The Official Language: A Case for Structural Reform
A Comparison of Governmental Language Policies.
Originally published in U-Lingua | Summer 2021, Issue 5, “Hot Off the Press”.
In May 2021, the international community witnessed a sea change in public opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict that has been likened to the mainstream acceptance of Black Lives Matter after last year’s murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. The forced evictions of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and the subsequent violence represent a pattern of marginalization accelerated by the controversial 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. The bill is particularly notable for stripping the Arabic language of its official status in the State of Israel, ending its de jure equality with Hebrew and alienating Israel’s Arab minority.
The concept of the nation-state itself, simply by combining — or rather, conflating — the nation (an ethnic, religious, or linguistic community) with the state (a governmental entity) implies homogeneity as an official governmental policy, thus rendering minorities who fall outside of the predominant nation the easiest scapegoats in electoral cycles.
“Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it.”
— Toni Morrison, author and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature
Although divisive rhetoric may be utilized against any type of minority, whether it be ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, or religious, linguistic discrimination has a unique significance in that language is, by definition, involved in all of our interactions and communications, and thus automatically delineates us as belonging to different communities. Language permeates all of our actions and even our internal monologues and thoughts, and serves as both an instrument for new forms of expression and as a barrier between groups.
As Prof. Sarah Bunin Benor of Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles states, “you can’t get away from it [language]. Whenever you open your mouth or even when you choose to remain silent, you are using language to show that you align with some people and distinguish yourself from others”. Regardless of the exact form of discrimination occurring in a state, each parameter is tied in a different respect to language, thus rendering it the most potent instrument for political entities on which to capitalize.
At one extreme, nation-states commonly regulate and maintain the majority language as the exclusive vehicle of business, media and education through interventionist policies. At the opposing extreme, state governments may choose not to enforce the use of any language, rendering speakers of minority languages unable to sustain their communities against assimilation.
In order to examine the motivations behind institutionalized linguistic discrimination in nation-states, we must first recognize that such policies can only be consistently enforced when the linguistic plurality in fact constitutes a strong majority. Today, nearly all constitutionally defined nation-states maintain linguistic majorities of over 80%, and the vast majority of these states have only one official language. The largest with such a majority include East Asian nation-states such as China, Japan and South Korea, as well as European former expansionist and colonial powers including Russia, Spain, France and Germany.
Since linguistic uniformity is one of the main elements in the concept of unity of the nation-state, linguistic conservatism and discrimination has been normalized to a much greater extent in nation-states than elsewhere. Such conservatism most often manifests itself in the undue power given to linguistic regulatory authorities, a noteworthy example being the state-sponsored Académie Française, which went as far as to oppose a constitutional amendment stating simply: “Regional languages are part of France’s heritage”.
Similarly, in Spain, minority languages such as Catalan and Basque were completely banned under the Franco administration from 1939 to 1975, and citizens are not permitted to choose the language of proceedings in the political or judicial arena if the parties involved are multilingual. In these cases, Castilian (Spanish) is imposed as the default. Such policies have contributed heavily to the growth of the Catalan independence movement, and thus demonstrate the political consequences for prioritizing the nation over the state. Further discriminatory policy by nation-states includes the requirement of proficiency in the majority language as a prerequisite for naturalization, while recognized minority languages are rarely sufficient.
It must, however, be noted that, thanks to the increased efforts of causes for language revitalization, acceptance of minoritized languages in nation-states has dramatically increased. In addition, the 1992 adoption of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages has established a new model for de jure language protection. However, despite providing an innovative framework for institutionally providing for linguistic minorities, the Charter does not grant any form of equivalent status for these languages within Council of Europe member states themselves, thus not affirming their belonging to their respective states. It is also crucial to note that nearly half of the Council of Europe’s member states to date have not fully signed and ratified the Charter.
As shown through openly discriminatory policies that prioritize the supremacy of the majority nation over the unity of the state, many nation-states implement policies of severe linguistic discrimination in order to preserve this paradigm. The future political stability of these states will depend on whether or not they can make the transfer of priority to the state itself rather than to the corresponding majority nation.
This is often a necessity in the case that a state contains several large linguistic groups, as each group has a sufficient amount of influence to hold their linguistic interests at the forefront of state policy. The most notable case of this phenomenon is the policy of official English-French bilingualism in Canada, whose political stability has historically been threatened by the Quebec sovereignty movement. This policy has seen such positive reception (and necessity) that to date, bilingualism in English and French is considered an unofficial prerequisite for high-ranking political office.
Similarly, the United States, which has seen a steady influx of immigrants since its independence, has never declared an official language at the federal level. A 1780 proposal to enact a language regulatory academy for American English was promptly rejected as a threat to freedom of expression on the basis of the already high linguistic diversity of its settler-colonists, not to mention the hundreds of languages of its Indigenous peoples. Similar logic has been given in the federal legislature for the refusal to declare English as the sole official language of the United States.
However, we must remain cautious that the de jure and de facto status of a given language in the state often reinforce one another in a feedback loop. By omitting legal recognition of languages, thus failing to explicitly allow for their use in all forms of media and education, we risk the possibility of assimilation by legal inaction, tantamount to forced assimilation as both are done with full knowledge of the consequences, similarly to how we communicate our intentions even when we “choose to remain silent”, thus allowing for unrestricted shift to American English. In this sense, the political establishments of Europe and the United States act at opposing political extremes, each of which forces the linguistic assimilation of minorities.
A moderate solution to this dilemma may be found in the language policy of Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Instead of using either of the two extreme strategies outlined above, Bolivia has taken a proactive approach to inclusion by giving its colonial language, Spanish, and all of its 36 Indigenous languages, equivalent official status. This is despite the fact that some of these languages, such as Pauserna, have a speaker population in the single digits, and others, including Cayuvava and Canichana, are no longer spoken, and are thus dormant. Nonetheless, their contribution to the heritage, history and culture of Bolivia is recognized. It is also interesting to note that Bolivia has taken the further step of using both colonial and Indigenous flags officially, the latter being the Wiphala.
This policy is particularly exceptional in that the Bolivian state has recognized that every state is de facto multinational, a truth that the United States and Europe have yet to internalize. Although obvious at first glance, the fact that most state governments have continued to enforce the concept of the nation-state implies the greater worth of a single nation simply due to their number. If a state is to move forward as a democratic society that respects the equal potential and equal opportunity of every member of the population, then it must not only move away from the nation-state as a political paradigm, but also take a proactive approach to ensure that individual languages are legally protected and afforded the same amount of legal and de facto privilege.
There are two main paths available to every state: one is to systematically subjugate smaller member nations, whether through intervention or inaction, in the hope of achieving a completely homogeneous nation-state; the alternative is to support all of the state’s inhabitants, regardless of their national and linguistic alignment. Only one is sustainable.
