 Track this topic | Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | | User | Thread poster: Raf Uzar Language Legislation |
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Parrot 
Spain
Local time: 17:39
  Member (2002)
Spanish to English
+ ...
MODERATOR |
Raf Uzar wrote:
Would could have possibly pushed them towards this? |
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We can't generalise, and I'm far from speaking authoritatively on Slovakia and Latvia, but certain movements and trends come in waves that require time to settle. (Admittedly, this is not a satisfactory response from the point of view of citizen's rights).
We talk about identity. An enlightened group of local governments are now beginning to deal with this in terms of "asset management", taking the population as human assets. This means that they must be willing to accept the impact of those assets upon the greater abstract concept of "identity", which dies hard. The consequence of not doing so is greater resistance, with an idea pitted against the facts.
From another angle, taking it out on language, or using language as a weapon, is one way of casting the blame (for whatever) upon outside factors. The wave tends to settle down when people realise that their problems are not largely the fault of outside factors. But this kind of soul-searching is difficult, since it involves a fair amount of self-criticism (i.e., "the problem could be you").
  | | | | Raf Uzar
Poland
Local time: 17:39
Polish to English
TOPIC STARTER |
Parrot,
Interesting take on this...
| | | | lai an
New Zealand
Local time: 05:39
Chinese to English
| | before, during and after 'foreign' rule: language policies, modernisation, social evolution etc | Jul 12 |
@ raf, parrot, Latvian peers and others
1 What has pushed the Latvian authorities to be so strict ...? Perhaps it's an attempt to restore the situation to what it was pre-the Soviet era, and to encourage non-naturalised residents to become citizens (?) This article gives quite a lot of background: http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/issuedetails.aspx?issueid=eaf17886-212b-4d36-a2ad-fe8a99d b4e57&articleId=70ca767a-08eb-422a-ad01-8684a3c79b58 Dace Strelēvica Ošiņa, D., Druviete, I., «Some Aspects of the Sociolinguistic Situation in Latvia: Causes and Effects» [There is also an article here on linguistic purism in Croatia: http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/issuedetails.aspx?issueid=eaf17886-212b-4d36-a2ad-fe8a99d b4e57&articleId=9b9ad066-1bcd-4b25-816c-29b97ee9dfb0 ]
2 The article suggests that Latvia was 'liberated' by the Soviet Union (and is now in a 'post-colonial' phase). Liberation means liberated from backwardness or exploitation, I guess, by a new form of government. Perhaps this can be compared to the liberation of the Oroqen in China (link below), or to colonial settlement in the Pacific, for that matter. The idea of liberated or colonised peoples being 'less advanced' is a not uncommon trope, IMO. It is spelt out further, more generally and systematically, in the 'Oroqen' article (excerpt below).
Lesley
[ 1 http://www.proz.com/forum/chinese/96553-对人生与社会的思考-page22.html#822211
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroqen
3 'The Oroqen are one of China's minority nationalities. According to the 1957 statistics they comprised only around 2,400 people, who lived in the dense forests on the richly productive Xing'anling mountains in the north of Heilongjiang Province. "Oroqen" is the name this nationality calls itself; it means "person of the mountain ridges". ... After New China was established, the backward primitive system, the cruel slave system, and the benighted feudal system were all replaced by the socialist system. Each minority nationality freed themselves from exploitation, and became masters in the new society. This was a cataclysmic great change. Today, in order to rid themselves even more of poverty and backwardness, they are now moving forward along the great socialist road. (translated from 'The Superior Socialist System: A huge change for the Oroqen' in Wang Yong Kuan et al., Native land, China Youth Press, Beijing, 1983) ]
[Edited at 2009-07-13 08:00 GMT]
| | | | Alan R King
Spain
Local time: 17:39
Basque to English
+ ...
| | For or against language planning? | Jul 13 |
Coming late to this discussion, it is clear that there is a certain "party" among the participants in the debate who are actually saying (though I don't think they have done so in so many words) that they oppose language planning.
There is of course a considerable literature and a whole academic (sub)discipline devoted to this subject, which became one of the important concerns of sociolinguistics in the twentieth century. Joshua Fishman is considered its most influential figure. Probably there are no real specialists in that theoretical area (myself included) in this forum, which is not necessarily a problem, but sometimes it is useful to bear in mind that we are discussing matters that have been given a great deal of thought and are the subject of university courses, postgraduate dissertations and scholarly books and journals.
A point to be borne in mind regarding language planning policies is that they may exist either explicitly or implicitly and be applied consciously (deliberately) or unconsciously (spontaneously). To draw an analogy, genocides do sometimes occur and governments do sometimes promote genocide; whether such a government explicitly formulates a genocidal policy as such and plans it deliberately or not is significant, but in any case genocide is still genocide. One consequence of the policy being explicit and deliberately planned is that presumably that could make it all the more efficient. Another consequence is that governments not stating such a policy explicitly can use a false discourse which denies that such a policy exists at all and thereby make it more difficult for opponents of the policy to attack and resist the policy. But just as genocide is still genocide however you look at it, language policies are practised one way or another all over the world by governments and other influential institutions, whether they admit it or not.
Thus the point of language planning is not to do something (namely act on language use in society) that wasn't already being done anyway, but rather to make it more explicit, conscious, deliberate, careful, effective, socially just, politically acceptable, and so on and so forth. In terms of political discourse, one function of introducing statements of planned language policy is to deal with processes and "policies" which were already there but not officially recognised and "hidden" from official discourse. Such policy statements, laws etc. may serve or at least be intended to correct undesired or undesirable processes that are already going on, or conversely to reinforce and rationalize ongoing processes. The pretence that until and unless institutions make explicit statements of language policy everything is happening "naturally" without impositions of any kind is at best naive.
One application of language planning is its use by governments to protect or advance the interests of nation-states concerning the implantation of the "national language", either by trying to stamp out minority languages spoken within the state in order to forge a more homogeneous official "national identy" or to resist the weakening of the local language under competition from more prestigious and powerful languages "from outside". In either case, the objective reality is that nation-states are artificial constructs to start with; they are founded upon the false premise that within a given state (= political entity) the population is homogeneous culturally, linguistically and identity-wise. Such uses of "top-down" language planning to promote linguistic uniformity are aimed at strengthening the state as a structure within which certain classes wield power locally.
Another application of language planning, however, is its use to protect linguistic minorities from the policies (whether overt or covert) of just such a nation state to which the minority happens to be politically subjugated whose cultural and linguistic identity are under threat (from such policies). That happens to be the kind of use of language planning that I am most interested in personally. It is essentially DEFENSIVE planning in that the reason why it is necessary is the existence of other policies, recognised or not, aimed at destroying minority communities and denying their collective and individual rights to maintain their own identity. Such planning may, in some cases, be the only hope that exists for the survival of such threatened cultures and languages given the outside pressures to which they are presently and have long been subjected. To deny the right or question the appropriateness of such action being taken is tantamount to denying the right of such communities to fight for their collective lives.
That is the bottom line and it is as well to point out the implications of taking a stand against language planning that argues that it is an imposition, as if that were the only imposition taking place.
| | | | Tomás Cano Binder, CT
Spain
Local time: 17:39
Member (2005)
English to Spanish
+ ...
| | Language planning, not different from racist oppression | Jul 13 |
Alan R King wrote:
Coming late to this discussion, it is clear that there is a certain "party" among the participants in the debate who are actually saying (though I don't think they have done so in so many words) that they oppose language planning. |
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I don't need many words to repeat my position: I completely oppose to language planning. To me, it is not very different from racist oppresion: if you speak this or that language, you are lowly and to be excluded from good society. The same as racist oppression. You just happen to be in the wrong race... or happen to be born in a family who speaks the wrong language.
Language planning always oppresses someone, and I am all against oppression. Let each person speak whatever they feel is best for them, and entitle them to have their mother tongue taught to their children in school. Anything else is sheer oppression, no matter who practices it or whether it is elegantly promoted with rich brochures depicting open skies and green pastures.
| | | | lai an
New Zealand
Local time: 05:39
Chinese to English
| | Central-Eastern Europe minority language typology; language use in various spheres: Poland | Jul 13 |
Raf Uzar wrote:
Lesley,
Yes, I was.  Thanks.
The situation in Poland is quite dissimilar. There was a moment when the legislators were thinking of doing something similar (around 8 years ago if memory serves) but nothing came of it. |
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Perhaps this paper is of interest:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/mercator/images/AberystwythTWicherkiewicz.pdf
1 It covers the Polish situation with minority language use in relation to:
Education
Radio and television
Press
Religious life
Cultural events
2 And has this proposal for a language typology:
A rough typology of European lesser-used language situations in Central-Eastern Europe (but also in Western European states) could then include the following categories:
- languages of national minorities, who have elsewhere their national/ethnic states, and often constitute transborder minorities (e.g. Hungarian in Slovakia and Slovenia, German in Poland and Czech Republic, Lithuanian in Poland and Latvia, Russian in the Baltic states);
- languages of national minorities, who do not have their national/ethnic states, and often inhabit territory belonging to more states (e.g. Ruthenian in Slovakia and Poland);
- non-territorial or diaspora languages – spoken be ethnies without an explicit national/ethnic territory (e.g. Yiddish and other Jewish languages, Romani dialect-complex, diaspora dialects of Armenian, Karaimic);
- microlanguages – spoken by extremely small number of speakers, often in isolated areas, on territories not exceeding a single colony or a group of settlements (the Germanic ethnolect of Wilamowice in Poland, the already-mentioned Karaimic as spoken in the town of Trakai in Lithuania, Livonian in Latvia, Izhorian in Estonia);
- regional languages – with the following general features: ...
[ Language in religion in Slovakia. I am a little interested in this because the Hungarian Federation in the US mentioned it as an issue in 2004. http://www.americanhungarianfederation.org/news_flagsinslovakia.htm
... priests do not speak Hungarian and the masses are held in Slovak, with only a few words ... uttered in Hungarian. ... The American Hungarian Federation hopes that recent Slovak accession to the European Union ... ]
| | | | Raf Uzar
Poland
Local time: 17:39
Polish to English
TOPIC STARTER |
Alan, many thanks for your comments.
The purpose of language planning is not unknown by most of us, I think. However, this knowledge and the idea that it is an academic subject does little, in my mind, to justify what is happening in all the above-mentioned countries. The term, language planning, is often negatively-loaded.
I understand the need to protect (a better word would be 'support') a linguistic heritage but to 'plan' is, I believe, far too strong a word and not necessarily the most delicate way to approach something as organic and 'living' as a language (which is always intrinsically linked to a group of people).
You have hit some interest ideas (and no doubt nerves as well), Alan. Many thanks.
Topic Source: http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/
| | | | John Rawlins
Spain
Local time: 17:39
Member (2007)
Spanish to English
+ ...
| | My nation is less artificial than yours | Jul 13 |
Alan makes the point that nation-states are artificial constructs. This may be true. However, territories shown on maps as containing a minority national language are usually equally artificial - being based on historical 'facts' rather than reality.
| | | | Raf Uzar
Poland
Local time: 17:39
Polish to English
TOPIC STARTER | | Tomás Cano Binder, CT
Spain
Local time: 17:39
Member (2005)
English to Spanish
+ ...
|
John Rawlins wrote:
Alan makes the point that nation-states are artificial constructs. This may be true. However, territories shown on maps as containing a minority national language are usually equally artificial - being based on historical 'facts' rather than reality. |
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Indeed!!
| | | | John Rawlins
Spain
Local time: 17:39
Member (2007)
Spanish to English
+ ...
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Yes, an interesting blog. I see you are a collector of European linguistic oddities.
| | | | Raf Uzar
Poland
Local time: 17:39
Polish to English
TOPIC STARTER | | Collector's riposte | Jul 13 |
One tries to accommodate one's perversions...
| | | | Tomás Cano Binder, CT
Spain
Local time: 17:39
Member (2005)
English to Spanish
+ ...
| | Maps and borders... too important! | Jul 13 |
I personally believe that those who care very much about maps and borders and make new borders where there was not one before are the people who are personally interested in the business of ruling a country or benefiting from the taxes of all.
What we need in Europe is to abolish all borders... and in fact start reducing the power so naïvely given to continental, national, regional, county, and local administrations. We are ruled by at least 5 different administrations and pay taxes to support them all. Just too much! We need to recover the power to the people and let people learn to responsibly organise things in common.
| | | | Raf Uzar
Poland
Local time: 17:39
Polish to English
TOPIC STARTER |
Tomas, drinking Coca-Cola and cancer also correlate. That doesn't mean that one causes the other...
| | | | lai an
New Zealand
Local time: 05:39
Chinese to English
| | Language Planning Goals, etc | Jul 14 |
| Raf Uzar wrote: ... The purpose of language planning is not unknown by most of us, I think. ... |
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Not well known to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning#Language_planning_goals
Linguists recognize eleven language planning goals:
1.Language Purification
2.Language Revival
3.Language Reform
4.Language Standardization
5.Language Spread
6.Lexical Modernization
7.Terminology Unification
8.Stylistic Simplification
9.Interlingual Communication
10.Language Maintenance
11.Auxiliary-Code Standardization
[ The state of play in NZ: suggested strategies:
1 Language Strategies: There should be specific national strategies for English literacy and ESOL, te reo Māori, New Zealand Sign Language, Pacific languages, community and heritage languages, and international languages. ...
2 Sector Strategies: There should be sector strategies for languages in the home, the community, education (early childhood centres, schools, tertiary), public services (including translation and interpretation services), business and broadcasting.
3 Current Strategies and Initiatives: There are existing strategies for English literacy, ESOL and te reo Māori. ...
http://www.hrc.co.nz/hrc_new/hrc/cms/files/documents/14-Feb-2008_12-31-36_Language_ Policy_Feb_08_V4.pdf Languages in Aotearoa: Statement on Language Policy ]
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