Tema:

In a gathering of scientists and academics such as this, some may feel that a symposium on “policies” is scarcely an issue of legitimate interest to those working in the shadows of ivory towers. I hope that both my paper and the discussions during the rest of this meeting will persuade all who have any doubts that the study of minorities cannot be separated from past and present policies … and their effects. Indeed, in my view those who have specialised in this area have several moral duties. Firstly, they have to bring to the attention of policymakers the results of their research. Secondly, they should help policymakers to appreciate the responsibility they have in designing a Europe which will be tolerant and supportive of its minorities.

I intend to argue that some of the changes that are taking place at the present time represent an opportunity for linguistic (and other) minorities, while others are undoubtedly a threat.

I will also share with you some of the areas that I believe merit further research in the near future.

The object of this symposium

We have come here to discuss four aspects of the subject, in the context of the need for a reconsideration of language policy, or language policies, in Europe. As you know, the issues are as follows:

1. Typology of linguistic communities. Can we classify and categorize language communities in a methodical way? Or is the situation so multivariate that it defies being satisfactorily reduced into discreet pigeonholes?

2. Conflict analysis. We use terms like language shift or diglossia in a very dry, clinical way. Is not the contact between people who speak different languages a socially more dynamic and psychologically more stressful phenomenon?

3. Educational policies. Many of us earn our living, or have done so in the past, working in an educational establishment. Do not many of those who are concerned about the future of particular language communities place too many hopes on the ability of the school, on its own, to reverse a process of language shift?

4. Research methodology. What methods are being shown to be useful in studying these issues? In what areas of research are there gaps which need filling?

I shall address the first three directly in my paper.

1. Towards a typology of linguistic communities

Much attention will be given to this topic here. I can only touch upon a few of what I believe to be the burning issues.

The importance of establishing some kind of typology is obvious when the context is one of trying to help decision-makers to define a policy. Do all language communities need the same kind of policy? A metaphor from the world of medicine will help us answer. It may be that the whole population needs some common elements: measures to ensure sanitation, widespread vaccinations, the dissemination of health and nutritional education, and so on. But hospitals are full of people with very different needs: a heart transplant, an appendix operation, an eye test, a birth…

1.1 “National” languages of independent States

The first type of language group or community[1] that we should consider is of course the “typical” national language of an independent State. We sometimes forget to refer to this category in talking about smaller or weaker language groups. I shall deal with just a couple of aspects here.

Firstly, in a world increasingly governed by a market-driven economy, the economy of scale makes it more profitable to offer language-related products in a limited range of languages. Such products can be offered at a lower price than similar products manufactured, labelled or marketed in languages aimed at smaller populations. It is therefore quite understandable that those responsible for governing the smaller linguistic communities (Norway, Portugal, even France) offer financial support in order to ensure that such products are not only available in the respective languages, but also at a competitive price.

Such considerations would be irrelevant for language-related products were it not for the fact that growing numbers of people can speak, as second languages, one of the so-called international languages. This process both broadens the market for the larger languages and makes the use of the other language more and more redundant, at least from the purely neutral point of view. (I myself would argue that a bilingual person is likely to react differently to persuasive messages in one or other of his or her two languages.)

One might hypothesise a mathematical model which, for one particular kind of product, would look something like this (a more sophisticated or expensive product would have a curve above it):

The greater the potential market (the further to the right), the lower the unit price. This makes products in the large market C profitable, because the cost curve falls on the profitable side (below) of the dotted line marked “P”. In a smaller market such as B, the same product, produced in smaller quantities, may have a unit cost higher than the profit line. In such a case if the authorities can cover the differential, the net cost of the product can be similar to that of the product made for the larger market, in which case they can compete on an equal basis. However, in case A the unit cost is so very high that the financial support needed is likely to be beond the limit that a democratic system will allow.

To give you an example from Catalonia: without a potential market of over six million people, I doubt that a virtual university would be viable. But the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has within the space of just four years already reached the ten thousand students mark. As far as I know, all our material for the degree courses is in Catalan. Would such a project not be too costly for the Icelanders, for instance, or the Estonians?

I would like to refer to one other aspect of the so-called “national” language. To its speakers, and to the institutions of the country, its use is taken for granted. It does not have to be justified, or explained., or even legitimated explicitly. In a sociological sense each “national” languages becomes an institution in itself, part of the country’s system. I am not criticising this, but simply underlining the unconscious nature of this relationship. I shall return to this point at the end of my paper. For many people driving around Europe, it is only when they enter the first post office or petrol station, across the border, that they realise they have left their country. However, as we all know, Europe’s political frontiers often have little relationship with its linguistic frontiers, and this leads me to the next category.

1.2 Transfrontier communities

One of the issues that I have touched upon, the high unit cost of products made for smaller products, should be of little concern to one particular type of linguistic community: those living generally in transfrontier situations bordering on to a kin-state in which the minority's language is the official or national language. The Alsatians, the Albanians in Greece, the Hungarians or the Slovenes in this country (Austria) are good examples. As far as products in their language are concerned, these often exist in the kin-state, and the main problem is one of distribution. A specific problem faces school textbooks: unless the curricula in both countries are identical - which is highly improbable - imported textbooks will have to be supplemented in some way so as to be useful. In neighbouring countries whose relations are friendly, such issues are probably of minor importance; but in other cases, and especially where one of the countries has broken away from the other relatively recently, the picture is different, as a new source of "linguistic" conflict can emerge. Thus in Croatia the textbooks used in Serb schools were until a short time ago the same books as those used in schools in Serbia; and history and geography books, in particular, gave a picture quite unacceptable to the Croatian authorities. The issue is not therefore only linguistic.

1.3 Stateless nations

A third group consists of communities whose language is not the national language in any State at all: the so-called "Stateless nations". The languages of the Welsh, the Bretons, the Frisians, are spoken without any international frontiers fragmenting the community. But sometimes the language is spoken in several states: such is the case of the Occitans, the Aromanian-speaking Vlachs, the Basques, the Catalans (if we ignore the fact that Andorra has Catalan as its only official language) or the Kurds.

All these communities do however have an historic homeland, an area which the language speakers feel is their own and in which they claim certain language rights. However, in common with the “transfrontier” group, few monolinguals remain today. T is all too easy to say how wonderful bilingualism is, and I do not wish to be misunderstood: but reality is often less virginal, as I will point out when I come to talk about schools. The truth is that bilingualism has often been used as the pretext for excluding languages, as well as being the first result of such an exclusion.

1.4 Non-territorial and migrant groups

In other cases the community feels that the language has no historic homeland to which it can refer. The classic cases are the Roma people and the speakers of the various languages related to the Jews: Hebrew, Yiddish and Sephardic.

This particular category has given rise to attempts to associate the language rights of what we may call the territorial or autochthonous language communities of Europe with those of new groups arising as a result of recent migrations. The Turks into Germany, the Algerian Arabs in France and the Indian and Pakistani groups in the United Kingdom are merely the largest communities at the top of a very long list of languages. This association, which would lead to regarding such people as a comparable category, I find uncomfortable. I take for granted, of course, that basic human rights have to be applied to all without distinction. Yet if we are talking about linguistic rights, I personally cannot accept that migrant persons and indigenous, autochthonous people share the same linguistic rights. For me, the focus is different: immigrants have the basic right to integrate into the society they have chosen to live in; indigenous groups have the right not to be assimilated into a society to which they probably belong without every having been asked their opinion[2].

Having said this, it is clear that the boundaries between categories are often fuzzy, particularly the distinction, in the now-independent States of the former Soviet Union, between indigenous minorities and migrant groups, the largest of which are Russian. Many of the latter have been present in the respective areas for a number of generations and it can be argued (they are the first to do so, not surprisingly) that they have acquired the status of an indigenous national minority.

1.5. In conclusion

For a linguistically stable Europe, all these language communities would have to aim to reverse the process of shift away from the community language. How successful they can be depends on many factors, perhaps the main one being the degree of power, and political will, to make an impact on the linguistic environment. The obstacles that appear will tend to prevent the rotation of this logical wheel that I have developed (Strubell, forthcoming):

There is no time on this occasion to explain the model. Suffice it to say that social changes are complex and that efforts must be made to try and bring together logical models than can help to guide policy formulation.

2. Conflict analysis

Contact is the "state or condition of touching or communicating"[3]. Conflict is harder to define. It can be simply a "fight, struggle" or "clashing (of opposed principles, etc.)", or in, a psychological sense, "(distress due to) opposition of incompatible wishes etc. in a person" (op. cit.:197). Early Catalan sociolinguists, led by two Valencians, Rafael Lluís Ninyoles (e.g. Ninyoles 1969) and Lluís Vicent Aracil (Aracil 1966, 1968:20), were quick to reach the conclusion that language contact is a conflict situation. In the long run it will lead to the speakers of the subordinate language either assimilating into the dominant group [language shift] or striving to restore the subordinate language to its former state, by "reversing language shift" (Fishman 1991), language revitalisation or what is called, in the Catalan context, language "normalisation". Significantly, Aracil's 1968 paper is dedicated "To Joshua A. Fishman, whose kindness I can only acknowledge in so meagre a way".

If language contact were only and literally this, language contact, then it would be meaningless to talk about language conflict. As contact linguists tell us, conflict comes from the fact that languages are spoken by people, that the contact involves groups of people with differing language competencies, and that these differences are related to social, political, historical and, perhaps above all, economic differences between the members of each group.

The study of linguistic minorities in Europe has shown that in nearly all cases the numbers of speakers of languages other than the official languages of the States to which they belong at the time have been on an incessant decline throughout this century. However, in the past thirty years it has also become clear that members of many of these groups are no longer content with this state of affairs. Alongside the growing body of research which, among other things, ended the myth that bilingual people are to be stigmatised for being in some way backward or unprepared for modern life, has emerged a new will to stand up to the powers that be, and to have a more active say in the future of their community.

Research into the causes of language shift has realised that social psychology provides the "missing link". I quote Kit Woolard:

Studies of language maintenance and shift initially implicated macrosocial events as direct causes. Later research has insisted that it is only through the interpretative filter of beliefs about language, cognition, and social relations that political and economic events have an effect on language maintenance or shift. (Woolard 1997: 16)

The reactions of the various States to attempts by groups to revitalise their ailing language have not, in general, been enthusiastic. It has only been as a result of strong pressure that the so-called minority (or regional) languages have gained a foothold in the school system, in the media, in the dealings of the authorities with the public: and not even in all multicultural countries.

However, a significant change in the political climate has taken place in the last few years, certainly no more than ten. It is largely, though not solely, due to the fall of the iron curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This of course is no surprise to any of you. But one of the results of the changes is the greatly increased perception among policymakers, and particularly top-level politicians, of the potential for conflict of the so-called national minorities in the former Soviet Union and the Balkan region. This has brought about a greatly heightened concern for the plight of minorities, especially in central and Eastern Europe. The responsibility of governments has become acknowledged, as Nelde points out: "Most current language conflicts are the result of differing social status and preferential treatment of the dominant language on the part of the government" (Nelde 1997). This concern has been the driving force for several interesting initiatives:

2.a. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe

The position of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). On November 19-21 1990 the Heads of State or Government of the 34 participating States met in Paris and agreed upon the so-called "Charter of Paris for a New Europe".

Among other things, they stated the following:

We affirm that the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of national minorities will be protected and that persons belonging to national minorities have the right freely to express, preserve and develop that identity without any discrimination and in full equality before the law.

and further down they said...

Determined to foster the rich contribution of national minorities to the life of our societies, we undertake further to improve their situation. We reaffirm our deep conviction that friendly relations among our peoples, as well as peace, justice, stability and democracy, require that the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of national minorities be protected and conditions for the promotion of that identity be created. We declare that questions related to national minorities can only be satisfactorily resolved in a democratic political framework. We further acknowledge that the rights of persons belonging to national minorities must be fully respected as part of universal human rights. Being aware of the urgent need for increased cooperation on, as well as better protection of, national minorities, we decide to convene a meeting of experts on national minorities to be held in Geneva[4] from 1 to 19 July 1991.

Following on from the abovementioned meeting, the OSCE came to the conclusion that there was an urgent need for action to try and prevent conflict before it erupted into violence. The former Yugoslavia was bursting into warfare and bloodshed. As a result, in "its Helsinki Decisions[5] of July 1992, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) established the position of High Commissioner on National Minorities to be "an instrument of conflict prevention at the earliest possible stage".

On 1 January 1993, Mr. Max van der Stoel took up his duties as the first OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM). Since then conflict analysts, mostly academics, have worked hand-in-hand on language-related issues with the High Commissioner on several occasions to support him during his many missions abroad. The first was the drafting of The Hague Recommendations regarding the education rights of national minorities, and the explanatory note [6] (October 1996)

i. The Hague Recommendations regarding the education rights of national minorities (1996)

The High Commissioner asked the Foundation on Inter-Ethnic Relations, established in 1993 to carry out specialized activities in support of the HCNM, to consult a group of experts[7] in order to receive their recommendations on the application of minority education rights in the OSCE region. The experts came from various relevant disciplines: jurists specializing on international law and linguists and educationalists specializing on the situations and needs of minorities.

ii. The Oslo Recommendations regarding the linguistic rights of national minorities[8] (1998)

A similar exercise was later put into operation to make recommendations in the field of linguistic rights. On this occasion, among the experts consulted[9] were jurists specialising in international law, as well as linguists, advocates and policy analysts specialising in the situations and needs of minorities.

My own involvement in the second working group was an extremely valuable experience for me, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to take part in the meetings of a third working party, to develop the Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life, a document which has just been published.

My general points here are twofold:

(1) As seems to be generally accepted nowadays, the accumulation of research into the causes of conflict shows time and again that language is hardly ever the primary cause for conflicts. These usually have other more powerful origins, ultimately of a political, social and/or economic nature, though they are often expressed through religious or cultural differences.

(2) At the diplomatic and political levels, the experience accumulated doing research, both in the field and in developing legal and political models and standards, is valued perhaps more than ever before.

iii. Report on the Linguistic Rights of Persons Belonging to National Minorities in the OSCE Area.

Almost as a contradiction to all that I have said as regards the importance of scientific research in this field, we can also find on the Internet a Report on the Linguistic Rights of Persons Belonging to National Minorities in the OSCE Area[10]. It is based solely on the input provided by official sources in each participating State and which, while being of some interest in providing basic information, is (in my opinion) of very little use to anyone wishing to detect the main problems facing linguistic minorities in OSCE countries. This is in no way to belittle the value of the work of the compilers.

2.b. The European Union

i. The European Commission

For years now, the DGXXII, for Education, Training and Youth has administered a budget, of up to about 4 MEuros a year, of subsidies to a wide range of project to strengthen and revitalise lesser-used languages. One of the main has been the maintenance of an important NGO, the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages[11].

The EUROMOSAIC report

The EUROMOSAIC report was commissioned by a task force which was soon to become the DGXXII, for Education, Training and Youth. It followed on from earlier report by Enciclopedia Italiana and Dr. Miquel Siguan. And, hopefully, will have been of use in the move of the Commission towards defining an official policy in this field. Our final synthesis report (Nelde et al. 1996) is not available on the Internet, to my knowledge. However, all the individual language group reports are[12], both of the first tranche commissioned, and of the second (which covered Austria, Finland and Sweden). We invite you to send in your comments, for fortunately the situation in at least legal and educational terms is improving in many places.

ii. The European Parliament: Resolutions, and the 1999 report

The European Parliament has been active at least since 1981[13] in drawing attention to the need to adequately guarantee the future of linguistic minorities. The later Kuijpers and Killilea Resolutions are principally political in origin and nature and, to my knowledge, it was not until the as yet unpublished 1999 European Parliament report (EBLUL, forthcoming), commissioned by its Directorate-General for Research, that specialists in the field became the principal authors of a report. We reported many non-linguistic factors that have brought the present linguistic minorities in the six States applying for EU membership[14] to their present state:

· Population movements caused in Central and Eastern Europe by the expansion of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century.

· Changes in frontiers resulting from World War I.

· The massive resettlement of some minorities, especially the Germans and the Roma, but also the Ukrainians in Poland, before, during and after World War II.

· The new independence of Estonia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic has made it necessary for the respective governments to start to work towards the integration of the population of non-autochthonous origin.

· The invasion of part of Cyprus in 1974, by the Turkish armed forces. The autochthonous Turkish-speaking inhabitants can exercise their linguistic rights as if they were in a sovereign Turkish-speaking State.

2.c. The Council of Europe

The other main initiatives have come from the Council of Europe. These have been twofold and, again, the participation of specialists and academics has been considerable: both of them came into effect in 1998: the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages[15] and the Framework Convention for the protection of national minorities[16].

Incidentally, the Council of Europe initiative to declare 2001 as the European Year of Languages has been followed by the Union, and obviously offer us financial possibilities and a favourable context for new projects.

In conclusion we can see that the resolution of language-related conflicts has in the past twenty years become a real concern of international organisations and their members. The break-up of several States, and the Soviet empire, was along ethnic rather than linguistic lines, but language is one of the hot issues in many of the newer States, and is seen as a potential source of conflict. On the other hand the moves towards recognising language rights in the European Union have come from a heightened sensitivity to personal rights in general, and, as we shall see at the end of this paper, are merely the tip of a much broader issue.

3. Educational policies.

Those who are concerned about the future of particular language communities (both activists and academics) often believe, quite sincerely, that introducing the teaching of the particular language into the classroom will bring about a profound change for the better in the fortunes of that language. My question is: Are we not over-optimistic in holding this belief? Ironically enough, I address this question to many of us here who earn our living working in educational establishments.

3.a. The role of the school

Throughout Europe the impact of the introduction of compulsory and universal primary schooling is fully recognised in many ways. The end to illiteracy, the access to higher education for able children of even the most humble origins has had an enormous effect not only on the socio-economic make-up of European countries and on social mobility, but also on the nature of democracy itself and on the feeling of sharing a nationality.

In many multilingual countries, however, compulsory schooling was introduced in only one language, and this had a dramatic effect on the languages of the stateless nations, and of national minorities in general.

Let us look, for instance, at Wales.

[The Education Act of 1870] brought English-medium elementary education within the reach of every child in Wales. Education […] was sufficiently widespread to bring about a rapid increase in anglicisation in areas where there was already a minority of English-speaking children. (Williams 1970: 94)

In the course of two generations whole communities changed their natural language from Welsh to English. They had no choice – the English language was “stuffed down their throats”, and not always without a measure of cruelty. (op. cit.: 95)

There was no popular condemnation of devices such as the “Welsh Not[17]” and various other attempts made in schools to prevent children from speaking Welsh even in school playgrounds. (op. cit.: 97)

However, as a result of an official enquiry[18], Williams (op. cit.: 98) claims that it is possible to argue that “since the early eighteen nineties, the Welsh nation has not been prevented by any central government regulations from giving its language recognition, status, time for study and usage in schools and colleges and that from this time the people of Wales cannot blame anyone but themselves for the continued humiliation of the Welsh language in the nation’s educational institutions”.

That the decline in the number of Welsh-speakers has been reversed since 1991 is thanks to the education system, to be sure. It is equally thanks to the will of the Welsh people, or at least of a sufficient number of them. However, my point is this: the reversal has taken fully a century to occur, precisely because the school system continued throughout the period to instil not just language but also linguistic prejudices into the children. These prejudices originated outside the school and were disseminated by other means as well: but there is no doubt that the school was and still is an extremely powerful, and in some cases even cruel, tool of socialisation.

There is no need to insist that Great Britain is just one of many cases. Equivalent instruments to the Welsh Not (sometimes in the form of rings) to repress the use of vernaculars have been documented in Brittany, Catalonia and elsewhere.

3.b. Attitudes and prejudice

What is more, the negative attitudes associated with the use of “minority” languages do not usually originate in their heartland, but rather at the centre of power. It is the majority that spreads prejudice, and the minority all too often mimetically adopts it, shooting itself in the foot.

In conclusion, the (re)introduction of a language into schools is no guarantee whatsoever that that language will recover.

Let us not however be over-pessimistic. There are “success stories”. Let me tell you about one, not so far from here. In the mixed Hungarian-Slovenian-speaking region in Slovenia, close to the border with Hungary, a parallel system of monolingual schools was set up, for Hungarian-speaking and Slovenian-speaking children respectively. The Hungarian schools acquired a poor popular image, with the result that more and more Hungarian-speaking families sent their children to the Slovene schools. What is more, few of the Slovene-speaking children ever learned Hungarian. The model was changed in the 1950s, and since then …

all pupils of whatever language attend bilingual primary schools whose aim is full bilingual competence; there is no segregation of pupils into separate schools. Both languages are used concurrently during each lesson, for all subjects of the curriculum. Teachers and non-teaching staff are required to be bilingual. (Strubell 1999)

It seems that these schools are remarkably successful, though (predictably) some Slovene families feel that it is a waste of time for their children to have to learn Hungarian. We all know the reasoning: they would probably argue in favour of English or German..

3.c. Foreign languages

This leads us to the issue of foreign language teaching in schools. Here is some degree of confusion here for several reasons. Firstly, on account of the hypocritical positions of some States vis-à-vis the issue of “bilingualism”. Secondly, because there are growing number of migrant workers, mostly in the larger conurbations, whose linguistic needs (along with religious, social and ethnic issues) are often quite salient. And thirdly, because of the growing domination of English as a foreign language in schools throughout Europe, and the political to ensure diversification in language learning.

4. Towards a solution: the need to respect cultural and linguistic heartlands

Before leading into my concluding remarks I would like to return to the central issue, in order to make one of my main points: the need for each language community, wherever possible, to have a linguistic heartland in which its language and culture are regarded as dominant, and as the language and culture of the authorities, and in which all inhabitants have the ame opportunities to integrate as they do in, say, Vienna or Madrid. I will introduce it with a metaphor, and take another example from the Catalan-speaking world.

4.1 Minorca

There are two large towns on the island of Minorca, in the Balearic archipaelago. In the north is the medieval town nestling round the bustling harbour, Ciutadella. Its name (which in English means “citadel”) betrays its long military history. But it is the other town that I would like to refer to. Maó, which Spaniards call “Mahón”, is tucked away, well sheltered from the open sea up a long estuary. For as long as anyone can remember, it has been the seat of the political and administrative authorities of the island. Close by, on the hillsides, 18th century mansions, built in the English style of the period, are a reminder that the island of Minorca was held by Great Britain for most of that century. English words (“bow windows”, “chalk” and so on) have also crept into the local dialect of the Catalan that has been the language of the islanders since the thirteenth century. Yet Maó’s greatest claim to worldwide fame may come as a surprise to some of you: that delicious sauce made from olive oil and egg yolk, with a little salt and vinegar to give it more flavour.

4.2 Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise, as it is known, has a quality that is highly relevant to our discussions here, as I hope to persuade you. Once the egg yolk and a few drops of olive oil have been painstakingly stirred into a consistent pasty sauce, the olive oil is added, very gradually, so that the volume of the mayonnaise increases without the sauce cutting. If it is poured in too quickly, the olive oil stubbornly refuses to integrate into the original sauce, and there is little hope of rescuing the resulting mess.

4.3 Demographic changes

Why have I introduced this metaphor? In a nutshell, because society has a limited capacity to cope with demographic changes. The capacity varies from one society to the next: there are highly assimilatory societies, with a colonial or imperial tradition, that can cope with relatively large numbers of in-comers. But others cannot claim to do the same. And, ironically enough, Minorca is one of the Balearic Islands that are suffering, even as we talk here, the effects of increasing pressure from in-migration related to the tourist industry. In Ibiza, particularly, but also right round the coastline of the largest island, Majorca, the islanders are beginning to feel outsiders in their own environment. They are becoming a minority in many places, the majority of the (new) population being either Spaniards who have moved through to work in the construction industry or in the hotels, bars, restaurants and other commercial ventures revolving around the rapidly growing tourist sector, or else former tourists who have decided to live there, and who in general will make no effort to integrate linguistically, forming instead local colonial set-ups.

A second irony. Forty years of dictatorship under general Franco, during which time the public use of Catalan was banned, during which it was neither the language of schools nor even a language taught in schools, did not break the back of the language as the natural social means of (oral) communication among the whole indigenous population. The few in-comers that arrived at that time quickly learned the language, and their children became culturally and linguistically indistinguishable from those of the longstanding island families. Yet after his death the language has come into a serious, perhaps irreversible decline, as a result of the substantial, and very rapid, transformation of the social make-up of the islands’ population.

4.4 The causes of the demise of languages

Early Catalan sociolinguists, in the late sixties and early seventies (e.g. Aracil, Ninyoles, Vallverdú) attributed the fate of the language to political oppression. To be true, they were also aware of the linguistic effects of the large-scale in-migration that took place into Catalonia between about 1950 and 1974, and which peaked in the sixties. But even here, many felt that these migratory movements were fostered by the regime in order to “dilute” the Catalans in their homeland.

Thanks, among other things, to my involvement in the Euromosaic project to which I referred earlier (Nelde et al. 1996), alongside Peter Nelde, Glyn Williams and, in the first phase, Henri Giordan, I have come to appreciate to what extent economic factors can explain the rise and fall of languages. Of course, it must quickly be added that States define economic policies and can play a large part in creating a climate that favours some language communities and threatens others. But it is a separate question as to whether they actually do so with a linguistic objective in mind. The answer is almost certainly: some of them, sometimes.

4.5 The ostrich syndrome

When it comes to the crunch, it is worth asking ourselves an apparently (but only apparently) straightforward question, almost a tautology: why are majorities majorities and minorities minorities? To answer (as the Galicians in northwest Spain do, with another question), I will take Great Britain as an example: but any other would do equally well. Why are there fifty million Englishmen (and women) and fewer than three million Welshmen, or seven million Scotsmen? I will not accept the first answer: that England is much larger than Wales or Scotland, for.... why is England much larger than Wales or Scotland? What happened to make a much larger number of farmhouses, villages, hills and rivers "England" than "Wales" or "Scotland"?

The answer of course is power, military in its origin. Power is what allowed the leader of one of the groups to extend his power much further than the others, and perhaps at the expense of the others. As a result, and over a period of centuries, the identity and culture and, of course, the language, of all the people within the area of what we today call England converged towards a single model, defined (wittingly or not) by the aristocracy of southeastern England. Note that I am not referring to the Anglicisation of Wales or Scotland. I am limiting this discussion to England itself. We have to conclude that, originating in relatively small geographical and social kernels, the territorial, political and social expansion of Englishness has been much greater than that of Welshness or Scottishness. It is questionable that there is any way of demonstrating that English culture is inherently "better" than Welsh or Scots cultures. It has simply[19] expanded over a much wider territory, assimilating far more people than have the others. It has, as we know, also encroached upon Wales and Scotland themselves, casting into doubt the age-old belief that language defined nationality:

"I would regard with some suspicion a man who said he was a Frenchman but spoke no French or a Russian whose only language was German. Yet, historically, there are sound reasons why large numbers of Welshmen speak only English.

"Although it would in my view be wrong to deny them, for this reason, membership of the Welsh family to which they clearly belong, it must be admitted that they are, because of their monoglot isolation, cut off from large and significant areas of their national culture.” (Chalfont 1973: xi)

Such a process has also taken place in what we today call France, Russia, Italy or Spain, to pick just a few other cases.

We can thus see that power leads to expansion, expansion to assimilation, and assimilation to size: it is power itself that creates (numerical) majorities and minorities.

But States are ostriches. They tend to hide their head in the sand. They tend to blame others for tension and conflict. At best, they change their policies grudgingly, unwillingly. Few if any of the larger States have been pro-active in their policies. Instead, "Too little, too late" has often been their motto. And the same may be said for the governing bodies of some pan-European organisations.

5. Mayonnaise-eating ostriches on icebergs

Ladies and gentlemen, I am coming near to the end of my talk. I wish to bring three metaphors together into a somewhat implausible picture of mayonnaise-eating ostriches sitting on icebergs. For the whole issue of minorities and the way States treat them is indeed the tip of a huge iceberg.

We live in an age that has been christened as "neoliberal". States are busy deregulating and privatising, stopping just short of completing eliminating the so-called welfare society. In the field of national minorities and linguistic minorities, some States seem to be developing a discourse, based on the rules of the market economy, to the effect that minorities will survive if they want to, and that it is society, and not the authorities, that will decide their future. However, time and again we must repeat that States are not neutral. They have their own, perhaps latent or implicit, language ideology and policies. Unless they have well-designed pro-active policies for the languages other than the "State" language, the whole machinery of power will continue to work actively against the continued existence of such languages (Kymlicka 1997).

The most significant shift in our understanding of language in powerful institutions [...] stems from the awareness of the language ideologies these institutions promulgate as hegemonic in a Gramscian sense - that is, as contributing to the constitution and maintenance of nation-states as political entities (Philips 1998: 213)

5.1. Research into language ideologies

What does this all mean for us researchers? In my view, it is up to researchers to study language ideologies in Europe thoroughly, and to make known and understood the results of this research. We know from bitter experience that people are usually unaware of their own linguistic ideology; they do not question (by definition!) what they take for granted as being "normal". It is the "others" who in their view hold "extremist", “deviant” or even “antipatriotic” views. As Philips (op. cit.: 222) says:

"Some would say that an interpretative perspective cannot be considered "ideology" unless it is to some extent implicit, for without what that implicates, with a taken-for-granted quality, an ideology cannot do its work, cannot take hold of people to the extent that it does not occur to them to think otherwise."

This is, I repeat, one of our tasks. It will be made easier, to be sure, when the European Union gets down to the serious business of defining a language policy which goes beyond the simple summation of the one nation-one language approach that has raised the number of official, working languages of the Union as each new member has joined it. At this rate, soon there will not be enough room for the interpreters' booths (Nelde 1997). However there are many imaginative ways round a drastic reduction in the use of these and other languages. Marí (1996) has developed the notion of egalitarian (or reciprocal) plurilingualism, as a way of underlining the need for differentiated policies, applying wherever necessary the principle of positive discrimination (or “affirmative action” to use what I believe is an American expression), in order to achieve the same eventual outcome, and using linguistic interfaces to allow citizens to use their own language in dealings with the authorities.

5.2. Research on language-choice norms

There is another area towards which I feel that researchers could and perhaps should devote more attention: that of the social norms that govern language choice among bilinguals. In a society that we feel is “free”, it is important in my view to expose the fact that bilinguals belonging to so-called minority language communities are in effect under social pressure – even strong social pressure – to conform to pattern of language convergence. This may happen even in situations where it is unnecessary (when speaking to others whose command of the minority language is sufficient to follow a conversation in that language), or even inappropriate (speaking to as stranger who turns out to be a speaker of the same “minority” language). In fact, speakers of some national languages are now apparently beginning to experience the same phenomenon. Language convergence is a very serious handicap inside communities that are subjected to in-migration. Language behaviour that is ideal for dealings with tourists or passers-by is extremely damaging, if it becomes a habit, in dealings with people coming to live in the area. In Catalonia, for instance, the proportion of Spanish-speaking in-migrants that have learned to speak Catalan, according to census data, is very much higher in (more rural) areas where they do not form virtually monolingual districts (as happens in many cities), but rather enter into daily contact with native Catalan-speakers.

The issue of minorities is the tip of the iceberg in societies which claim to be free. For we all know that we are not as free as all that. We are not free to choose whether or not we pay taxes, whether or not our children should receive schooling, whether we can help ourselves to other peoples’ property, where in the world we will take our next holiday… But in the last analysis, are society and its institutions at the service of the citizens, or is it the other way round? This is the very heart of the matter.

For these reasons, I think it is important for policymakers and politicians to realise that in the field of language (not foreign languages, note: just plain language) there is a need for policies at the national and pan-European levels that will help to make it possible for the European mosaic to continue to be as multicoloured as it still is. This need is urgent, and it is largely up to the scientific and academic world to infuse policymakers with this sense of urgency.

And, so as to end on a lighter note, having talked about mayonnaise, ostriches and icebergs, I will leave the last problem for you to solve: how an ostrich with its head stuck in the tip of an iceberg can at the same time be eating mayonnaise!

Thank you.

Bibliography

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[1] I use the two words as synonymous, in a non-technical sense.

[3] Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th ed. 1987:203.

[7] Specifically, the experts were: A.G. Boyd Robertson, Senior Lecturer in Gaelic, University of Strathclyde (United Kingdom); Dr. Pieter van Dijk, Member of the State Council (the Netherlands); Dr. Asbjorn Eide, Director of the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights (Norway); Professor Rein Mullerson, Chair of International Law, King's College (United Kingdom); Professor Allan Rosas, Abo Akademi University (Finland); Dr. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Associate Professor, Department of Languages and Culture, Roskilde University (Denmark); Professor Gyorgy Szepe, Department of Language Sciences, University Janus Pannonius (Hungary); Professor Patrick Thornberry, Department of Law, Keele University (United Kingdom); and Mr. Jenne van der Velde, Senior Curriculum Adviser, National Institute for Curriculum Development (the Netherlands).

[9] Specifically, the experts were: Professor Gudmundur Alfredsson, Co-Director, Raoul Wallenberg Institute (Sweden); Professor Asbjorn Eide, Senior Fellow, Norwegian Institute of Human Rights (Norway); Ms. Angelita Kamenska, Senior Researcher, Latvian Centre for Human Rights and Ethnic Studies (Latvia); Mr. Dónall O Riagáin, Secretary General, European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages (Ireland); Ms. Beate Slydal, Advisor, Norwegian Forum for the Freedom of Expression (Norway); Dr. Miquel Strubell, Director, Institute of Catalan Sociolinguistics, Government of Catalonia (Spain); Professor György Szepe, Department of Language Sciences at Janus Panonius University (Hungary); Professor Patrick Thornberry, Department of Law, Keele University (United Kingdom); Dr. Fernand de Varennes, Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Human Rights and the Prevention of Ethnic Conflict (Australia); Professor Bruno de Witte, Faculty of Law, University of Maastricht (The Netherlands); and Mr. Jean-Marie Woehrling, Institut de droit local alsacien-mosellan (France).

[11] EBLUL recently published a Discussion Manual on Lesser-Used Languages / Argumentaire sur les langues moins répandues, written by Jordi Bañeres and myself.

[13] e.g. Arfé Resolution on a Community Charter of Regional Languages and Cultures, October 16, 1981.

[14] Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia.

[17] The Welsh Not was a short wooden plank, with these words forbidding the use of the language written on it, that was hung round the offender’s neck, until the child could denounce a fellow pupil for also speaking in Welsh.

[18] The Royal Commission on Elementary Education, established in 1886.

[19] I use the word "simply" as a rhetorical device: such processes are far from simple in reality.