An Official Language from a Foreign Land

I find the politics (or whatever we want to call it) of language fascinating. It is hard to get many Americans engaged with the issues as it is so foreign to most (although I suspect there are plenty of exceptions among CT readers).

Living in Switzerland for a year during college was intriguing from this perspective. My impression is that Swiss from the German-speaking regions and Swiss from the French-speaking regions often just resort to English as it seems most fair to all involved. (That is, while they have to learn the other’s language, the francophones learn high German, which is not what most Swiss Germans use anyway and the Swiss Germans, while they certainly work on French, likely speak English better just like the francophone Swiss.) As for the Italian Swiss, I suspect it gets even more complicated.

Crucial to the universities is that the work in a language where there are journals to publish in… from there you basically cascade back towards having an official schooling language that belongs to a “great power” (at least educationally.)

And tribal tensions should not be underestimated. Alas, they are real and promoting one of those languages to be the “first language” could be inflammatory.

Could they have more than one official language? They could, but it gets expensive…

Sounds a lot like India. Supposedly (I’ve never been there) there are scores of local languages, and English is used to comminucate with others.

Different units here, but still on-topic. The EU seems to spend an enormous amount of money on translations alone. There are no easy answers when it comes to languages. But then again, who ever thought that countries would agree go get rid of their currencies and join in on the Euro? (Lots of varying issues with both cases, I don’t mean to simplify things, I just thought it was another related complex topic.)

> We should all just use Esperanto ;-)

But seriously, esperanto has some pretty nasty gender-marking issues[1] that render it unfit for its intended use in its current form. They were spotted pretty early and fixes proposed, but the user community at the time rejected the fixes and the people who cared about fixing the problem moved on to find different projects. Which means there’s basically no support remaining in the esperanto user community for people who want to actually make the language capable of fulfilling its intended purpose. Everyone today who uses esperanto is a person who sees no reason to fix baked-in sexism.

I have thoughts about exactly the motivations and understandings in play here, but basically esperanto’s a doomed project and has been since the fifties at least. Lojban would be more likely to succeed at this point.

[esperanto also has shortfalls in ill-defined and ill-selected phonotactics and phonology, a plain-old-stupid orthography and a vocabulary that could do with some work, but none of these are critical. Although man the orthography — circumflex-h? — is stupid, but they’ve made some progress on that]

[1] All words masculine unless explicitly marked for feminine, mixed-gender groups use masculine words. Some other stuff around the language’s being ill-defined, but the gender stuff is killer. It’d be acceptable in a real-world language, but esperanto has no natural user group and has to overcome higher barriers to come into use, barriers that really do not at this point appear likely to be overcome.

MPAVictoria@5

But think of the benefits to thought and imagination in being able to have the mirrors of two cultures.

An acquaintance of mine was trying out his rudimentary Arabic unsuccessfully on a local shopkeeper who was, in fact, Iranian. I pointed out to him that Iranians aren’t Arabs and was about to say that they speak Persian, not Arabic, when it occurred to me that I simply didn’t know whether Iranians — at least those above a certain educational level — commonly did have competence in Arabic or not, and I’ve had no luck finding that out. Does anyone know?

Thanks for the info Collin. I didn’t know any of that about Esperanto. I only knew the language exists because in Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat series that is what Everyone in the future speaks.

CJColucci: except for knowing the odd word that made it into Farsi due to the Islamic subjugation, the average Persian (whether educated or not) won’t speak Arabic at all – the two languages are very different. You’re better off trying your luck with English.

A bit of googling, and this seems to suggest that Arabic is taught in all Iranian schools, tho it’s less than utterly clear (and it mentions that Arabic is the “second national language” as per the post-79 constitution—see p. 74, tho I’m not finding corroborating evidence for this).

In parts of North America where groups lived in proximity who spoke unrelated languages, we find:
Plains Indian sign language
Chinook jargon

Chinook jargon was based mostly on the Chinook language with, as I understand it, most of the grammar discarded, and some words from other Northwest languages, and later French and English.

Maybe Europe should consider going with Europanto. I know it was invented as a joke but with a little standardization it could evolve into something.

I only vaguely remember the scene, but that would make a lot of sense wouldn’t it?

IME when you learn Arabic in order to study the Quran you learn a Classical form which no one speaks anymore. People learn it in Indonesia, for example, especially in Aceh. I had an Achenese friend who had a kind of bat mitzvah-type/confirmation in the church analogue at her mosque for which she claimed she had to memorize THE ENTIRE QURAN and get quizzed on it in a public ceremony. They learn it by singing it, like a cantor does, and actually how modern Indian kids whose parents force them to memorize the Rig-Veda do (sorry kids. Well, I guess you know the Rig-Veda now?) I could not bring myself to believe that my friend actually knew the whole Quran, but there you are. She left town to study Balinese traditional dance which she was insanely good at, and she wasn’t a lying person, so I don’t know. I guess actually I have seem those kids in India recite swathes of the Rig-Veda, so why not, but they weren’t doing ANYTHING ELSE their entire childhoods, while she was just doing this part of the time to become a full member of her religious community. In any case, she could not use any of that knowledge to speak Arabic or to watch the funny Cairene movie on the in-flight channel, because it was Classical Arabic that she knew. And I think if you as a random non-Arabic speaker are set down now to learn it you will imaginarily be from Cairo, just as, as a n00b French-learner, you are from Paris. But as Arabic varies widely, then you may have trouble getting by in Baghdad, even though you just spent a year studying Arabic. So people say. I don’t personally know it.

This thread probably wouldn’t be complete without a nod towards efforts to wipe out indigenous languages. I can’t do much more than a nod – I’m not terribly well informed – but even after the genocides and displacements stopped in North America there were concerted attempts to wipe out native languages and culture, especially in Canada, which was wont to confiscate children and place them in under-resourced boarding schools where use of native languages was severely punished. See also efforts in the British Isles, and I believe also in Australia.

I thought it was different to the analagous point that I, as a good reader of Ancient Greek, can tell what an article in a modern Greek newspaper is about (unless it’s about monetary policy! which it probably is), but not any of the specifics, though randomly some words will jump out nigh-identical (verbs, weirdly). Maybe it’s only as bad as a modern English speaker reading the Canterbury Tales? However, an educated Arabic speaker will (probably) have read endless quotes and references by the time she is a literate adult, increasing Quran facility. The higher priests of the Curia all speak Latin; it was Pope Benedict’s only good quality, perhaps, that he could speak and write in Latin ex tempore quite perfectly. Only unpleasant things, but said beautifully.

One thing that is interesting is the usefulness of alphabets to the language they originally serve. A Jesuit modified the Latin alphabet to serve Vietnamese and it is beautifully rationalized now. I don’t really know what they had before. Cham people had a script like in Cambodia, I guess, in south Vietnam. Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia are very well served by the Latin alphabet as read with no ambiguous sounds. I should have learned one of them by now, it’s very lazy of me, they’re famously easy (to become moderately proficient in, vs., I don’t know, Russian), and I have business to transact in Indonesia. But I can’t start just now as it’s impossible to learn two different new languages at the same time (I’ve tried. Russian and Ancient Greek, actually. I had to drop Russian.) It would probably work if you were in Mali and wanted to learn French-sub-Mali and Fulani at once, because you’d get so much practice, but still one at a time is best.) Prior to that there was a local script based on Arabic but gone so curly and discrete that I’m not sure it wasn’t based on the South Indian scripts. It worked TERRIBLY. Educated Balinese people can read it fine, though, and if you look at street signs in Bali they have the old script on them also. Quite a view Finno-Ugric languages are ill served by unmodified Cyrillic compared to Hungarian or Finnish. I have to say I find characters that can represent a zillion different sounds and an array of meanings a poor lexicographical choice (and I’m the sort of person who taught herself Ancient Egyptian Heiroglyphics for fun!) I remember what each Japanese character means no problem but not all the sounds of the words it represents. My children remind me every day they have been doing this since they were three and I am a big baby and need to pick myself up and start learning characters. (My children aren’t dicks; they are just amusing themselves, and it is a fair comeuppance.) I do remember Violet coming home from kindergarten saying mournfully, “mommy, Mandarin is so easy to talk but it’s too hard to write.” I cheerfully told her that little Chinese girls have been saying that for thousands of years so she’d have to just buck up. I don’t know that they taught little girls to read so long ago, but…

“Is it really true that most Malians don’t understand French?”

No it is not true, most Malians get by quite well with spoken French. Perhaps inadvertently, the article implies this by stating that 62% of the population are illiterate, which means they cannot read or write but does not mean they do not have a good spoken level of French.

Literacy is complicated in Sub-Saharan Africa. Written forms of the indigenous languages were rare before contact with Arab slavers and European colonizers. Many languages adopted either the Arabic or Latin script, it’s also not unusual that some languages adopted both forms. With the rise of African Nationalism in the 20th century, many languages also received a newly invented written form; specifically created by locals in order to avoid use of the colonizers alphabet. So some of the native languages have three written forms to choose from.

The other major problem are that the remnant post-colonial nation states in Africa typically have nothing to do with ethnic or tribal groupings. So with such a smörgåsbord of languages, written forms, and religious / ethnic groupings, using a major language like French as the official language makes a lot of sense. It also helps Malians when they immigrate to France or Belgium!

The only place I know of that took indigenous languages seriously was the Soviet Union, where they tried to draw local boundaries to reflect ethnicities, and provided alphabets and printing and publishing and schools up to whatever level the numbers would support (so, say, instruction in Chuvash was in Chuvash at primary school, Chuvash and Russian at high school and then Russian at uni. With, of course, the usual fights, backsliding, bureaucratic attempts to impose Russian at lower levels, fights over boundaries and language status. Still, kept a lot of small languages alive, even flourishing.

Fascinating conversation, and nothing so far about domestic US politics, he said snarkily.
Much has already been said but a couple of points may be worth making.
There are (at least) 2000 languages spoken in Africa, or about one third of the world’s total. The whole world was a patchwork like that once, but low population density and difficulties of communication meant that the pattern of lots of small local languages has lasted much longer than elsewhere in the world. The practical consequence is that people have to speak several languages as a simple survival mechanism, one of which is usually a former colonial language. Even in South Africa, where English is almost universally spoken, I’ve had a Sotho-speaking friend talk to me in English, talk to the security guard in Xhosa (a language they had in common) and talk to a Coloured friend in Afrikaans (although not the same Afrikaans as is spoken by the white community) all in the same hour or so. But actually you find the same thing outside Africa: Japanese and Koreans will communicate in English, for example, as will most Europeans from different language families. It’s all about convenience.
A second variant is where you have languages spoken by major regional powers, and you learn the language at school or for professional reasons. Russian in eastern Europe, of course, German in some areas, but also Spanish in Portugal and, conversely, Portuguese in parts of Latin America.
It’s against this background that you have to see the Mali example: seriously, what other choice is there? Curiously, African French, at least in its educated variety, is highly appreciated in France itself. The kind of French taught in the ex-colonies is much purer and more traditional than contemporary French in France, and much less full of franglais and globisch. A number of African (including Maghrebian) writers are highly valued in France for the elegance of their language.

Collin Street, the idea that gendered nouns and work titles carrying gender makes Esperanto unsuitable for its intended purpose, that’s … your opinion. They could accommodate that objection, of course… but it’s far from the only objection that could be made. Some people see that as problematic, then some people see the mostly western grammar and roots as problematic, then some people will say this sound and that sound are too hard to pronounce for Chinese people, etc.

The reason Esperantists didn’t “fix” their language in the way you care about was that at the point it came up, they were bloody tired of schisms over that sort of thing (1), so they decided to freeze the fundamentals of the language, and let the rest work itself out by actual usage. You’re free to use gender neutral work title constructions and alternate gender pronouns in Esperanto (a ton have been proposed), it works just like in English: if enough people start doing it, it becomes standard.

The Esperanto folks just decided they were done with top-down changes to the language, which when you think about it, is a change that has to come sooner or later.

(1) I heartily recommend “In the land of invented languages” by Arika Okrent for a part of the story.

It does seem as if a lack of educational materials for young speakers are part of the barrier to success for speakers of small languages. Most people in Lombok (90%) are ethnically Sasak, but go to schools where they are meant to become literate in Bahasa. On the one hand you need to be able to speak to the wider world, or rather, the rest of your country, and island, even. On the other it must be tough going for young students at the start; I’ll have to ask how it’s organized the next time I’m there.

“Curiously, African French, at least in its educated variety, is highly appreciated in France itself. The kind of French taught in the ex-colonies is much purer and more traditional than contemporary French in France, and much less full of franglais and globisch.”

Yes, indeed. In Mali and Burkina Faso you have to be careful to use a more formal French than you would in France. Always use “vous” for “you”, and not “tu”, for example.

The ex-Portuguese colonies in Africa have also tended to stick to Portuguese as the official language just to avoid arguments (though there are sometimes arguments in Cabo Verde about the which form of Creole is more authentic).

The analogy to Arabic in Iran would be Latin in Germany. Many educated Germans learn at least a few years of Latin in Gymnasium, even now. German has a lot of Latin loan words. If you walked around Cologne trying to speak Latin to people, they would probably find you bizarre (just as someone trying to speak classical Arabic in Iran would be bizarre) but you would probably be able to communicate your needs and wants successfully. Trying to speak Egyptian or Iraqi Arabic in Iran is analogous to speaking Italian or Spanish in Germany. Chances are you will find someone who speaks that language, but most people won’t. In both cases, Iran and Germany, English is probably a better bet for communication.

Before the Vietnamese used alphabetic characters, a lot of official documents were written in classical Chinese (analogous to medieval England doing official documents in Latin, I suppose). There was also a writing system called chữ nôm that used Chinese characters for their sound value in representing Vietnamese. So to use this writing system you first had to learn to speak and write Chinese. Because a lot of Vietnamese sounds don’t occur in Chinese they also had to come up with many extra characters.

I imagine the adoption of the standard alphabetic representation did a lot for education. The current literacy rate in Vietnam is over 90%.

There are quite a few minority languages in Vietnam. I think not all of them have a written form.

Most people in Lombok (90%) are ethnically Sasak, but go to schools where they are meant to become literate in Bahasa. On the one hand you need to be able to speak to the wider world, or rather, the rest of your country, and island, even. On the other it must be tough going for young students at the start; I’ll have to ask how it’s organized the next time I’m there.

It’s presumably the same in Lombok as in almost all Indonesia except for some of the remotest parts of eastern Indonesia: the first three years of primary school are in a mix of the local language and Indonesian, and thereafter it’s all Indonesian. This may not be as tough as it sounds – most kids (except in those really remote areas) will have become conscious of Indonesian on TV and radio as soon as they become conscious of language. And many local languages in Indonesia, plus Indonesian itself, have pretty complex systems of diglossia – from early on kids have to start handling the different levels even within the family, let alone in wider contexts. So learning a new language, that all your classmates are learning at the same time, is in a sense an extension of this.

I grew up in Kenya and visit regularly – you see an interesting variant on this theme there.

Kenya’s boundaries got set Berlin in the 1880s and as a result the country has probably 30-40 languages, in three main language groups that are really fundamentally different from each other. So a Kikuyu speaker can usually get by quite easily in Kamba but Maasai is utterly different

English and Swahili are the official lingua francas, which everyone will speak (to some basic level) as well as their own language. So everyone is multilingual. I think functionally it would be necessary to have some sort of lingua franca, and politically it is an advantage that English and Swahili are not the home language of any major tribal grouping*

There is an irony in that it has become common practice that one speaks Swahili to those viewed as somehow socially lower on the scale (e.g. junior employees) and English in the other direction. So a well meaning tourist trying to learn some Swahili and speak it a) is not necessarily speaking their counterpart’s first or even second language b) may come across as trying to talk down. The perils of multilingualism…**

* The only people who speak Swahili as a first language are a smallish set of tribes on the coast. They very much look down on the poor quality of everyone else’s Swahili

** Comparable only to what I encountered in Brussels when i mistakenly thought it woudl be culturally sensitive to try to speak French to what turned out to be a Flemish nationalist taxi driver. There is a nice irony in having the supposedly post-nationalist EU keeping its legislative centre right on the front line of one of the more vicious modern-day language / culture spats…

The reason they still use kanji in japan is pretty simple: japanese written in straight hiragana is basically illegible.

Complex reasons.
+ because of the way grammar and inflections are written in hiragana and actual words-proper usually written in kanji — or katakana if there’s no kanji — the script alternation actually serves the same purpose as word spacing. Reading japanese in kana It’s a pretty regular occurence — once a paragraph? — that you missjudge word boundaries and have to rewind half a sentence.
+ this is a font issue, but kana are actually written slightly smaller than kanji in the same font, and fit more loosely into the character box, which has the effect of making the kanji look slightly bolded; for kana-only text in current fonts this manifests as big gaps between characters that make it hard to follow a line of text. And since kana are pretty uniform in shape, there’s no signposts, and jumping to the next line can happen fairly often.
+ man japanese written in kana takes up a lot of space.

There used to be 16 languages on the Indian banknote – all official (there may be more now). Very many Indians are multilingual, but you can get by in Tamil Nadu or Bengal with just Bengali or Tamil – the state language is there for all official purposes. Oddly enough, official Hindi was standardised on the Varanasi version, which is close to unintelligible for most western speakers (although learning standard Hindi is much easier for a Delhi native than for a Tamil or Kannada speaker). So it’s the same for India as for Indonesia and Kenya – the official language is native to a minority.

Colin Street,

Both of those objections are pretty minor and would be easily solved by minor orthography changes, like say putting in spaces. Not a big deal.

The great advantage of ditching kanji and more importantly Chinese characters, is that literacy would go way up. China claims very high literacy, but that is really viewed as some kind of sub-literacy, say 3000 characters. So one can “spell” common words, but has no idea how to write fumigator or French press in Chinese characters. Many Chinese learners have remarked on the pleasure they receive seeing native college-educated Mandarin speakers forgot how to write down words because they have forgotten the characters.

There was a huge movement in China to use pinyin (Latin script) for Mandarin. There were two main reasons it failed. The first was that the academic classes, who had put truly ridiculous amounts of effort into learning characters, didn’t want to lose that power and influence over everyone else (who are often semi-illiterate) and blocked reform. The second is that maintaining characters allows the government to maintain the fiction that one script can produce a unified Chinese nation. (It’s not true, of course, since each main Han language in China requires its own special characters, and the spoken languages aren’t mutually intelligible.)

Japanese is better off since it has dispensed with a lot of Chinese characters, but of course it has two different systems that are essentially the same to preserve the Japanese language from “foreign” words that will pollute its vital essences.

The Koreans did this right, and hopefully they will soon be able to purge Chinese characters entirely from everyday writing so that it can go back to being a study for the few strange people who enjoy punishment and aesthetics over literacy.

France is the most zealous in its desire to establish a national language for everyone and destroy its other indigenous languages. That’s why we should laugh long and hard at them when they complain about French losing influence and exposure among the world’s languages. Live by the sword of language extinction, die by the sword of language extinction.

David,

The remark about Japanese vital essences was mostly a joke. It is somewhat ridiculous to have two distinct syllabaries that do the same thing, but ok. Since Japanese has limited its use of characters, literacy is still possible, though obviously more difficult. Chinese doesn’t have an acceptable variant (though pinyin and bopomofo do sometimes fill that role), and so people literally can’t spell words if they forget the character representation.

The point vis a vis France is that substantial effort by the French state was undertaken to destroy all the other native languages of France, because they were viewed as treasonous to the state. “The language of the republic is French.” Alsace-Lorraine was only 4% French speaking in 1918, and now Alsatian is endangered, for example.

France refuses to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and severely restricts public schooling in other languages. I hadn’t heard of this effort to teach children Arabic, but it represents a sea change in French attitudes. I’ll be more impressed when you can get educated in Basque, Flemish, Occitan, or German though.

And not just France. Welsh gained official status in Britain in 1965.

Well, even Plaid Cymru doesn’t hold out much hope of it getting official status in England … but the Welsh Language Act is actually pretty strong in terms of giving the right to Welsh speakers to do all their business with public authorities through the medium of Welsh. If you look carefully on most UK Government websites, you’ll find a link to a Versiwn Cymraeg. I once, in order to wind up a mate, claimed that I wanted to go through the entire FCA registration process entirely in Welsh, and we ended up concluding that if I had decided to be a dick about it, they would indeed have had to translate everything.

Warren Terra @ 28

“See also efforts in the British Isles”

The Statutes of Kilkenny were the first to outlaw Irish dress, music and language, and post-seventeenth century the language was denied any official recognition in the new British kingdom. But the death of the language came with the rise of the so-called ‘constitutional’ (i.e. proceeding on the basis of accepting a legitimacy of British rule) forces which arose with Daniel O’Connell, and the Famine and subsequent tradition of emigration to English-speaking countries destroyed the backbone of the language. There was a strong Gaelic revival at the turn of the twentieth century, with many new learners being only the first or second-generation of monoglots, but the legacy civil service in the new State succeeded in dooming the language to decline again.

Dsquared @ 62

“claimed that I wanted to go through the entire FCA registration process entirely in Welsh”

Heh. To myself and many other Irish people, the ‘FCA’ will always be An Forsa Cosanta Áitiúil, an institution of local Irish life for most of the twentieth century – and incidentally, the guys who brought you the battle scenes in both BRAVEHEART and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQjeOoKNS0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vShQ3gQVPk

I’m sort of puzzled here that the language is being seen as the source of the problem and not the boundaries or the lack of education.