Scarica Languages in a globalizing world e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Storia e geografia linguistica dell'Europa solo su Docsity!
Languages in a globalizing world
Chapter 2, Towards a new linguistic world order
● Events of great import totally change the geostrategy of the planet, have a decisive influence on the general flux of the political life of the world and have an effect on the interrelationships among the “big” languages. ○ The collapse of the USSR caused a reorganisation in the market of central and eastern Europe for foreign languages and the decline of Russian: in the USA and UK the number of students enrolled in Russian courses dropped. ○ The end of apartheid in South Africa favoured the diffusion of English in southern Africa and the political upsets in Central Africa have resulted in an increase in the presence of English, and this is critical for the future of the French language. ● The relationships between languages can no longer be analysed only through a geographic dimension: the arrival of new types of media (internet, radio and television satellites) forces us to take into account also virtual space → in a world without borders, languages would be better studied in terms of flux. ● Standardisation of new technologies could then have consequences for the destiny of languages: most languages are already excluded from the world wide web because small languages do not represent sufficiently profitable markets for the software giants. Anyhow, many of the non-anglophones on the internet can at least read the language. So, even if we can say that the close linkage that once existed between computers and English has been broken, the hegemony of English will continue to be felt for a long time to come. ● Globalisation and the creation of large economic blocs increase language demand: in the countries of the EU there are two tendencies regarding language learning and the knowledge of languages: ○ generalisation of the spread of English ○ teaching of a restricted number of other languages to a minority of pupils. Multilingualism (the translation and interpretation market) in Europe is expensive and European jurisprudence judges linguistic diversity as an obstacle to economic integration. ● Americans seem to consider it as an accomplished fact that English will be the universal language of communication. Will English be able to keep its place, when the West no longer controls the world? Some experts say that no language will occupy the central place that English did at the end of the 20th century. The rise in power of the West has been a slow process of centuries, and its decline could be just as long. Western languages, such as English, still have a bright future ahead. ● The expansion and retraction of languages is a social phenomenon, which reflects a position of power. The disappearance of a language always has non-linguistic causes, which are the result of a balance of forces. Most people have never heard about the threat to a large portion of the languages presently spoken on earth: 90% of all languages will disappear in the 21st century. Others believe that big languages like English and French will become the victim of a Babelisation process.
● Can language problems and communication problems be resolved by the promotion of one or a few languages of wider communication or by technological innovation? Piron: “The idea that language problems can be easily resolved, either by the spread of English, by electronic media, or by teaching, has nothing to do with reality. It is a myth.” Piron promotes the solution of “ Esperanto ”, but it seems hardly realistic at the moment. ● Solving the communication problem: ○ first solution: the spread of English → English is the least adapted of any to the demands of the international community, because of vague grammar, fragile phonetics and vocabulary ○ second solution: recourse to technology → it is hardly realistic to believe that technology will help solve the linguistic problems of the world, even in the long term. Automatic translation still continues to confront numerous difficulties, and a professional translator is required to intervene and correct the translation produced by the machine before sending it out ○ third solution: teaching → it may solve the language problem of the world, for example by proposing in Europe as in America the obligatory teaching of two foreign languages at least at the secondary level. The proposal is confronted with major difficulties: a lack of teachers, insufficiently trained teachers, insufficient budget. And there is also the problem of illiteracy, that continues to increase in the world, even in developed countries.
Chapter 3, The geostrategies of interlingualism
● Linguistic politicostrategies have generally aimed to entrench the use of a single language in public administration and education, across an entire territory or within internal borders. In reality, though, linguistic politicostrategies are no longer adequate instruments of national or community policy. Every language community must become aware of its position in a “dynamic world system of languages” characterised by vast and expanding differences in status and use. ● The future evolution of this system depends on the means used to transmit information and ideas across language borders: mediation by human or electronic translators, widespread plurilingualism, and the spread of lingua franca (languages with a powerful political and economic base, such as English, or “planned” international languages, such as Esperanto). ● The politicostrategies era led to a hierarchical distribution of linguistic skills and languages resources: national elites, for example, typically have a very different linguistic profile from rural or working-class population; also there are differences between the industrialised countries and the struggling former colonies of the South. Often, politicostrategies tend to confuse integration with assimilation. ● Interlingual idea: ○ Plurilingualism: a world in which knowing many languages is as normal as knowing many people might be an interlingual world; if multilingual competence became widely valued, people who needed to communicate across language barriers could normally develop the ability to do so
economic and military dominance of Anglophone countries. So English is often perceived as the expression of capitalism, technology, modernisation and ideological globalisation. This means that the spread of English results in the spread of an ideology, political system and a culture. With the death of the languages threatened by the spread of English, there will no be variety of ideas. ● There is an economic cost to ensuring the survival of endangered languages, and is beyond the means of even the richest nations, let alone the developing ones. Most of those languages are doomed. ● It is impossible to define the power relationships between linguistic communities: new technologies grant certain languages those of powerful and technologically advanced countries, new powers of influence. It is preferable an option that promotes the respect for diversity, rather than seeing diversity as an inconvenience. We can and must help those who wish to sustain their linguistic heritage, but we have no right to judge those who choose not to do so.
Chapter 5, Babel and the market: Geostrategy for minority languages
● The ancient law of Babel → God confused human’s language, so that they could not understand each other’s speech. They were tied by a common project, they were concentrated territorially within a single city and they spoke the same language. To destroy their enterprise God breaks their language. But it is not enough, additionally he disperses them geographically. The implication is clear: if the men had stayed in Babel, they would eventually gone back to speaking the same tongue. ● So, if the goal is to maintain language distinctiveness and to favour multilingualism is essential to adopt the strategy of separation: in a well integrated social system the more powerful language leads the return tu unilingualism. ○ What determines the power of a language? The power does not reside in the language itself, it lies in its demographic, economic and political correlates. The more powerful would gain control of the higher functions, while the less powerful would be relegated to the private sphere and eventually fade away. ● The dominant strategy of protection of a minority language (the strategy of territorial and functional separation) when carried to extremes will have perverse effects and weaken the culture of which the language is carrier and so weaken the language itself.
Chapter 6, Forecasting the fate of languages
● Present predictions may go wrong for different reasons: ○ their demographic assumptions ○ their choice of decisive factors ○ their methods of extrapolating present trends ○ their appropriation of models from different disciplines ● Demographic assumptions → the future of a language depends on the number of people using it: if people can no longer speak or read a language, its future is doomed. The importance of a language has often been determined by the number of people who use it, this number is generally derived from population studies based on
census surveys. Assessing the accuracy of a demographic projection of the future use and distribution of a language depends on answers to 3 questions: ○ What count as a user? The number of users of a language are generally confined to the population of native speakers. Even when there is more than one language (as in Canada and India) people are still labelled by language. ■ The most usual language of millions of people in many countries is not the language they first learned at school or the language of their mother or father or associated with their ethnicity. For example, French: in the middle of the 21st century there will be 70 million of French speakers, but this projection does not take into account the fact that non-native speakers of French outnumber the native-speaking population. ■ Also, many of these countries are in the Third World where life expectancy is likely to continue rising and total population tends to increase faster than in the rich countries. ■ More and more literature is being written in the second or third language of their authors, because artists want to publish in a language accessible to the greatest number of potential clients. ■ Finally, we can not really say that a language belongs to the state, as more and more people are spending their lives far away from their place of birth and the increase in the mobility of populations makes it clear that language actually belongs to people who use it. ○ What counts as a language? Demographers tend to maximise the importance of an official language by incorporating all languages remotely related, even though mutually unintelligible. ○ What counts as a country? A nation has been defined as a mental construct made up of affinities with thousands of imagined people united by symbols that promote the feel-good benefits of belonging and being encompassed within borders that are seldom seen. Yet these borders are considered permanent and sacrosanct. While uniting an imagined community, they divide real communities sharing the same language and culture. If the languages of these communities are remotely related to the national language, they are simply categorised as varieties or dialects. ■ Increase in the displacement of persons: there are now more refugees, immigrants, tourists, long and short-term workers, foreign people and expatriate retired folk than ever before. ● Decisive factor choice → language expansion is often attributed to some decisive factor like military domination, economic power, technical and scientific superiority. “If Hitler had won World War II, we would probably today use German as a universal vehicular language” (Umberto Eco). Or probably not, as it is doubtful whether theories of history can be applied to the life and death of languages. It is true that a single military victory can have complex and far-reaching but unpredictable consequences for the future of a language. ○ Economic power: we have to consider the growing power of trade blocs like the EU. This globalised economy seems to be motivated by a product-oriented “more is better” philosophy of the good life based on limitless
Mexico) and cultural issues (protection of national language). Cultural, language and migratory issues overlap with one another and are excluded from NAFTA. As people have moved in large numbers especially from Mexico to the USA, they have brought the languages and cultures of their native lands with them, thereby raising concerns in their newly adopted homeland (for example Mexican migrations depriving Americans of jobs, while also creating Spanish-speaking enclaves). ● All the NAFTA areas are becoming more interdependent on one another, and there are effects that are considered positive (if they maintain or promote North American linguistic diversity) and others that are negative (that limit linguistic diversity): ○ Positive effects → attract millions of Mexicans workers to the north (language shift was kinda slow, because of the geographical concentration of immigrants in closed communities). Language is an important part of the Mexican strategy to build bridges between the two communities. ■ Responsibility of Mexico, as the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, to play the leading role in promoting the global status of the language. Mexican government showed more interest in the future of Chicanos in the USA, creating educational programmes in which language plays a key role to emphasise the importance of being bilingual → an american amendment allowed Mexicans by birth to adopt US citizenship without losing their rights as Mexicans. ■ In Quebec French language and culture have tended to lessen the effects of Americanisation, while cultural and linguistic similarities between English-speaking Canada and the USA have facilitated cultural intrusion by the larger partner. Free trade has been viewed positively by Quebecers as promising economic benefits, allowing greater autonomy for the province including in the linguistic sphere. ○ Negative effects → English continues to grow as the second language among Mexicans and in technical disciplines the role of English is domain: because of Mexican vulnerability to US influence, English-language spread in the country has often been viewed negatively. ● Conclusions: there is a tendency for increasing North American integration to spread English throughout the area → the free-market trends in North America have continued to push towards assimilation. The future of the Spanish language in the USA is likely to have important effects beyond national borders as well, because the three main areas of the Spanish-speaking world are Spain, Spanish America and the USA, even though the USA regard monolingualism and cultural homogeneity essential for national unity.
Chapter 19, Towards a scientific geostrategy for English
● Geostrategy = empirical research model, that should allow for a widespread monitoring and analysing of changes in the numbers of language users and language uses. The problem is that few of the “big” languages have a centralised international agency to collate, analyse, monitorate, evaluate, generate and distribute normative macro data on a global scale..
● To monitor the changing macro patterns of language use, we have to create three general types of language configurations: ○ languages undergoing expansion, enjoying an increase in the number of users and in the number of uses ○ languages undergoing loss in the number of users and use (the majority of world’s languages are likely to become extinct) ○ languages showing maintenance in the number of users and use ● Sources giving international data on languages are extremely limited in number, because if we want to analyse at the level of factors in equilibrium or disequilibrium there should be an internationally recognised body. ● A tripartite division of types of speakers of a language was proposed by Crystal according to the role of the language in a country, with three concentric circles representing three types of English speakers: ○ basic role - mother tongue → “inner circle” is reserved for countries of mother tongue or first language (L1) speakers (countries like Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and USA) ○ subsidiary role - second language → the second circle is “outer” or “extended” covers those countries where English has played an important public role as a speaker’s second language (L2). These countries are within an historical Anglophone sphere of influence, but English was not generally spoken in the home, but would rather be spoken in a number of domains in the public sphere controlled by governments (countries like India, Philippines, Singapore. In India English remains largely a language of the educated urban class, but a foreign language for the vast illiterate population) ○ restricted formal role - foreign language → the third or “expanding” circle are neither English mother tongue countries nor Anglophone sphere countries, but are rather non-Anglophone sphere countries where English is learned not as a second language, but as a foreign language (China, Japan, Russia.) In the past, people in the countries of the second circle had a certain learning advantage because of physical proximity of English in the society, since contact with English was more frequent. But now, with the revolution in communications this is less the case, as physical proximity is no longer a compelling factor. Today, English can be useful and used everywhere in cyberspace and in all types of communication: more and more non-mother-tongue speakers of English are coming “online” → those who speak English as a second or foreign language will determine its world future. In fact, English is highly attractive for those wanting to be heard by a largest number of people. However, in the whole question of tracing the future path of any language (and particularly English) is uncertain due to the large number of unpredictables involved: English is successfully spreading, but this is no guarantee for success in the future. ● A survey was made to find out in what type of countries, in what functions (learning English / learning through English) English was most used: ○ in Europe, Anglophone-sphere countries rated strongly on both functions, which was not surprising given the fact that these countries are also English mother-tongue countries. The non-Anglophone-sphere countries in Europe rated strongly in the “learning English” function
more visibly global. These shifts in the political and economic organisation of the world are producing shifts in language use. ● Languages are not produced by anyone in particular: they simply exist, available for conversation. Languages are elective, they tend to expand and contract in accordance with their relative utility : this is an issue not of choice of one language over another, but choice of a language environment. In the formulation of a geostrategy of languages, it is important to know whether such a choice can be influenced through policy and planning. ● Economic and technological realities would seem to require the cultivation of a global lingua franca → English is at present the sole major contender. All those wishing to operate at a global and a regional level must be individually bilingual, able to operate in both languages. In short, individual bilingualism and multilingualism, the creation of a language ecology that allows an individual to move in and out of overlapping linguistic codes with relative freedom, seems the only option. ● Popular culture has already caused English to gain importance in all domains, so the “owners” of English have little incentive to accede to the wishes of others to limit their linguistic reach. ● When talking about education, choices must be made: some languages favoured over others, some languages promoted and some languages discouraged. Inevitables casualties of such policies are the languages that are left out, this means, in practice most languages. The current European and North American concerns about language decline and language death means that the efforts to preserve and revive local languages are flourishing. On the contrary, in those parts of the world where multilingualism is most prevalent (like Africa) the efforts to develop and amplify even major regional languages are failing for lack of resources: any language planning policy requires a budget. ● Although governments are key players in language use and language choice, languages are not always respecters of boundaries: in many parts of the world where boundaries were drawn between states only in the past century and a half, political boundaries have little to do with language. Furthermore, modern transportation, which has made it easier for people to move, has turned cities into Towers of Babel, so that language has become a burning issue. ● It is important to acknowledge the desirability of linguistic diversity, knowing that diversity of thought is as important to our collective future as diversity of species. As inhabitants of a world that technology is making smaller and population growth is making more crowded, we must acknowledge the need for direct communication. Linguistic unity is essential if global integration is to continue, so we need a common language. That language is likely to be English. But if English were to be our lingua franca, we must develop ways of preventing it from intruding on the domains of other languages. ● Furthermore, a global effort is needed to expand the number of linguistic facilitators, who can move messages from language to language through translation and interpretation. Finally, we need to expand the reach of the technology in order to engage those populations currently cut off from it by poverty or politics.
