Migration and Language Policy

Note: Repost from the old blog. In comments on the The Record of Communist Language Policy post, James Schipper notes astutely:

One very important aspect of language policy is migration. The more migration there is within a multilingual state, the more minority languages are threatened. If Russians are free to move move into Latvia, then the Latvian language will be in danger, even if Latvian remains an official language in Latvia.We are seeing this in Tibet too. The influx of Chinese in Tibet is the real danger to the Tibetan language. In the capital of Tibet, the Chinese are already the majority. The smaller a people is, the more they have to be able to control immigration if they want to survive as a nation. Of course, by making its territory rigidly unilingual, the minority can create a linguistic barrier to immigration. If Latvian is the sole language of administration and instruction in Latvia, then Russians will think twice before settling there. For minority languages there are two basic rules: concentrate yourself in one area and make that area as unilingual as possible. This is really only possible in a federal state in which the provincial borders match the linguistic borders as closely as possible. In Switzerland, this territorial principle is strictly applied. No French in Zürich and no German in Genève. Of the 26 Swiss cantons, only 4 are not unilingual, but within those four there are internal linguistic borders. As usual the Swiss do it right. They are without doubt the only foreigners that deserve admiration.

It is sad but true that the only to really be sure of preserving your language is to have an independent state. This is one reason that I support many separatist movements – I assume that this may be necessary in order to preserve a minority tongue. James is correct, though. Immigration into a region does indeed threaten a local tongue. This is a long-standing problem in the Basque Country of Spain. In Northern Italy, there are various Italian “dialects” spoken which are actually separate languages. They include Venetian, Emiliano-Romagnolo, error3

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2 thoughts on “Migration and Language Policy”

  1. Seems to me, there’s nothing at all wrong with just letting languages die. Culture is evolving so rapidly that no culture will be preserved for long, regardless of whether the language is preserved. Fifty years from now, ideas, values, the arts, technology, our lifestyles, will all be vastly different from the way they are now; many traditional ideas will be quite dead, and many new ideas not yet conceived will have achieved global spread. Vernacular will have evolved so much that the old and the young will barely understand each other, and the quantity of new culture will be so vast, there will be scarcely time for most people to devote to any interest in the past (especially if the new stuff is more vivid, more real, more unreal, more hi-res, more 3-d, etc., as it is likely to be). So why the urge to preserve linguistic continuity with the past? It’s almost Quixotic. I see no point in it.

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