Re: CHAT: language and politics (was CHAT: conlangs and mental illness)

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

>In the Netherlands (and as far as I know in the rest of the European
>Union), there are three grades of official languages: Official Language,
>Official Minority Language and Class 2 Minority Language. This only
>holds for indigenous languages; immigrant languages are another chapter.
[snip]

Interesting!  That sounds like what India has: Hindi as official language,
English as associate official (it's being phased out gradually though), and
14 additional languages mentioned in the Consitution.  What are they
again... Urdu, Marathi, Gujurati, Panjabi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya,
Kashmiri, Sinhala?, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam... I forget the
others.

South Africa goes so far as to have 11 [!] official languages: of course
English and Afrikaans, plus Zulu, Xhosa, Northern and Southern Sotho,
siSwati and others.  Khoisan languages such as Nama are protected indigenous
languages.

Canada of course recognizes English and French as official, and I think they
give a lot of Native American languages special protection.  (In the US on
reservations Indians have some self-government, so they can use whatever
language(s) they want to among themselves.)  This year, a new territory is
being created from the eastern Northwest Territories; the territory is
called Nunavut, which means "our land" in Inuktitut, so Inuktitut would have
official status there.

Mexico, as far as I know, doesn't give much legal status to Nahuatl, Mayan,
Zapotec and other indigenous languages, which is a shame because they are
spoken by millions, and there is strong ethnic pride among these peoples.

Danny


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