Re: Language Replacement (Re: French and US high school language instruction)

 --- "Thomas R. Wier" wrote:

> A well-written and IMHO generally correct article (although his
> documentation could have been better).
Agreed.

> Rosenfelder claims that a language's "fortunes" have often
> improved historically through conquest, and this is undoubtedly
> true.  But he wildly exaggerates the ability of sheer, raw
> domination to extend a language's influence.  In most cases
> in human history, political conquest has only succeeded in
> propagating the conquerors' language when the conquerors
> began to demographically outnumber speakers of other languages.
<snip>

This allows me to ride my hobby-horse a bit, Soviet nationalities policies.
One of the objectives of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was the merger
of all peoples (plural) inhabiting the territory into one great "Sovetskij
narod", which was to be accomplished in two steps: sblizhenije (rapprochement
in English?), and slijanije (merger). Unfortunately for all other nations and
nationalities than the Russian, both were in practice synonymous with
russification.
Russification was to be achieved in two ways:
- by colonization: large numbers of Russian speakers were moved to non-Russian
republics, while part of the latter's intelligentsia were removed from their
territories and relocated elsewhere.
- by oppressing the local languages. They were practically banned from the
public life, education was restricted, it became almost impossible to publish
anything else in them but communist propaganda, the use of them was considered
an act of nationalism (and automatically fascism), etc.

Evaluating the results:
In those territories that "joined" the Soviet Union during or shortly after
World War II (the Baltic states, Western Ukraine, Moldova) the local languages
are still very alive. The only result of russification policies is the presence
of a considerable Russian minority, that is impopular among the local
populations, which results in a lot of tension.
In those territories acquired earlier, especially those that have been part of
tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union for centuries, the situation is worse. I'm
not well-informed about the Caucasus and Central Asia, but in Ukraine and
Belorussia the situation is very bad. Especially since those languages are so
close to Russian, they had to suffer severely from the notion, superimposed by
the authorities, that they were nothing but backward Russian rural dialects. On
the long term, this strategy worked extremely well: many people started to feel
ashamed of using their native language; in order to have better chances in
society, they slowly abandoned it and decided to go for "the real thing",
Russian. It is still a fact that even among many Ukrainians the Ukrainian
language enjoys a bad reputation, and many of them can't even speak it anymore,
having Russian as their L1 instead.
Being language a language with over 50 million speakers, Ukrainian can
definitely not be considered an endangered language. Unfortunately, the same
cannot be said of Belorussian, a language that has effectively been largely
replaced with Russian. In many ways, the situation in Belorussia is similar to
that in Ireland.

> An interesting prediction made from this theory is that the
> English language will *not* replace languages on the
> European continent since American and British military
> contingents are placed only sparsely, and are not intended
> to be permanent settlements.)
:)))

No, but seriously: if you compare the linguist impact of the political
situation we had until ca. 10 years ago, you can draw a few conclusions.

In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Russian was actively promoted
and even imposed as the "lingua franca" of the socialist countries. There was
no intent (at least, on the short term) to replace the local languages with
Russian, although small and unsuccessful attempts were made to "shift" them
towards Russian by minor modifications to grammar (Polish) and orthography
(Romanian). The example of Easern Europese shows clearly that such a thing like
imposing a lingua franca by force, does not work. On the contrary, everybody
learnt a lot of Russian at school but categorically refuses to ever speak it
and mostly forgot it.
In the west, however, the popularity of the ever-present American culture has a
deep impact on language. In the Netherlands, this influence is obvious. Our
vocabulary, including a lot of slang words and technical terms, is fuller and
fuller of English loanwords and expressions, and in many cases the English word
became more fashionable than the Dutch equivalent. Many people believe that
Dutch is just an insignificant provincial language, not worth for any foreigner
to learn.
No purist has been able to stop this development until now.

I hope this text wasn't too boring for anyone who cared to read it :)

Jan

=====
"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought,
wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that
happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great
comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." --- J.
Michael Straczynski

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