TOSCO 2022 IMPERIAL LANGUAGES (original) (raw)
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Language empires, linguistic imperialism and the future of global languages
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México, …, 2003
An earlier and shorter version of this text is published as: Hamel, Rainer Enrique (2006) The Development of Language Empires, in Ammon, Ulrich, Dittmar, Norbert, Mattheier, Klaus J., Trudgill, Peter (eds.) Sociolinguistics Soziolinguistik. An International Handbook of the ...
2018
The perspective of time At this point, we may ask how old multilingualism and linguistic diversity really are. It is not just the world of today which is multilingual; the past has had its fair share too. Many languages have vanished, and from Anglosaxon and Etruscan via Ostrogothic, Punic and Sumerian to Tocharian, Vandal and Wiradhuri we can draw up a long list of extinct languages 16-some of which we may still know today, if they have been preserved in writing and deciphered; while others we may still know of, if at some point somebody has cared to leave a mention or a name. When we travel back in time, what we find is that, at each and every stage of the written record for the past 5,000 years, there have always been many languages in the world. Three millennia BCE, Uruk in Sumer, the city of Gilgamesh and cuneiform writing, was a large multilingual metropolis 17-and so were many other city states in the Ancient Orient, such as Babylon, Ebla, Hattusa, Mari, Niniveh, Nippur or Palmyra. Ever since those ancient times, monolingualism may have been a most powerful dream, ideal or norm, 18 but the fact is that there has always been linguistic diversity in the world. Going back in time from today's multilingual New York 19 and London 20 to the time of Uruk, we can track its existence at all intermediate stages of known history-in eighteenth-century Europe, 21 the Renaissance. 22 and the Middle Ages 23 no less than in the Roman Empire, 24 the Celtic and the Germanic world, 25 the Hellenistic World, 26 Persia, 27 the Phoenician Mediterranean, 28 as well as the pre-classical Orient, 29 and beyond this along the Silk Road and farther. 30 As Rankin put it: "It is not easy to assume the monolingual uniformity of any inhabited area in ancient time." 31 And before Uruk? Here, as Steven Fischer has observed, 32 there is "an absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction" in "the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago." Beyond that boundary, we move into evolutionary time-when it may well have taken very long indeed, from the earliest beginnings of language (perhaps about 100,000, or possibly 200,000 years ago) 33 until the final assemblage of the disparate components-such as vocal imitation and language play, signaling behavior and communicative interaction, speech sound
From a Dialect to the Status of National Language: Overcoming The Effects of Empire
Multilingual Discourses
Following the view on the modern language problem in Ukraine as a result of a long war, this paper focuses on the language question which constitutes the anti-imperial Ukrainian counter discourse starting from the middle XIX century up to the present day and explores the development of nationalistic ideas in their close relationship to the language.
Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires, 2023
This volume probes into the mechanisms of how languages are created, legitimized, maintained, or destroyed in the service of the extant nation-states across Central Europe. Through chapters from contributors in North America, Europe, and Asia, the book off ers an interdisciplinary introduction to the rise of the ethnolinguistic nation-state during the past century as the sole legitimate model of statehood in today's Central Europe. The collection's focus is on the last three decades, namely the postcommunist period, taking into consideration the eff ects of the recent rise of cyberspace and the resulting radical forms of populism across contemporary Central Europe. It analyzes languages and their uses not as given by history, nature, or deity but as constructs produced, changed, maintained, and abandoned by humans and their groups. In this way, the volume contributes saliently to the store of knowledge on the latest social (sociolinguistic) and political history of the region's languages, including their functioning in respective national polities and on the internet. Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires is a compelling resource for historians, linguists, and political scientists who work on Central and Eastern Europe.
Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires, 2023
Language, or this proverbial ‘puff of hot air’, destroyed Central Europe’s empires after the Great War. In the region’s history, the year 1918 constitutes the sharp watershed between the non-national empires and the ethnolinguistically defined nation-state as the sole legitimate form of statehood. Although the Soviet Union was a non-national communist polity, de facto, it spread the model of ethnolinguistic nation-state across Eurasia. First, internally, the communist polity was administratively divided into ethnolinguistically defi ned union republics (for instance, Belarus, Georgia, Russia, or Ukraine), which closely emulated Central Europe’s norm of ethnolinguistic nation-states. Second, after World War II, the Kremlin created a Soviet bloc, which unabashedly was built from ethnolinguistic nation-states. Following the end of Stalinism in 1956, the bloc’s ideology became what is now known as national communism (Zaremba 2005 ). In a nutshell, it was communism attuned to the needs and specifi cities of this or that nation in its own nation-state, as already earlier practiced in Yugoslavia, which had broken with Moscow in 1948 ( Shoup 1968 ; Tyszka 2004 ). The collapse of communism in 1989 was swiftly followed by the breakups of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet-like non-national federations of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Practically, all the successor polities are ethnolinguistic nation-states, each aspiring to have its own unshared idiom in the role of the offi cial and national language ( Greenberg 2004 ).
Language of empire, language of power (2018)
How do people in a position of power address those under their control? Do they impose their own language, possibly in a reduced version? Do they adopt a simple form of the language of the people they control? Do they employ a lingua franca that is commonly used in the region? Recent research usually focuses on the linguistic strategies the new speakers apply to the input. Much less information is available about the input itself. The contributions to the present issue deal with the linguistic strategies and policies used by those in power to facilitate communication with those under their control, as well as the modifications they apply to their speech. The contributions deal with the input in several work- or trade-related varieties, such as Français tirailleur, Garden Herero, Pidgin Madame, Butler English, Lingua da preto, Dienstmaleisch, Kyakhta Pidgin, and the role they played in colonial societies.
Hegemony of the Empire to the Language Hegemony: A Correlational Case of English
Language and power have been interlinked and are noticeable in the form of presence of languages like English, French and Spanish in different countries around the world due to rules of British, French and Spanish colonies. The colonial empires made systematic attempts for linguistic and cultural colonization as well making people believe that the language of colonial rulers was superior to their local languages. The spread of English around the globe today had its roots in the colonial empire of British. Through the power, which these rulers enjoyed, they established the hegemony of their language. And in the present day, the economic and military powers of these hegemonic powers are also serving as the tools to establish their linguistic hegemony. With this background, the present paper seeks to review how hegemony of power, which Britain and America enjoyed and enjoy, is correlational with the hegemony of English language spread and use around the globe.
Empire, Lingua Franca, Vernacular: The Roots of Endangerment
Endangered Languages of the Caucasus and Beyond, 2017
Endangered languages are one kind of outcome of a historical process which is fundamental to the story of humanity. Recounting this process illuminates the causes of language endangerment, and may give rise to more realistic understanding of what it is, why it matters, and how any policy may be designed to affect or reduce it. Empires, then, do oppress, and ultimately suppress minority languages within their domains, provided there is a lively prospect of members of lower orders into more dominant classes. Demeaned classes may leave their own languages. But if this social mobility is absent, there may be a polarisation of languages, with a serf or peasant class still speaking their language, and never finding means of promotion. This seems to have happened in mediaeval England, and also ancient Anatolia. Though the language of the elite may later be under threat when overthrown by new elites, the language of rural food producers is likely to be immune to change.
One definition of Romanization, or acculturation understood within its broader scope, is the process of heavily influencing the adoption and application of key concepts (i.e. language, architecture, and politics) from a “superior” culture into an “inferior” culture. This trend of suggesting that a militarily (and to a lesser extent, culturally) superior culture is completely active and the culture under its control is completely passive is, presently, a largely devalued viewpoint which gained momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries (Millet 1992: 1-2). Francis Haverfield and his professor, Theodor Mommsen, are both largely responsible for educating many influential nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars about the patterns of one-directional cultural matriculation (McGeough 2009: 300). As such, they are also generally regarded as the primary proponents of Romanization. Romanization is understood here as studying and documenting alterations in a native culture (i.e. pre-Roman Britain) in favor of noticeably Romanesque “material changes and historical processes (Millet 1992: 1).” Haverfield and Mommsen’s keen observances of cultural variance within provinces and cultural subgroups have cast a large shadow because current scholarship (archaeology, history, linguistics) is still weighing its academic significance against its modernist theory undertones—Haverfield’s major publications came in 1905, 1913 and 1924.