Re: NATLANG: English Homework - Keeping alive languages of minorities?

I presume you meant to send this to the list.  Damn CMail!

Andreas wrote:
>Quoting Thomas Wier <trwier@...>:
>
>> Carsten wrote:
>
>> > But now go and tell the currently about half a
>> > | billion citizens of the European Union to give up their
>> > | language and perhaps even parts of their culture.
>>
>> It's somewhat less than that.  And the argument isn't
>> that the citizens of the EU should give up their culture,
>> but about what practical measures should be adopted to
>> allow them to communicate with one another.  The question
>> is emphatically not about one language or the other, but
>> which should be first among equals.
>
>European history would certainly suggest that political unification with a
>common official language is a bad thing for cultural and linguistic diversity
>in the long term.
But that's simply not true.  France was a relatively unified monarchy
after their victory in the Hundred Years' War, and had a de facto
standard tongue since at least when the Northern Renaissance set in,
but it was only after particular language policies were instituted
by Nationalists during and after the Revolution that most of the minority
languages began their steep decline.  England gave even less autonomy
to conquered regions like Wales and Ireland, but in both cases the
spur for language shift came about only when Welsh/Irish land was
directly colonized by Anglophones, and policies like Sally mentioned,
that their decline began, centuries after the initial conquest had
occurred.  What about Spain? What about the Hellenistic world? There
are just too many counterexamples to your claim.

>I'd also put a question mark at the applicability of the notion of a "first
>among equals" in this context. If one language is granted a superior offical
>position, it's not first among equals; it's superior.
Look, it's really simplistic to say that one language being used
in common will automatically uproot others.  There are countless
examples of linguae francae being used stably in the context of
other languages.  Greek in Ptolemaic Egypt;  English and French
in much of modern Africa; Latin in medieval Europe.   It's a red
herring to suggest that if the EU adopted English (or some other
languages like French or German) that these languages would reduce
the overall language diversity.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637