Revivals, Nationalism, and Linguistic Discrimination

Threatening Languages

Kara Fleming, Umberto Ansaldo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317274070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Sociolingüística

Is linguistic revival beneficiary to the plight of newly emerging, peripheral or even 'threatened' cultures? Or is it a smokescreen that hides the vestiges of ethnocentric ideologies, which ultimately create a hegemonic relationship? This book takes a critical look at revival exercises ofspecial historical and geopolitical significance, and argues that a critical and cautious approach to revival movements is necessary.

The cases of Sinhala, Kazakh, Mongolian, Catalan, and even Hong Kong Cantonese show that it is not through linguistic revival, but rather through political representation and economic development, that the peoples in question achieve competitiveness and equality amongst their neighbors. On the other hand, linguistic revival in these and other contexts can, and has been, used to support nationalist or ethnocentric agendas, to the detriment of other groups, recreating the same dynamics that generated the argument for revival in the first place. This book argues that respect for linguistic and other diversity, multilingualism and multiculturalism, is not compatible with linguistic revival that mirrors nation-building andessentializing identity construction.

1 On language, power, and the nation

1.1 Background

From the 1990s to the 2010s, it seemed to many observers that nationalism was on its way out. Intellectuals and political commentators alike proposed new alternatives that would replace the nation-state, such as ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Appiah 1997), as a result of an optimistic evaluation of globalization processes (Fukuyama 1992). At present, however, it seems these optimistic evaluations were perhaps premature. From the USA to Russia and China, as well as in a number of smaller European countries, nationalist as well as racist agendas are strengthening and finding more vocal support. The alleged decline of violence and the imminent arrival of total enlightenment predicted (Pinker 2011, 2018) are being countered by military expansion into volatile areas such as the South China Sea, nuclear buildup in North Korea, and decades of violence in the Middle East.

These recent trends and events demonstrate that it is certainly premature to announce an end to nationalism and its associated evils. Nationalist symbols, politicians, institutions, and ideologies seem to have an enduring and perhaps even increasing appeal. What this book proposes to investigate is the way that language plays a central role in these nationalist ideologies, and particularly how these nationalist ideologies are appealed to and used by ‘minoritized’ or ‘reviving’ groups.

In what follows, the term ‘minority’ will be used in a relative sense. In general, a minority group – with their language a minority language – refers to a community that is not in a dominant position in a given society, not necessarily only a pure numerical minority. Often, this group may also be somewhat segregated, or excluded, from political agendas. Minorities may or may not be officially acknowledged by a state. In any case, minorities are often at some kind of disadvantage when compared to the majority group, in terms of power, health, and education. In general we can see that ‘minoritization’ of groups and languages is a social process of marginalization rooted in particular structures of power – groups become ‘minoritized’ through such practices of hierarchization and exclusion (May 2000, 2001, 2006). It is in such groups – as well as in groups that purport to be minorities when they are not, as this book will argue – that we may find movements of revival. When a minority group finds itself in a position where it fears to be losing its language and culture due to external pressures that often come from the majority group, it may initiate an active monitoring and support of its language, which may then often lead to or involve revival or revitalization. It should be noted that there is no exact distinction between these two terms in most of the linguistic literature. ‘Revival’ may be more often used to refer to the bringing back of a language that was actually defunct, such as ‘the revival of Hebrew’. More commonly found in macro-sociolinguistic discourse, it often refers to language planning at a national level. ‘Revitalization’ is a more recent term, part of and found more often in the discourse of the growing field of language documentation. As we will discuss in detail in the next section, in this book we make a clear distinction between the two terms. While revitalization to us indicates a genuine wish to support a disadvantaged language in a real minority context, revival refers to the process of ethnicity-building typical of nationalist movements. Here, we argue, notions of disadvantage and marginalization are not genuine, but artificially constructed. What we are interested in is unearthing the dimension of language as a central one in the manipulation process.

This book focuses on movements of linguistic revival as well as the discourse of threat or discrimination that certain groups experience or construct in politically sensitive contexts. We argue that in language revival movements and in the discourse of language threat, the goal is not increased democratic access and participation, as is often maintained by the groups embarking on such projects and by external observers who describe them favorably, but rather a re-creation of the nationalist ideal simply applied to a previously undermined or constructed minority or ‘threatened’ group. Specifically, we propose that there are aspects of linguistic revival when it comes to ethnic agendas that, more often than not, result in discrimination, abuse, and even violence. As we will show, the groups discussed in our case studies are heavily invested in, or in the process of moving toward, nation-state ideals of unity, shared national symbols, and cultural and linguistic homogeneity. The opposition between ‘nation’ and ‘minority’ is recursively reproduced on multiple levels through debates on language (Irvine & Gal 2000). One of the central themes of this book will be to unravel the dynamics of essentializing discourses.

By essentializing, we mean the assigning of a special status and internally shared characteristics to a given group in terms of language, culture, and heritage. This essentializing, we will see, is strategic in revival movements – under classic models of nationalism, a group that can make a strong claim to being one people with one culture and one language can attain a kind of legitimacy, which is often a necessary prerequisite to statehood or consolidating state power. The comparative nature of this research will illustrate how these ideologies are put into place at different stages of nation-building and what some of their consequences are.

In this book we take cases from a variety of geographic and political contexts, including several which are underrepresented in the social sciences, in order to demonstrate the relationships between linguistic nationalism and discourses of language threat and revival. Furthermore, these cases illustrate revival at different stages: from completed, to ongoing, to barely started.

The aim of this book is to illustrate how projects of language revival are frequently intimately tied to nationalization and reinforce particular visions of ethnic homogeneity and exclusion. This opening chapter outlines some of the theoretical bases for this. In the rest of the book, a number of case studies have been chosen to examine how such discourses of language revival and national identity operate in different settings. The settings we focus on include the following: Sri Lanka, a case where linguistic nationalism fed into a bloody civil war lasting 26 years; Kazakhstan, where state symbols and the meaning of the ‘nation’ have been in a process of significant renegotiation since independence; Mongolia, where the ‘threats’ of increasing ‘impurity’ and Chinese influence are used to justify various nationalist sentiments and moves; Hong Kong, where growing ‘localism’ and tightening control from the mainland Chinese government raise complicated questions about the roles of Cantonese and Mandarin; and lastly Catalonia, a ‘classic’ case of revival which, some have argued, constitutes one of the most positive or successful examples. In selecting these cases, our goal is, on the one hand, to tease out the commonalities all these cases share through a comparative approach; on the other hand, we aim to illustrate the different stages of such processes by examining such a selection of established, developing, and incipient revival movements, as further detailed below.

In the rest of this chapter, we review foundational concepts related to language revival and language endangerment as well as theories of nationhood, authenticity, and identity. We look at the discourse of linguistic human rights and touch on the essentials of language shift and linguistic ecology. These theories and debates we use to frame the case studies that are discussed in detail in the forthcoming chapters. The outline in this chapter is meant as an orientation for the reader, so as to be able to identify the layers of the different revival discourses we will be investigating, and is not an exhaustive review of the decades of literature written on these complex interrelated notions.

1.2 Language as national instrument

The link between language and nation has been a hallmark of nationalist discourse since early nationalist writers described language as the inextricable expression of a nation’s spirit. As Johann Gottfried Herder writes in 1774:

Has a people anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In its speech resides its whole thought-domain, its tradition, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul. To deprive a people of its speech is to deprive it of its one eternal good…. As God tolerates all the different languages in the world, so also should a ruler not only tolerate but honour the various languages of his peoples…. The best culture of a people cannot be expressed through a foreign language; it thrives on the soil of a nation most beautifully, and, I may say, it thrives only by means of the nation’s inherited and inheritable dialect. With language is created the heart of a people.

This section will outline major theories of language and nation, and consider their links to current political realities.

Though precise models of nationalism take different forms in different contexts, it is often the case that nationalist ideologies emphasize sameness and homogeneity. As Blommaert and Verscheuren (1998: 195) put it,

the ideal model of society is monolingual, monoethnic, monoreligious, monoideological. Nationalism, interpreted as the struggle to keep groups as ‘pure’ and homogenous as possible, is considered to be a positive attitude within the dogma of homogeneism. Pluriethnic or plurilingual societies are seen as problem-prone, because they require forms of state organization that run counter to the ‘natural’ characteristics of groupings of people.

As we will see in all our case studies, these ideologies permeate language revival movements and inevitably recreate themselves in different contexts and at different times.

Language is one of a constellation of frequently invoked nationalist symbols and is symbolically central to many nationalist struggles (though other symbols, such as religion, land, or cultural practices, may take on more or less importance than language, depending on the context). Language is meant to align neatly with the boundaries of a people, state, territory: “language becomes inseparably associated with a territorially bounded identity in a relationship that takes language, territory, and identity to be isomorphic” (Freeland & Patrick 2004: 5). The mention of territory is crucial here because, ultimately, the aim of nationalist symbols is to control, protect, and acquire resources in and for a territory. Our case studies will clearly illustrate how control of resources and discriminatory access to them lies at the heart of most revival movements. Crucially, we show how language becomes a central part of this discrimination through the process of linguistic revival.

Once the discourse of a uniform ‘national’ language and culture has been constructed, those individuals, groups, or practices which are judged to be outside the central ‘nation’ can be positioned as problematic minorities (or oppressing majorities, depending on the point of view). The national category emphasizes its own primacy; it is the most important category that individuals are supposed to identify with, superseding any regional or trans/supranational connections. This can be described as “a fundamental paradox of nationalism: though grounded in the observation of ‘existing’ differences, once a separate entity has been defined, nationalism is unable to recognize the legitimacy of any smaller-scale (or larger) group identities” (Blommaert & Verschueren 1998: 198). It is important to recognize this paradox as it shows the fundamental irrational nature of nationalist philosophies. It is untenable, because it argues against its own reason for being. This is why in many instances nationalist ideologies are often presented in primordialist terms, as if the nation in question has always existed and has merely been objectively described. In contrast, scholars of nationalism have emphasized the constructed and processual nature of nationalism (Anderson 1991; Brubaker 2011). As Hobsbawm (2012: 2) writes, “nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round”. At some point any nationalist agenda loses itself in a mythological past, a time that is beyond rationale and of which there is no concrete evidence. It requires a leap of faith, a common denominator for the creation of a superior identity that transcends other humanities. In this sense, nationalism is inherently racist.

Brubaker (1996, 2011) has described states undergoing explicit nation-building processes as ‘nationalizing’. While not all the cases we describe here are necessarily ones which Brubaker would put into this category, nevertheless the term and its attendant theory are a useful way to emphasize the processes involved in nationalism and some of the major characteristics of nationalist discourse. Brubaker (2011: 1786) describes five characteristics of a ‘nationalizing’ state:

1. the idea that the state contains a ‘core nation’ or nationality, understood in ethnocultural terms and distinguished from the citizenry or permanent resident population of the state as a whole;
2. a claim to ownership or primacy: the state is understood as the state of and for the core nation;
3. the claim that the core nation is in a weak or unhealthy condition;
4. the claim that state action is needed to strengthen the core nation, to promote its language, cultural flourishing, demographic robustness, economic welfare or political hegemony; and
5. the claim that such action is remedial or compensatory, needed to redress previous discrimination or oppression suffered by the core nation.

Many, if not all, of these characteristics will be seen in the cases we analyze.

1.3 Framing linguistic revival

Notions of language revival and language revitalization have not been clearly distinguished in the literature. In this book, we see linguistic revivals as social movements in which groups seek to garner state power to serve their own ends – specifically, the aim to advance a discriminatory view of a given language, which inevitably creates exclusionary forms of essentialism. Language revitalization, on the other hand – we could also call it indigenous revival – is not directed at state capture but rather lobbies for tolerance, accommodation, and political recognition. Thus in what follows, we purposely use the term ‘revival’ to discuss cases where language, ethnicity, and nationhood are strictly linked and, in our view, language is being abused as an instrument of power. And we suggest the use of ‘revitalization’ instead to distinguish cases that may be more bona fide attempts at helping a language, and its culture, to not disappear from the face of the planet.

This book is primarily about the former and not the latter, though toward the end, we will revisit the issue of whether, at some level, there is a continuum between these two (see Section 7.4). However there is one crucial question we want to raise here: can a language be properly revitalized without any playing up of communal, ethnocentric sentiments that may one day be abused for the purpose of ethnic segregation? This seems to us an important question to ask with serious ethical consequences for the practice of documentary linguistics.

1.3.1 Threats to languages

The reality of language endangerment and loss is well established in linguistics. Specific estimates may vary, but it is clear that every part of the world is faced with the imminent potential loss of a significant portion of its linguistic diversity. As many as 1,478 languages are currently definitively, severely, or critically endangered (Brenzinger 2007; Moseley 2007; Bradley 2011: 68), with a further 350–453 considered unsafe. Though language shift and death have occurred throughout human history, the rates at which this death is currently happening are deemed to be unprecedented and intensifying.

This reality has prompted a range of responses both among affected communities and within the field of linguistics. As part of these responses, in the last two decades efforts to document, describe, and archive endangered languages have seen notable increase. This is not merely an academic exercise aimed at preserving information of linguistic, cultural, and historical value before it is lost, usually with the death of the last speakers. An offshoot of these efforts is that, in a number of contexts, language revitalization starts within the community. Language revitalization aims at developing materials, procedures, and eventually institutions to strengthen the vitality of moribund languages. They usually target different generations, often in grassroots initiatives, to raise awareness of the language and culture, and aim to raise the profile of speaking one’s language. Community groups as well as schools can get involved in developing teaching materials, especially where a standard orthography might be absent. Online resources, chat rooms, and other media have also proven useful in this effort to preserve what is considered an important aspect of human diversity.

It is important for us to clearly state that the languages discussed in this book do not belong to those reasonably considered endangered. This is because, irrespective of the context within which they are spoken, these languages have tens of thousands of speakers, are taught as mother tongues within the family, and are supported by a range of different institutional forces. The existence of some or all of these aspects denies a language the status of being endangered, even if it may be ranking lower in power and prestige than other languages spoken in that society. As we will see, however, revivalist movements are quick in exploiting the endangerment narrative to their advantage. This means that, while linguistically the ‘reviving’ languages considered in this book show substantial vitality, they are often portrayed by their speakers as fragile. Our case studies will show time and again how a narrative of ‘threat’ is spun to create urgency and discriminatory practices in la...