most remaining vitality of the language to the least: revitalization, renativization, denativization, revival, and heritage. A further possibility is that new contact languages may develop through nativization; many such contact languages have low status within their communities and are particularly susceptible to endangerment, often via gradual reabsorption into one of the source languages involved in the contact, better known as decreolization. Where a minority whose language is such a contact language wishes to pursue language reclamation, the processes are similar to those outlined later; this may happen once the direct link with the former dominant language which is the source of much of the lexicon is broken, such as after 1999 when Portugal handed Macao back to China and the Patuá Portuguese-lexifier creole spoken there no longer had the superposed Portuguese standard that was quite so omnipresent and influential. This creole is now critically endangered, but substantial reclamation efforts are under way. Another example (discussed by Joshua Nash in this volume) is the Pitcairn and Norfolk contact language. In revitalization, the language is still spoken by some members of the community and is used as a resource in wider community efforts for others to regain or learn skills in that language. One challenge here is that the structure of an endangered language changes rapidly as it becomes more endangered, and so there may be a range of abilities and a variety of alternative ways to express the same thing. The semi-speakers, those whose abilities are less conservative and show more changes from the traditional pattern of the language,

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may be discouraged from speaking if the traditional speakers are purists and do not accept their innovative speech, wanting the goal of the revitalization to be the maximally archaic form of the language. Of course, all languages change, and older people are often not happy about the innovative speech of the young, but for an endangered language this kind of community division about “pure” speech forms is unhelpful. It may be necessary to reach some kind of compromise, for example, in the Bisu community in Thailand, younger speakers do not distinguish the voiceless lateral and nasal consonants and do not know which words traditionally had voiced or voiceless laterals and nasals. In the new Bisu orthography being used to revitalize the language, the voiceless lateral and nasals are not distinguished from their voiced counterparts, and older speakers who still use them have accepted this. A further example of revitalization (discussed by Donna Patrick in this volume’s chapter on Arctic languages of Canada) is the cluster of varieties of Inuit. Here, as is often the case, it is not easy to unify distinct speech varieties spoken in different areas, even though all the varieties are closely related, with a relationship that also extends to Inuit living in separate political entities including Greenland, Alaska, and Siberia. In Canada, and in Greenland for a long time, language and education matters are mostly locally controlled with the backing of a supportive national policy facilitating revitalization (in principle); though there may be hurdles to overcome before this happens. Revitalization strategies will differ greatly among communities depending on how widely the language is still spoken within the group. Realistic goals within revitalization projects are important since, from the perspective of a group member who has no active or passive traditional language skills, it is always like learning a new language. The early school immersion model which may work well in Hawai’i or New Zealand where there is substantial underlying knowledge in some parts of the community can be less successful or even a total failure in another community without teachers who are fluent in the language and where all or nearly all children are from homes where the language is not spoken. Also, the methods required and the likely level of outcomes will differ greatly even within a community. For example, where Maori is still widely spoken in the oldest generation in many North Island New Zealand communities, children can achieve more success than in urban settings where no adult speech model is available. Renativization is a rather limited type of reclamation in which the target language to be learned is extremely well established and still learned and used for some purposes within a community but not as an everyday means of spoken communication. The most widely cited example is Modern Hebrew.

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Hebrew was the liturgical language of Judaism, and all observant Jewish men and many women learned to read and write Biblical Hebrew for liturgical and other literary purposes for nearly two millennia after the language ceased to be spoken, replaced initially by Aramaic which had evolved from it, then Greek, and later various diaspora languages. Once resettlement of Israel from many parts of the Jewish diaspora started to increase in the late nineteenth century, a spoken language was required for everyday communication and which fulfilled the desire for a traditional Jewish language. At that point, language activists started to use Modern Hebrew for all purposes, children started to be socialized in the home speaking Modern Hebrew, and the language was greatly enriched and adapted for this purpose over the last 130 years, becoming an official language in British-occupied Palestine from 1918 and of Israel from 1948. Obviously a puristic approach as sometimes followed in revitalization would have been difficult, and the renativization of Hebrew led to the development of a language that is somewhat different from Biblical Hebrew. Denativization is another unusual subtype of reclamation, often implemented top-down by governments for political and socially unifying ­purposes. This is where a new standard variety of a language is created, using elements from several spoken varieties. The problem here is that there is no community where the newly created variety is traditionally spoken, and people may identify with their traditional local speech rather than with the new standard; this is a widespread issue in the development of many standard languages, including highly successful ones like Italian. In Switzerland, for example, Rumantsch has five local varieties, each with a long literary history and substantial differences between varieties. As a national language of Switzerland since 1938 and an official language of Switzerland since 1996, the government commissioned a study which led to the creation of a single written standard, Rumantsch Grischuns (the Rumantsch of the canton of Graubünden), that was widely implemented in official publications, media, and schools. However, this new standard was not widely accepted (in fact, after protests, the original local varieties have been brought back in most schools), though it continues to be in use in various official written domains. This shows that denativization is a risky strategy albeit it can work as in the case of Lisu, a language in southwestern China and northwestern Southeast Asia. Here, a new compromise standard with some of the complexities and differences of each spoken variety removed was created by a committee of outside missionaries and Lisu pastors from 1917 onward, and this was implemented during the course of the last century, initially within the Christian Lisu community and now more widely (Bradley and Bradley 1999). At a recent centenary celebration (on December 15, 2017) of the language in Myanmar, Lisu speakers from many countries were present.

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Revival is the type of reclamation where a language is no longer spoken by anyone, perhaps for quite some time, but materials exist which can be adapted for language learning and use, and the community or some of its members wish to bring their language back. One well-documented example is Kernewek (Cornish) in southwestern England, which was in very restricted use in a few areas since 1650 and not spoken at all since 1891 when the last semi-speaker died. The Revival started in 1904 with linguistic documentation and active revival efforts from 1929 but moved very slowly and was hindered from the 1980s to 2005 by three competing standards; now this has been largely overcome, but unfortunately public funds which had been assisting the revival process since 2002 were withdrawn in 2017. From no speakers after 1891, the language had spread to about 300 speakers by 2000 and 2000  in 2008. However, all speakers are fully fluent in English, and it is not clear that this many people can actually use the language in every possible domain. There is a strong tendency for speaker numbers to be over-reported in censuses; for example, Ket in Siberia has under 50 speakers within an ethnic group of just over 1200, including non-fluent semi-speakers. However, according to the most recent Russian census in 2010, it enumerated 199, and an earlier census (in 1990) even suggested that half of the Ket population spoke the language. Another example of Revival is Kaurna, the traditional language of the Adelaide area in South Australia. This was documented by German missionaries in the 1840s and ceased to be widely spoken in the late nineteenth century; the last speaker died in 1929. With the help of the linguist Rob Amery, the Kaurna community has been reviving their language since 1989 (Amery 2000, 2016); substantial progress has been made, with language teaching in schools and the community and short speeches being made in Kaurna at public events. Since 2010 a few children are being brought up bilingual in Kaurna and English by language-activist parents. This Kaurna Revival effort has made full use of the web and new media such as YouTube, as do many other Revival efforts among indigenous minority groups in North America and Australia. Heritage is a type of reclamation which does not target everyday conversational use of a language but rather seeks to use it mainly for symbolic purposes—public signage, short everyday phrases and short speeches, some school learning including mainly cultural but also limited linguistic content, and other forms of recognition. Of course stabilized heritage usage of a language that is no longer spoken may eventually lead to some degree of Revival, if the community desire and the linguistic content are there. But heritage use may be all that a community desires and all that is realistic given the stage that language shift has reached (Thieberger 2002); heritage reclamation can be

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important for self-esteem and at least maintains the visibility of the minority and its language in the wider community. Each community is different, with different resources and different challenges, so every attempted reclamation is also always different and rarely easy. For a number of more in-depth case studies including Bisu, Hebrew, Kaurna, Ket, Patuá, and Rumantsch mentioned here and others, see Bradley and Bradley (2018).

Conclusion: Why Does It Matter? The political recognition of minority rights including language rights has improved markedly in recent decades in many countries around the world, and the linguistic documentation of endangered minority languages has progressed rapidly, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in recent years. However, the political power and the linguistic resources have not always been deployed for language reclamation, and in many cases, previous policies over a long period have had a detrimental effect. Community attitudes among many minorities remain ambivalent: assimilation and socioeconomic improvement including better education and health care are widespread and appropriate goals, more so than maintaining traditional language and culture; and even when there is active minority identity politics, it is often not associated with language. The view that bilingualism is detrimental for education is unfounded. It spread when most minority community members were learning an unknown second language in monolingual mainstream schools, ending up with a cognitive deficit, or as adults in a new social environment. However, as is by now well established in the literature, bilingualism and multilingualism confer cognitive as well as economic advantages and do not detract in any way from one’s abilities in any of the languages which one speaks fluently; if anything, the contrary applies. Crystal (2000: 32–67) identifies five types of reasons why language endangerment and loss is undesirable: diversity, identity, history, world knowledge, and linguistics. Another should be added: ethical, the fact that all humans should have the right to express themselves in their mother tongue, and that linguists who work on a language have a moral obligation to contribute something back to the community, such as by helping in language reclamation. There are two main reasons why even the smallest minority languages are important for their groups: Crystal’s “identity” and “history” together form one cluster. Identity is a composite of the attitudes and feelings one has about one’s in-group and other groups and how one defines that in-group: through

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ancestors, social connections and obligations, land and other types of roots, names, official recognition, and so on. History is the link to the past, the preserved traditions of a group, whether these are written or oral. It is expressed and embodied in language. The second is more linguistic: each language organizes and classifies reality in a different way, and so each is a unique expression of human cognition and perception. This fact, popularized by Whorf and often articulated by speakers who regret the loss of semantic and lexical resources and cultural information with the loss of their language, represents Crystal’s “diversity”. There are also compelling reasons why minority languages are important for the entire world, not just as a linguistic curiosity: Crystal’s “world knowledge”. Small indigenous minority groups often have deep knowledge of the ecosystem and the plants and animals in it; this usually includes knowledge about medicinal plants, locally cultivated and wild plant resources, and more. If the keepers of this knowledge within a group do not transmit it while the language is disappearing, this can be lost without trace, with most unfortunate consequences. For example, the Lisu and some other groups in the same area of southwestern China have long used wormwood (Artemisia spp.) as an antimalarial. The active ingredient in this, artemisinol, is now the basic ingredient of the only remaining antimalarial to which there is no resistance, developed over the last 20 years; as a natural product, it is also not subject to restrictive commercial control and price exploitation and is widely used in China and surrounding countries. Previous similar applications of indigenous plant medicines include quinine, atropine, and many others. Similarly, the genetic resources of crops still cultivated by many small indigenous groups can enrich the gene pool, for example, for many basic grain crops, or even provide alternative new crops for wider use elsewhere, like quinoa from the Andes. Some early human civilizations collapsed partly because of lack of crop diversity and failure to react to climate changes; with the resources and knowledge of every human society around the world, we will be in a better position to achieve resilience in our food production as well as to have better health outcomes. The third cluster of reasons for work on language reclamation relates to linguistics and our obligations in the field. Firstly, there are the purely linguistic reasons. Unless every currently spoken language is documented, we are not in a position to make general typological claims about the nature of human language and determine what is possible, what is not. Similarly, if a language disappears undocumented, its contribution to the historical-comparative reconstruction of human linguistic phylogeny will be lost and we will never be able to reconstruct proto-languages as effectively. And if the disappearing

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language, like Ket, represents the last surviving member of a family of languages, then a substantial component of humanity’s linguistic history disappears with it. These languages are important from the perspective of linguistic theory. More compelling is the second, ethical reason: as linguists have benefitted from working in a community and gained valuable knowledge with the assistance of that community, it is morally unacceptable not to provide both all relevant data and whatever possible assistance to the group with whom one has worked, when they choose to undertake reclamation. One should also train and motivate in-group minority-group members so that they are prepared to undertake reclamation if and when they want to do so; we no longer call them “informants” or “subjects”, they are now consultants and can often become valuable colleagues. For too long, linguists have adopted what I call a “parachute” approach: appear suddenly from afar, collect data intensively, and disappear, never to be seen or heard from again. Many minority groups are tired of this exploitative approach, and some are no longer welcoming new fieldworkers because of previous bad experiences. We need to avoid what Rice (2009) calls “two solitudes”—the fieldworker and the community, each ­working in isolation—and follow a joint approach where we organize our data and use our expertise so that the community can act effectively to reclaim its language according to its own wishes and hopes, with our cooperation and advice when and how they want it. This is no doubt the most effective way to achieve resilience for endangered minority languages.

Note 1. The Gurkha have been recruited from various specific minority groups in Nepal to serve in military units under British officers and stationed elsewhere, usually far from Nepal, since the early nineteenth century. This has continued since 1947 with both British and Indian Gurkha forces, the latter with Indian officers. The term Gurkha is derived from the name of a town in western Nepal and the dynasty of rulers of Nepal who spread from there in the eighteenth century.

References Amery, R. (2000). Warrabarna Kaurna: Reclaiming an Australian Language. Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger. Amery, R. (2016). Warraparna Kaurna! Reclaiming an Australian Language. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press.

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Becquelin, A.  M., de Vienne, E., & Guirardello-Damian, R. (2008). Working Together, the Interface Between Researchers and Native People: The Trumai Case. In K. D. Harrison, D. S. Rood, & A. M. Dwyer (Eds.), Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages (pp. 43–66). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Benton, N. (1989). Education, Language Decline and Language Revitalisation: The Case of Maori in New Zealand. Language and Education, 3(2), 65–82. Bradley, D. (1983). Identity: The Persistence of Minority Groups. In J. McKinnon & W. Bhruksasri (Eds.), Highlanders of Thailand (pp.  46–55). Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Bradley, D. (2001). Language Policy for the Yi. In S. Harrell (Ed.), Perspectives on the Yi of southwest China (pp. 195–214). Berkeley: University of California Press. Bradley, D. (2002). Language Attitudes: The Key Factor in Language Maintenance. In Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance (pp.  1–9). London: RoutledgeCurzon. Bradley, D. (2010). Resilience Linguistics: Case Studies of Gong and Lisu. Anthropological Linguistics, 52(2), 123–140. Bradley, D. (2011a). Resilience Linguistics, Orthography and the Gong. Language and Education, 25(4), 349–360. Bradley, D. (2011b). Resilience Thinking and Language Endangerment. In B. Bai & D. Bradley (Eds.), Extinction and Retention of Mother Tongues in China (pp. 1–43). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Bradley, D., & Bradley, M. (1999). Standardisation of Transnational Minority Languages: Lisu and Lahu. Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée, 69(1), 75–93. Bradley, D., & Bradley, M. (Eds.). (2002). Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Bradley, D., & Bradley, M. (2018). Language Endangerment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brenzinger, M. (Ed.). (2007). Language Diversity Endangered. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Crystal, D. (2000). Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorian, N. C. (Ed.). (1989). Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Easton, C., & Wroge, D. (2012). Manual for Alphabet Design Through Community Interaction for Papua New Guinea Elementary Teacher Trainers (2nd ed.). Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Evans, N. (2001). The Last Speaker Is Dead  – Long Live the Last Speaker! In P. Newman & M. Ratliff (Eds.), Linguistic Fieldwork (pp. 250–281). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunderson, L.  H., Allen, C.  R., & Holling, C.  S. (Eds.). (2010). Foundations of Ecological Resilience. Washington/Covelo/London: Island Press. Harrell, S., Bamo, Q., & Ma, E. (2000). Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Hinton, L. (2001). The Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program. In L. Hinton & K.  Hale (Eds.), The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (pp. 217–226). San Diego: Academic Press. Ladefoged, P. (1992). Another View of Endangered Languages. Language, 68(4), 809–811. Moseley, C. (Ed.). (2007). Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Moseley, C. (Ed.). (2010). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (3rd ed.). Paris: UNESCO. Olthuis, M.-L., Kivelå, S., & Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2013). Revitalizing Indigenous Languages: How to Recreate a Lost Generation. Bristol/Buffalo/Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Person, K. R. (2018). Reflections on Two Decades of Bisu Language Revitalization. In S.  Premsrirat & D.  Hirsch (Eds.), Language Revitalization: Insights from Thailand. Bern: Peter Lang. Purnell, H. C. (1987). Developing Practical Orthographies for the Iu Mien (Yao), 1932–1986: A Case Study. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 10(2), 128–141. Rice, K. D. (2009). Must There Be Two Solitudes? Language Activists and Linguists Working Together. In J.  A. Reyhner & L.  Lockard (Eds.), Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement, Guidance and Lessons Learned (pp.  37–59). Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University. Roche, G. (2017). Linguistic Vitality, Endangerment and Resilience. Language Documentation and Conservation, 11, 190–223. Schmidt, A. (1990). The Loss of Australia’s Aboriginal Language Heritage. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2017). Ethnologue (20th ed.). Dallas: SIL International. Thieberger, N. (2002). Extinction in Whose Terms? Which Parts of a Language Constitute a Target for Language Maintenance Programmes? In D.  Bradley & M.  Bradley (Eds.), Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance (pp. 310–328). London: RoutledgeCurzon. van Engelenhoven, A. (2002). Concealment, Maintenance and Renaissance: Language and Ethnicity in the Moluccan Community in the Netherlands. In D.  Bradley & M.  Bradley (Eds.), Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance (pp. 272–309). London: RoutledgeCurzon. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington/Covelo/London: Island Press. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2012). Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function. Washington/Covelo/London: Island Press.

21 Minority Contact Languages, Small Islands, and Linguistic Ecology Joshua Nash

 n Defining Minority Languages and Minority O Language Linguistics Minorities and their cultures have received much attention in the social sciences in recent times. Still, what constitutes a minority language and a minority culture is far from clear. A reasonable working definition conflates minority languages with endangered languages. Such languages normally have small speaker numbers, are often not transmitted across generations, are frequently ridiculed both by outsiders and the language speakers themselves, and are commonly considered Indigenous1 to the place and culture where they are spoken. These assumptions are used to explore the three major concepts of this chapter: minority contact languages; the role of the natural environment, small societies, and isolation in language development and change; and linguistic ecology or ecolinguistics (see also Bradley, this volume). The minority contact languages of the South Pacific considered here are the historically and This chapter draws significantly on a paper ‘Is Norf ’k an Indigenous Language?’, presented by the author at the Society for History and Linguistics in the Pacific conference, University of Adelaide, 5 July 2012.

J. Nash (*) Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_21

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linguistically related Pitcairn and Norfolk, the languages of Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island, respectively. Norfolk, also spelled Norf ’k, stems from the language that emerged on Pitcairn Island from 1790 in a small community comprised of Polynesian and English speakers after the famous mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. All the Pitcairn Islanders were moved to Norfolk Island in 1856. This marks the beginning of Norfolk as a form of Pitcairn, also spelled Pitkern, which has undergone changes due to its transplantation to a new environment. These languages are the linguistic artefacts of their parallel minority cultures. Their existence problematises what a minority language may be more generally and how their island origins affect their minority status. This foundation is used to explore how such languages can be perceived in terms of their ecological embeddedness within requisite natural and sociocultural environments. Several key (eco)linguistic assumptions borne out of the author’s long-term research engagement with ecolinguist-creolist Peter Mühlhäusler are summarised, a relationship founded in 1999 and based in mutual collaboration on the Pitcairn and Norfolk languages and cultures. This chapter is submitted as a general summary of almost two decades of research and thinking involving ecolinguistic relations and how such views relate to research on minority (island) contact languages and specifically contact Englishes of the Pacific. Research into Pitcairn and Norfolk suggests they cannot be considered simple cases of language contact, language development, or creolisation. Since these ways of speaking do not have obvious social and linguistic role models because they have not originated and developed in more typical language contact environments with authoritarian control like missions or plantations, it is not clear whether they are the same, different, or are a combination of any number of dialects, sociolects, or family lects. Whatever these languages are, the expression language is used as a term of convenience. What is apparent is that traditional classificatory tools like pidgin, creole, mixed language, or a variety of English fail to represent adequately what these ways of speaking are historically, how they function, how they are used in daily life, and how they might be classified scientifically. As such, and specifically related to minority languages, Pitcairn and Norfolk question to what degree describing ways of speaking is useful in understanding languages. Recently developed minority languages spoken by minority peoples, particularly those in remote island environments and with small populations, consolidate this linguistic quandary. As regards the reclamation, maintenance, and revival of Australian Aboriginal languages, the majority of Aboriginal languages on the Australian mainland are either dead or severely threatened (see e.g. Wigglesworth’s chap-

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ter in this volume). Of the 250 languages once spoken, only around 15 are still passed on in their traditional form intergenerationally. It is not at all certain whether any of these languages will survive for more than two generations. The situation for Norfolk, by contrast, is far less bleak. Linguists, language planners, and anthropologists use a number of vitality-measuring instruments. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) officially recognised Norfolk’s degree of endangerment more than a decade ago (in 2007), employing the following criteria: Factor 1. Intergenerational Language Transmission Factor 2. Absolute Number of Speakers Factor 3. Proportion of Speakers within the Total Population Factor 4. Trends in Existing Language Domains Factor 5. Response to New Domains and Media Factor 6. Materials for Language Education and Literacy A different set of criteria used by Ethnologue, the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), lists Norfolk as “Category 6a (vigorous), meaning that the language is used for face-to-face communication by all generations and the situation is sustainable”. Although Pitcairn is not officially recognised as endangered, its future is much less promising than Norfolk’s. There are fewer than 30 speakers of the language and almost no people of child-bearing age. With mainly passive language knowledge in the five-odd Pitcairn Island children on the island, according to the EGIDS, the vitality of Pitcairn lies between “Category 7 (shifting) – the child-bearing generation can use the language among themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children” and “Category 8a (moribund) – the only remaining active users of the language are members of the grandparent generation and older”. Although the reasons Pitcairn and Norfolk have become endangered are multifaceted, their social stigma and denigration have affected their vitality tremendously. Still, Pitcairn and Norfolk speakers are proud of their idiosyncratic ways of communicating. Latham (2005: 97) notes that: Membership of the Society of Pitcairn Descendants is reserved for those with Pitcairn ancestry  – anyone who can trace their blood back to the settlers of 1856. The society aims ‘to promote knowledge of the Pitcairn race’ and claims Pitcairners are indigenous to Norfolk Island. ‘It’s not a claim,’ says Ric [Robertson] in response to the use of the ‘c’ [claim] word. ‘It’s a fact. We were the first people as a whole to settle on Norfolk Island as a permanent homeland – now if you want a definition of indigenous that’s it, isn’t it?’

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Mühlhäusler’s documentation work and community involvement on Norfolk Island associated with increasing the awareness of the importance of Norfolk in education and in the island’s society at large has been successful. This author’s recent documentation work of Pitcairn on Pitcairn Island and in the New Zealand and Australian diaspora is likely to bear fruit in terms of language revitalisation. Yet, with such a small population and almost no children speakers, Pitcairn’s future is doubtful.

Are Pitcairn and Norfolk Languages? In order to make sense of and possibly answer the question ‘Are Pitcairn and Norfolk languages?’, it is necessary to define what can be implied by using the word language. A working definition is that a language as primarily the spoken but also the non-verbal and written method of expression and communication used by a particular group of people. What is not clear, however, is what and how the reification of the concept of a language can represent and account for ways of speaking, and how such accounts can help us understand the study of language types. Scholarly interest into Pitcairn and Norfolk has led to different ways of dealing scientifically with the concept of languages including philosophical, ontological, and typological treatments (e.g. Harrison 1985; Laycock 1989; Mühlhäusler 2007a, 2011; Nash 2016). When a small group of British sailors and their Polynesian consorts exiled themselves on Pitcairn Island, a new society and a new language emerged within a generation. After the move to Norfolk Island, several families back-­ migrated to Pitcairn Island  in the 1859 and 1864. For almost 150  years, there was little contact between the descendants of these two groups. Both groups experienced some contact with speakers of other languages and the language varieties spoken by missionaries, people on passing ships, and visitors. The Norfolk variety continues to be spoken on Norfolk Island today by approximately 400 descendants of the Pitcairners. Using the word ‘approximately’ is appropriate here because it is not at all clear what a speaker of Norfolk is, or, indeed, when a person is speaking Norfolk or the variety of English used on the island. Around 30 people speak Pitcairn on Pitcairn Island. The language situations on both islands are diglossic in the sense that the same speakers use Pitcairn and Pitcairn Island English and Norfolk and Norfolk Island English under different conditions. For example, the Pitcairn Island English statement “we’re going down Landing” (the longboat launch at Bounty Bay) is influenced by Pitcairn in at least two ways: the obligatory use

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in Pitcairn of the spatial descriptor ‘down’ to specify the location relative to the speaker is chosen and transferred to Pitcairn Island English, which is not obligatory if the standard English ‘to’ were used; the absence of the definite article—‘Landing’ instead of ‘The Landing’—is grammatically aberrant in other varieties of English but acceptable in Pitcairn Island English, because of the effect of Pitcairn. Similarly, the use of obligatory Norfolk spatial prepositions such as “he out Mission” (he’s [out] at the Melanesian Mission area in the southwestern part of Norfolk Island) and “she up in a stick” (she’s [up] in the wooded areas in the northern part of Norfolk Island) are transferred to Norfolk Island English although they are not obligatory. The Norfolk Island English “he’s out at the Melanesian Mission” and “he’s at the Melanesian Mission” are polysemic. The choice of language on both islands depends on the situation and the linguistic abilities of the interlocutor. It is not clear whether Pitcairn and Norfolk are high (acrolectal) and low (basilectal) varieties of English when compared to the more standard varieties of English spoken. The following examples emphasise the difference between English and Norfolk: English: Norfolk: English: Norfolk:

Where are you two going? We are going to Kingston, to Anson Bay, to the airport, to Pitcairn Island, to Aunt Em’s place. Bout yorlye gwen? Himii gwen Doun ar Toun, out Anson, roun ar droem, up Pitcairn, up Aunt Em’s. What do you call this place? Kingston, Cooks Monument? What name des side? Doun ar Toun, out Cooks.

Once again, fixed spatial prepositions are used in Norfolk which contrasts with English. Pitcairn and Norfolk are mutually intelligible. However, lexical and grammatical differences are significant; there are distinct variances in article grammar (e.g. the Pitcairn definite article ha is phonologically and syntactically different from the Norfolk definite article dar), divergent phonology especially vowel quality, for example, Pitcairn’s ‘stone’ [sto:ˈn] compared to Norfolk’s ‘stone’ [støːˈn], and unalike anthroponymous and biotic lexicon and expressions because of the dissimilarities in the islands’ cultural and physical environments. The Pitcairn expression “you gut Fred feet” (you’ve got very big feet), named after Frederick Christian born 1883, is not found in Norfolk, just like the Norfolk “you Lucy’en” (you’re crying in public or weeping) from the meaning “to cry in public or to be weepy” after the one-time habit of a now deceased Norfolk Island woman, Lucy, is not used in Pitcairn.

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Because of the unfocused nature of Pitcairn and Norfolk and their few linguistic role models across their history, the languages are anomalies to more standard varieties of English and to linguistic studies of all these varieties. Asking ‘Are Pitcairn and Norfolk languages?’ is a probing method to understand not only how small (island) languages can operate within the social and natural environments they exist but also what assumptions linguists place on the characterisation of these particular ways of speaking and more generally any other hard-to-pin-down linguistic anomalies. Pitcairn and Norfolk are different and mutually unintelligible enough from the Englishes used on the respective islands to be reasonably considered separate languages in their own right. Additionally, Pitcairn and Norfolk as dominant cultural markers, social space delineators, and minority ways of communicating, which can speak about and be researched in terms of their political and historical connection to place, have a meaningful presence separate from other more mandated linguistic norms such as those associated with using English.

 re Pitcairn and Norfolk Indigenous Languages? A Politics and Place Because of Norfolk Island’s political connection to Australia as an external territory, this island’s linguistic history constitutes a de facto element in the continent’s linguistic history. Similarly, owing to its linguistic and historical relationship to Norfolk Island, Pitcairn Island is related to Norfolk Island and thus Australia. The politics of these language, people, and place relationships are critical when attempting to describe the minority status of these languages. The position of Australian (Aboriginal) Indigenous languages has been at issue for several decades. Because of the importance of claims to country, native title legislation, and documenting endangered languages, linguists, anthropologists, and cartographers are often puzzled where boundaries between groups lie, how these boundaries can be mapped, and what the purpose of creating boundaries actually is. Such questions and considerations are central when documenting Indigenous languages and any ill-understood or lesser-known language. What seems even trickier is how to conceptualise Indigenous contact languages, for example, Gurindji Kriol, varieties of Northern Territory Kriol, and Aboriginal English (see also Wigglesworth’s chapter in this volume). Like many other Indigenous languages spoken

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in Aboriginal and First Nation communities elsewhere in the world, these languages not only have no official standing but often have no social standing, even in the opinion of the speakers of the languages themselves. Some speakers even believe these languages, which they speak, and which linguists are trying to document, do not exist (Dobrin et al. 2007) or that they speak ‘shit language’ (Mühlhäusler 2005: 7). Like Walsh (2005), who asked “will Indigenous languages survive?”, it can be maintained that the effectiveness of minority language revitalisation and documentation and engagement with the language speakers, whether they are Indigenous to the location where they use their language or not, is as much political engagement as linguistic commitment. No languages spoken by Indigenous Australians are accorded official or even co-official status under the Australian Constitution. Moreover, no language—even English—has official constitutional or legislative status. Norfolk Island has since 1913 been administered as an external territory of Australia. It is thus politically and geographically a part of Australia. Norfolk is the only language recognised by legislation within Australia. Not even English has any definite legislative status afforded to it by the Australian Constitution, except in that granted it by the Norfolk Island Language (Norfolk) Act (2004) (Administration of Norfolk Island 2004) (‘The Act’, presented in full in the appendix). This places Norfolk in an odd category; it is official on Norfolk Island, and so along with the  Norfolk Island variety of English, which is acknowledged in The Act, it is the only language in Australia to have any legislative status. None of the 20-plus Indigenous Australian languages still spoken have any similar status. Despite this significant fact, Norfolk remains poorly documented, described, and understood. As a way of speaking, its future has remained and is still unsure and insecure; what (generally lexical) documentation has been achieved over the past two decades by linguists Mühlhäusler and this author with the assistance of the Norfolk Island community has taken a large amount of time and has not seen a respective increase in the absolute amount of Norfolk spoken. What this does question and require is a deeper understanding of the role of language scholars and linguistic science in not only comprehending their object of study as political entities but also methods by which (small island contact) languages and minority language varieties and their grammatical and social typologies can be appreciated. In 1996, Pitcairn was loosely accorded official status without the need for a referendum or any requisite legislation. It is officially spelled ‘Pitkern’, and has since been an official language of this British Overseas Territory (see e.g. Källgård n.d.).

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Although there are many parallels between Pitcairn and Norfolk and Australian (Indigenous) languages and other Indigenous languages in how the languages and their speakers were and are possibly still perceived and treated by non-Indigenous people, Norfolk is not related socially or typologically to any (Australian) Indigenous language. Its social and ecological history means it cannot be considered Indigenous to Australia as Australian Indigenous languages are. Because of the grammatical and lexical influence of non-European varieties in Pitcairn, Norfolk’s social and typological status in relation to the linguistics and geography of Polynesian and Oceanic languages is trickier than Norfolk’s connection to Australian Indigenous languages. Although Norfolk is spoken by approximately 400 people and Pitcairn by around 30 speakers, the languages are integral to Australia’s and the United Kingdom’s linguistic heritages, respectively. I do not claim that Norfolk is Indigenous in the same sense that other Australian Aboriginal languages such as Guguda or Arrente still spoken today are Indigenous to Australia and that Pitcairn is Indigenous to Pitcairn Island in a similar manner to how Tahitian and other Polynesian ways of speaking are connected to Tahiti and Greater Polynesia. However, because of place and people relations, reflecting on the term Indigenous as applied to Australian Indigenous languages and other minority languages with respect to the politics and place of Pitcairn and Norfolk should be rewarding both for linguists and anthropologists researching (Australian) Indigenous languages and place and scholars of the politics of language. Because of the official recognition of Pitcairn by the Pitcairn Island Government in 1996 and of Norfolk through The Act, the position of the languages problematises not only the linguistic status of (minority and Indigenous) languages in British Overseas Territories and Australia but also the political status and role of Pitcairn and Norfolk in relation to such minority languages.2 Norfolk is a poignant case in point. It is the language “spoken by the descendants of the first free settlers of Norfolk Island who were descendants of settlers of Pitcairn Island” (The Act, paragraph 4).3 The language is legally allowed to be used in governmental and political dealings on Norfolk Island by the Norfolk Island Government. According to the Act, “The Norfolk Island Language may be used in all forms of communication between persons of Norfolk Island (but need not be) but when used in official [legal and political] communications [it] must always be accompanied by an accurate translation in the English language” (The Act, paragraph 5 (1)).4

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 ociohistorical Issues in Minority Languages: S Pitcairn and Norfolk Like other minority languages in Australia and the Pacific, Pitcairn and Norfolk have been looked down upon socially. Up until the 1960s, both languages and cultures were not celebrated and were severely stigmatised by outsiders and even insiders themselves. Pitcairn and Norfolk have received many names, some of which have strongly misrepresented what the language is socially and linguistically. Names like Pitcairnese and Norfolkese, Pitcairn and Norfolk patois, Pitcairn and Norfolk creole, gibberish (Marrington 1991: 12), bad English, and the expression ‘breaking da King’s crown’ meaning ‘to speak Norfolk’ have existed in parallel with the ridicule associated with speaking the language (Flint 1964: 209).5 The Norfolk Island education system, which is administered by the New South Wales Government, has been at the heart of much of this derision by outsiders (Mühlhäusler 2007b, 2015). The Pitcairn Island education system, administered by the New Zealand government, has also not been until around the 1980s supportive of the use of Pitcairn in the Pitcairn Island school. Despite measures such as language and toponymic documentation (e.g. Nash 2013 for Norfolk; Nash 2017  for Pitcairn), teaching Norfolk at the Norfolk Island Central School (e.g. Mühlhäusler 2007b), and the creation of education tools such as picture books (Meralda Warren’s 2007 Mi Bas Side orn Pitcairn [My Favourite Place on Pitcairn] on Pitcairn Island; Gaye Evans’s 2009 Orn’sehn [At the Beach] on Norfolk Island), a Norfolk school grammar (Eira et al. n.d.), and the attempt at establishing a consistent writing system for Norfolk (Mühlhäusler n.d.) and Pitcairn (Källgård n.d.), which has not been entirely successful, the domains of use of Pitcairn and Norfolk and the absolute number of Norfolk speakers have decreased. This trend continues, which is ironic because there has been a conscious embracing of the language as a social emblem associated culturally and aesthetically with the island; the Norfolk Island community themselves and many outsiders like the language and they like to hear it spoken. The language situation on Pitcairn Island is significantly different to Norfolk Island; although speaker numbers are not high, they are relatively stable because there are so few people resident on the island. Diminishing speaker numbers is largely the result of deaths within the community. Looking specifically at Norfolk, it is observed that this decrease characterises one of the most important and intricately implicit social functions of the language: because it is a language of defiance, a language employed to create, delineate, and emphasise social boundaries, and even to jeer and provoke

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­ eople (both insiders and outsiders, in public and private), the amount of p Norfolk used has decreased because of the social exposure it now receives. Norfolk and Norfolk speakers do not have as much to fight against as in the past, due to the current relatively amicable dealings with the Australian Commonwealth, distant British influences, and other colonial powers.6 The ridiculed and stigmatised past associated with the speaking of Norfolk are connected to the often negative perception of events which took place on Pitcairn Island and in Polynesia (e.g. Shapiro 1938). These incidents have since become a source of celebration and even an origin of name generation in the landscape through embracing this past rather than rejecting it. For example, the use of Tahitian personal names has become common on Norfolk, for example, as in Tevarua Lane. This previously unnamed road was named in 2008 in honour of Tevarua, a Tahitian woman who arrived on Pitcairn with the Bounty mutineers. She died in around 1799 and was the consort of Bounty mutineer, Matthew Quintal. Her name is entered as ‘Te Walua’ in the Pitcairn Register which also lists ‘Sarah’ and ‘Big Sullee’ as her other names (Ross and Moverley 1964: 52). The officialising of Tevarua Lane as an iconic road name symbolises an acceptance within the community of the Norfolk Islanders’ Tahitian heritage that began in the 1960s. The recognition of this ancestry through a road name is only one example of a renaissance of Polynesian cultural symbolism on Norfolk Island, a method of Indigenisation of a previously non-Indigenous cultural and geographical space. This reawakening is felt in realms of culture such as Tahitian music and dance (see Hayward’s 2006 Bounty Chords for an interpretation and micro-ethnography of the music of Pitcairn and Norfolk) and the use of personal names (e.g. Reynolds’s 2007 Tahitian Names for Babes: I’oa Tahiti; Wiseman 1977).

 olitical and Legal Issues: Legislation P and Language Although Norfolk Island Government legislation does not necessarily need to be honoured by Canberra, Norfolk, a language spoken with differing degrees of proficiency, is the only language in Australia and its territories that can be recognised by the Australian Commonwealth. This has several political implications for what the language is in Australia politically, legally, and legislatively. The Act (2004) is unprecedented in that it was the first time any Australian Commonwealth legislation dealing with language had been ­written, and it was where the name of the language was officialised

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through its now official name, Norf ’k.7 Although a small document, its weight and potential influence for claiming linguistic human rights for Norfolk speakers and for the (official) appearance of Norfolk in the public sphere, for example, Norfolk press media, and in the landscape, for example, official and unofficial street and business signage, cannot be underestimated. Common opinion among the Norfolk Islanders, who are Pitcairn Island descendants, is that Norfolk Island is not a part of Australia. However, Norfolk Island’s 2899 postcode is a part of the New South Wales postal service and the language is unequivocally a part of Australia’s linguistic heritage (Baker 1978). Norfolk contains lexical and grammatical elements that have their roots in England, St Kitts in the Caribbean (attributable to Bounty mutineer Edward Young), and Polynesia. Norfolk is Indigenous and belongs somewhere, and the fact that it may be described, characterised, or classified as a dialect or mixed language makes little difference to its social and political status as an Australian (contact) language. However, this does problematise what an ‘Australian language’ is or could be and indeed what an ‘Australian Indigenous language’ is or could be. Are other Australian contact languages, for example, Gurindji Kriol and Northern Territory Kriol, Indigenous languages? Indeed, although these languages may be mixed to a lesser or larger degree with Australian Indigenous languages, are they, too, Australian Indigenous languages? How are they to be treated legally, and what effect does this treatment have on their linguistic and social status? It is not necessary to answer this question suffice to say that Norfolk falls into a different category altogether: it is an Australian language that does not possess any Australian Indigenous language content. It is Australian because it exists in Australia and it is influential legally because of its legislative status. The issue of whether Pitcairn and Norfolk are Indigenous languages again is intended to be exploratory and work in progress.

 cologically Versus Non-Ecologically Embedded E Languages: Ecolinguistics and Pitcairn and Norfolk Having dealt with extra-linguistic issues associated with Norfolk and to a lesser extent Pitcairn, the ecological status of these languages in terms of ecolinguistics and linguistic ecology is now considered more specifically. Although contemporary research has often oversimplified claims regarding the classification of Pitcairn and Norfolk and has generally focussed more on formal

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structural analysis based in secondary sources and conducted by people who themselves never visited the island (e.g. Avram 2003; Gleißner 1997; Holm 2000; Reinecke et al. 1975), taking a social and ecological view on typological classification of these languages raises a different problematic. For, by considering only formal language structure, the intricacies of the social and ecological setting of Pitcairn and Norfolk are lost, obfuscated, or at least not considered. What I suggest as a means to reconcile some of these problems is to present what I consider a more appropriate method not necessarily to describe (Australian) (non-)Indigenous (contact) languages but to assess and observe how they exist within dynamic social and natural ecologies. What I am considering is whether an introduced contact variety can become intensely ecologically embedded and socially and subsequently linguistically connected to a place over a short time period, namely since the arrival of the Bounty on Pitcairn Island and since the arrival of the Pitcairn Islanders on Norfolk Island. It is possible that this process of being and becoming embedded is increased or decreased according to spatial dynamics. That is, faster processes of linguistic embedding and adaptation may occur in (simpler contact) varieties bounded within spatially restricted environments such as those found on small islands. Analysing small contact languages such as Pitcairn and Norfolk may prove more effective in finding answers to these questions. Ecolinguistics or the field of language ecology is primarily concerned with two major research areas: firstly, environmental discourse analysis, often termed eco-critical discourse analysis or the language of ecology and environmentalism, and secondly, language ecology and the interactions between humans, mind, and environment, often expressed through lexico-­grammatical studies of how humans talk about and adapt linguistically to new and foreign environments, that is, the ecology of language. Extending Ernst Haeckel’s (1866) idea that ecology is the study of the mutual interrelations and interactions of species and other entities, one strain of ecolinguistics is defined as the study of the mutual interactions between languages and between a language and its environment. A consideration of the ecological embeddedness of languages is nestled well within ecolinguistic thought. Observing ecological embeddedness in small, minority languages may help us understand the dynamics involved when a population of mixed ancestry arrive in a foreign environment where typologically dissimilar languages are in contact as is the case with Pitcairn and Norfolk. Applying an ecological approach to minority languages small in scope may offer results which are applicable to larger scale, possibly non-minority situations.

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In traditional views of linguistic analysis, languages can be studied without any reference to the biocultural context in which they are used. Detached from their environment, they can be transplanted and replaced by other languages and function as arbitrary codes to express universal cognitive categories. The idea that linguistic practices are detachable from the world suggests that one can distinguish between two prototypical language types: (1) ecologically embedded languages and (2) disconnected languages. These are idealised types, and in reality, most languages are a complex mix between being constructed by their environment and constructing their environment (Mühlhäusler 2003: 2). However, such a split between conceptions of what languages are is useful in an empirical analysis. Using place names as examples, an ecologically embedded language should exhibit the following properties: 1. Words reflect social interaction between humans and their environment, for example, Moo-oo Stone on Norfolk Island is an offshore rock formation with a large amount of moo-oo, or native flax; Out Ha Speckle Side (Out at the Speckled Place) refers to the sandy, speckled seaweed-like coral at the bottom of the sea in a specific offshore location around Pitcairn Island. 2. Lexical and grammatical forms are not regarded as arbitrary, for example, the toponym Side Saff Fly Pass (English: Place Surf Flies Past) as a grammatical unit is a sentence. This place name expresses an esoteric and relatively unknown Norfolk Island toponym form that remembers the nature of the swell on the southwest coast of the island; Pitcairn Island’s Dan Fall tells about the relation between dangerous topography and naming. 3. The same word can be used to describe human and other life forms, for example, the Norfolk horg (pig, hog) is used for animals, humans, and even the name of a fishing location. Dar Horg is named after a terrestrial feature that resembles a pig from the sea. 4. The lexicon and grammar of space reflects topography, for example, Out ar Station is in a distant location on Norfolk Island; Up Dubbin on Pitcairn Island is topographically ‘up’ in comparison to Adamstown which is either ‘down’ or ‘in’. 5. Language is a memory of past interactions between humans and nature, for example, Gun Pit is a concrete structure on the west coast of Norfolk Island built during World War II. It is also the name of the fishing ground Ar Gun Pit, which uses Gun Pit in one of its marks. A diachronic approach is of vital importance to the study of synchronic patterns of language use; Side Dan Cack on Big Jack (the place Dan shat on Big Jack) remembers a fated yet well-remembered event involving humans and their environment.

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An understanding of such interrelated phenomena can be achieved by interacting in real-world situations in the actual ecology where the language is spoken and used every day. Names associated with Norfolk Island tourism, for example, Hibiscus Lodge, Daydreamer Holiday Apartments, and Riggers Retreat, and Pitcairn Island names, for example, Christian’s Café and the house Down Fletcher (both referring to mutineer Fletcher Christian) demonstrate how history affects naming and how names become embedded. The vision of these islands as island paradises is reflected in these names. The (re) construction of these environments is seen in many domains of naming including the reintroduction of Polynesian names and a distinct absence of Australian and British anthroponyms on Norfolk Island and Pitcairn Island, respectively. Due to its size and confined social environment, Pitcairn and Norfolk are languages which necessarily require their speakers to be more densely intertwined with the environment where the language is spoken, that is, it is an ecologically embedded language rather than a detachable one. It is not that any variety of English is not linked to its social and natural environment, but such varieties are possibly more detachable than Norfolk is. Pitcairn and Norfolk, however, are not actually detachable from the society and place where they are spoken, Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island, respectively. Based on fieldwork interaction with Pitcairn Islanders and Norfolk Islanders, it is clear that speaking these languages in cultural, and to a lesser degree natural, environments away from these islands makes very little cultural or ecological sense.8 Any language does real work in the real world; it is not claimed that other (potentially ecologically disconnected) languages like varieties of French spoken in New Caledonia or the Hindi spoken in non-Hindi speaking parts of southern India do not have perlocutionary effect, rather that the domain of perlocution in ecologically embedded languages is different than those languages that are dislocated. A theoretical characterisation of the Pitcairn and Norfolk languages as ecologically embedded cases of language contact, language development, and language change is warranted. What makes this characterisation particularly significant is that such links had to be established twice, due to the initial arrival of the Bounty mutineers and 21 Polynesians on Pitcairn and the relocation of the entire population of Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island in 1856. As a result, these processes of adaptation have been deposited twice in the grammar and lexicon of the languages of Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island. The complex social and environmental history of Pitcairn and Norfolk suggests that an analysis comprising three tiers, that is, structural, social, and ecological can help in further understanding the factors at play when describing such

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languages. Linguists often take for granted that a diachronic perspective will help with a synchronic analysis. The author’s research on both languages highlights the importance of new and singular perspectives in linguistic analysis; what works for Pitcairn and Norfolk may not necessarily be applicable to other language ecologies and languages.

 xiting Pitcairn and Norfolk: Future E Considerations for Minority Contact Languages, Small Islands, and Linguistic Ecology What the Pitcairn and Norfolk examples have shown as regards minority contact languages, small island environments, and linguistic ecology is that small and new contact languages strongly question traditional characterisations and perceptions of language and how they operate in isolated situations. Pitcairn and Norfolk highlight the importance of legislation in recognising and changing the social status of previously ridiculed languages. Because these languages are well known in Oceania and elsewhere, the examples should be relevant not only to assessing and describing the linguistic and social nature of other minority languages in Australia and Oceania, but in questioning how ecologically embedded such languages are. Whereas the characterisation and use of the descriptor Indigenous is not apt or fitting for characterising languages such as Pitcairn and Norfolk, ascertaining the extent to which such languages are ecologically embedded might help alleviate the problems which plague linguistic typologists, specifically in this case, creolists. The designations ecologically embedded (contact) language and non-ecologically embedded (contact) language were put forward as potentially useful categories for describing what Pitcairn, Norfolk, and other contact languages may be and how they may function in the places where they are spoken. By continually drawing parallels between the past and present status of Australian Indigenous languages and the frequently debased treatment they have received, the Norfolk example offers much insight that may be relevant to Pitcairn and possibly other minority languages, too. To the orthodoxy, Norfolk is not an Australian Indigenous language, nor is Pitcairn an Indigenous language of the Pacific. However, and this is of interest to linguists philosophically and methodologically: what Norfolk is not in terms of its Indigeneity as an Australian Indigenous language may contribute to an understanding of what other Australian Indigenous languages actually are. The same could be said of Pitcairn and other minority languages in Oceania.

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What is suggested is a theoretical characterisation of the Pitcairn and Norfolk languages as ecologically embedded cases of language contact and change in contrast to the ecologically disconnected majority of contact languages and minority languages. What makes this study of language change and language characterisation particularly interesting is that such links had to be established twice, due to the move from Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island, and that these processes of adaptation have been deposited twice in the grammar and lexicon of the languages of Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island. This study is even more noteworthy because, as mentioned above, Norfolk has been recognised by UNESCO (2007) as an endangered language (see also Garrett 2006). There are several linguistic and social issues surrounding Pitcairn and Norfolk that question the use of the label ‘language’ when describing ways of speaking on the respective islands. These relate primarily to the absence of linguistic norms and have resulted and continue to result in unfocused ways of speaking and writing these languages. Dealing with unfocused linguistic entities with few established standards not only means that unitary labels aiming to marry disparate ways of speaking break down but they may even create problems in establishing how such ways of speaking are documented and represented. Flint’s (1979) “stable diglossia”, Harrison’s (1985) “social setting of Norfolk speech”, Laycock’s (1989) “cant”, and Mühlhäusler’s (2008: 104–105) “complex outcome of a mixture of linguistic and social forces” are descriptors that offer the most accurate characterisations of Norfolk, and to a lesser extent of Pitcairn, and they are all based on primary data and fieldwork experience. However, that scholars do not agree on these descriptors is ­significant for any consideration of its history, ontology, and describing what kind of way of speaking it is. Like other minority language matters, disputes about how Pitcairn and Norfolk could and should be written (e.g. in official correspondence) and displayed in the public sphere (e.g. in house and interpretive place name signage) have done little to strengthen the languages’ vitality and linguistic self-­ esteem within the respective communities. Family and generational speech variation is the norm and there is often little agreement on the meaning of words and expressions. Subtler aspects such as pronunciation and vowel length and distinguishing present Pitcairn and Norfolk as ways of speaking require more documentation and analysis before accurate descriptions or characterisations can be arrived at. Work into Norfolk by Flint, Harrison, and Laycock led Mühlhäusler (2008: 104–105) to share his misgivings about applying any stark linguistic characterisation or categorisation to Pitcairn and Norfolk together:

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Pitcairn Norfolk is an ideal test case for all kinds of linguistic processes because of its small size, its short history and its restriction with regard to domain and function. But it is not a canonical case of creolization, nor a prototypical Pidgin or mixed language. Rather, it is the complex outcome of a mixture of linguistic and social forces […]

Laycock (1989: 627) described Norfolk as a cant, an insider language, an anti-­ language, and a language of defiance: “A cant is a kind of linguistic parasite, in that it cannot exist in isolation, away from the language of the larger community that the cant-speakers are attempting to hide from”. Up to the present, Norfolk has not been used to communicate with outsiders and the use of the language has tended to increase when external forces (e.g. Australian political powers) have threatened the Islanders. To summarise, it is worth making some broad philosophical statements about how the nature of minority languages, small island ecologies, and linguistic ecology relates to linguistics and science in general. Several of these positions were developed during the author’s long-term research engagement with Peter Mühlhäusler. First, structural analyses cannot provide complete insight into the how, what, and why of language. Second, islands and their languages provide ideal case studies for observing language development, language change, and language death, the three major research foci of linguistics. Third, small and young languages like pidgins, creoles, and dialects, especially those which developed in small and restrictive social and natural ecologies, offer representative findings applicable to languages with more speaker ­numbers and which are spoken in larger and more diverse environments. Fourth, some phenomena in the world, like the nature of linguistic form, function, and content, cannot in principle ever be completely known. As such, any semblance of linguistic inquiry must by definition be tentative and incomplete. Fifth, and possibly most importantly, to studies of minority languages and their applicability to the greater field of linguistic science, the ontology and the nature of languages and the persistent existence of singularities and specific case studies rather than clear categories is at issue when documenting and analysing languages. As regards theory and methodology, there is an important gap and difference between our representation of languages as our research objects and what languages actually are. What appears as a shortcoming of science is possibly more an acknowledgment of the nature of the world and how humans use language to interact with the world. While this chapter has advocated a parameter-rich, possibly conclusion-poor approach, it is in realising the complexities of the ontology of language and the restrictedness of the scientific apparatus that linguists can get closer to realising the nature of

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what their research object actually is. It is by paying attention to these five perspectives and their applicability to minority languages within dynamic social and natural ecologies that future inroads in language and environment research may better proceed.

Appendix (from https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2015Q00190 accessed 24 November 2017) Norfolk Island Language (Norf’k) Act 2004 – Act No. 25 of 2004 An Act to recognise the Norfolk Island Language (Norf ’k) as an official language of Norfolk Island. [Assented to 21 December 2004] BE IT ENACTED by the Legislative Assembly of Norfolk Island as follows — Short title 1. This Act may be cited as the Norfolk Island Language (Norf ’k) Act 2004. Commencement 2. This Act commences on the day on which notification of assent is published in the Gazette. Definitions 3. In this Act “Norfolk Island Language” or “Norf ’k” means the language known as “Norf ’k” that is spoken by descendants of the first free settlers of Norfolk Island who were descendants of the settlers of Pitcairn Island. Acknowledgment of Norf ’k 4. By this enactment, the government and people of Norfolk Island recognise and affirm the Norfolk Island Language (Norf ’k) and the right of the people of Norfolk Island to speak and write it freely and without interference or prejudice from government or other persons. Use of Norf ’k

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5. The Norfolk Island Language may be used in all forms of communication between persons of Norfolk Island (but need not be) but when used in official communications must always be accompanied by an accurate translation in the English language.

Notes 1. Throughout this chapter, the term Indigenous is used with capital I. This is customary practice in Australian linguistics and anthropology. 2. This relates directly to the legal and political position of Norfolk on Norfolk Island and The Act (2004), which is Norfolk Island and hence Australian legislation. Because Norfolk is the only language in Australia and its territories specifically to have legislation, my use of ‘legal’ and ‘political’ does not consider other Australian Indigenous languages because none of these languages are legislated. 3. Although Norfolk Island is an external territory of Australia and could be deemed distinct from Australia, politically it is Australia. Despite having its own government, its citizens are Australian and it uses Australian currency. For details on the political and social status of Norfolk Island and the Norfolk Islanders, see Low (2012). 4. This is the first mention of English or the English language in any Australian Commonwealth legislation. 5. Under the entry for ‘king’, in international phonetic script, Flint translates “you breakin’ da King’s crown” as “you’re speaking bad English”. The term bad English on Norfolk Island is inevitably linked with the speaking of Norfolk: “This jargon, which is the everyday medium of conversation between the islanders – adults as well as children – is in no respect a language. It is not even a “patois”. It is said to be a mixture of English and Tahitian. As a matter of fact it is bad English, spoken by the Bounty men and imperfectly imitated by the Tahitians” (Anon n.d.). 6. It remains to be seen what the recent 2015 changes to the Australian tax system, which will soon include Norfolk Island, will do to Australia-Norfolk Island dealings and hence the amount of the language spoken. The island’s parliament and political system will be replaced with a local council. It is unclear what effect this will have the interaction between mainland and Norfolk Island politics. 7. There has been a fair degree of disagreement with the language name and how it should be spelled. The spelling Norf ’k is a technical solution to a problem which has much greater social and psychological considerations. The most obvious reason why Norf ’k was chosen over the previous Norfuk is because

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some community members felt the latter bore too much resemblance to the English fuck. 8. Few Norfolk Islanders living away from Norfolk Island speak the language or pass it on to their children. This has also been observed for Pitcairn Islanders living in New Zealand.

References Administration of Norfolk Island. (2004). Norfolk Island Language (Norf ’k) Act 2004. Norfolk Island: Administration of Norfolk Island. Anon. (n.d.). Report by Inspector Reay, Norfolk Island Public School, May 30, 1912, ‘Education on Norfolk Island’, Box 4, Folder 12, Flint Collection, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Avram, A. A. (2003). Pitkern and Norfolk Revisited: Is Pitkern-Norfolk and Atlantic Creole Spoken in the Pacific? English Today, 19(3), 44–49. Baker, S.  J. (1978). The Australian Language (3rd ed.). Milsons Point: Currawong Press. Dobrin, L., Austin, P.  K., & Nathan, D. (2007). Dying to Be Counted: The Commodification of Endangered Languages in Documentary Linguistics. In P. K. Austin, O.  Bond, & D.  Nathan (Eds.), Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory (pp. 37–52). London: SOAS. Eira, C., Magdalena, M., & Mühlhäusler, P. (n.d.). Draft Norfolk School Grammar. Adelaide: Discipline of Linguistics, University of Adelaide. Evans, G. (2009). Orn’sehn [At the Beach]. Norfolk Island: Gaye Evans. Flint, E. (1964). The Language of Norfolk Island. In A. S. C. Ross & A. W. Moverley (Eds.), The Pitcairnese Language with contributions by E. Schubert, H. E. and Alaric Maude, E. H. Flint and A. C. Gimson (pp. 189–206). London: André Deutsch. Flint, E. (1979). Stable Diglossia in Norfolk Island. In W. F. Mackey & J. Ornstein (Eds.), Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact: Methods and Cases (pp. 295–333). The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Garrett, P. B. (2006). Contact Languages as “Endangered” Languages: What Is There to Lose? Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 21(1), 175–190. Gleißner, A. (1997). The Dialect of Norfolk Island as Compared to Other Creoles. Master’s Thesis, University of Regensburg. Haeckel, E. (1866). Generelle Morphologie der Organismen—Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformierte Descendenz-Theorie. Zweiter Band: Allgemeine Entwickelungsgeschichte der Organismen. Berlin: Verlag von Georg Reimer. Harrison, S. (1985). The Social Setting of Norfolk Speech. English World-Wide, 6(1), 131–153.

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Hayward, P. (2006). Bounty Chords: Music, Dance, and Cultural Heritage on Norfolk and Pitcairn Islands. London: John Libbey & Company. Holm, J.  (2000). An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Källgård, A. (n.d.) Pitcairn and Pitkern Revisited: A New Role for a Small Island Language. Unpublished manuscript. Latham, T. (2005). Norfolk: Island of Secrets: The Mystery of Janelle Patton’s Death. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Laycock, D. C. (1989). The Status of Pitcairn-Norfolk: Creole, Dialect, or Cant? In U.  Ammon (Ed.), Status and Function of Languages and Language Varieties (pp. 608–629). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Low, M. (2012). Putting Down Roots: Belonging and cultural Identity on Norfolk Island. PhD Thesis, University of Western Australia. Marrington, P. (1991). In the Sweet Bye and Bye: Reminiscences of a Norfolk Islander. Sydney: Reed. Mühlhäusler, P. (2003). Language of Environment  – Environment of Language. London: Battlebridge. Mühlhäusler, P. (2005, June 15). The Restoration of Bilingualism on Norfolk Island and the Far West Coast of South Australia. Paper Presented at the ‘Penser le bilinguisme autrement’ Symposium, Guebwiller. Mühlhäusler, P. (2007a, September). Is Pitkern-Norf ’k a creole? Paper Presented at the Australian Linguistic Society Conference, Adelaide. Mühlhäusler, P. (2007b). The Pitkern-Norf ’k Language and Education. English World-Wide, 28(3), 215–247. Mühlhäusler, P. (2008). Multifunctionality in Pitkern-Norf ’k and Tok Pisin. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 23(1), 75–113. Mühlhäusler, P. (2011). Some Notes on the Ontology of Norf ’k. Language and Communication, 33, 673–679. Mühlhäusler, P. (2015). From Despised Jargon to Language of Education: Recent Developments in the Teaching of Norf ’k (Norfolk Island, South Pacific). In C. A. Volker & F.  E. Anderson (Eds.), Education in Languages of Lesser Power: Asia-­ Pacific Perspectives (pp. 223–241). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mühlhäusler, P. (n.d.). A Writing System for the Norf ’k Language. Unpublished manuscript. Nash, J.  (2013). Insular Toponymies: Place-Naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nash, J.  (2016). Ecologically Embedded Languages, Cumulative Grammars, and Island Ecologies. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 48(2), 161–170. Nash, J.  (2017). Pitcairn Island, Island Toponymies, and Fishing Ground Names: Towards the Possibility of a Peaceful Onshore and Offshore Reconciliation. Journal of Territorial and Maritime Studies, 4(1), 98–108.

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Reinecke, J. E., DeCamp, D., Hancock, I. F., Tsuzaki, S. M., & Wood, R. E. (1975). A Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. Reynolds, P. (2007). Tahitian Names for Babes: I’oa Tahiti. Norfolk Island: ‘Ana’ Ana Publishing. Ross, A. S. C., & Moverley, A. W. (1964). The Pitcairnese Language with contributions by E. Schubert, H. E. and Alaric Maude, E. H. Flint and A. C. Gimson. London: André Deutsch. Shapiro, H. L. (1938). The Heritage of the Bounty: The Story of Pitcairn Through Six Generations. London: Victor Gollancz. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (2007). Degree of Endangerment of the Norf ’k Language (Norfolk Island, South Pacific). Unpublished manuscript. Walsh, M. (2005). Will Indigenous Languages Survive? Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 293–315. Warren, M. (2007). Mi Bas Side orn Pitcairn [My Favourite Place on Pitcairn]. Pitcairn Island: M. Warren. Wiseman, B. (1977). Living on Norfolk Island. Norfolk Island: Photopress International.

22 The Yiddish Conundrum: A Cautionary Tale for Language Revivalism Dovid Katz

For those who cherish the goal of preserving small, endangered languages, some developments (and lessons) from the case of Yiddish might be illuminating, though not in the sense of some straightforward measure of ‘success’ or ‘failure’. There is no consensus on the interpretation of the current curious—and contentious—situation. If the issues raised might serve as a point of departure for debate on its implications for other languages, particularly the potential damage from exaggeratedly purist ‘corpus planning movements’ as well as potentially associated ‘linguistic disrespect’ toward the majority of the living speakers of the ‘language to be saved’, then this chapter’s modest goal will have been realized. Moreover, the perils of a sociolinguistic theory overapplied by a coterie with access to funding, infrastructure, and public relations need to be studied.1 Ultimately, the backdrop for study of the current situation is the pre-­ Holocaust status quo ante of a population of Yiddish speakers for which estimates have been in the range of 10 to 13 million native speakers.2 Nowadays, on the one hand, millions of dollars a year are spent on ‘saving Yiddish’ among ‘modern Jews’ (secular and ‘modern Orthodox’) and interested non-Jews. People may be academically, culturally, literarily, musically, sentimentally, ideologically, and otherwise attracted. The number of Yiddish-­ speaking families these efforts have generated is in dispute, but it is under a

D. Katz (*) Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Creative Industries, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9_22

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dozen. A high proportion of those hail from a postwar movement of normativist language revision, on the Ausbau model of Heinz Kloss. This conscious process has taken their variety ever further from native Yiddish speech of any naturally occurring variety while retaining a steadfast, profound commitment to actually using the language in daily life. Lavish subsidies provide for a newspaper, magazines, myriad programs, and a few large architectural edifices dedicated, one way or another, to ‘saving Yiddish’. In academia, endowments have provided a number of positions that are ironically known in the field as ‘poetry fellowships’ in so far as their incumbents may try to be ‘Yiddish writers’ while under no pressure to produce successful doctoral programs that would be generating new generations of scholar specialists who can themselves write and teach in the language (say for advanced courses). In the case of some Yiddish chairs, the elderly East European-born donor ‘had the chutzpah to go ahead and die’, leaving his or her children amenable to a program’s ‘rapid enhancement’ via conversion from the low-student-number (‘failing’) Yiddish to the ‘higher student takeup’ (‘winning’) menu of ‘Judaic Studies’ or ‘comparative Jewish literature’ courses.3 Much of the current ‘language ­movement’ is focused on ‘Yiddish products’ in English (and other national languages) about Yiddish that have engendered fundraising campaigns for buildings and centers, without seriously attempting to produce new speakers, let alone writers. This has been made possible by what I have called massive American-style PR driven ‘delinguification’ of Yiddish (Katz 2015: 279–290). The satire, ‘A conference of Yiddish savers’ by Miriam Hoffman, the last major actual Yiddish author born in Eastern Europe before the war, now based in Coral Springs, Florida, continues to delight readers from all sides of the argument (Hoffman 1994). Note that none of this is to suggest that any of these efforts are ‘wasted’. On the other hand, there are somewhere between half a million and 1.1 million Haredim (‘ultra-Orthodox Jews’), the vast majority of them Hasidim, for whom Yiddish is the primary family language ‘from cradle to grave’.4 These groups, deriving from an eighteenth century passionately religious movement, have, as if truly by miracle, constructed vast and viable Yiddish-­ speaking communities, characterized by large and stable families. They do not generally focus on ‘language per se’ but rather on the imperative, as they see it, of maintaining their true Judaism as a veritable civilization that includes strict religious adherence to the inherited norms as well as attire, language, and compact neighborhoods rooted in continuity with pre-Holocaust East European Jewish life. Needless to say, in the face of modernity, this requires a principled and voluntary separationism from others (esp. non-religious Jews). They hold firm (and currently politically incorrect) beliefs concerning, for

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example, the age of the world, Jewish ‘chosenness’, infallibility of their sect’s Rebbe (rébə, or grandrabbi-by-heredity), childbearing and child-rearing focus of women’s purpose, literalness of the world to come and messiah, in many cases staunch anti-Zionism, and much more, that can make modern acculturated Jews cringe (even though Hasidim are among the most non-violent groups in history and generally have little interest in initiating conflict with outsiders). For their part, many Hasidim do in fact look down on modern Jews as a fleeting species, inevitably soon to be lost via assimilation, intermarriage, and further (as they see it) reductionism of Judaism to some ‘weekly religion’ or ‘culture’ or ‘hobby’.5 One scholar, who worked with a worldwide count of around 250,000 back in 1995, estimated eight to ten million Yiddish-speaking Hasidim by 2075 (Eisenberg 1995: 1–2). These then are the two groups of ‘Yiddish involved Jews’ who barely speak to each other, a phenomenon long observed by people who have seen Jews from both groups ‘pass each other by with barely a hello, or none at all’ on the streets of say New York, London, or Jerusalem. This chapter aims to look, in broad contours, at ‘what got us here’ followed by a modest proposal or two for a not-so-modest change of attitude in the ‘modern Yiddishist’ camp, and thoughts on the lessons for other language revival and revitalization movements. First, however, a word must be said about the third group of Yiddish speakers, the one with ‘no direct Yiddish future’ but with the most precious preservable past in the sense of nuance and authenticity of language: the (very) aged Yiddish speakers internationally who were born in Eastern Europe and came to some kind of linguistic maturity before the Holocaust. Estimates vary widely, ranging from 100,000 to 550,000.6 Outside of the Hasidim among them, very few of their progeny speak any Yiddish. They, who can most intactly speak the pre-genocide language are human treasures from whom students in the field of Yiddish can still learn so very much. Late in the proverbial day as it is, they should be recorded and interviewed and of course morally supported and given the opportunity to enjoy frequent and joyful conversations in their native language, to the end of their days.7

The Storyline of ‘What Got Us Here’ The Yiddish language arose around 1000 years ago when the Jews who had migrated from the Near East (and other parts of Europe) to the Germanic-­ speaking lands of central Europe rapidly formed compact and sustainable communities, which assumed an international position in rabbinic law, lore,

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and literature.8 The language arose in the generation of settlement via an intricate fusion between the Northwest Semitic elements (Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic) that the migrants brought with them, taking the majority component and most of the grammatical machinery from the onsite medieval urban German dialects they found.9 They called their new land Ashkenaz and its inhabitants Ashkenazim (sg. Ashkenazi).10 It was not too long before these words came to refer rather to Jewish civilization and Jewish people of this provenance, making way for the terms to become effectively mobile. When the Crusades and other calamities of medieval Christian intolerance induced many to flee eastward, they continued to be the Ashkenazim, albeit now of Eastern Europe, which itself then became the new Ashkenaz. As the late Max Weinreich, master historian of Yiddish, put it, ‘geography was transformed into history’. Weinreich developed the notions Ashkenaz I (in the ‘original’ west of the Yiddish-speaking area) versus Ashkenaz II (in its ‘early migration land’ east), where, moreover, Yiddish acquired a substantial Slavic component (see Weinreich 1973: I, 5–6). For the last 1000 years or so, the traditional (premodern) linguistic structure of Ashkenazic society has been one of Internal Jewish Trilingualism: three Jewish languages coexisting in generally complementary distribution with respect to function and status, in addition to working knowledge of the local co-territorial non-Jewish languages in daily life (see Katz 1985, 2007: 45–77). There was Yiddish, the one vernacular for all Ashkenazim, which arose at the outset of Ashkenaz. From the early centuries onward, it increasingly occupied the literary vacuum left for women generally (and most men, too) whose knowledge of the two sacred languages inherited from the Near East, Hebrew and Aramaic, did not suffice to, say, enjoy an unread book. It is one thing to recite a prayer (with whatever level of understanding of the text) and another to enjoy a ‘good new read’. Though not vernaculars, Hebrew and Aramaic were nevertheless far from dead languages. In addition to being recited and studied, new works continued to be written in both languages: the prestigious Hebrew for community documents, Bible commentaries, and codices of law, among others; Aramaic, more prestigious still, for commentaries on classic works of Talmud and Kabbalah. The same rabbinic scholar who spoke only Yiddish at home, and taught only in Yiddish, would write a community missive and Bible commentary in Hebrew and might (if he could) write a Talmudic or Kabbalistic work in Aramaic.11 The history of Ashkenazic trilingualism is replete with fascinating ‘mishaps’ and ensuing conflicts that included rebellious experiments to translate the Kabbalah into everyday Yiddish, to use the vernacular for sacred prayer or legalistic works, or to ‘go too far’ in adopting raunchy medieval romances for earlier Yiddish literature

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(see Katz 2015: 19–109). All three were always written in the right-to-left Jewish alphabet, and with the rise of Jewish printing in the fifteenth century, there arose, to be standardized by the early sixteenth century, sharply distinct fonts for classical texts (‘meruba’ or ‘square’), rabbinic commentaries (‘Rashi’) and Yiddish (‘mashkit’). To this day, people familiar with only the classic ‘square’ Hebrew alphabet need to invest some surprisingly substantial time to come to grips with reading the others. Nowadays, something approaching that primeval Ashkenazic Jewish Trilingualism survives in various incarnations in certain Hasidic communities. The centuries when it was the firm, exclusive, by-definition linguistic definition of Ashkenaz ended in the eighteenth century with the ‘campaign against Yiddish’ in Germany among the ‘first modern European Jews’. By then, and there, in ‘the west’ (from the viewpoint of Yiddish history), the language had been much weakened (both by migration and attrition to partially cognate local German). Its great cultural centers had long been in Eastern Europe. Still, this campaign, which created the proud participant in the surrounding general culture, retaining what he or she wishes to retain of Jewish belief and identity, was to be the fuse that led to a chain of sociolinguistic events whose effects ultimately go to the heart of today’s Yiddish Conundrum, an intriguing interplay of ideology and lifestyle with aspects of the precise kind of Yiddish promoted. The ‘Berlin Enlightenment’ as it is called in Jewish historiography, painted Yiddish as a corrupt, ugly jargon that prevented Jews from being accepted as full and true Germans (see Katz 2015: 189–200). The movement adopted many anti-Semitic tropes, including those which called Yiddish a secret language with the twin purposes of cursing Christianity and cheating Christian neighbors in everyday commerce (see Katz 2015: 177–188). In Eastern Europe of the early nineteenth century, what with its compact Yiddish-speaking population of millions, the Berlin Enlighteners’ followers were literally laughed out of town squares when they arrived talking their German and telling people to stop talking Yiddish (they didn’t call it that of course, they called it Zhargón and worse). Some of them called for Russian (or Polish, Hungarian, and other national languages) to replace Yiddish. The result was the dismal bordering on the comic. What did happen was something quite different and substantially more creative. While the ‘hardest’ and most prestigious of the three Ashkenazic languages, Aramaic, was ‘left alone’ to continue its Talmudic and Kabbalistic life in writing, the other two, Yiddish, everyone’s native language among the millions of East European Ashkenazim, and Hebrew, studied in rudimentary fashion by a vast majority of the Jewish population, were instead rapidly mobilized for modern culture.

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This became the eastern version of Jewish Enlightenment: the use of Hebrew and Yiddish for modern European genres, including novels, poems, essays, plays, political pamphlets, and more. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe had both produced a proud corpus of modern works. By the century’s latter years, a political rift was growing. A modernized Hebrew (in writing only) was becoming largely the language of the Zionists and nationalists, who increasingly dreamt of actual, physical return to the ancient homeland of the Land of Israel (then Palestine of the Ottoman Empire) and, eventually, to its revival there as the everyday spoken language. In a sense, they were politically, in the spirit of nationalism, and national sovereignty in a homeland of one’s own, ‘of the political right’. Yiddish, by contrast, was rapidly becoming the language of here-ism, dedicated to remaining in place and building a new liberal multicultural society that would replace the autocratic Czarist empire (the narrative diverged in some respects in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Increasing use of Yiddish in print became associated with an alphabet soup of political movements that included anarchism, communism, social democracy, socialism, territorialism, and by century’s end, the specifically Jewish socialist (and eventually Yiddishist) movement called Bundism. In short—‘of the political left’. But not only of the left. Also for much of the apolitical ‘silent majority’ by simple virtue of its being the universal Jewish vernacular. A Yiddish language movement, that rapidly became known as Yiddishism, rose up. Its symbolical highpoint was the 1908 Chernowitz Language Conference held in then Bukovina (today’s Chernivtsi in western Ukraine). Attended by major writers and intellectuals, it proclaimed Yiddish to be a national Jewish language (see Reyzen et  al. 1931; Fishman 1987; Katz 2007: 265–274; 291–293).

But What Kind of Yiddish? Symbology of Words, Style, Spelling And here we come, in the later nineteenth century, to a major split in the type of Yiddish to be used, setting off the direct chain reaction of events that has fed into the twenty-first century ‘Yiddish situation’. Traditional, religious Yiddish literature had been cultivating, from the early nineteenth century, a new East European-based literary language that gracefully synthesized the major dialects into a de facto standard in which countless Bibles, prayer books, works on Jewish ethics, and other popular religious books appeared. The old Western

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Yiddish standard was discarded (by the early nineteenth century), followed by the gradual abandonment of the mashkit type font, with new Yiddish religious works appearing in square Hebrew and with full Hebrew diacritic vowels (giving Yiddish the ‘same look’ as a sacred Hebrew text). In the later part of the century, the revolutionary movements, deeply anti-­ religious, developed major Yiddish publishing projects and began to evolve a ‘centering’ of the very notion Yiddish (see Katz 1994). Results ultimately grew to include, by the start of the twentieth century, a bona fide infrastructure that grew exponentially during the time of World War I. It comprised new and modern schools, book and journal publishing, newspapers, and youth movements, and other trappings of modern languages that were truly impressive for a stateless language movement associated with controversial (and often quite dangerous) counter-state tendencies. But these movements were in most cases not about to base their kind of published or public ‘revolutionary Yiddish’ on the vernacular of everyday religious folks, much less so on the native Yiddish of those pious books. The revolutionary movements sought to create a new, modern Jew who would be a secularist European, and in the desires of many, atheist or at least agnostic. And that meant ‘a new kind of Yiddish’. This was a cultural revolution against tradition. It didn’t even help that the greatest of the literary masters of the late nineteenth century, the real ­backbone of the societal rise of Yiddish in terms of the creation of enduring literary treasures, Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh, ±1835–1917), Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitsh, 1859–1916), and Y.L. Peretz (1952–1915) were honing, refining, and splendidly preserving the genuine folk language in the medium of a new literary language.12 Secular as they might have been in aspects of daily life, the vast majority of these classicists’ works were rooted in the milieu of traditional Ashkenazic civilization. By contrast, the very revolutionary movements that built the infrastructure for Yiddish as a modern language also, in a sense, disfigured that language by ridding it of vast number of native words and constructions and replacing them with ‘equivalents’ from the language of Marx and Engels and large numbers of revolutionary pamphlets—modern German (which was not a co-­ territorial language in the Russian Empire, where the bulk of their work transpired). To be sure, traditional Yiddish had perfectly good words for a vast array of sophisticated societal institutions, but they were in use for the traditional religious civilization. With hindsight, political and cultural will might have been mobilized to recycle some of them for the new world they were building on the model of their non-Jewish counterparts’ societal movements.13 But where any linguistically or sociolinguistically comprehensible rhyme-and-­

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reason (comprehensible to us, in the twenty-first century, that is) crumbles is in the fate, in the hands of the socialist movements, of Yiddish items that derived from older Germanic roots; they were just too folksy compared to cognate ‘modern European’ forms of standard German.14 But to complete the picture, there were also reams of imports of words and phrases for concepts that were verily new for traditional Ashkenazic society.15 This can only be fathomed by moderns if we keep in mind how exotic (from the Western standpoint) Ashkenazic civilization actually is. Because all of Ashkenazic life is in one way or another concerned with religion, Yiddish, for example, never even needed a ‘separate word’ for ‘(Jewish) religion’ though it has a sophisticated vocabulary for nuances of belief and practice alike.16 But if the developers of the Germanized modern Yiddish assiduously retained the Yiddish alphabet, almost as some unconscious mystic talisman of a tie to the ancients that would just not be severed, they were determined to give it a big-time facelift. While retaining the square Hebrew font, the Germanizers did away over time with the vowel diacritics, except for one or two that are really helpful.17 That was just setting the (graphic) table. The feast itself was—orthography. A large percentage of Yiddish words of Germanic origin would be orthographically Germanized, creating a new Yiddish publishing image that was increasingly a mirror of German spelling. For example, the silent hey (‘h’) was introduced in positions where it had not been used in Yiddish (on the model of where German has ‘h’, thus yor ‘year’ was respelled, in Jewish characters, as yohr). Most pervasive was the silent áyin (‫ע‬, used for ‘e’ in Yiddish spelling). For the better part of a millennium, ‘n’ and ‘l’ sounds functioned as syllables in themselves, and had no áyin preceding them: hence (to use Latin letter transcription): zogn (‘to say’), himl (‘sky’).18 And so, in an ancient Near Eastern, Northwest Semitic alphabet, the equivalents of nineteenth-­century Eastern Yiddish zogn and himl got respelled to zogen and himel in a change affecting numerous words on any given page. For the summary purposes at hand, we can take the silent áyin as a symbol of orthographic Germanization. Meantime, the great writers, led by the ‘triumvirate’ or ‘classicists’ of modern Yiddish literature, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz, continued to adhere to genuine Yiddish vocabulary and grammar and to forge more and more standard literary Yiddish from the dialects. Nevertheless, they all adopted the new Germanized spelling leading to (for moderns) the ‘hybrid look’ of genuine, deep Yiddish, being molded into a major European literary medium, but with the Germanized spelling of the press and pamphlets of the day. That remains the ‘face’ of virtually all pre-­ World War I editions of the finest works of Yiddish literature. But any text can be readily respelled. It is the actual language that remains the thorny part.

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By the early twentieth century there were two competing literary Yiddishes, the native standard evolving from the dialects in the hands of creators of belles lettres, and the ever more Dáytshmerish, or ‘Germanized Yiddish’ of the rapidly growing daily press, both in Eastern Europe and internationally.19 Like all dichotomies of the sort, this one too glosses over many complex and intermediate varieties in the spirit of ‘the best generalization available is better than none’. A growing number of writers, particularly poets of the older generation, were getting ‘tied up’ in Dáytshmerish too, though some younger talents showed varying degrees of determined resistance. Then came the potent reaction. It came right along with the creation of modern Yiddish linguistics (philology as it was then called; in Yiddish: di yídishe filológyə in the warm and proud sense of a field of scholarship for the benefit of a living Yiddish speaking nation). The field was created almost singlehandedly by the remarkably talented Ber Borokhov in Vilna (today’s Vilnius) in 1913, via two foundational works. One was an essay called ‘The Aims of Yiddish Philology’ and the second a huge annotated bibliography of Yiddish studies covering the preceding four hundred years, both in Yiddish, in some sense in the first academic Yiddish style ever forged (Borokhov 1913a, b; see Katz 2007: 274–278; 2008). They were the symbolic era-launching bookends of the first major anthology of academic Yiddish studies to appear in the spirit of the new Yiddishist movement. Called the Pínkəs, or record book, it was edited by Sh. Niger (1883–1955), a major Yiddish literary historian, critic and author who later settled in New York. The book has kept its position, over a century later, as the foundational work not only for modern Yiddish studies, and particularly linguistics, but also in the social, cultural and political rise of Yiddish internationally. Borokhov called for the establishment of a Yiddish language academy, a dream largely realized when the Yivo (a Yiddish acronym for the words for ‘Yiddish Scientific Institute’) was founded in Vilna, in 1925, by scholars working in his spirit (the city was by then Wilno in the interwar Polish Republic). On the major issue of language reformation, Borokhov, in one devastating blow, brought a conceptual end to the conceptual ‘era of Dáytshmerish’. In English translation: Because the three elements, German, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Slavic, fulfil differing functions in the language, the hybridity of Yiddish does not hinder its development. Quite to the contrary. It has enabled our language to become ever richer in words and means for expressiveness. There is to be found, however, a fourth element, introduced by our intelligentsia, the youngest of all, which contradicts the structure of the other elements and is virtually incapable of comple-

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menting them. That element is called ‘Dáytshmerish’. It is ruining our language and is actually dragging it down to the level of an ‘ugly Zhargón’. Let us therefore take the time to analyse it. (Borokhov 1913a: 11)

Borokhov’s works appeared, at his insistence, in his radical reformed new spelling (unlike the rest of the volume which used the standard Dáytshmerish spelling).20 Borokhov died young, in 1917, at the age of 36. But when the post-World War I Yiddish school systems and cultural institutions got underway in Eastern Europe, in their largest numbers in the huge interwar Polish Republic (which then included parts of today’s eastern Lithuania, western Belarus, and western Ukraine), his spelling rapidly became, in virtually all its major features, the new Yiddishist standard for education and literary ­publications and remains so to this day. Its details were further codified at a major school conference, and in a volume published in Vilna by master Yiddish scholar Zalmen Reyzen (1920). The universal acceptance of the basic principles of this spelling around the world, by very diverse literary and educational circles, has remained ‘Borokhov’s miracle’ even if one of his lines stirs controversy to this day: ‘As a foundation, I take the pronunciation of the region of Vilna’ (Borokhov 1913a: 18). While the Borokhovian reforms were never challenged in modern Yiddish culture, they served as a basis for further factional reforms that were ever more radical, anti-traditional, and anti-religious in the years following World War I. In the United States and other countries, left-wing poets experimented with respelling words of Hebrew and Aramaic origin according to the phonetic system, making all Yiddish words ‘equal’. This reform was to become the basis of the Soviet system, imposed by law under Stalin in the late 1920s throughout the USSR, which went much further still by banning the five word-final forms of letters, as well as the 1000-year-old ‘silent alef ’ and replacing it with a series of diacritics that were supposed to become as ‘mandatory’ as those of French or Polish but were (and remain) a pain to those who know the traditional language. One of the more ubiquitous images of that reform was the introduction for the first time in a thousand years of three consecutive vovs, (resulting from v+u and u+v sequences) that to this day remain, even when ‘fixed’ with a diacritic, the symbol of anti-religious, anti-traditional sentiment. When in the late 1930s, Yiddishist politics in Poland took a sharp leftward turn, the Yivo institute in Vilna introduced its final prewar spelling rules, which took up the Soviet system’s diacritics but not its ‘naturalization’ of Semitic words as a kind of ‘compromise’. However both those features, the phonetization of traditionally sacred Hebrew and Aramaic origin words, and the imposition of the ‘Soviet diacritics’ in lieu of the silent alef, would remain

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anathema to the eye and sensibilities of the majority of speakers and writers (of whatever politics or ideology) outside the USSR’s legal straightjacket. Indeed, New  York’s famed Communist Yiddish daily, the Fráyhayt, would stick to the Borokhovian spelling rules on most issues notwithstanding its radical politics, rendering spelling a consensus issue, by and large, among the secular Yiddish speaking factions. In Eastern Europe after World War I, Yiddish achieved minority status rights in a number of the new East European states, most prominently, as noted, Poland, whose Jewish population numbered over three million. Although the daily Yiddish press throughout the region obstinately stuck with much Dáytshmerish language and spelling, the Yiddish school systems, literary and educational publishing houses, and cultural organizations virtually all adopted modern Borokhovian Yiddish norms and spelling. Even in the absence of government forces in all these countries, the forces of ‘the published word’ were centripetally moving toward consensus.21 Many of the words derived from New High German that had become synchronically Yiddish over half a century or so of linguistic history in fact enriched the language by providing nuanced stylistic and semantic variants complementing words of older vintage, irrespective of etymology, within the unitary synchronic structure that is Yiddish.22 Left versus right, secular versus religious, modernist versus traditionalist ‘language problems’ were in large measure solved by centripetal forces of language in society that came into play in the interwar Yiddishist (i.e. consciously pro-Yiddish) communities around the world. One irony is that for some religious school systems, the Dáytshmerish spellings with the silent áyin and all the rest, that had a half century earlier been the symbol of anti-religious revolutionary fervor, were now, in post-World War I Eastern Europe, symbols of traditional religious conservatism entailing distance-keeping from the secular Yiddishist infrastructure. Yes, the same silent áyin that had ‘just’ (as history goes) been the anti-religious face of Yiddish publishing, rapidly became its pro-religious face once the secularists ceremoniously banished it. In a large swath of Yiddish society, it became accepted that modern educational institutions and literary publications used modern spelling and avoided those Dáytshmerish words that were by then culturally offensive, while so many others were integrated, modified, and rapidly found their place in the economy of Yiddish semantics and culture. A word considered to be a Daytshmerízm (‘Germanism’ or ‘Daytshmerism’, plural Daytshmerízmen, ‘Daytshmerisms’) might become a staple of the press but be avoided in the classroom. In any case, many, linguistically speaking, nineteenth-century borrowings had become so Yiddishized that they ceased to be, synchronically

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speaking, Daytshmerisms. In fact, ironically, some of the daily concepts of modern Yiddishist life revolved around words that were part of the ‘New High German component’ of the language that had over half a century become integral, uncontroversial words acceptable to writers of every stripe. By the 1920s, every group on the planet that used Yiddish for societal life accepted without thought bavégung (‘movement’), klas (‘class’), tsáytung (‘newspaper’), zítsung (‘meeting’). It goes without saying that the same was true for kultúr and literatúr. Sure, the small circles of Yiddish linguists, professional and amateur, could then, as now, have their fun figuring out the relative age of a Yiddish word by its sound structure. All old u sounds had shifted to i sounds in the southern dialects, but not in words of nineteenth century or later vintage, which entered centuries after the sound shift was complete. But that was and is a matter for observers’ metalinguistic fun, with zero to do with the current life of these words in the language, other than occasional satire, say making fun of purportedly poor quality stuff with transient hit words such as ‘kiltír’ and ‘literatír’ that have taken on a life of their own. Writing from America for a prestigious Yiddish literary journal in Vilna in 1928 on the contemporary aims and achievements of Yiddishism, Yiddish educator Leybush Lehrer placed the issues of Daytshmerisms and spelling in their ‘newfound places’ at the very bottom of the roster of hot-button questions of the day (Lehrer 1928: 414). A special case was Soviet Yiddish. Until Stalin’s shutdown of Yiddish culture, the Soviet Union financed a Yiddish infrastructure in regions with large Yiddish-speaking populations, particularly the USSR’s Belorussian and Ukrainian republics. For all the stultifying effects of growing government clampdowns on freedom, permanent cyclical intrigue entailing ‘mandatory professional destruction’ of one’s own teachers and mentors, the Soviet Union enabled the publication of many major works of Yiddish literature in addition to funding schools, theaters, and research institutions through much of the interwar period. There are various studies of Soviet state-mandated radical reform of vocabulary, spelling, and more (see e.g. Erlich 1973; Estraikh 1999). But there is, from the sociolinguistic point of view, one ‘posthistorical’ issue that would rise again in the later twentieth century in, of all places, North America. For a small postwar group of Yiddish normativists, the 1920s–1930s Soviet Yiddish phenomenon of ‘language decisions by diktat of the law’ became a sociolinguistic, and indeed, a psychological, model for a kind of normativist Yiddish ‘authority’.

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The Postwar Yiddish Crisis In the history of Yiddish-related polemics, the ‘Holocaust debate’ has been, and largely remains, whether the (as history goes) abrupt murder of some five and a half million Yiddish speakers on the native territory of the language in Eastern Europe was or was not ‘a death blow’ to the vernacular (‘living’) language. The relative few who escaped the genocide’s choke-hold and migrated to Western countries were able to join rapidly linguistically assimilating, increasingly prosperous communities of pre-catastrophe emigres hailing from Eastern Europe. One important section of the survivors settled in a newfound state created just for this minority. The State of Israel was in fact built with an essential component of its ideology being the revival of a rival ancient language (in part via a campaign of hate and destruction against the erstwhile language of that state’s founders). A formula for ‘language death’ has seldom been more extreme, more deadly, or more persuasive. As countless academics, pundits, and educators would put it more gently, ‘the era of Yiddish was gradually coming to its end’. The prime desire of the immigrant generations of East European-born Jews in the United States (or Canada, Britain, Australia, South Africa, as well as France, Argentina, and various others), whether they came before the war, or as Holocaust survivors, was to build a good and tranquil life where their children and grandchildren could thrive on a level playing field with anyone else and rise to the highest positions of personal success and achievement. Anecdotally, and sometimes not only anecdotally, that could mean, say, sweatshop toiler immigrants worried that their children might have some slight trace of a foreign accent or mannerisms in places like America that would hinder them becoming a doctor or lawyer or ‘at least an accountant’. That fear was naturally transferred to the new generation itself.23 It was also the case that two major pan-Jewish edifices were growing by leaps and bounds in the creation of educational, cultural, political, and other institutions. One was a reinvigorated, modernized Jewish religion in its many and diverse groupings and sub-groups. Another was the sheer inspirational power of the new State of Israel fighting for its existence against a vastly larger array of local enemies sworn to its destruction. Then comes the clincher. Both religion-based and Israel-centric Jewish life had the Hebrew language, which in its own variety of historic incarnations spanned the millennia from the most ancient Biblical texts to the living language of the newly minted Israelis. That in turn made for popular American intra-Jewish comparisons between the image of the Israelis who rapidly mastered the arts of war, as set against those alleged ‘ghetto Jews

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back in the old country who went like sheep to the slaughter’, including their own many murdered relatives. Then, in societally monolingual America, for many decades after the war, home to the world’s largest Jewish community, the very sound of Yiddish often became offensive. The very sound of oy diphthongs in everyday words and vaudevilized oy-oy-oy expressions became a source of cringing by American-born Jews. For Jews who did want their ‘own language’ (though not, to be sure, as an added vernacular for daily life), it could be only some kind of Hebrew. For those who centered modern Israel as ‘what makes Jewish life tick’, there were trips to Israel, an inspiring new country that spoke Hebrew, or to be more precise Israeli, a new, stable, and creative official language of a nation-state.24 An extensive array of Jewish day schools arose in the United States, with fulsome programs in both general (‘English’) and Jewish (‘Hebrew’) studies in which Yiddish was not only boycotted but subjected to systematic degradation. So much so that children whose Jewish names were given to commemorate deceased relatives, including those who perished in the Holocaust, might have those names mocked by the teacher and replaced with modern Israeli names (e.g. Gitl (f.) being force-changed to Tova, Alter (m.) to Ilan).25 Needless to say, their graduates were not aware that a world-class literature was produced in the language of their heavily European-­ accented parents or grandparents. On top of everything else, there was a political obstacle. Coinciding with the McCarthy era and its aftermath, the postwar period was permeated with a political environment in which the vast majority of secular Yiddish writers, teachers, and cultural leaders, who had been brought to modern secular Yiddish culture as part of a wider socialist ‘all-­ people-­are-equal’ ethos, were decidedly far to the left of the Western mainstream. For example, the two feuding centers for the older generation of secular Yiddish writers in New York City were 175 East Broadway, home to the Jewish Daily Forward (in Yiddish: Fórverts) stalwart of the Yiddish rékhtə (‘rightists’), and 35 East 12th Street, address of the Fráyhayt, home to the línkə (‘leftists’). Deep into the late twentieth century, the Forward’s masthead sported on either side of the paper’s name the Yiddish translations of ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ and ‘The liberation of the workers depends on the workers themselves’. And that was the ‘right-wing’ paper. The range of devastating setbacks other than the Holocaust includes Stalin’s destruction of Soviet Yiddish culture that culminated with the murder of the last truly great Yiddish writers on 12 August 1952; the vicious campaign in Palestine, then Israel, to root out the language, not only by attacks on writers, kiosks, and publishers, laws against daily newspapers, but also, and critically, on massive investment in a campaign of degradation and delegitimization26; and finally, massive, rapid voluntary shift to English,

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French, Spanish, and other national languages, characterized in the United States, home to the largest non-European Yiddish cultural infrastructure, by an especially negative take to anything Yiddish. In America, that negativism was encouraged by some of the largest and most successful communal, educational, and political Jewish organizations. The two extant and weak Yiddish-speaking sectors were (in American terms) of the far left (the older generations of readers of socialist publications) and the small numbers of ultra-Orthodox Hasidim and other East European Haredim, (in cultural terms) of the far right. Nobody foresaw that the Hasidim were ‘quietly’ creating hundreds of thousands of new Yiddish speakers. When the news was eventually brought home, sometimes in the 1990s, sometimes more recently, it was a kind of thunderbolt. East European Yiddish writers, journalists, publishers, teachers, actors, and other cultural activists in all these countries of migration did not by any means ‘give up the ghost’. To the contrary, they became pillars of exceptional moral and intellectual fortitude who continued creating to the very last days that their health or life permitted (it is just that they did not, with a tiny percentage of exceptions, pass on even the language to their children). East European-­ born Yiddish educators maintained four distinct secular Yiddish (supplementary, afternoon, and Sunday) school systems in the United States for as long as they could through to the mid-twentieth century or beyond; these school systems generated sophisticated periodical publications (see Freidenreich 2010; Prawer Kadar 2016). There were the Yiddish dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies that survived to different points in the waning years of the last century. Various proud international points on the map of secular Yiddish survived until the turn of our millennium, with the retirement, severe illness, or death of the last avatars of Yiddish culture in each. It would be invidious to attach years to cities, but in the field, there was a general consensus about which ‘disappearances’ by the limitations of the human life span led to the loss of a city on the map of secular Yiddish culture. There were no serious ‘language corpus’ or ‘normativism issues’ among the otherwise highly variegated Yiddish culturists born in Eastern Europe. To be sure, there was ongoing variation in various details, but it is fair to say there was a standard lexicon, a standard orthography and an aura of normalcy (that itself included the daily press vs. literary publishing dichotomy). This community tried hard to forget that every last one of them came to Yiddish before Hitler ever invaded Poland and that the proverbial málekh hamóves (‘angel of death’) was inching ever closer to each beloved secular Yiddish culture icon.

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 he 1960s Rise of Pro-Yiddish Sentiment T and Activity By the 1960s, some change was underway concerning the status of secular Yiddish being the exclusive preserve of prewar persons. The New Left, the Hippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the counterculture scene, coupled with Black is Beautiful, knowledge of the Holocaust, successful translations of a few Yiddish writers into English, and (for some, a strange juxtaposition) the Six-Day War with its eye-patched image of Moshe Dayan all led, in ways yet to be studied, to a renewed interest in a ‘native’ Jewish culture that was ‘closer’ than Israelites in ancient Egypt or the new State of Israel far away in the Middle East. Pride in previously prejudiced ethnicity took off among some baby boomers, for whom Yiddish was suddenly ‘cool’. There was also the conglomerate effect of beloved East European-born parents ‘starting to die’ in large numbers and their bereaved children realizing that they barely knew a word of the language of their daily newspapers, magazines, books, and of the destroyed world of their East European childhood. A new academic openness to Minority Studies also enabled the phenomenon of what came to the older generation to be a ‘salve to the soul’: Yídish in di universitétn (‘Yiddish in the universities’; see Prager 1974). But if ‘unlucky Yiddish’ had ever had ‘one great stroke of luck’ it was in the fortuitous departure from Vilna, in the summer of 1939, of master Yiddish historian and co-founder of the Yivo, Max Weinreich (1894–1969). He at City College, and his son Uriel Weinreich at Columbia University, would ‘double-handedly’ establish Yiddish language studies on a high academic level that was at the same time based on overt secular Yiddishist ideology, sadly a rather rare juxtaposition in the field in later twentieth-century North America. The yidishístn (‘Yiddishists’) tended to be ‘shouters about their love for Yiddish’ and the serious academics with interest in things Yiddish tended to be sanskritístn (‘Sanskritists’) who firmly believed that the academic study of Yiddish should not be compromised by sentiments about a ‘dying language’. Still in his early twenties, Uriel Weinreich published the first (and for many decades the only) viable Yiddish textbook for American elementary university Yiddish courses, College Yiddish (Weinreich 1949). He was to become one of America’s leading general theoretical linguists, a standing that he proudly applied to the benefit of Yiddish studies wherever possible. The Weinreichs, father and son, assisted by a number of East European origin Jewish academics in New York City, especially Sol Liptzin, established a viable Yiddish Studies tradition synthesizing the striving for high academic standards with love of Yiddish. While

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Max Weinreich was completing his magnum opus, History of the Yiddish Language, Uriel was publishing dozens of brilliant works in general linguistics that succeeded in inspiring a number of non-Jewish linguists to Yiddish questions; some would personally go on to learn to speak Yiddish too.27 Uriel Weinreich predeceased his father by a couple of years. After his death, Columbia University and Yivo, in partnership in 1968, launched the intensive Uriel Weinreich summer program that became the ‘mother of Yiddish summer programs’, an institution emulated at various times by summer programs at Oxford, Paris, Tel Aviv, Vilnius, Warsaw, and Weimar, among others, that have arguably had more success in transmitting language skills than many ‘Yiddish 101’ classes. But the rise of a small group of baby boomer scholars and activists who would become ‘Yiddishists’ in the sense of actually speaking and writing the language was largely the work of a Chernowitz-born, Bronx-­ based Yiddish lexicographer and master language teacher, Mordkhe Schaechter (1927–2007), who was becoming, from the late 1960s, the most successful Yiddish teacher in North America in the sense of producing students in advanced courses who would go on to speak and write in Yiddish and who would remain dedicated to the cause of Yiddishism. They were generally affiliated with the group Yugntruf (‘Call to Youth’), which is also the name of their magazine, founded in November 1964. Those affiliated with the magazine and the club became known as ‘Yugntrufists’.

 ormativist Purism in the Spirit of Heinz Kloss’s N Ausbau Theory There was, however, one highly contentious issue. The Yugntrufists, under the influence of Dr. Schaechter, an uncompromising normativist and purist, became, in the eyes of the Yiddish writers and teachers of New  York and beyond, ‘language fanatics’ for lexical purism (‘permanent war on the Daytshmerisms’) and the precise Soviet-impacted radical ‘Yivo spelling’ rules that were anathema to most of the world of Yiddish (and virtually all those of traditionalist or religious orientation). Instead of embracing and learning from the world of Yiddish writers, the mini-movement’s publications and activities often lambasted the leading Yiddish writers and publications for using what they were calling Daytshmerisms and for refusing to adopt the unpalatable spelling rules. One of the jokes among New York Yiddish editors was that you could tell that a magazine was on its deathbed when it was pressured to change its spelling just before going under. What was unfathomable

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to many was that Uriel Weinreich’s posthumously published English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (Weinreich 1968), had two levels of black marks, black circles (= ‘of doubtful admissibility in the standard language’) and black triangles (= ‘inadmissible in the standard language’), both categories including many vocabulary items used by the most famous Yiddish writers. But black marks can be ignored. The dictionary also included a huge number of neologisms not marked by any symbol, which became known as ‘fake words’ that would engender hilarity from native speakers. Part of them were there to replace ‘newly forbidden’ Daytshmerisms, others to provide equivalents to terms in English. One unsolved mystery is that Uriel Weinreich’s own Yiddish writings were not at all of the stylistic ilk of his posthumous dictionary; it was a view he mysteriously came to at the end of his life. For a critique and analysis, see Katz (1991, 1993: 161–252). Despite this flaw, that advanced users could readily isolate, Uriel Weinreich’s dictionary remains an irreplaceable masterpiece of modern lexicography and semantic precision, in which the author’s genius shines through ‘many times on every page’. It was also beautifully published by McGraw Hill and Yivo, enhancing the prestige of Yiddish. The Yugntrufists, who edited the magazine Yúgntruf, and their mentor, Dr. Schaechter, who edited the magazine Afn Shvel, continued through the 1970s and 1980s to ban ever more common Yiddish words, while introducing ever more neologisms (though it had been a century since anyone went looking for Yiddish words in German dictionaries; this was turning into a linguistic hunt of lexical items of nineteenth ­century, rather than earlier vintage). Bad-spiritedness periodically came to the fore in periodic polemic broadsides against writers and editors in Afn Shvel and circulars from an associated ‘enforcement committee’. But for some readers of the older generation not directly involved, the newfound ‘liveliness’ around Yiddish itself brought its own spiritual, and occasionally comic, relief. For the baby boomers, the rub was that instead of becoming inspired pupils of the last generation of Yiddish writers and educators born before the Holocaust, the only (howsoever small) group of young North American-born secular Yiddishists who spoke and wrote in Yiddish declared a cultural war on the older generation. One low point of the period came early on, during the one and only public picketing action conducted by Yúgntruf. It was not against the Hebrew day schools that boycotted Yiddish, not against the American Jewish organizations that excluded Yiddish, and not against any municipal or other agencies that had programs in minority languages that left Yiddish out. They picketed the two leading Yiddish daily newspapers, both on East Broadway, on New York City’s Lower East Side, on the 23rd and 26th of April 1970 in a protest centered on vocabulary and spelling! The triumphalist

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account of the humiliation of New  York’s last Yiddish newspapers, ergo of their writers and staffs, appeared in the magazine Yúgntruf’s September 1970 issue (no. 20), with photos and self-heroizing articles about how they were somehow ‘saving true Yiddish’ (Orenstein et al. 1970). The movement’s ‘higher academic guru’ was the late and prolific master sociologist of language, Professor Joshua A. Fishman (1926–2015), who was himself a prime founder of the very field of modern Sociology of Language. In an array of superb works, he accomplished a vast amount, not only academically but also in inspiring interest in Yiddish, among many other weaker and threatened languages. He is one of the towering inspirations to current initiatives around the world to save from threatened extinction smaller languages. It is no diminution of Professor Fishman’s permanent contributions that some of the theoretical underpinnings of his work on the language that meant most to him have been controversial. Frankly, they now need to be debated openly with the benefit of a half century of subsequent language history to analyze. The fact remains that Professor Fishman and Dr. Schaechter were among the first (and tiny group) of non-Hasidic, conscious Yiddishist idealists, who built families so committed to Yiddish as a living language that a half century later their grandchildren and great-grandchildren continue to maintain Yiddish as the language of the home, with numerous descendants deeply active in things Yiddish, wherever in the world they may have settled. It is also important to note that Prof. Fishman never engaged in the attacks on Yiddish writers and editors that have tarred the record of some of his ­followers. Moreover, Fishman, as a master scholar, separated his support for the New York normativists from his scholarly appraisals of empirical reality. When it came to his thoughts on ‘which population to monitor most closely (from the point of view of variance in connection with ongoing sociocultural processes’, his reply to his own rhetorical question was clear: ‘I would select the ultra-Orthodox in the United States and in Israel’ (Fishman 1981b: 746). Moreover, those who follow Prof. Fishman’s works on Yiddish have never forgotten his most famous footnote about a situation where the folks ‘living out’ the normativists’ dreams were the normativists’ minute circles themselves which they would then report on as supposed successes. He naturally put it more diplomatically: ‘However, at the same time, the world of Yiddish-in-­print has shrunk to such an extent that the circles of the remaining planners and the circles of those who still publish in Yiddish criss-cross much more fully […]’ (Fishman 1981a: 56). This newfound American Yiddish normativism that was pitting the few young adherents of the secular language against the surviving older writers did not come from some individual whim of several families. It came right from

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a serious and internationally known sociolinguistic theory intended to facilitate, not undermine, the revitalization and survival of weak languages. That was the Ausbau theory of minority language development of German linguist Heinz Kloss (1904–1987). Kloss distinguished, in his study of smaller minority languages, between Abstand languages that had natural distance from their powerful competitors and Ausbau languages that were somehow too close to their powerful competitors and needed to be made further by sociolinguistic intervention. Kloss introduced these concepts in 1952, and they became widespread in the English speaking world of sociolinguistics with his 1967 paper on the subject (see Kloss 1952, 1967). Fishman and Schaechter openly cited the model of the German linguist as theoretical underpinning for their new Yiddish mini-movement in the late twentieth-century Bronx (see e.g. Schaechter 1980: 212; Fishman 1981a: 56–57). The application of the German linguist’s Ausbau thinking to late twentieth century North American Yiddish continues to strike some observers as eerie. As noted earlier, it had been around a century since anyone tried to ‘enrich’ Yiddish through modern German. Those days had been long over in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Why would it be made an issue now in America? Moreover, after the Holocaust, and after the growing recognition of Yiddish literature internationally in the later twentieth century, hardly anybody was calling Yiddish ‘bad German’ as had earlier generations of German Jews and Zionists and anti-Semites; and if anyone still felt that way, who cared? They were certainly not going to care about ‘some more words being changed’! The 1960s Yiddish (lexicon, grammar, orthography—the works) of the great writers living in the United States, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Grade, and dozens of others was a stable, sophisticated highpoint in the 1000-year history of Yiddish. For most East European-born native speakers of Yiddish, including the writers, editors, teachers, and cultural leaders, the assault on their form of Yiddish was a rude shock (see Katz 1993: 37–45). Among those who dared ‘reply to the professors’ were Avrom Golomb (1967), Kh. Sh. Kazhdan (1973), M. StekinLandau (1992), and most famously, the master Yiddish satirist Abraham Shulman, in numerous columns in the Yiddish Forward (Fórverts) that still await being collected and republished. Looking back, one of the most meaningful protests was the one known team-up of a prewar cultural figure with a much younger American-born scholar (Gutkovitsh and Tsukerman 1977). The dean of Yiddish scholars in Israel, Dov Sadan, asked in one of his books: ‘One of [the] weapons [in the normativism campaign] is the ‘Yúgntruf ’ organization. But one has to ask oneself, whether a youth group, as the operational unit for a normativist and purist philologist […] is not too modest in what it asks for itself and of itself ’ (Sadan 1979: 257; cf. Katz 1992: 44).28

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By the mid-1990s, those few of New York’s secular Yiddish publications and institutions that had long-term funding, in a few cases many millions of dollars, deriving from ‘the good old days’, were faced with the disappearance of the last generation of prewar East European-born editors, directors, educators, and leaders. In the absence of their own progeny or pupils, they had to turn, usually over the objections of the aged and ailing mohicans still in office, to two groups of baby boomers to take over. Seeking early on to avoid the Yugntrufists, they turned first to veterans of the Soviet-sponsored Moscow magazine Sovétish héymland who were on occasion specially brought to America, Britain, or Israel in the 1990s, and in later years, often in conflict with them, the Yugntrufists. The ex-Soviets, beyond their understandable satisfaction and joy at finding solid careers in the field of Yiddish upon touchdown in the West in the 1990s, also sometimes had an agenda of rehabilitating and trying to redefine for history the role of Soviet Yiddish literature, mores, and culture for the future Western canon of the field (sometimes including their own mentor from the 1980s, the Soviet regime’s high-level informer and chief tormenter of Yiddish writers, Aron Vergelis). In the twenty-first century, the Yugntrufists began to obtain some of these jobs and have proven, again, to be the only true stalwarts of Yiddishism in their environment. One may agree or disagree with the late Dr. Schaechter, but his descendants continue to speak and write Yiddish. The most recent and most important accomplishment is the recently published and very weighty Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary Based on the Lexical Research of Mordkhe Schaechter (CEYD; Schaechter-Viswanath and Glasser 2016). It is a work of love and dedication to the late normativist. At the same time, its purist bent led to the omission (in a massive volume) of many everyday words the compilers consider to be Daytshmerisms, including the unmarked, everyday Yiddish words, for example, doubt (n. and v.), examine, hopeless, immortality, invent, loss, moderate (adj.), point of view, pronunciation, visit (n. and v.). At the other end of the spectrum are the large numbers of ‘made-up words’ (proposed neologisms). These do not empirically become ‘Yiddish’ because they are in a normativist dictionary. They mislead the language learner into usages that native speakers find hilarious. The project will remain for sociolinguistics a warning of what can be wrought by language normativism and purism, or ‘corpus planning’ that reigns unchecked in the situation of a much-weakened language environment. Even the most sympathetic academic reviewer to date has noted that: The proportion of terms from various domains (agriculture, astronomy, botany, various crafts and industries, zoology, etc.) is significantly higher in CEYD than in any other Yiddish dictionary. […] In CEYD we find Yiddish equivalents for

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such English words as aardvark, aardwolf, gnu, kraal, mahout, sausage tree, names of all the vitamins from vitamin A to K, etc. […] Having overfilled the book with terms of all kinds, the CEYD editors ran out of space for other lexicographic data, even if they are felt to be missing. […] The label for a neologism is absent. CEYD introduces lots of new Yiddish words such as ‘elevator operator’ liftnik, ‘gypsy cab’ privátnik, ‘jogger’ láyflər, ‘spam’ blitsmist, etc. How can a CEYD user know that a word found in this dictionary is an accepted long-used Yiddish word and not a new lexical coinage? (Moskovich 2017: 122, 123)

Some observers have argued that the normativists have indeed made one neologism popular in the circles of Yiddish clubs, and those who enjoy inserting bits of Yiddish in their Latin-letter emails: blíts-post for ‘email’ (it was duly featured in the headline of the New York Times article on the dictionary; Berger 2016). But even this ‘success’ has proved disturbing for native speakers. First they enjoy their ímeyl. Second, some are made uneasy by derivatives of blitz in the wake of its World War II use for forming nominal compounds. Native speakers use it only, as a noun on its own, in its old sense of ‘lightning’.

The Yiddish Conundrum And that, finally, takes us to the current Yiddish divide that is its conundrum. Hasidic communities are producing dozens of weekly newspapers, magazines, and publish many new books each year. One of its family magazines, Máyləs (or Má:ləs in the southern dialects that dominate the Hasidic scene), edited in the Hasidic enclave of Monsey, New York, is arguably one of the best young people’s magazines in Yiddish of any period.29 With the advent of the internet, more and more Hasidim are quietly enjoying more and more in Yiddish from other circles. Times have changed. Some of these communities are now so confident of their cultural security that they do not ‘fear’ the ‘influence’ of secular Yiddish linguistic norms as they did half a century ago. The proverbial Wall of China comes, curiously, from the other direction. ‘Modern people’ who love Yiddish, study Yiddish, want to actually speak and communicate in Yiddish, and not just enjoy translations, music, dance, and some entertaining words and phrases, will need to overcome the hasidophobic and haredophobic attitudes of modern Jewry, including some of the leading ‘secular Yiddishists’, and seek out means to communicate with some among the hundreds of thousands of living people who speak the Yiddish language. If they cannot see that a living language in living communities with a vast and growing published output is not infinitely more important than the corpus

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planners’ aversions to banned words, need for new words, and universal implementation of radical spelling reform that is offensive to the mass of living speakers, there is a profound problem. Incidentally, a number of millennials are now starting to overcome the baby boomers’ prejudices. Those who have sought Hasidic friends and Yiddish mentors have rapidly found them. It can be instructive to imagine, what might scholars think, a hundred years hence, about Yiddish professors, teachers, editors, lexicographers, and attempted poets who would have nothing to do with the only communities that spoke the language in their own time? At the time of writing, there is the news, perhaps for the first time, that a Hasidic scholar has finally been given the opportunity to make some of these points in one of the Jewish linguistics journals. In her significant new paper, Chaya R.  Nove notes ‘that Hasidic Yiddish dialects, the only ones that were directly transmitted by native speaking European immigrants and successfully maintained by four subsequent generations, have been essentially excluded from the Yiddish linguistics literature’. She courageously makes explicit reference to the biases within academia, including ‘anti-Hasidic prejudice’ and ‘a more specific anti-Hasidic bias, inherited from secular Yiddishism and intensified by new resentments’. Provocatively, and correctly, Nove alludes to the degree to which these biases have snuffed out professional linguists’ and sociolinguists’ own storied ‘acknowledgment of heterogeneity and new methods for analysing and quantifying variation and change’ (Nove 2018: 120–122; cf. Katz 2006: 472; cf. summaries of this paper’s perspectives in Figs. 22.1 and 22.2). Nove’s perspicacious observations relate to a phenomenon we may call ‘Envy of Hasidism’ on the part of secular Yiddishists, academic and non-­ academic alike, who have been pursuing linguistic purism in a (truly admirable) mini-circle of determined speakers, though at times, in the realm of research (on rather more risky ground), taking themselves to be the speech community to be studied. Hasidism, by contrast, has produced hundreds of thousands of native Yiddish speakers whose children can at times understand substantially more of a given page from the Yiddish literary classics of Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, or Bashevis Singer but have no interest at present in looking at this literature (cf. Katz 2007: 379–392; 2015: 291–304). Nove threw down the gauntlet in 2018: For Yiddishists, the humiliating sting of failure, tinged with envy, may have provoked more anti-Hasidic resentment than did its history of secularism. That these black-clad Hasidim with no connection to Chernowitz, no knowledge of Sholem Aleichem, and no desire to participate in secular culture would become the de facto stewards of the language they had fought so hard to save may have been too much to bear. (Nove 2018: 128)

Fig. 22.1  150 years in the life of Yiddish

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Fig. 22.2  The two kinds of contemporary Yiddish

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Paradoxes abound. Around 99 percent of the ‘secular Yiddish writers’ whom the secular Yiddishists so cherish, themselves grew up in Eastern Europe in the depth of the deeply religious, ultra-Orthodox civilization that would in our times be referred to as ‘Haredi’ (often Hasidic). An overwhelming majority of the most beloved works of the great secular Yiddish authors are actually set in that premodern traditional East European Ashkenazic society. There is a direct linguistic continuity between the Yiddish of the great writers of the last century and a half and the living Hasidic Yiddish of the next century and a half. That is in itself, coming after the Holocaust, a remarkable phenomenon worthy of study by linguists and sociolinguists alike for a long time to come.

Implications for Language Revivalism, Revitalization, and Normative Planning For several centuries, the study of diverse aspects of Yiddish has proven fruitful for wider linguistics and the social sciences. This is not because of any mystical Yiddish fount. It is because of the highly unusual, exotic (and in the twentieth century extraordinarily tragic) trajectory of a language without a country that has meant so much to such diverse groups of left and right, religious and secular, traditionalist and avant-garde, always in stiff competition not just with the onsite national languages but with the two older classic languages of the same people. The use of the ancient Semitic alphabet has added an appreciable array of artful aspects. We have seen how the letter known as silent áyin that symbolized radical socialism in one generation morphed into a symbol of religious traditionalism once the radicals had abandoned it.30 In our own time, the case of Yiddish may contribute to the study of resilience for minority languages.31 It is a case that can serve as a warning beacon for the dangers of application of sociolinguistic principles in actual language movements, especially in the case of weak languages, all the more so where the sociolinguists have the resources, while the vast number of native speakers are old and weak. When sociolinguists and their language-activist pupils wage war on the older native speaker generation of ‘a language in danger’, their work can be counterproductive. Instead of becoming icons to be emulated, the last native speakers (even great writers acclaimed in English translation) are rendered exemplars of some allegedly defective form of the language (in the case at hand: vocabulary and spelling).

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Within the realm of language planning, the greatest potentially damaging elements are unnecessary and unwanted corpus planning, especially the brands of normativism that entail purism, an insistence on counter-empirical degrees of uniformity in writing and speech, or policies of ‘confronting’ English or other world languages with neologisms that are laughable to native speakers, the more so when they appear unmarked in dictionaries for technical fields nobody is using the language for. The cumulative effect of such policies can be the setting up of a language czar’s office to bring down, rather than raise up, the remnants of the population that still speak the endangered language. The next Yiddish lesson here, so to speak, entails the capacity to take good news as good news. When a little-considered group of speakers emerges with an unpredicted demographic big bang, it is an occasion for sociolinguistic and language-revitalizationary celebration. The unexpected advent of hundreds of thousands of new Yiddish speakers in compact communities became instead the normativists’ new target for ‘what is wrong’ rather than the revivalists’ celebration, coupled with the true linguist’s joy in having novel bona fide language development to study, document, and analyze. But the Ausbauists’ purism and fear of similarity to some other language is only one side of the current Yiddish conundrum. The other is ideology and worldview. The revolutionary, secularist, radical politics fervor that drove earlier generations of Yiddishists is long gone. Its heirs, mostly modern secular liberals, a handful modern Orthodox, now isolate their ersatz Yiddish as a symbol of resistance to the linguistically real Yiddish of hundreds of thousands who are deeply religious and are continuing the very religious life that gave rise to the birth and life of Yiddish in the first place. What can that mean for the best-intentioned practitioners of language revivalism and revitalization? It can send a signal to well-intentioned saviors to be much more careful before engaging in activities that undermine—rather than support—the future of the very language they are ‘saving’. Preserving endangered languages is no easy feat; in fact, persuading young people to raise their families in a small, endangered language of their forebears instead of one of the great bulldozer languages of the nation-state and of the internet is extraordinarily difficult, as revivalists know and appreciate. The solution can be fathomed from the biblical Judgment of Solomon (I Kings, 3: 16–28). The truest language revivalists will strive to strengthen the survival, status, and future of the empirically real vernacular varieties of the small, threatened language before them. Even if recent linguistic history has moved in a direction other than that of their own and their mentors’ language planning choices. Even if the communities of native speakers steadfastly hold

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worldviews and beliefs characteristic of the first thousand years of the history of Yiddish speaking people.

Notes 1. Sincerest thanks to Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and Bernard Spolsky for valuable comments to earlier drafts of this paper and to Preeti Rawat for her unusually valuable editing queries and comments during production. None of them bears responsibility for views or errors. Disclosure: The author published (in Yiddish) a pro-descriptivist, anti-normativist tract on Yiddish stylistics a quarter century ago (Katz 1993). 2. Figures for Yiddish speakers for the 1930s include Solomon A. Birnbaum’s 11,875,000 (Birnbaum 1979: 41) and Max Weinreich’s 10,690,250 (M. Weinreich 1940: 25, basing himself on Lestschinsky 1936); Weinreich adhered to these figures to the end of his life (see in his magnum opus, completed 1969, at 1973: I, 171; III, 146). Other estimates range up to 13 million. Much of the discrepancy is due to questions on how to reckon with several million East European Jewish emigrants around the world who were native speakers but rapidly shifting to other languages. 3. This humoristic formulation of the emblematic tale of the Yiddish university chair benefactor is owed to the late Prof. Gershon Winer (1922–2003), whose buoyant posthumously published memoir (Winer 2009) is instructive on these questions. 4. Estimates for the 2018 number of native Yiddish-speaking Haredim include 500,000 (Chaya Nove, 22 April 2018); 525,000 (Barry Kosmin, 19 April and 14 May 2018, personal communications); 1.1 million (Sergio Della Pergola, 24 April and 11 May 2018, personal communications; Jewish Data Bank, 24 April 2018, personal communication). Specialists are often agreed about the inadequacy of census data. For the United States, Samuel Heilman (24 April 2018, personal communication) advises: ‘Best estimates are from US Census and then double’. 5. Among the many works on Haredim, one that stands out is Noah Efron’s (2003). For more discussion see my chapters, ‘The Future of Yiddish’ in Katz (2007: 367–398) and the section ‘The Hasidic Future of Yiddish’ in Katz (2015: 291–300). 6. Estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 internationally (Della Pergolla, 11 May 2018, personal communication) to 550,000 (Kosmin, 19 April and 14 May 2018, personal communications). Needless to say, this number is rapidly plummeting toward inevitable demographic zero, with the sharpest drop-off among the oldest, that is, those with maximum prewar linguistic maturity. 7. I have begun in a very minor way to post on YouTube extracts, recorded over a quarter century, of the last in-situ Yiddish speakers in the Lithuanian lands (Northeastern Yiddish), even as the larger collection looks for a permanent

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home (Katz 2018a). One of the academic goals has been a modest in-progress language atlas (Katz 2018b). Thankfully, there are major institutional projects that have preserved very much, both audio (the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, or LCAAJ) and video (among them, AHEYM at Indiana University). 8. Survey works in English focused on Yiddish, with sections for both the general and the more specialized reader, include Birnbaum (1979), Katz (2007, 2015), and M.  Weinreich (2008). The major current survey of the Jewish languages more widely is Spolsky (2014). 9. I have argued for Aramaic being the direct, living Semitic linguistic link between Near Eastern antiquity and the earliest Yiddish in Europe; these topics are not relevant to the issues here considered (see references in Katz 1985). 10. On the origins and history of the terms Ashkenaz, Ashkenazi, Ashkenazim, see Katz (1998). 11. Some twentieth-century secular Yiddish linguists, occasionally far from the two sacred languages, somehow decided (incorrectly) that Hebrew and Aramaic in Ashkenaz had ‘merged’ into a hodgepodge often called Hebrewhyphen-Aramaic (see Katz 1985, 2007: 45–77). 12. It was Mendele above all who synthesized a powerful standard literary language from within, with generous acceptance of living Semitic- and Slavicderived elements, and the internal Germanic component development, of Yiddish without, so to speak, looking in foreign dictionaries for solutions (see Prilutski 1928; M. Weinreich 1928). 13. A ‘lesson’ could have been a shíyər, a congress an asífə, a poster on the wall a kol-kóyrə (these three being Yiddish words derived from Hebrew). ‘Probably’ could have remained mistámə, ‘certainly’ — avádə, and ‘dispute’, — plúgtə (these three, from Aramaic, have survived). But these Semitic-derived words, for the Yiddish-as-a-modern-language developers, reeked of the despised world of their childhood. Even everyday words like tákə (‘really’), bóbə (‘grandmother’), késhənə (‘pocket’), of Slavic origin, were often deemed too homey and earthy and replaced from the German dictionary. 14. Examples include everyday words like ‘yesterday’ (Yiddish nékhtn), ‘obvious’ (basháympərləkh), and ‘inexpensive’ (vólvl). If any final nail in the coffin were needed, multitudes of Yiddish words of Germanic origin were themselves ‘fixed-up’ into the modern German version. For Yiddish words for ‘day’ and ‘days’ (tog and teg), ‘(to) fly’ (flíən), or ‘inkwell’ (tíntər) came ‘replacement words’ with the supposed ‘feel of Europe’, Yiddish letter variants of, say, in the order cited, gestern, offensichtlich, billig, Tag, Tage, fliegen, Tintenfass. 15. These include Kultur, Literatur, Presse, and Theater. They were simply adopted from German and put into Yiddish script. In the case of the first two, the relatively rare final-syllable stress gave them extra modernist cache. One of the problems, unexpectedly for some today, arose in the case of the word for ‘language’. Older Yiddish, by the usual sound laws, had shprokh for ‘language’

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(in the northern, ‘Lithuanian’ lands, with the usual o > u shift giving shprukh in the southern ‘Polish’ lands). But this word had acquired secondary meanings of a set formula uttered to drive away illness or demons. That left the way clear for Hebrew-derived loshn (duly, via o > u, in the southern dialects, lushn) to become the unmarked word for ‘language’, which it did. But it too, besides its Hebraic associations, has its intricate cultural nuances in Yiddish, including in some usages ‘style’ or ‘way of phrasing something’, not to mention its very ‘Hebraic-within-Yiddish’ plural (ləshéynəs in the north, ləshóynəs in the south). So, one needn’t be much of an analyst to figure out what the newly empowered revolutionary stalwarts of modern secular Yiddish culture did. They took the German word Sprache, and simply spelled out [shprákhə] in Yiddish letters. Here, the nativists who gave modern Yiddish rəlígyə for ‘religion’ (to replace German derived religyón) would be deleting the final shewa giving the modern Yiddish doublet shprakh (same in all dialects) versus loshn (long-standing dialectal divide intact) with an array of intricate nuances that are part of the pleasures that await the twenty-first century student of Yiddish. 16. A Jew who keeps the laws and commandments with special care might be known as an érlakhər yid (‘honest person’, lit. ‘honest Jewish person’). One who takes extra care to obey every detail of the ancient law might be a mákpəd, and what it is they are adhering to might be called Di Tóyrə (‘The Torah’), di mítsvəs (‘the Commandments’), or just plain Yídishkayt (‘Jewishness’). 17. For example, the markers for the letter álef that distinguish between a and o and are retained to this day, one of their many legacies to the Yiddish of the future. They had actually taken this feature from the earlier German-Jewish practice of transcribing German in Jewish characters in a system based on Yiddish orthographic convention. 18. For some decades earlier in the nineteenth century, there had been growing use in religious books of the letter yud (i) here, giving the spellings zógin and hímil. 19. The origin of the term Dáytshmerish, which has become a rather precise term for the concept ‘of nineteenth-­century-origin Germanized Yiddish provenance’, continues to be debated. To date, nobody has refuted Naygreshl’s proposal (citing Prof. A. A. Roback as its source) that the term arose in Vienna in the mouths of Yiddish-speaking Jews of Galicia poking fun at the language of the Moravian Jewish community in the city (daytsh + mérish with eventual stress shift); see Naygreshl (1955: 367–368). 20. The silent áyin is thrown out, except following certain consonants and combinations (principally: m, n, ng, nk), where some dialects retain a reduced vowel. He even had the audacity to respell the name of the language, Yiddish, using double yud (giving [yídish]) rather than initial álef yud (giving: [ídish], which had been a favorite of Lithuanian Yiddish editors following their native phonology that features a word-­initial yi > i rule).

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21. There would be no more gestern instead of Yiddish nekhtn (for ‘yesterday’), or mond for Yiddish ləvónə (‘moon’), or nahe for nóənt (‘near’), or umzónst for Yiddish umzíst (‘for nothing’). But over the decades, masses of the words that had been Dáytshmerish in the late nineteenth century had become part and parcel of virtually all registers of Yiddish. Sometimes in Yiddishized form: shprákhə was, as noted earlier (note 15), partially nativized to shprakh, giving Yiddish such doublets as shprakh (‘language’) versus shprokh (‘incantation’), másə (‘mass’) versus mos (‘measure’), vékhntlakh (‘weekly’) versus vókhədik (‘characteristic of unremarkable weekdays’), kunst (‘art’) versus kunts (‘trick’). 22. Such cases include the nuances distinguishing (with the new variants provided first) ráyzə and nəsíyə (‘trip’), gift and sam (‘poison’), baáynflusn and mashpíyə zayn (‘influence’), rayf and tsáytik (‘mature’, ‘ripe’), rund and káyləkhdik (‘round’, ‘circular’) among many others. For a discussion of the distinct nuances, see Katz (1993: 219–228). 23. I recall from my own Brooklyn youth some Jewish boys deeply worried that their pronunciation of ‘words like big’ betrayed a ‘hidden Yiddish accent’ (as they put it), referring to a higher level of final-­consonant voicing among some first-generation-born Americans than in ‘Walter Cronkite English’. Moreover, there are many differences between different countries. In multilingual Montreal, for example, Yiddish fared rather better than in most monolingual American cities. 24. Israeli is increasingly not ‘Hebrew’ but a dynamic new national language in the Mideast. While most in the field have avoided such research, Ghil’ad Zuckermann has highlighted it with a mass of linguistic evidence; see Zuckermann (2008). See also Zuckermann’s important work on language revitalization (e.g. in Zuckermann and Amery 2015). 25. See Katz (2007: 345). 26. See Katz (2007: 310–323). 27. See Katz (2007: 357–358) on the storied case of Professor Robert D. King. 28. See Hutton (1993) on Yiddish normativism vis-à-vis the notion of authenticity. 29. The magazine’s own transcription: Mallos. A recent visit to a Brooklyn kiosk in the Hasidic enclave of Boro Park yielded purchases of an array of Hasidic Yiddish magazines, including Di Baləbóstə, Der Blik, Bnóys Tsíyen, Dóyrəs, Famílyə, Der Flam, Kínder Blik, Kínder Tsayt, Di Líkhtikə Heym, Máyləs (Máləs), Der Momént, Der Óytsər, Der Shtern, Di Vokh. These and others, published in magazine format, are separate from the selection of hefty weekly newspapers also on offer at the kiosk. On these, and the rising internet presence of Hasidic Yiddish, see Waldman (2018). 30. Most Hasidic Yiddish publications have dropped the silent áyin in recent decades. Once it had lost its status as a marker of traditionalist religiosity visà-vis the secularists’ publications (because the secularists’ papers and magazines have mostly disappeared), that silent áyin lost its symbolic value (it had

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been, before World War I, a hallmark of anti-religious secularism, and then became, in the interwar and postwar period, the symbol of religious publications when the secularists jettisoned it). A cursory examination shows that many now drop the áyin even when the modern standard spelling keeps it (after the consonants determined by Borokhov in 1913 and codified in Reyzen 1920), making some current Hasidic Yiddish spelling ‘more orthographically radical than the once radical spelling of the secularists and the modern standard literary language of the twentieth century’. A future Sociolinguistic History of the Silent Yiddish Áyin will be a rewarding project. 31. See Bradley (this volume) for the positive approach of Resilience Thinking.

References Berger, J. (2016, October 4). How Do You Say “Email” in Yiddish? New York Times. Birnbaum, S. A. (1979). Yiddish. A Survey and a Grammar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Borokhov, B. (1913a). Di úfgabn fun der yídisher filológye [The Aims of Yiddish Philology]. Sh. Niger, 1913, 1–22. Borokhov, B. (1913b). Biblyoték fúnem yídishn filológ [Library of the Yiddish Philologist]. Sh. Niger, 1913, 1–68 [separate pagination at end of volume]. Efron, N. (2003). Real Jews: Secular vs. Ultra-Orthodox. The Struggle for Jewish Identity in Israel. New York: Basic Books. Eisenberg, R. (1995). Boychiks in the Hood. Travels in the Hasidic Underground. New York: Harper Collins. Erlich, R. (1973). Politics and Linguistics in the Standardization of Soviet Yiddish. Soviet Jewish Affairs, 3(1), 71–79. Estraikh, G. (1999). Language Planning and Linguistic Development. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fishman, J. A. (1981a). The Sociology of Yiddish: A Foreword. In Fishman (1981c) (pp. 1–97). Fishman, J. A. (1981b). Epilogue: Contributions of the Sociology of Yiddish to the General Sociology of Language. In Fishman (1981c) (pp. 739–753). Fishman, J. A. (Ed.). (1981c). Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters. The Hague: Mouton. Fishman, J.  A. (1987). Ideology, Society and Language: The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum. Ann Arbor: Karoma. Freidenreich, F. P. (2010). Passionate Pioneers. The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910–1960. Teaneck: Holmes and Meier. Golomb, A. (1967). Vegn terminológye un nomenklatúr [On Terminology and Nomenclature]. Yídishe shprakh, 27, 17–19.

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Gutkovitsh, Y., & Tsukerman, R. (1977). Derekh-érets farn loshn fun folk [Respect for the Language of the People] Di tsúkunft, 83.2, 72–76. Hoffman, M. S. (1994). An asífe fun yídish réter [A Congress of Yiddish Savers]. Yerusholáymer álmanakh, 24, 302–306. Hutton, C. (1993). Normativism and the Notion of Authenticity in Yiddish Linguistics. In D. Goldberg (Ed.), The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Yiddish Language, Folklore and Literature (Vol. 5, pp.  11–57). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Katz, D. (1985). Hebrew, Aramaic and the Rise of Yiddish. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages (pp. 85–103). Leiden: E.J. Brill http:// dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFLinguistics/1985.pdf. Katz, D. (1991). A shtékale aráyn, a shtékale aróys, di dáytshmerishe gefár iz óys [It’s High Time to Declare the Dáytshmerish Scare Over and Done with]. Yídishe kultúr, 53.5, 24–31. http://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFStylistics/1991.pdf Katz, D. (1992). Der krízis fun der yídisher stilístik [The Crisis of Yiddish Stylistics]. Yídishe kultúr, 54.3, 38–44. http://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFStylistics/6-1992Crisis-Yiddish-Stylistics.pdf Katz, D. (1993). Tíkney Takónes. Fragn fun yídisher stilístik [Amended Amendments. Issues in Yiddish Stylistics]. Oxford: Oksforder Yidish Press/Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. http://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFStylistics/1993. pdf Katz, D. (1994). Notions of Yiddish. In G.  Abramson & T.  Parfitt (Eds.), Jewish Education and Learning. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Katz, D. (1998). Farvós heysn mir Ashkenázim? [Why Are We Called Ashkenázim?]. Yerusholáymer Álmanakh, 26, 235–249. http://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFLinguistics/ 1998.pdf Katz, D. (2006). Review of N.  Jacobs, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. AJS Review, 30(2), 471–473. http://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFLinguistics/2006Review-of-Jacobs.pdf Katz, D. (2007). Words on Fire. The Unfinished Story of Yiddish. Revised and Updated. New York: Basic Books. Katz, D. (2008). Borokhov, Ber. In YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (pp. 218–219). New Haven: Yale University Press http://www.yivoencyclopedia. org/article.aspx/Borokhov_Ber. Katz, D. (2015). Yiddish and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Katz, D. (2018a). Litvak Yiddish and Lore (YouTube Channel, In Progress). https:// www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL89369D626BD42D2C&feature=plcp Katz, D. (2018b). Lítvish. An Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish (Online, In Progress). http://www.dovidkatz.net/WebAtlas/AtlasSamples.htm Kaz[h]dan, Kh. Sh. (1973). Di mánye fun vort- un shprakh- makheráy [The Mania to Make Up Words and Language]. Úndzer tsayt, 10, 14–17. Kloss, H. (1952). Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen von 1800 bis 1950. Munich: Pohl.

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Kloss, H. (1967). ‘Abstand Languages’ and ‘Ausbau Languages’. Anthropological Linguistics, 9(7), 29–41. Lehrer, L. (1928, December). Yídish—yidishízm—kulturízm [Yiddish— Yiddishism—Culturism]. In Di yídishe velt 9 (pp. 414–430). Vilna: B. Kletskin. Lestschinsky, J. (1936). Di tsol yidn in der velt [The Number of Jews in the World]. Yívo Bléter, 9.4–5, 161–193. Moskovich, W. (2017). Review of Schaechter-Viswanath and Glasser 2016. Journal of Jewish Languages, 5, 121–130. Naygreshl, M. (1955). Di modérne yídishe literatúr in Galítsye (1904–1918) [Modern Yiddish Literature in Galicia (1904–1918)]. In Fun nóentn óver (pp. 265–398, Intro. J. Pat). New York: Congress for Jewish Culture. Niger, Sh. (ed.). (1913). Der pínkes. Yórbukh far der geshíkhte fun der yídisher literatúr un shprakh, far folklór, kritík un biblyográfye [The Record Book. Yearbook for Yiddish Literature and Language, for Folklore, Criticism and Bibliography]. Vilna: B.A. Kletksin. Nove, C. R. (2018). The Erasure of Hasidic Yiddish from Twentieth Century Yiddish Linguistics. Journal of Jewish Languages, 6(1), 109–141. Orenstein, E., Roskies, D. H., & Gold, D. (Eds.). (1970, September). Yugntruf, No. 20. https://yugntruf.org/zhurnal/zhurnal.php?numer=20#page/1/mode/2up Prager, L. (1974). Yiddish in the University. The Jewish Quarterly, 22.1–2(79–80), 31–40. Prawer Kadar, N. (2016). Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917–1950. Waltham: Brandeis. Prilutski, N. (1928). Méndele’s yídish [Mendele’s Yiddish]. In N. Mayzl (Ed.), Der Méndele túrem [The Mendele Tower] (pp. 167–179). Warsaw: Farlag Mendele. Reyzen, Z. (1920). Gramátik fun der yídisher shprakh [Grammar of the Yiddish Language]. Vilna: Sh. Shreberk. Reyzen, Z., Weinreich, M., & Broyde, Kh. (eds.). (1931). Di érshte yídishe shprákh konferénts. Baríkhtn, dokuméntn un ópklangen fun der Tshérnovitser Konferénts, 1908 [The First Yiddish Language Conference. Reports, Documents and Responses to the Chernowitz Conference of 1908]. Vilna: Yivo. Sadan, D. (1979). Óysleyg, nórmes, ukdóyme [Spelling, Language Norms, and the Like]. In Tóyern un tirn (Gates and Doors) (pp. 256–262). Tel Aviv: Yisroel bukh. Schaechter, M. (1980). Dem Yívos yídish úftu. Roshe-prókimdike observátsyes un sakháklen tsun a yóyvl dáte [The Yivo’s Yiddish Accomplishment: Outline Observations and Summaries on the Occasion of a Jubilee]. Yívo bléter, 46, 192–228. Schaechter-Viswanath, G., & Glasser, P. (Eds.). (2016). Comprehensive English-­ Yiddish Dictionary Based on the Lexical Research of Mordkhe Schaechter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Spolsky, B. (2014). The Languages of the Jews. A Sociolinguistic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stekin-Landau, M. (1992). Review of Schaechter 1986. Lébns-fragn, 477–478, 12–13. Waldman, R. (2018, April 27). Seizing the Means of Cultural Production: Hasidic Representation in Contemporary Yiddish Media. In Geveb. https://ingeveb.org/ blog/seizing-the-means-of-cultural-production-hasidic-representation-in-contemporary-yiddish-media Weinreich, M. (1928). Méndeles ónheyb’ [Mendele’s Beginning]. In Bílder fun der yídisher literatúr geshíkhte fun di ónheybn biz Méndele Móykher Sfórim [Scenes from the History of Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to Mendele Moykher Sforim] (pp. 330–351). Vilna: Farlag Tómor fun Yoysef Kamermakher. Weinreich, M. (1940). Yídish [Yiddish]. In Álgemeyne entsiklopédye (pp. 23–90, Vol. Yidn B). Paris: Dubnov Fond. Weinreich, U. (1949). College Yiddish. An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture. New York: Yivo. Weinreich, U. (1968). Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary. New York: Yivo/McGraw-Hill. Weinreich, M. (1973). Geshíkhte fun der yídisher shprakh. Bagrífn. Faktn. Metódn [History of the Yiddish Language. Concepts, Facts, Methods] (IV vols, in Yiddish). New York: Yivo Institute for Jewish Research [English translation = M. Weinreich 2008]. Weinreich, M. (2008). History of the Yiddish Language. Concepts, Facts, Methods (II vols). New Haven: Yale University Press. Winer, G. (2009). Victory in Defeat. Memoirs. Israel: Privately Published. Zuckermann, G. (2008). Israelít safá yafá [The Beautiful Israeli Language]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Zuckermann, G., & Amery, R. (2015). Language Revival: Securing the Future of Endangered Languages, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). EdX. https:// www.edx.org/course/language-revival-securing-future-adelaidex-lang101x

Index1

A

Aanaar Saami, language, 522 Aboriginal, 522 Aboriginal Australian, 10, 532, 536, 538 English, 362, 369, 370, 372, 536 Acquisition language, 213–215, 290, 358, 363–365, 372, 415, 510 planning, 484, 488 Activism/activists, 103, 104, 112, 120, 164, 190, 191, 198n17, 200n42, 267, 317, 326, 455, 482, 486, 487, 524, 567, 569 Adelaide, 525 Administration, 48, 77, 92, 105, 107, 108, 123n5, 148, 167, 182–184, 191, 194, 221, 264, 290, 291, 295, 314, 324, 386, 390, 395, 397, 513 Advertisement/advertising, 9, 53, 288, 293, 298, 300, 303n14, 434, 459, 489, 494

African countries, 139, 239, 314, 315, 320, 326, 407 languages, 312, 313, 318–321, 325–327 Afrikaans, language, 48, 168, 174, 319, 320, 323 Åland, 23, 61n3 Alaska, 261, 278n4, 523 Albania, 23 Aleksandr II, 75 Alpatov, 75, 76, 80 Alpaut, R., 91 Alphabet Design Workshop, 517 Alsatian, language, 487 Amery, R., 366, 525, 583n24 Anbarra, 360 Appropriation, 29, 39, 44, 49–51, 117, 138, 145, 215, 217, 301, 315, 316, 359, 361, 397, 421, 423, 515, 516, 518, 526, 534, 542 Arabic, language, 170, 351n1, 414, 491–492, 494

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 G. Hogan-Brun, B. O’Rourke (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54066-9

589

590 Index

Aragonese, language, 467, 474 Aramaic, language, 524, 556, 557, 561, 562, 581n9, 581n11, 581n13 Arctic Council, 261, 278n4 language policy, 267 languages, 257–278, 523 Arctic Athabaskan Council (AAC), 261 Arrernte, 371 Arts, 199n30, 290, 291, 296, 338, 341, 365, 489, 519, 520, 565, 583n21 Asia, 240, 383, 389, 406, 410 Southeast, 10, 134, 383–399, 524 Assessment, language, 372 Assimilation, 10, 136, 140, 142–144, 155, 163, 189–191, 193, 212, 215, 350, 366, 383–399, 509, 512, 526, 555 linguistic, 80, 192, 196, 565 Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED), 415, 416 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 134, 383, 387, 391–393 Attitudes, language, 243, 245, 489 Aussiedler, 139 Australia, 10, 13, 219, 237–239, 244, 245, 248, 357–372, 441, 465, 514, 525, 536–541, 545, 549n2, 549n3, 549n6, 565 Australian Aboriginal, 10, 532, 536, 538 Austria, 2, 23, 146, 214, 242, 485, 487 Austrian State Treaty, 29, 30 Austro-Marxists, 5, 15n3, 182–184, 195, 197, 198n4 Authenticity, 8, 217, 287–289, 296–298, 301, 555, 583n28 Autonomy national cultural, 5, 79, 181–201

national cultural autonomies (NCAs)(Russia), 200n39 non-territorial, 182–185, 198n13 and personality principle, 5, 181 territorial, 25, 75, 84, 137 Autonym, 514 Ayers Rock, 514 B

Baby signs, 217 talk registers, 362 Bahasa Malaysia, language, 149, 154, 324, 325, 395 Balinese, language, 456, 458 Balkans, 55, 142, 160 Barinov, 85, 86, 91 Barry, B., 171 Bashkir, language, 78, 89, 92, 185 Bashkortostan, 76, 84, 91 Basqecization activities, 324 Basque country, 12, 123n1, 160, 164, 293, 301, 303n14, 488, 495–497 Basque/Euskara, language, 12, 123n1, 163, 164, 236, 293, 301, 302, 303n14, 324, 468, 488, 495–497, 514 Basque, language, 293, 301, 302, 303n14 Bauer, O., 15n3, 182, 195 Becquelin, A. M., 520 Belgium, 4, 6, 12, 47, 134, 147, 155, 311, 491, 493–495 Belonging (ethno)cultural, 78, 139 linguistic, 26, 34, 46, 50, 52 Benton, N., 521 Berger, T., 270 Berlin, 311, 489 Bidirectional, 496 Bilingual

 Index 

education, 194, 215, 218, 395, 409, 412, 416, 521 policy, 521 programs, 359, 368, 369, 410 winks, 495 Bilingualism, 88, 141, 198n5, 209, 213, 215, 263, 272, 273, 295, 315, 346, 366, 436, 515, 521, 526 Bisu, language, 518, 523, 526 Blog, 468, 469 Boas, F., 519 Bolivia, 52 Bolzano, 29 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 169, 172 Boundaries, language, 172, 263 Bradley, M., 510, 512, 513, 516, 522, 524, 526 Branding, 291, 297–300, 302n12 Brenzinger, M., 510 Breton, language, 68n92, 163, 302, 486 Britain, 163, 239, 248, 311, 324, 525, 541, 565, 573 Brunei, 383, 387, 391, 392, 394–397 Brussels, 47, 67n81, 491, 493–495 Budyšin/Bautzen, 490 C

California, 521 Cambodia, 383, 387, 391 Cameroon, 11, 405, 406, 411–413, 419–422, 425 Canada, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 36, 103, 108–111, 113, 123n1, 134, 147, 219, 239, 243, 257–278, 301, 325, 333–351, 441, 491–493, 523, 565 Supreme Court of, 265 Capotorti, F., 32–34, 36, 60 Caregivers, 362, 363 Carinthia (Austria), 29, 30, 487

591

Case-marking, 363, 364, 366 Catalan, language, 8, 164, 174, 293, 301, 302, 466, 487, 496 Catalonia, 8, 79, 91, 103, 108, 123n1, 301, 487 Catherine II, 87 Catherine wheel, 291, 295, 301 Cecil, Robert, 23 Census, 78, 83, 93n3, 121, 185, 191, 198n10, 239, 242, 244, 271, 358, 471, 525, 580n4 Central European Initiative Instrument for the Protection of Minority Rights, 74 Centralization, 163, 188, 192, 387, 499 Chechen, language, 80, 91, 185 Chechnya, 80, 86, 90, 91 Child directed speech, 10, 360–363 language, 25, 47, 48, 52, 77, 83, 270, 314, 318, 319, 357–373, 513, 514 China, 154, 384, 514, 517, 518, 520–522, 524, 527 Chinese, 148–151, 154, 325, 351n1, 384, 398, 494, 515, 519, 521 Chinese/Han, language, 515 Chinese Mandarin, language, 325 Chukotka Peninsula, 261 Circumpolar North, 260 Citizenship ethnically differentiated, 151–153 national, 136, 140 Classroom(s), 369–372, 563 Code-switching, 363, 364, 465, 494 Codification, 416 language, 182 Colonial languages, 240, 311–314, 317–322, 325–327, 393, 407 policies, 148, 312–319, 326

592 Index

Colonialism, 278, 313, 317, 385, 386, 388 Colonisation, 287, 289 Commissioners, language, 105–114, 116–117, 122 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), 43 Commodification, 2, 8–9, 15n12, 397, 486, 498, 520 Communism, 192, 558 post-communism, 181, 182, 184, 185 Communities, 1–15, 23, 27, 31–35, 37, 39, 42, 47, 50, 52, 56, 62n27, 66n66, 77, 102–105, 108, 109, 114, 119, 133–137, 140, 141, 143–145, 147, 149–155, 160–167, 170, 172, 173, 176, 181–184, 186, 187, 189, 191–193, 195–197, 207–222, 236–243, 245, 247, 250, 258–263, 287, 312, 333, 357, 386, 405, 433, 443–445, 452, 482, 510, 532, 554 interpreting, 219, 220, 484 Comparative methods, 261 Completeness functional, 435 institutional, 435 Conflicts ethnic, 54, 57–59 ethnolinguistic, 313 language, 174, 490, 491, 493, 494 post-conflict societies, 160, 168, 169, 172, 176 Consociations, 4, 133–155 Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, 90 Constitution of the Russian Federation, 73, 92n2 Contact language

creole, 10, 13, 235, 359, 369, 372, 522, 532, 539 pidgin, 13, 235, 411, 417, 532, 547 Contestation, 12, 160, 172, 289, 388, 482, 484, 490–497, 499 Convention against Discrimination in Education, 30 Convention (No. 169) concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, 31 Convention (No. 107) concerning Indigenous and Tribal Populations, 30 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), 215, 223n7 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 31, 52 Co-produce, 299 Coptic, language, 513 Cornish, language, 514, 525 Cornish/Kernewek, language, 514, 525 Corpus language, 567 planning, 484, 488, 553, 573, 579 Corsica, 137, 290 Corsican, language, 290, 447n3, 485, 487, 496 Council of Europe (CoE), 38, 57, 60, 74, 75, 82–84, 159, 168, 169, 173, 175, 194, 195, 198n7, 198n18, 210, 437, 440 Covenant of the League of Nations, 23 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 31, 32, 34–36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 59, 60 Crafts, 148, 297, 300, 338, 520, 573 Creole, language, 10, 13, 235, 359, 369, 372, 522, 532, 539, 547 Creoles/Kriol, language, 10, 13, 235, 359, 364, 369, 371, 372, 522, 532, 536, 541, 547 Crimea, 74, 87, 173

 Index 

Critical discourse analysis, 288 Critical theory, 8, 316–320 Croatia, 169–171 Crystal, D., 451, 465, 526, 527 Cultural/culture, 9, 31, 33, 35, 39, 53, 62n27, 64n44, 80, 85, 86, 89–92, 111, 122, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 142, 145, 153, 162–164, 171, 172, 181, 186, 191–193, 195, 196, 200n42, 212, 244, 261, 268, 271, 274, 277, 291, 295–300, 313, 336, 337, 344, 348–349, 366, 390, 391, 397, 408, 413, 418, 422, 424, 435, 439, 442, 444, 445, 447n1, 457, 468, 469, 489, 510, 511, 513, 514, 516, 518, 520, 526, 531, 532, 539, 540, 555, 557, 562, 564, 566–568, 573, 575, 582n15 autonomy, 4, 182–185, 187, 189, 190, 198n13 councils (Estonia), 189 diversity, 37, 38, 134, 141, 147, 149–155, 214, 261, 389, 421 Mayan, 166 rights, 189, 195 Cyberspace, 456, 486 D

Danzig, 23 Deaf and disability, 6, 211, 214, 215, 221, 222 epistemologies, 215, 218 gain, 213–214 and implant, cochlear, 213, 216 and medicalisation, 211 ontologies, 218, 264, 546, 547 scholars, 218 studies, 209, 214, 217–218 Death

593

language, 236, 241, 547, 565 Decision-making, 49, 111, 186, 191, 197, 312 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 32, 37, 266 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, 30, 32, 57, 67n87 Demand, 8, 39, 49–52, 118, 119, 135, 137, 164–166, 170, 174, 182, 185, 221, 265, 287, 290–292, 295, 296, 312, 318, 321, 338, 361, 386, 389, 394, 416, 423, 486, 487, 518 Demography, 242 Denativization, 522, 524 Determiners, 370 Dhuwaya, 366 Dialect, 83, 162, 165, 170, 192, 235, 262, 263, 273, 334, 358, 365, 369, 370, 372, 395, 396, 398, 417, 459, 519, 532, 541, 547, 556, 558, 560, 561, 564, 574, 575, 582n15, 582n20 Diaspora, 7, 236, 444, 453, 471, 511, 516, 524, 534 Dictionaries, 32, 296, 339, 368, 474, 518, 519, 570, 573, 574, 579, 581n12, 581n13 Digital ascent, 454–456, 473 communication, 367, 443, 454, 455, 457, 463, 465, 473, 474 language vitality, 454–456 Directives/directional, 45, 363, 388 Discourse planning, 484, 487, 488 Disempowerment, 483 Distinction, 296, 297 Distinctiveness, 161, 186, 187, 287, 298

594 Index

Diversity cultural, 37, 38, 134, 141, 147, 149–155, 214, 261, 389, 421 language, 14, 38, 133–155, 176, 392, 398, 456, 493, 494 migration-based, 1, 14 superdiversity, 247, 249, 483 Djambarrpuyngu, 362 Doctrine of Discovery, 264 Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension, 32 Domain, 8, 9, 12, 13, 237, 240, 241, 243, 248, 249, 268, 271, 277, 288, 290–293, 296, 301, 314, 318–320, 322, 324, 336, 345, 362, 364, 370, 439, 440, 442, 444–446, 451–453, 457, 482, 488–490, 495–497, 510, 513, 515, 524, 525, 533, 539, 544, 547, 573 Donostia-San Sebastián, 489, 495 Dorais, L.-J., 261, 262, 271–273 Dorian, N. C., 260, 386, 516 Dutch, 47, 207, 239, 445, 461, 462, 493–495 E

Easton, C., 517 Ecolinguistics, 13, 531, 532, 541–545 Ecology, 10, 216, 258, 358, 372, 389, 396, 509, 531–549 language, 8, 10, 358, 396, 542, 545 Economic advantages, 294, 321, 526 interests, 258, 492 value, 113, 289, 317, 321, 326 variables, 15n8, 312, 316–318 Economic opportunities, 287 Economics behavioural, 464 language, 8, 311–327

Education/educational, 289–291, 293, 295, 301, 302n8 bilingual, 215, 218, 395, 409, 412, 416, 521 exclusion, 30, 33, 46, 55, 57, 58, 135, 140, 155, 212, 259, 317, 410, 497 heritage language, 236, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247–250, 358, 368 inclusion, 140, 214 linguistic rights, 6, 213 minority, 186, 199n26 minority-language, 82, 83, 111, 187, 188, 194, 197 mother tongue-based multilingual, 410, 422 policy, 10, 75–79, 145, 267, 270, 359, 369, 383, 387, 388, 392 settings, 367, 422 spaces, 488 Egypt, 513, 568 Elections, 84, 92, 119, 192, 194, 199n34, 200n48, 201n54, 314 Elite closure, 76, 86, 151, 164, 167, 172, 190, 249, 289, 313, 315, 317, 319, 324–326, 392, 393, 396, 398, 406, 408, 512 Ellipsis, 364 Empire Austro-Hungarian, 22, 181, 198n4, 558 Russian, 3, 74–79, 87, 559 Employment opportunities, 49, 57, 247, 275, 294–296, 322 Empowerment, 184, 197 Endangerment, language, 11, 13, 215, 259, 271, 273, 358, 516, 526 England, see Britain English, language, 290, 298, 303n13 Aboriginal, 357, 362, 369, 370, 372, 536 Alyawarr, 365, 370 Australian, 359

 Index 

global, 498 Ennis, 497 Equality, 22, 24, 26, 28–31, 45, 46, 48, 56, 77, 80, 81, 105, 108, 161, 167, 182, 312, 320, 346, 347, 438, 494, 496 Erasure, 482 Ergative, 364 Estonia, 23, 181, 182, 188–191, 196, 488 Estonian, language, 144, 189, 190, 192 Ethiopia, 323, 497 Ethnic cleansing, 58, 144 conflict, 54, 58, 160, 195 homogenization, 143, 144 ideal types, 134, 135, 141 nation, 138 riots, 150, 153 separations, 80, 142–144 Ethnicity, 26, 41, 75, 76, 78, 81, 136, 138, 139, 142, 182, 183, 186, 209, 241, 245, 288, 384, 388, 398, 439, 498, 568 Ethnicization, 137, 138 Ethnography, 196 Ethnolinguistic group, 7, 236, 239, 242, 249, 387, 397 identity, 483, 498 vitality, 243–245, 482, 493, 515 Ethoglossic, 394 Eugenics, 214 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 31, 38, 39, 65n56, 83, 173, 334, 436 European Commission, 83, 159 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 28 European Day of Languages, 159 European languages, 83, 313–315, 358 European Union (EU), 45, 106, 134, 141, 159, 164, 168–170,

595

173–175, 195, 198n10, 198n18, 209, 210, 212, 221, 239, 247, 437 Evans, N., 362, 516 Exchange value, 288–291, 296, 297, 300 Exogamy, 238 Exonym, 514 Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (E-GIDS), 454, 533 F

Facebook, 294, 445, 452, 456, 458, 461, 463, 468, 469 Factor ambivalent, 238 socio-demographic, 239, 241 Family, 29, 42, 50, 54, 110, 112, 113, 162, 163, 182, 208, 211, 216, 219, 220, 238, 241, 248, 249, 258, 261, 266, 276, 290, 295, 319, 351n1, 358, 361, 369, 396, 397, 443, 512–514, 516, 518, 520, 528, 532, 534, 546, 553, 554, 571, 574, 579 Federal Agency for Affairs of Nationalities (FADN), 85, 87, 92 Federalism Russia, 186 Federative Treaty, 79, 80 Film, 296 Finance, language, 184, 433–446 Finnish sign language, 294 First Nations, 142, 264–266, 368, 537 Fishman, J. A., 182, 183, 237, 241, 243, 247, 294, 323, 324, 326, 435, 454, 467, 558, 571, 572 Flemish, language, 493, 494 Folklorization, 520 Food, 297, 300 Forager, 393, 397

596 Index

Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, 168 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, 30, 31, 40, 49, 50, 57, 59, 60, 75, 210 France, 4, 135–137, 146, 147, 150, 163, 236, 248, 311, 335, 485, 487, 496, 565 Franco, 164 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 22 Freedom of expression, 27, 29, 40–44, 60, 65n64, 66n70 of religion, 24, 40–42 Free word order, 364 French, language, 47, 48, 66n70, 67n81, 68n92, 103, 108, 109, 135–137, 139–142, 146, 155, 163, 167, 168, 248–250, 257, 267, 268, 270, 272, 279n15, 290, 311, 313, 315, 317–319, 321, 323, 325, 333, 335, 337, 338, 346–350, 351n1, 411–416, 425n8, 487, 492–495, 544, 562, 567 Friesland, 12, 495–497 Frisian, language, 438, 445, 461–465, 495, 496 North, 486 Funding (NCA), 24, 44, 51, 170, 174, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192–195, 197, 200n46, 200n48, 267, 276, 359, 420, 421, 445, 470, 490, 553, 564, 573 G

Gaelic, language, 292, 293, 296, 297, 301, 325, 335, 337, 444, 458, 486, 490 Galician, language, 302 Gedeo, 497

Gelao, language, 514 Gender, 238, 241 Generation, 4, 13, 38, 101, 103, 160, 187, 192, 196, 216, 218, 241, 242, 248, 249, 264, 266, 275, 292, 293, 302n7, 311, 326, 366, 372, 456, 514, 522, 523, 531, 533, 534, 540, 554, 556, 561, 565–568, 570, 572, 573, 575, 578, 579 Genoese, language, 496 Geolinguistics, 240 German, language, 2, 14, 29, 30, 137–142, 146, 155, 164, 188, 189, 192, 198n6, 207, 237–239, 335, 351n1, 487, 493, 495, 525, 556, 557, 559–561, 570, 572, 581n13, 581n14, 581–582n15, 582n17 New High, 563, 564 Germany, 2, 4, 27, 135, 138, 139, 146, 147, 214, 239, 311, 485, 486, 490, 495 Nazi, 27, 138, 143 Giddens, A., 258 Gifting era, 293 Global communication, 259 periphery, 259 warming, 7, 257, 260 Globalisation/globalization, 1, 6, 7, 11, 14, 111, 141, 209, 236, 246, 247, 257–278, 288, 289, 302n5, 333, 334, 338, 341–350, 385, 398, 494, 495, 498, 499 and effect on translation, 333–351 Good Friday Agreement, 165 Governance, language, 4, 101–123 Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), 241, 250n2, 454

 Index 

Grammar, 296, 339, 519, 535, 539, 543, 544, 546, 560, 572 Graubünden, 524 Greenland, 261, 269, 278n4, 523 Group ethnolinguistic, 7, 236, 239, 242, 249, 387, 397 language, 173, 174, 210, 262, 395, 406, 458, 466, 483, 490, 499 membership, 162, 244, 249, 514, 515 titular, 78, 185, 188 Guatemala, 5, 160, 166 Guest workers, 239 Guidelines on the use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media, 65n65, 68n100 Gunderson, L. H., 509 Gurindji Kriol, language, 364, 365, 536, 541 Gurkha, 512, 528n1 Gwich’in Council International (GCI), 261 H

Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities, 32, 40, 50, 60, 68n100 Harrell, S., 520 Hashtag, 464, 468 Hawai’i, 523 Hearing loss/otitis media, 372 Hebrew, language, 190, 336, 491–492, 513, 519, 523, 524, 526, 556–562, 565, 566, 570, 581n11, 581n13, 583n24 Heritage, 301 language, 217, 236, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247–250, 358, 368, 525, 538, 541 tourism, 297, 298

597

HFEA 2008, 214 High Commissioner on National Minorities, see Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Hinton, L., 288, 372, 521 Hitler, A., 164, 567 Holocaust, 143, 555, 565, 566, 568, 570, 572, 578 Home language, 248, 359, 370, 407, 410, 497 Human rights, 22–24, 26–32, 34, 36–41, 45, 46, 48–50, 52–60, 65n56, 66n70, 168, 175, 219, 269, 389, 438 Hungarian, language, 146, 185, 191–193, 195, 443, 444, 557 Hungary, 2, 6, 23, 141, 143, 146, 181, 182, 185, 191–193, 196, 197n1, 200n42, 200n43, 444 I

Identity, 288, 298–301, 303n13, 303n14 ethnic, 5, 160, 166, 182, 192, 515 ethnolinguistic, 483, 498 global, 1, 298 and language, 145–146, 166, 175, 192, 244, 249, 271, 438, 516 expression of, 2 symbol of, 145–146, 520 national, 52, 183 and social media, 465 Ideologies, 288 language, 9, 115, 288, 334, 457, 482, 485, 487, 499 nation-state, 249, 288, 312, 313, 487 Illiteracy, 315, 412, 414 Inclusion, social, 212 Independence, 10, 112, 144, 150, 151, 153, 154, 314, 324, 386, 387,

598 Index

390, 412, 413, 417, 418, 420, 421, 497 India, 384, 511, 517, 544 Indian Act, 265 Indigenous language rights, 267 languages, 7, 8, 13, 39, 52, 168, 210, 240, 257, 260, 261, 266, 267, 269, 274, 278, 287–290, 295, 298, 311–315, 318–327, 358, 362, 368, 369, 372, 390, 406–408, 411, 425n8, 536–538, 541, 545, 549n2 peoples, 6, 10, 37, 38, 49, 53, 62n24, 75, 148, 188, 216, 257, 260, 264, 266, 295, 296, 367, 368, 436 tweets, 469, 471 Indigenous, Australian, language, 10, 357, 371, 372, 537, 538, 541, 545, 549n2 Indonesia, 134, 154, 383, 387, 513, 516 Industry local, 291, 302n7 publishing, 295 tourist, 295 translation, 342, 349 Input, 161, 363, 364, 418, 423 Integration, 51–53, 56, 136, 139, 155, 187, 189, 195, 340, 387, 390, 436, 466, 514 Interactions, 7, 111, 113, 114, 119, 159, 186, 241, 249, 258, 271, 272, 275, 276, 289, 301, 340, 359, 361, 367, 369, 370, 394, 435, 436, 455, 498, 542–544, 549n6 adult–child, 362 Interdisciplinary, 483 Intergenerational transmission, 210, 216, 291, 294, 435, 456 Intergroup relations, 244 International

Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 31, 32, 34–36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 59, 60 Article 27, 32, 34–36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 59 Labour Organisation, 30, 31 SIL, 410, 413, 415 International Association of Language Commissioners (IALC), 4, 108, 110–114, 121, 122, 124n8, 124n10 Internet, 271, 276, 279n20, 293, 338–340, 396, 436–441, 444, 445, 454, 463, 513, 518, 574, 579, 583n29 Interpreting, 291, 295 community, 219, 220, 388, 484 public service, 219–221 sign language, 6 Intervention, 14, 84, 105, 112, 134, 213, 214, 390, 394, 454–456, 464, 467, 470, 474, 484 sociolinguistic, 390, 572 Interview, 86, 197n1, 198n17, 199n33, 200n42, 200n44, 241, 243, 244, 497 Inuit, language, 7, 351n1, 523 Circumpolar Council Canada (ICC), 261 urban, 276 Inuit Nunangat, 262, 264, 274, 279n18 Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), 262, 270, 278n5, 279n18 Inuktitut, language, 7, 268, 269, 271, 272, 279n16 Inuktun, language, 262 Inuktut, language, 270–274, 276, 279n18 Investment, 288, 295 Iraq, 23 Ireland, 3, 5, 104, 108–110, 115, 119, 122, 123n1, 293, 297, 301, 302, 302n8, 302n12, 337, 436, 497

 Index 

Irish, language, 3, 4, 8, 104, 107, 114–123, 124n19, 165, 166, 174, 175, 288, 290, 292, 293, 295, 297, 299, 301, 302n3, 302n7, 335, 337, 436, 459, 461, 463, 465, 469, 471, 472, 486, 490, 497 Islands, 13, 275, 279n20, 290, 383, 496, 523, 532–536, 539, 542–544, 546 small languages, 531–549 Israel, 12, 336, 491–492, 524, 558, 565, 566, 568, 571–573 Italian, language, 29, 164, 337, 351n1, 496, 524 Italy, 28, 79, 146, 150, 164, 174, 311, 496 Iu Mien, language, 518 J

Japan, Government of, 23 Jinghpaw, language, 517 Job markets, 288, 289, 291 Journalism, 293, 433, 434, 438, 441, 446 Judaism, 524, 554, 555 Jus sanguinis, 138–140 soli, 137, 140 K

Kabbalah, 556 Kanashi, language, 511 Kaurna, language, 525, 526 Ket, language, 525, 526, 528 Kin kinship, 362 kintax, 362 state, 2, 25, 55, 68n97, 192, 195, 196, 201n53, 444 Kinyarwanda, 167, 168 Kiswahili, language, 323, 325

599

Kloss, H., 14, 161, 238, 239, 243, 554, 569–574 Knowledge certified, 321 indigenous, 257, 314, 321, 362, 533 language, 362, 461, 510, 514, 533 Koorete, 497 Kreol (Mauritian Creole), language, 464 Kulturnation, 138 Kurds, 163, 164 Kymlicka, W., 163, 171, 184 L

Labour market, 296 Ladefoged, P., 514 Ladino, language, 166 Lahu, language, 517 Lahu Si, language, 517 Landscape linguistic (LL), 175, 247, 419, 481–499 semiotic, 485 Language (by definition), 497 (non) dominant (NDL), 11, 182, 406–412, 414, 416, 423, 424 colonial, 167, 168, 240, 311–314, 316–323, 325–327, 393 endangered (at risk), 13, 37–39, 65n53, 216, 259, 263, 298, 454, 513, 516, 519, 522, 523, 531, 536, 546, 553, 579 ethnic, 3, 73, 78, 86 (non) indigenous, 359, 368, 538 local, 11, 76, 77, 82, 181, 184, 236, 240, 263, 274, 314, 319, 322, 409, 412–422, 425, 425n8, 426n12, 494, 495, 497 majoritized, 311 minoritized, 311, 322, 483, 484, 488 national, 4, 47, 48, 74, 86, 91, 115, 145, 162, 211, 314, 324, 386,

600 Index

Language (cont.) 390, 392, 394–398, 414, 417, 418, 420, 425n8, 463, 485, 509, 513, 514, 517, 518, 521, 524, 554, 557, 567, 578, 583n24 non-dominant, 11, 182, 407, 411, 414 non-official, 43, 49 North, 165, 261 official, 25, 30, 41–44, 48–53, 57, 66n70, 68n92, 74, 76, 77, 91, 103, 104, 108, 109, 111, 114, 116, 119–122, 123n1, 154, 168, 170, 212, 270, 313, 315, 319, 324, 334, 343, 345, 346, 351n1, 390, 391, 407, 408, 411–413, 417, 420, 425n8, 439, 460, 491, 492, 497, 524, 537, 566 Puerto Rican (Spanish), 465 regional, 91 rights, 2–5, 9, 12, 14, 21–60, 73–92, 101, 109–111, 113, 122, 123, 123n4, 124n10, 160, 161, 169, 172–176, 209, 212, 219, 220, 267, 270, 334, 345–347, 512, 526 sacred, 556, 581n11 small (island), 531–549 stateless, 13, 559 traditional, 10, 13, 357–359, 362, 363, 365, 368, 369, 372, 512, 523, 525, 526, 562 vernacular, 154, 269, 300, 323, 417 vernacular (living), 565 Language development, 292, 293 Language learning, 294, 295 Language maintenance, 294 Language planning, 296 Language policy, 287, 290, 291, 294, 295, 301, 302n6 Language processing, 296 Language rights, 2–5, 9, 12, 14, 21–69, 73–95, 101, 109–111, 113,

122, 123, 123n4, 160, 169, 172–176, 209, 212, 219, 220, 267, 270, 334, 345–347, 512, 526 Language schools, 296 Laos, 383, 387, 391, 517 Latgalian, language, 485 Latin, language, 154, 289, 519, 560 Latvia, 23, 141, 485 League of Nations, 23, 24, 27, 145, 146 Learning community, 11, 274, 369, 408, 422, 469, 516, 525, 526 language, 10, 174, 190, 196, 277, 278, 294, 295, 317, 319, 369, 370, 514, 516, 522, 525, 573 Legal hypercorrection, 489 Lenin, V., 76 Lexical, 261, 337, 362–365, 488, 527, 535, 537, 538, 541, 543, 569, 570, 574 Light Warlpiri, 364, 366 (De)legimitization, 566 Linguicide, 163, 164, 216 Linguistic anthropology, 242, 262 capital, 297, 301, 317, 318, 325 demography, 242, 245 diversity, 5, 27, 37–40, 51, 65n56, 74, 89, 135, 141, 145–148, 154, 155, 159, 163, 171, 175, 176, 185, 196, 247, 313, 386, 405, 417, 419–421, 424, 483, 499, 509 enclave, 238 functionality, 439, 442, 519 human rights, 6, 67n79, 219, 541 landscapes (LL), 12, 175, 247, 297, 419, 481–499 market, 2, 289, 290, 301, 317, 321, 496 minorities, 2, 5, 6, 9, 14, 24, 26, 27, 30–32, 35, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46,

 Index 

49–53, 57, 59, 60, 61n4, 61n9, 62n27, 65n64, 66n66, 75, 84, 141, 146, 161, 171, 175, 212, 222, 239, 333–339, 343–350, 405, 434, 436, 440, 445, 484, 498, 513 profile, 248 repertoire, 248, 371, 465 rights, 6, 32, 37, 40, 43, 45, 50, 53, 57, 60, 68n96, 77, 81, 159, 175, 181–197, 213, 219–221 (human) rights, 6 tokenism, 486 variables, 15n8, 312, 316, 317 Lisu, language, 520, 524, 527 Literacy adult, 315, 405, 409–419, 421–423 definition, 407, 408 policy, 417, 418 rate, 315, 389, 405, 407, 411, 414, 417 Lithuania, 23, 562 Ljouwert, 489, 495 London, 166, 555 Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life, 32, 63n35, 68n100 M

Macao, 522 Macedonian, language, 169, 323 Maintenance, language, 7, 216, 235–250, 294, 320, 337, 363, 366, 372, 435, 451, 454, 473, 474, 486, 488 Majority, 2, 26, 36, 47, 48, 53, 56, 80, 114, 134, 139, 149, 154, 161, 162, 167, 172, 174, 183–185, 196, 212, 213, 222, 244, 247, 260, 292, 299, 314, 315, 326, 334–336, 346–348, 350, 358, 370, 386, 392, 406, 407, 435, 444, 454, 457, 467, 485–487,

601

492, 498, 499, 514, 517, 532, 546, 553, 554, 556, 557, 559, 563, 566, 578 language, 12, 50, 220, 221, 241, 289, 298, 302, 311, 322, 335–337, 409, 443–445, 452, 453, 457–460, 463, 465, 467, 468, 473, 490, 493–496 Malana, 511 Malawi, 314, 320, 513 Malay Brunei, 387, 394–396 standard, 395, 396 Malaysia Bangsa, 153 East, 383, 390, 397 Malayan, 151, 154, 387 Malaysian, 151 West, 383, 386, 397 Manchu, language, 514 Manx, language, 475n14 Māori, language, 210, 212, 302n8, 465, 471, 474, 521, 523 Market(s), 288, 290–296, 298–301 conditions, 289, 290 job, 9, 288, 289, 291, 292 labour, 296 linguistic, 2, 289, 290, 301, 317, 321, 496 long tail, 299, 300 processes, 287 segmentation, 300 souvenir, 300 value, 9, 288, 289, 292, 299, 301, 317, 318 Marketing, 9, 288, 291, 292, 298–300, 302, 320, 321 May, S., 164 Maze prison, 165 Media, 288, 290–295, 298, 299, 301, 302n4, 302n5, 302n8 analogue, 442 community, 441 demand, 49 digital, 294, 442, 443, 446, 454

602 Index

Media (cont.) electronic, 44, 263, 271, 359, 418 ethnic, 302n5, 434 genre, 436 indigenous, 469 language, 43, 433–446 legacy, 441, 442, 446 minority, 11, 44, 82, 90, 292, 433, 442 online, 11, 293, 433, 441 otitis, 372 social, 2, 11, 12, 439, 440, 444, 451–474 supply, 433, 435, 437, 444 use, 433, 440, 441, 443, 452 Medium of instruction, 26, 44, 47, 49, 312–315, 317–319, 322, 324–326, 368, 392, 409 Memel Territory, 23 Meritocracy, 153 Métis, 265, 266, 279n8 Migrant language, 496, 513 transnational, 14 Migration, 1, 2, 6–7, 14, 190, 221, 236, 238–240, 245–250, 259, 261, 275, 292, 384, 434, 510–512, 514, 518, 556, 557, 567 Minangkabau, language, 513 Minderheitsschutz, 145 Minorities definition, 406–407 ethnic, 32, 34–36, 77, 185, 191, 397, 434, 485 linguistic, 14, 24, 27, 31, 40, 41, 84, 141, 146, 222, 347–350, 405, 434, 445, 513 national, 32, 191, 437 religious, 40 Rohingya, 36, 58 studies, 568 transnational, 143, 236 treaties, 22–30, 36, 55, 59, 60, 61n3 Austria, 23

Bulgaria, 23 Czechoslovakia, 23, 143 Greece, 23 Hungary, 23, 143 Poland, 23 Romania, 23, 146, 443 Turkey, 23, 143, 441 Yugoslavia, 23, 55, 143, 144, 155, 169, 195, 323 Minoritisation, 287, 289, 290, 293 Minority languages, 287–301, 302n9, 303n14 Minzu (minority), 521 Mixing, language, 248, 271 Mobile phones, 367, 452 Mobility, 289 Mobility, social and globalisation, 209, 236, 246, 247 and language, 235–250 transnational, 235–250 Modernity, 134, 155, 393, 452, 554 Modernization, 258 Monegasque, language, 496 Monolingual education, 213 mindset, 313 Monolingualism, 53, 174, 184, 313, 366, 485 Montreal, 276, 493, 495 Morphology, 367, 370 Moscow, 82, 84, 87, 89, 91, 573 Moseley, C., 258, 262, 510 Mother tongue, 9, 10, 25, 29, 30, 46, 48–50, 78, 87, 171, 188, 191, 192, 209, 241, 269, 314, 323, 359, 408–416, 420–423, 443, 514, 520, 526 Multilingualism/multilingual, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14, 53, 146, 154, 168, 169, 215, 240, 245, 247–250, 257, 258, 271–274, 287–288, 313, 324, 336, 342, 359–361, 371, 406, 408–411, 416, 419, 420, 422–425, 433,

 Index 

437, 446, 457, 466, 467, 470, 485, 487, 488, 493, 495, 497–499, 526 urban, 247, 493, 496 Multimodal/multimodalities, 294, 359, 365, 367 Multinational empires, 133, 134, 142, 146 Multiracialism, 153 Murrinhpatha, 361, 363, 367 Museumification, 520 Mussolini, B., 164 Myanmar/Burma, 134, 383, 386, 387, 389–392, 517, 518, 520, 524 N

Names, see Language (by definition), rights Narrative, 13, 162, 164, 174, 175, 362, 365, 518, 558 Nation ethnic, 3, 73, 138 political, 89, 135–137 state, 80, 85, 133–155, 162, 184, 189, 288, 383, 386, 393, 487, 566, 579 National councils, 183, 193, 200n51 cultural autonomy (NCA), 5, 79, 86 culture, 145, 186, 390, 391 curriculum, in Autralia, 359 identity, 52, 490 languages surveys, in Autralia, 358 minorities, 3, 6, 25, 30–32, 40, 46, 49, 50, 55–57, 59, 60, 67n87, 68n95, 68n96, 68n100, 68n101, 69n104, 74–76, 83–85, 169, 173, 181, 184, 188–194, 198n7, 200n48, 210, 294, 433, 437–439, 446 National Association of Cameroon Language Committees (NACALCO), 413

603

National cultural autonomies (NCAs) (Russia), 5, 6, 79, 86, 181–197, 197n1, 198n12, 198n15, 198n17, 199n33, 199n34, 200n39, 200n49 National cultural autonomy legislation in Estonia (“NCA Act”), 189, 190, 199n33 in Hungary (“Minority Law”), 191, 192, 200n39, 200n40 in Russia (“NCA Law”), 185–195 in Serbia (“NC Law”), 193, 194, 201n52, 201n56 Nationalism multicultural, 5, 140, 144, 148, 151, 171, 433, 558 transnational, 7, 14, 169, 209, 235–250, 264 Nationality, see Citizenship Nationality self-government (NSG) (Hungary), 191–193, 200n42 Nation-states, 4, 133–155, 162, 184, 249, 288, 312, 313, 315, 383, 386, 393, 487, 566, 579 Nativization, 522 Naturalization, 139, 562 Neapolitan, language, 496 Negotiation, 12, 23, 80, 135, 149–155, 220, 260, 268, 298, 484, 485, 487 Nepal, 324, 511, 528n1 Netherlands, 208, 212, 239, 495, 516 Net speak, 465, 466 Network language, 109, 467, 468 New signers, 210, 216 speakers, 2, 14, 114, 123, 247, 488, 554 New Zealand, 1, 212, 216, 237, 239, 521, 523, 534, 539, 550n8 Ngaanyatjarra, 361, 362, 365 Nissart, 496 Niuean, language, 474

604 Index

Non-discrimination, 4, 40, 46, 48, 51, 60, 161 See also Equality Norfolk (the Norfolk Island language), language, 13, 522, 532–549, 549n2, 549n3, 549n5, 549n6, 550n8 Normalisation, 174, 213–214, 216, 222 medical, 213–214, 222 Normativism, 571–573, 579, 583n28 Northern Ireland, 160, 165, 169, 174 Nunavik, 268, 269, 272, 273, 276, 279n13, 279n19 Nunavut, 262 Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (NLCA), 269 Nuosu, language, 519–521 O

Oaxacan, language, 463 Obsolescence, language, 216 Occitan, language, 487, 496 Ohrid Framework Agreement, 168 Olthuis, M.-L., 522 Online media, 293, 299 Ontologies, 218, 264 Organisation, 23, 27, 28, 30–32, 42, 51, 54, 55, 65n65, 104, 105, 108, 110, 120, 121, 159, 166, 173, 175, 183, 191, 195, 198n18, 211, 222, 245, 250, 302n5, 384, 414, 415, 422, 453, 459, 468 non-governmental (NGO), 102, 293, 412, 413, 418, 421 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Bolzano/Bozen Recommendations on National Minorities in Inter-State Relations, 68n100, 437, 439

Guidelines on Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media, 436–439 High Commissioner on National Minorities, 55, 57, 65n65, 68n95, 69n104 Ljubljana Guidelines on Integration of Diverse Societies, 68n100, 437 Orthography, 13, 517, 519, 523, 560, 567, 572 Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, 32, 40, 50, 60, 63n33, 67n87, 68n96, 68n100, 68n101 Ossetia, 86, 91 Ossetian, language, 78, 91 Ottoman empire, 23, 142, 163, 170, 182, 558 Ownership, 151, 163, 174, 217, 288, 365, 452 P

Palestine, 524, 558, 566 Papua New Guinea (PNG), 11, 405, 417–419 Participant observation, 243 Participation, 6, 29, 32, 36, 46, 50, 52, 53, 57, 171, 194, 197, 212, 219, 220, 277, 314, 324, 384, 413, 434 political, 190, 222, 424 Patrie ouverte, 136, 137 Patuá, language, 522, 526 Paysage linguistique, 493 Peace processes, 160–162, 171 Peer interaction, 273, 365 Penan, 393–398 Eastern, 394 Performance, 109, 114, 116, 133, 272, 293, 303n13, 520

 Index 

Peripheral/periphery, 8, 186, 245, 259, 287, 290, 293, 297–299, 301, 302n9, 313, 494, 499 Permanent Court of International Justice, 26, 61n4, 66n68 Permissibility, 456–461 Person, K. R., 145, 392, 518 Personalised, 299 Personality principle, 5 Philippines, 10, 383, 384, 386, 387 Phonology, 367, 535, 582n20 Pidgin, language, 13, 411, 417, 532, 547 Pintupi-Luritja, 369 Pisin, language, 417, 418 Pitcairn (the Pitcairn Island language), language, 13, 522, 532–548, 550n8 Pitjantjatjara, 361, 366, 367 Place names, 168, 543, 546 Planning acquisition, 484, 488 corpus, 484, 488, 553, 573 language, 13, 15n6, 104, 105, 160, 164, 169, 212, 222, 296, 312, 316, 320, 322, 323, 325, 388, 390, 398, 451, 470, 493, 579 (see also Social media) prestige, 311, 312, 319–326, 484 status, 484, 487 Plural societies, 4, 149, 150, 155 Plurilingualism, 173, 174, 187 Poland, 23, 24, 141, 143, 562, 563, 567 Policy family language, 554 language, 3, 78, 86, 102–104, 107, 111, 114, 116, 120, 122, 163, 164, 167–169, 210–212, 267–271, 273, 287, 290, 291, 294, 295, 301, 302n6, 312, 316, 324, 335, 384–393, 407, 412, 413, 423, 457–460, 482, 484–491,

605

493–496, 498, 512, 513 (see also Social media) literacy, 417, 418 multilingual, 11, 409, 410, 422 national, 4, 11, 269, 409, 521, 523 production of, 482 reception of, 9 sign language, 210–212 Polish nationals, 24 Politeness, and language, 463 Politics language, 171, 172, 267, 268, 271, 278 of recognition, 2, 4, 5, 133–135, 147, 155 Population exchange, 143, 191 Portugal, 145, 311, 493, 522 Post-structuralist, 249 Power, 2, 9–12, 29, 74, 75, 79, 81, 84, 92, 102, 103, 107, 110, 113, 116, 117, 121, 139, 146, 150, 152, 153, 160, 162, 163, 172–174, 186, 208, 211, 218, 259, 263, 267, 277, 289, 300, 313, 314, 316, 318, 321, 333, 334, 337, 342, 350, 366, 384, 386, 390, 391, 393, 395, 398, 399, 406, 408, 424, 433–446, 451, 454, 471, 482, 483, 490, 492, 493, 495, 496, 526, 565 Practices ethical research, 218 language, 7, 8, 10, 209, 218, 236, 247, 249, 250, 257, 274, 287, 296, 317, 357–373, 388, 457, 483, 484, 487 Prestige, language, 196, 292, 293, 319, 455 Pride, 288, 297 Print media, 293 Private life, right to, 27, 41–43, 60 Problems, 2, 5, 39, 68n97, 88, 118, 120, 183, 184, 189, 196, 211, 313, 320, 321, 336, 390, 391,

606 Index

396, 420, 438–441, 468, 509, 510, 517, 520, 521, 524, 542, 545, 546, 549n7, 563, 575, 581n15 language, 390, 563 Product(s) language, 291, 293, 297–300, 317, 350 niche, 290, 298 print, 292, 418 Profit(s), 15n12, 288, 291, 298, 301, 349, 397, 452 Promotion, language, 4, 110, 122, 123n3, 263, 323 Proportionality, principle of, 52 Protection culture, 4, 80, 184 language, 2–4, 28, 36–39, 80, 114, 166, 175, 195, 484 Public signage, 172, 486–488, 497 bilingual, 495 Public space, 12, 162, 165, 166, 171, 172, 175, 434, 459, 481, 485, 490, 492, 494, 495, 498 Publishing, 43, 289, 295, 559, 563, 567, 569 Yiddish, 559, 560, 563 Pupavac, V., 171, 172 Purism lexical, 569 movement, 553 Purnell, H. C., 518 Q

Québec/Quebec, 66n70, 108, 261, 262, 265, 268, 269, 279n13, 279n15, 338, 487, 491, 492, 494 Questionnaire, 241, 244 R

Race, 23, 24, 29, 32, 41, 77, 81, 151, 245

Radio, 43, 52, 53, 77, 121, 276, 293, 294, 437, 442, 445 Rainbow nations, 150 Reclamation, 368, 514–520, 522–528, 532 Recognition of languages, 4, 167, 172, 175 of speakers, 4 Reconciliation, 5, 14, 111, 113, 159–176 Reform (language) education, 190, 561 spelling, 564, 575 of vocabulary, 564 Regimes of toleration, 133–135, 147 Registers, 183, 186, 189, 194, 201n54, 465, 583n21 Religion Chinese, 149 right to, 40 Renativization, 519, 522–524 Renner, K., 182–184, 187, 195, 197 Repertoire, language, 247, 248, 250, 289, 357, 359, 371, 372, 465 Representation, 105, 133, 162, 187, 193, 195, 197, 212, 222, 274, 436, 438, 481, 492, 497, 547 Republics (ethnic, Russia), 74, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 90–92, 187, 188 Reserve lands, 264, 265 Residential schools, 266 Resilience community, 474 for minority lanuguages, 509–528, 578 thinking, 13, 509 Resistance, language, 31, 215, 291, 386, 391, 486, 579 Revitalization, language, 2, 12, 259, 274–277, 583n24 Revival, language, 482, 555 Rice, K. D., 528 Rights, 288, 289, 292, 298, 300 (linguistic) human, 6, 219, 541 indigenous language, 267

 Index 

language broadcasting, 43, 44, 65n64, 116, 292, 439 criminal proceedings, 66n71 education, 83, 111, 269, 392 media, 2, 292, 526 names, 29, 42, 43 private, 24, 25, 41–43, 489 public offices and administration, 105, 107, 290 to private life, 27, 41–43, 60 to religion, 40 to self-determination, 2, 4, 6, 81, 268 Roche, G., 510 Roma, 143, 192, 200n42 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), 266 Rumantsch, language, 524, 526 Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON), 261 Russian Federation/Russia, 3, 6, 73–92, 143–145, 168, 173, 181, 182, 185–188, 196, 197n1, 198n10, 198n17, 261, 438, 562–564 Russian, language, 39, 73–92, 92n2, 172, 173, 185, 187–192, 198n8, 198n10, 198n18, 199n19, 199n20, 261, 525, 557 Empire, 3, 74–79, 87, 559 in Estonia, 181, 185, 188 Federation (see Russian Federation/ Russia) republics, 74, 81, 82, 85, 87, 90–92, 187, 188 in Russia, 3, 79, 83, 84, 86–90, 182, 185–187, 190, 198n17 Russian-speakers, 173, 189, 190 Rwanda, 5, 160, 167, 168

607

S

Saami Council, 261 Salt, D., 509 Sámi, language, 8, 51, 210, 288, 293–298, 300, 436, 444, 445, 486 Sanskrit, language, 154, 519 Sardinian, language, 146, 496 Schleswig-Holstein, 174 Schmidt, A., 514 Schools hobby, 190, 199n30 minority/national, 44, 66n69, 182, 192 private, 44 state/public, 24, 26, 46, 47, 189, 191, 192, 241 Sunday, 187, 567 Scotland, 104, 293, 325, 443 Script Chinese, 154, 519 Cyrillic, 81, 171 Hebrew, 491 Roman, 270, 491 Segmenting, 300 Segregation, social, 490 Self-determination, 2, 4–6, 23, 60n2, 61n3, 79, 81, 183, 212, 213, 222, 268 Self-government, 93n2, 181, 186, 191, 193, 194 Self-representation, 222, 436 Semi-speaker, 522, 525 Senegal, 11, 320, 406, 411, 414–417, 419–421 Serbia, 6, 22, 144, 169, 170, 181, 182, 185, 193–196, 197n1, 201n52 Serbian, language, 22, 143, 170, 171, 193, 200n48, 200n49 Serbo-Croat, language, 169, 170 Service era, 293 Settlement, 2, 107, 123n4, 183, 189, 191, 194, 235–250, 258, 265,

608 Index

266, 268, 279n8, 393, 485, 496, 556 Shift, language (LS), 7, 13, 14, 15n5, 215, 216, 235–245, 247–250, 250n2, 289, 290, 372, 510, 513, 515, 516, 525 intergenerational, 187 Siberia, 78, 144, 523, 525 Sicilian, language, 496 Sign language, 6, 207–221, 223n1, 223n2 communities, 6 interpreting (remote), 6, 219–221 legislation, 212, 213 planning, 210–212, 222 policy, 210–212, 216, 221, 222 popularization, 217 recognition, 211–213, 217, 222 standardization, 212 translation, 219 Sign Language Interpreting (SLI), 215, 219–221 Sign linguistics, 217–218 Signs, 295, 297 commercial, 66n70, 489, 493 private, 42, 66n70, 496 public, 492, 497 transgressive, 487 Silent, 33, 560, 563, 578, 582n20, 583n30 alef (in Yiddish), 562 SIL International, 410, 413, 415 Simons, G. F., 278n7, 454, 510 Singapore, 153, 325, 383, 384, 387, 392, 395, 398 Skutnabb Kangas, T., 163, 208, 211, 219, 311, 389 Slovenia, 169, 171, 496 Slovenian, language, 143, 496 Social media (see Social media) network, 242–243, 245, 248, 249, 452, 453, 460, 463, 466–470, 513

psychology of language, 243–244 Socialisation, 358, 360–363 Social media, 292, 294, 436 audience, 463, 464 and geo-spatial analysis, 470–473 and identity, 465 and language change, 464–466 and language choice, 461, 463, 466, 467 and language policy, 457–460 motivation for joining, 457 and social network, 452, 453, 460, 463, 466–469 Societies civil, 102, 111, 120–122, 186, 198n17, 410, 413, 415, 421, 422, 438 conflicted, 160, 161, 172, 175, 390 ethnically divided, 153 plural, 4, 149, 150, 155 post-conflict, 160, 168, 169, 172, 176 Sociology of language, 237, 240–243, 245, 359, 571 Software, 296 Sorbian, language, 486, 490 South Africa, 108–110, 134, 147, 150, 160, 168, 173, 239, 319, 320, 323, 565 South Australia, 361, 525 Southeast Asia (SEA), 134, 383–399, 524 South-Tyrol, 146, 174 Soviet Union, see Russian Federation/ Russia Spaces breathing, 467, 474 cyber, 456, 486 educational, 488 virtual, 474 Spain, 4, 79, 109, 141, 150, 163, 164, 174, 236, 302, 311, 324, 495 Spanish, language, 65n64, 166, 175, 311, 313, 314, 317, 319, 321,

 Index 

323, 324, 351n1, 466, 495, 497, 567 Puerto Rican (Spanish), 465 Special Rapporteur, 32–34 Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, 32, 40, 175 Spelling norms, 563 reform, 562, 564, 575 rules, 562, 563, 569 Staatsnation, 141–144 Stalin, 143, 562, 564, 566 Standard Australian English (SAE), 357, 359, 369, 370 Standardization language, 292, 517 sign language, 212 Standard language, 249, 524, 570 State kin, 2, 25, 55, 444 language, 48, 76, 80–82, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92–93n2, 183, 184, 187, 194, 196, 197, 198n8, 335, 438, 443, 485, 495 Status language, 104, 168, 173, 212 marital, 241 Sukang, 395–397 Superdiversity, 247, 249, 483 Supply, 287, 291, 295 Sustainability, 7, 277, 423, 442 Sustainable development, 37, 261 Sweden, 190, 239, 248, 278n4, 445 Swedish community (Estonia), 6, 23, 197n1, 199n33, 200n39, 488 Swedish, language, 51, 188–190, 199n34, 237, 248–250, 443–445 Switzerland, 4, 53, 113, 134, 147, 155, 335, 337, 524 Symbolic, 289, 292, 294, 297 Symbolic value, 292

609

T

Talmud, 556 Tatars, language, 3, 74, 75, 78–80, 86–92, 185, 188, 199n24 Tatarstan, 3, 76, 79, 80, 84, 86–88, 90–92, 186, 188 Taylor, C, 161 Teachers, 10, 86, 187, 200n44, 210, 268, 269, 273–275, 294, 359, 369–371, 395–397, 418, 424, 464, 516, 521–523, 564, 566, 567, 569, 572, 575 indigenous, 269, 294, 359 Teaching materials, 296 indigenous, 269, 294, 359 minority language, 187, 200n44, 293, 294, 521 Technologies, 293, 296 communication, 7, 11, 257, 293, 367, 440, 455, 457, 474 language processing, 296 Television, 43, 52, 53, 77, 121, 271, 292–294, 302n3, 367, 436, 437, 442, 445 Terra Nullius, 264 Territoriality extra-territoriality, 188 and transnationalism, 246, 264 Territorial/territory, 5, 24, 25, 50, 51, 75, 76, 81, 84, 86, 135, 137, 140–142, 146, 148, 151, 154, 160, 162, 172, 182, 183, 185–188, 191, 208, 238, 264, 269, 270, 275, 334, 485, 487, 493, 509, 511, 537, 549n3, 565 autonomy, 5, 25, 75, 137, 182, 185 principle, 75, 81, 141, 182, 183 territorial concentration (minorities), 50, 51 Text Biblical, 565

610 Index

minority language, 9, 21, 43, 44, 77, 194, 211, 295, 334–336, 434 Textbooks, 86, 187, 194, 198n18, 568 Texting, 237, 263, 273, 274, 294, 297, 334, 337, 339–341, 343, 345–347, 389, 407, 423, 455, 465, 489, 519, 520, 556, 560 and language use, 294, 297, 317 Text talk, 465 Thailand, 145, 383–385, 387, 390–392, 511, 517, 518, 520, 523 Thieberger, N., 525 Tibetan, language, 295 Tigrinya, language, 497 Timor Leste (East Timor), 383 Tiwi, 371 Tokenistic/tokenism, 119, 297, 301, 482, 486, 499 Tolerance, 52, 133, 190, 438, 488, 489 regimes of, 133–135, 147 TOSTAN, 415, 416, 426n11 Tourism, 288–292, 296, 297, 302n9 heritage, 297, 298 language, 291, 296–298, 486 language heritage, 297 Traditional child-rearing practices, 360 Transcultural, 299 Translanguaging, 371 Translation, 291, 295, 296 functions in minority communities, 336 industry (into/from) minority language, 296 sign language, 219 language interference, 337 language planning, 168, 337 power relations, 9, 333, 334, 337, 350 technologies, 296, 334, 340, 341, 344

effect on quality of translations, 340, 347 effect on translator status, 342 industrialization of translation, 342 machine translation systems (MT), 339, 340, 342, 344–345, 348, 349 risks of MT for linguistic minority communities, 350 translation memory systems (TM), 339, 340, 342 Translation Bureau of Canada history and evolution, 343–344 investigation, 346–348 Portage (machine translation tool), 344–348 role, 343 transformation, 9, 334, 344 Translation studies, 338, 346 Translator professional, 9, 333, 334, 338, 340, 342, 345, 350 role, 347, 348 working conditions, 333, 342, 350 workstation, 339–341 Transliteration, 43 Transmission patterns, 208, 214 Transnational migrants, 14 network, 209 Transnationalism, 7, 164, 168–171, 173, 175, 235–250, 264 Travaux préparatoires, 33–35 Treaties, 5, 22–31, 33, 35, 36, 38–40, 44, 46, 49, 55, 59, 60, 60n2, 61n3, 64n53, 74, 79, 80, 84, 88, 90, 143, 146, 160, 164, 166, 168, 264, 279n13 Treaty of Peace with Italy, 28, 30 Trentino, 164 Trento, 29 Trieste, 496

 Index 

Trilingualism, 556, 557 internal Jewish, 556 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 266 Tujia, language, 515 Turkey, 23, 139, 143, 163, 164, 239 Twitter, 445, 452, 457–459, 463–469, 471, 472, 474 Typology, 15n2, 515, 522, 527, 534, 537, 538, 542 U

Ulster-Scots, 165 Uluru, 514 UNESCO, see United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization Uniqueness, 197, 288, 289 United Nations (UN) Charter, 28 General Assembly, 28, 35 Human Rights Committee, 33–36, 48, 66n70 Special Rapporteur on minority issues, 32, 40, 175 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), 266 United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 12, 37–39, 50, 65n53, 159, 168, 258, 262, 269, 315, 397, 405, 407–412, 414, 417, 423, 425n2, 425n3, 426n14, 452, 454, 513, 533, 546 United States of America (U.S.A.), 51, 135, 150, 168–170, 175, 214, 218, 219, 237, 238, 278n4, 441, 497, 518, 562, 565–567, 571, 572, 580n4

611

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 28, 54–57, 437 Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, 159 Upper Nazareth, 492 Upper Silesia, 23 Urban, 523 Inuit, 276 multilingualism, 247 rural, 384, 491, 496 Urla, J., 164 Usefulness, of language, 8, 53, 290, 322 Use-value, 297 USSR, see Russian Federation/Russia V

Value core, 244–245, 361 exchange, 9, 288–300, 318 of languages, 14, 289 market, 288, 295, 296, 318, 322, 327 Van der Stoel, Max, 68n95, 69n104 van Engelenhoven, A., 516 Variety, language, 238, 247, 260–263, 270, 273, 275, 277, 317, 318, 386, 483, 498, 534, 537 Versailles peace negotiations, 23 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 35 Vienna Declaration on Human Rights, 32 Vietnam, 383, 387, 391 Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno), 561, 569 Visibility, 2, 11–12, 57, 292, 295, 436, 453, 482, 485, 486, 494, 496, 517 of language(s), 12, 210, 293, 460, 482, 486, 488–491, 495–497, 526

612 Index

Vitality ethnolinguistic, 243–245, 482, 493, 515 (digital) language, 454–456 Vojvodina, 195 Volk Volksgeist, 138 Volksseele, 138 W

Walker, B., 509 Walloon, language, 493, 495 Walmajarri, 363 Warlpiri, 361, 363, 364, 366 Warumungu, 363 Watt-Cloutier, S., 257, 260, 266, 268, 269, 277 Weinreich, M., 237, 239, 556, 568, 569, 580n2, 581n8, 581n12 Weinreich, U., 237, 239, 568–570 Welsh, language, 12, 104–107, 123n4, 292, 297, 301, 302n8, 302n10, 325, 445, 457–461, 463–465, 467–473 Westminster, 166 Whorf, 527 Wikimedia, 459 Wikipedia, 452, 455, 459, 474 World Bank, 50, 406, 410

World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), 209, 211, 218, 222 World War First, 22, 23, 25, 27, 59, 61n3, 61n11, 135, 137, 144, 145, 164, 191, 237, 496, 559, 562, 563, 584n30 Second, 22, 23, 26–32, 56, 59, 77, 143, 160, 190, 191, 237, 239, 265, 269, 386, 543, 574 Wroge, D., 517 Wumpurrarni English, 362–365 Y

Yankunytjatjara, 361 Yiddish as ‘bad German’, 572 Borokhovian, 562, 563 Germanised, 561 secular, 563, 566–568, 573, 574, 578 semantics, 563 Soviet, 564, 566, 573 Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yivo), 561, 562, 568–570 Yolngu, 361 Young, I., 171 YouTube, 452, 464, 525, 580n7